Why does it feel like the pressure of life never actually lets up?
WATCH
I Am, 6 of 7 from April 5, 2026
“Jesus Himself is our only hope to find God.”
John 13-14 by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon explores Jesus’ declaration that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” showing that knowing God is not about a religious system, feelings, or rules but about a relationship of personal trust with Jesus Christ, who is not merely a good teacher but Yahweh himself. By walking through Jesus’ final night with his disciples before the crucifixion and his death and resurrection, Pastor Michael emphasizes that Jesus alone provides access to the Father and that, although the world is broken and trials come, God uses crisis to increase our trust in who Jesus actually is rather than who we imagine him to be.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 What doubts are we maintaining about God’s trustworthiness?
💬 What ways to God have we tried and found wanting?
💬 What did God allow to happen that has eroded our trust in Him?
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Welcome to our neighbors. If we haven't met yet, my name is Michael. I'm one of the pastors here.
Do you feel sometimes like you wake up in the morning, it's like, okay, I get to do the thing that I did yesterday again. And the thing that I did the day before yesterday, I did that yesterday. So today I'm doing again the thing that I did two days ago, and then three days ago, I did that thing, but then I did it yesterday and the day before yesterday. It's just like, every day you wake up and it's kind of like I get to do the same thing over again until you get to the weekend or whatever version of the weekend is. Because sometimes, like, waitstaff, their weekends are different.
Like, it's just like every day I gotta go. And what are the things that we have to do? Like, if we've got kids, we've gotta make sure that they eat. If we've got a place to live, we gotta make sure the mortgage is paid. If we're gonna make sure that the mortgage or the rent is paid.
That means that we gotta have money. And money just doesn't grow on trees. I have found even when you grow trees, even if you sell trees, you still gotta, like, you gotta work. Like, there's work that involves. In order to be able to make the money to have the housing, you gotta buy the groceries, which is.
It feels like it's harder every month to buy the groceries. And it's like, we just start. We wake up and we start over again. And it's like the pressure to do those things doesn't ever diminish. Like, when was the last time that you went into work and your boss was like, hey, I need to talk with you.
Okay. This is gonna be a great day, right? So your boss calls you in the office, and they're like, hey, I've noticed that you've been working really, really hard, and I really appreciate that, and all the work that you're putting in and all that kind of stuff. So I actually, like, I'm gonna ask you to lay off a little bit. Just give me a little bit less effort.
And we're just gonna. We're gonna try that out for a little while. Has anybody ever had that experience? You have? Where are they hiring most of the time?
Like, have you ever been to a family engagement? And, like, you went to a family engagement, whatever that relationship was, they, like, said, hey, things have been really, really good right now. I actually wanna, like, I want for us to take some time away. From each other, not as, like, whatever. I just think.
I think we're good, right? Like, it's just enjoy less of each other. Like, that's usually not what happens. Usually in our relationships, people are like, hey, things are kind of tense and we should lean in. We should do more together.
Or when we do, even when we do good at work, usually the reward for doing good at work is more work. It's like every day, the pressure just keeps adding up to, you gotta finish, you gotta finish, you gotta finish, you gotta finish. Or we have this, like, this theme in our culture that you gotta start something new. If you're not starting something new, then you're just kinda working for the man. Like, you gotta invent something that nobody's ever seen before.
You gotta have a personal brand and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, if you let those things drive you, the pressure just builds and builds and builds and builds. Or maybe that's just me. Does anybody have that?
As we are in that mode, it's like, how do we get out from underneath this pressure? How do we get out from underneath this world that just feels like it keeps piling on? No matter what you do to kind of alleviate, like, no matter how many rent payments you make, there's always another month coming. No matter how many weeks that you hit all of your targets at work, there's another quarter that we've got to work towards. How do we get out from underneath that?
And sometimes we just get to the place where we're like, all right, I just gotta. I gotta tweak this a little bit. I gotta find something. I'm getting really, really heavy, and so I need to go to a different power source. Maybe if I plug into Jesus, if I add a little bit of Jesus to my life, he'll give me the margin that I need or the power that I need to be able to achieve all of the things that I have all this pressure to do.
And so we're like, okay, I'll just add some Jesus into that. Well, then you've got this pressure that you gotta. You kinda come to church on Sundays that maybe the one day of the week that you get to sleep a little bit. Like, now I gotta go to church. And, like, if I go, like, maybe there's this expectation that I gotta have showered or I gotta put on a collared shirt.
Like, I feel like I have to put on a collared shirt now. I get to stand up here. And so there's some really, really nice old ladies in the church. I grew up in that beat it into me very early on that you wear a collared shirt when you go to church. So I don't know if that's right.
But there's this expectation that even when we come, we've got these pressures that we have to kind of conform to. And it feels like even when we are plugged into or we think we found the right answer, we've plugged into Jesus, that the pressure didn't let up. How do we get out from underneath that? Right. So one thing that I notice, it's a couple of verses and they're really, really powerful and they're really, really transformative.
I just want to read them to you. They're in the book of Romans and they're in chapter 12.
I should have flipped there beforehand. Oh, man. So Romans, chapter 12. He says, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. So you should worship, you should give yourself to God, give your life to God, plug into Jesus.
But then verse 2. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. He says here, like, the world is going to try to conform you into the shape of what it wants for you to be. The world is designed and the world functions as a pressure cooker.
It is constantly piling up pressure and it is trying to shape you after it's to do its own thing. And most of the time the pressure of the world, like Pastor Ryan was saying, most of the time the pressure of the world is going to lead us to think about ourselves. You need to satisfy yourself. You need to make sure that you have enough money for you. You need to make sure that you are comfortable.
You need to make sure that you are satisfied, make sure that your desires are met. And then maybe once you've kind of let loved yourself well enough, you can consider loving other people. There's a pressure to achieve and a pressure to conform to the world. But the vision of what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus, not just plugging into Jesus and adding a little bit of Jesus to your life, is that when we surrender our lives to Jesus, we no longer conform to the pressure, but our heart is transformed, formed. It's completely different thing, right?
So picture with me if I'd have. It was going to be a lot of work, and there was a large risk of me breaking glass and water getting everywhere. It's happened before. So let me just. Will you picture with me.
Picture an aquarium, right? And I fill the aquarium with some water, okay? And so the water is like the presence of Jesus. Now, the Bible is actually really, really clear. And one author puts it this way.
Stuck in my head, I share it with you. The presence of God is the primary fact of creation, that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The presence of God is the primary fact of creation. There's nowhere in our creation that God's presence is not the primary fact of creation. So we've got to.
We've got an aquarium. We've got water. It's Jesus presence, right? Now imagine I take a rock and I put the rock into the water. I just try to.
I know I need to be in the presence. I need to soak. And so I pull the rock out and the water just drips off unchanged, right? Now imagine if I had a sponge. Now, it can be an old sponge.
Some of y' all have a sponge that's older than you. It usually lives under the kitchen sink somewhere. There's a sponge and it feels like a rock. It's hard, it's brittle, there's pieces. You remember some warfare that you've done in the past.
Even if you take that old sponge and you put it in the water, what's going to happen to that sponge? It's going to soak it back up, right?
Surrender in our lives to Jesus. Following with Jesus. Do not be conformed to the pattern of the world. Don't be a rock that's just getting beat and pounded and chipped apart. And then try to add a little bit of Jesus.
He says, when I change you or when I come into your life, I take your heart of stone and I give you a heart of flesh. I change that rock into a sponge which is able to perceive my presence in the world and be filled by it and be refreshed by it and be encouraged by it. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed.
Transformed. It's completely different. It's completely different.
What does that look like? I can kind of describe that. We can picture a sponge, but, like, how many of us know, like, my heart, like, sometimes feels like a rock, but, like, it doesn't function that way. Like, my desires don't really are. I can't, like, see that.
And it's really cool to see or to imagine an illustration of Jesus presence like that. But that's like, not the world that I live in. I don't see it that. What does it look like to live a transformed life? That's what I'd like to talk with us about over the next three or three weeks or so.
What does it actually look like to live a transformed life? If Jesus has actually gotten a hold of us and actually has exchanged our hearts of stone for a heart of flesh, if we were dead in our sins and trespasses and now we've been made alive in Christ, if that exchange, if that transformation has happened. What does that look like? Looks like walking on you see you guys. You guys are good.
All right, as we, like, do that, I'm going to ask you to turn to the book of Galatians. That's where we're going to set up camp. Ooh, hey. That's where we're going to set up camp for a couple of weeks. In the book of Galatians.
If you're using these blue Bibles on page 1121, you can follow along in the blue Bibles. It's page 1121.
But before we get into, like, reading and discussing, let's take a moment and let's pray. If you give me that. It's our habit as disciples. Yeah, that too. So our habit as disciples of Jesus together as neighborhood church to pray what we call the Disciples prayer.
You might know it as the Lord's Prayer or something like that, but this is the prayer, the model of prayer that Jesus said that if you're going to follow me, this is what the shape of your prayers should be. And so I put the words up on the screen. You can pray together out loud with me. But more than just like, saying the right words or knowing the right words, like, Jesus asks us to conform our hearts for our hearts to be transformed so that this is what's coming out when we get scared, squeezed. So let's just take a minute and let's just take a deep breath.
Lord, I'm a creature of habit. I can do the same thing over and over again ad nauseam.
And so I pray that. That as we share these words together, that it would not just be an exercise in whether or not we've memorized the right words, but the Lord as we say these words, that we would give a thought, we would genuinely ask that your will would be done. We would look to you for our daily provision, that we would seek your heart to be able to extend forgiveness, and that we would look to you to be our deliverer.
And so we pray together. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Amen. Galatians, Chapter one. We're going to start in verse one.
You can take that off if you would like to. Galatians, Chapter one. So this what's interesting about the Bible. The Bible isn't like it's a book. Like, you can see you've got it in your hand.
It's a book, but it's a little bit different from most books. Instead of it just being a single book, you know, with chapters and all that kind of stuff, it actually is a little library. It's a collection of many different books that were written over a long period of time. And God orchestrated the writing of it. He made sure that the people who were writing it wrote down his words over that expansive part of time, and that as he communicated, as the spirit communicated, like his word would be recorded.
So in this section, we actually have kind of a binder of letters. So when we open the book of Galatians, we're going to be reading somebody else's mail, which is a felony. But. But I'm going to give you a pass today. All right?
So let's look together in the book of Galatians, we'll commit this felony together. Let's start reading in verse one, Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me to the churches in Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. Pause there. So a little bit different from the way that our mail works.
They would often send mail on screen scrolls, and if you roll up a scroll and you kind of seal it, you don't want everybody to be able to read what's on the letter, Right? So instead of putting a piece of paper folded in an envelope and then writing the address on the outside, what they would do is they would start with the from and the to as the first lines of the letter. So that when that scroll got rolled up and it was sealed, anybody who saw the scroll could see, oh, this letter is from Paul, and it is to the churches in Galatia, so they wouldn't have to open it up. Is this mail for me? They would just know this is who it's to.
And then as it gets to the person who's supposed to read it, they'd break that seal. They could roll out the rest. And it even got to where if you had to send a letter and you wanted, like, part of the letter to only be read by some people, you would put extra seals as you rolled up. So you'd put the bottom. At the bottom, the most secure stuff you want, like, the best person or whatever to do.
And then you'd roll that up and seal it, and then you'd write some more. And then you roll that up and seal it so that you could deliver it to multiple people. And the last person got the whole message, but the first person only got part of the message, right? So that just their technology was a little bit different than ours. But that's how he starts.
He says, paul, an apostle. This is from. So this letter is from a guy named Paul, and he is an apostle, but he's an apostle, which means a sent person. Somebody who's an emissary, kind of like a mailman. He says, I'm a mailman sent not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead and all the brothers who are with me.
So he says, my name's Paul and I'm an apostle. I'm sent with a message, but I'm not sent with a message that comes from men. And I'm not sent with a message, but from man's authority. There's not some, like, authority somewhere. There's not a guy that I'm working for, except that I am sent by Jesus and by God.
So there's not a higher authority I'm answering to. I come to you. I write to you on God's letter, like he's the one who's sending you, and there are all the brothers who are with me. So he doesn't name off who those guys are, but as he's writing, he's saying, it's not just me that's sending it. I also have some other other people that are given input in this.
Now then he writes to the churches in Galatia this Letter is a little bit different. We've studied here recently the letter of Second Corinthians and Second Corinthians was a letter that was written to a group of people in a church in Corinth. So that was a group of people that were in the same city. When Paul writes to the churches in Galatia, what he has in mind is a region where there are multiple. There are multiple cities and multiple churches in the.
Or multiple churches, one in kind of each city. So he's writing there's probably four or five. I don't know if the kids were in here. I might say there were six or seven different churches that he's writing this to. It's a letter that was written for all of them to kind of circle around.
All right, I appreciate it. Thank you, Brad.
That's good. So he's writing this letter for multiple different congregations to be able to be read. This is like, if I wrote a letter maybe to the churches of Marion county, if I wrote a letter to about something that's true of the churches in Marion county, then that letter would be circulated around. Now, this is before you could do chain letters and email. Like, you actually have to, like, take the physical letter to the people and let them read it or, like, physically copy down a transcript of everything the letter said if you want to have multiple copies.
Right. So technology is a little bit limited, but he's writing to a bunch of different congregations. Now, the difference between Paul writing the church of Galatians and Michael writing to the churches of Marion county is that I didn't start any of the churches in Marion County. Paul, as he's writing, he. He's writing to cities and places where he came through on a missionary journey, and he preached the gospel and people responded to the message of Jesus and they trusted Jesus, and he got those people together and established a church, a group of people that are dedicated to Jesus and on Jesus mission.
Did you know that's what a church is? There's lots of organizations that call themselves a church that aren't. But Paul, as he went, he said, I'm going to set you guys up as a church. You guys believed in Jesus, and now you're going on Jesus mission, in Jesus strength and Jesus power. And so you guys are a church.
And he did that in a couple of different cities as he kind of traveled through the region. So he started these churches, and now he's writing a letter back to these churches. And how does he start his letter? Verse 3. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to Whom be the glory forever and ever.
Amen.
So he writes, as he's writing, he starts off with this blessing. He says, grace to you. And it's. There's a little bit of a play on words going on.
The normal word that the Romans would use is a word that means, like, greetings, like hello, salutations, Right? And in the Greek, that would be chiron. Chiron is greetings. Salutations. When Paul starts, he starts a word with grace.
And the Greek word for grace is charis, so it's spelled almost identically. But instead of sending greetings, he sends grace. Grace to you and peace. Not from me. I'm not sending grace.
I'm not sending peace. But I am asking that God would send you grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. So he says, I'm writing to you, and the first thing I want is I want for you to be blessed with grace and peace from a supernatural source.
I want you to be connected to Jesus. I want for your life and your heart to be transformed by Jesus. Why? Because Jesus gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. I am blessing you with this divine grace coming from this source.
Now, I've said grace a bunch of times. What's a grace?
What's that? My wife. Yeah. Okay, so if your name is grace, that's a grace. We do have a grace among us.
Is grace like just the thing that you say? But when you're really, really hungry and you're ready to eat, like somebody just say grace so we can eat this food. Right? Actually, anyway, I have a funny story about that, but it's a long story, Right? So what is grace?
It's a word that we use in church. In fact, this church body used to be called grace. Like grace, church was our name for a long, long time. Why would we use that term? Why would we want to send grace from God to somebody else?
What's grace? Unmerited favor, undeserved favor. Right. You guys all right, I've got three points of definition for you, and it sounds like you don't need them. But the first is this.
Grace is costly. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord. Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, who gave himself. Implicit in that gave himself is that Jesus showed up to give grace. By dying, grace is costly.
It cost God his one beloved begotten son. Grace costs the person who extends it severely. It is expensive. If I say freedom isn't free, we might be reminded of our service members and people who gave their life in order for us to be able to be free. Likewise, grace isn't free in the sense that it cost Jesus his whole life, and he gave it willingly.
As we kind of looked over the last couple of weeks of Jesus story in the Book of John, he was not surprised when they came to arrest him. He knew that it was coming. And he was not surprised when they wanted to accuse him falsely of making all of these claims. And he was not surprised when they wanted him to die and he did nothing to prevent his execution. And when they crucified him, which is a long and torturous, slow, painful way to die, they hung him on the cross.
And then he chose the moment that he gave his spirit away. And the Romans who crucified people for a living, like, it was kind of a hobby of theirs, they were really, really good at it because they really liked people to suffer. I don't know if you have a boss like that, but the Romans in particular really enjoyed, really enjoyed making people suffer. And so when the Romans, like, saw Jesus crucified, they come and they're like, actually, it's a holiday weekend. We got to get out of here.
I'm not working overtime today. So they, like, come to break the legs of these people so that they suffocate, so that they die faster. They come to Jesus and they are appalled. They're shocked that he is already dead, because it's supposed to take a long time. And Jesus chose the moment when he was going to leave.
He gave his life on purpose, surrendered himself his whole life. He died. Grace is costly.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. The thing that we contributed to Christ's death is the sin that made it necessary. Jesus was perfect. He had no reason to die.
I don't know. This is probably a rabbit trail. But I wonder, if Jesus wasn't crucified, how long would he have lived in a human body? Like, what if he just went on forever? Interesting possibility, but probably a rabbit trail.
But because he came for a purpose and because we are people who had sinned, he died. So grace to us is undeserved. It's costly, and we don't deserve it. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but there's this constant thing where Jesus is saying, hey, you need to forgive other people. You need to forgive other people.
You need to forgive other people. And we say back to God, yeah, but they don't deserve forgiveness. And he's like, that's why they need forgiveness. If they deserve forgiveness, it wouldn't be forgiveness. It would just be being nice.
But there's a need. There's a need that we have. We do not deserve God's love, and yet he is willing to pay the cost for that grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. According to the will of God our Father. Grace is costly.
Grace is undeserved. And grace is a gift. It's a gift.
The grace that God gives to us is a gift. He says, listen, you did not deserve life. You did not deserve love. You did not deserve anything but destruction and damnation. And here's what I did.
I took the thing that you had earned for yourself and I put it on Jesus. And he paid the price. It was a costly price, but Jesus paid it. And you did not deserve it. But now I am giving you grace that I might deliver you from the present evil age.
I give it to you. It is a gift. It's not something that you earn. It's not something that you pay back. Grace is a gift.
Grace and peace to you, or grace to you. And peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. All this according to the plan, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. It is a gift.
A couple of things.
God gives us grace to deliver us from this present evil age. I'm afraid that there's times where we look at this present evil age and we look at some of the shiny sparkly things and we look at some of the ways that we hear people talk about. Like, well, I fully embraced this desire, and then I suddenly felt satisfied. Like, we look at the things that the world has to offer and we begin to wonder, like, is it really that evil? Like, aren't we supposed to be in the world, but not of the world?
Like, how in should I be? I guess really the question is, how much out do I have to be? Because I kind of just Want to be in the world. Like, these things are shiny. They make my life better.
I could probably. Like, I've got the new thing, and I could probably keep up with people. I can probably make it work. Like, there's times where I think we try to make peace with the present evil age because there's something in it that is tempting to us.
So I wonder, as we look at God's grace, which is costly and undeserved and a gift, as we look at that gift, what are the things in this present evil age that we resist being delivered from? Our cell phones. Okay, our cell phones. What are the things that we resist being delivered from? Because Jesus says, I have paid the price in full to give you this gift in order to deliver you.
And we look at him and go, deliver us from what? Because, like, I'm actually kind of comfortable here and you can deliver me from. From this thing and that thing and that thing. Cause Lord knows I need deliverance from that. I need to get out of there.
But, like, this other thing over here, I don't know that I really need deliverance. Like, what if you let me keep this part? What if I just stay in the world in this part and the rest of it you can deliver me from? He says, listen, the world that is pressuring you to conform is evil. And I've come to give you a gift that you can be delivered out of it.
A gift that you can't earn back, you can't pay back.
It's a gift. It's not a loan. How many of us have, like, gotten a gift from somebody and immediately tried to figure out how we're going to pay them back?
How many of us have turned down receiving a gift because we know we can't pay it back? I can't take that from you. There's no way I could ever repay you, right?
God says, my grace that I would save you from the sin that cost my son his life. My gift to you is not a loan. I'm not asking you to pay it back. I'm not asking you to then try harder. I'm not asking you then to take my gift and use my gift in order to beat other people up with it.
I'm not asking you to take my gift and then, like, work really, really hard to make sure that you keep hold of it. I just give you the gift. But I think we tend to minimize how big God's grace is. We'll say, God, I see that you were willing to die for me while I was your enemy. But surely you don't care about what I'm stressed about today.
Surely your grace can ring, rattle.
Surely your grace can bring Lazarus back from the dead. But there's no way it's going to extend to what's broken in my heart or to my addiction or to my circumstances.
It's a gift that he wants to give. It was according to his will, his desire. The plan from the beginning was that Jesus would die for for our sins, that we could surrender our life to him and be transformed.
How are we minimizing God's grace?
Let's continue reading in verse six.
I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we have preached to you, let him be accursed, as we have said before. So now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God?
Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. So I'm astonished. He says to these churches, he started these churches, he preached the gospel. He believes that they genuinely trusted in Jesus and turned to him for salvation.
That Jesus exchanged their hearts of stone for a heart of flesh. But now he's looking at him going, I thought we were transformed. But you're acting like you're being conformed. I'm astonished. I'm actually really, really surprised that you have turned from Jesus, not just from the message, but you have deserted him.
You've deserted Jesus, who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one. There's only one. Which leads me to ask a question. What's a gospel?
It's a good news. I've got three points of explanation or definition. The first is the gospel is exclusive, like you see here. I'm astonished that you are turning to a different gospel. Verse 7.
Not that there is another one. There's only one gospel. There's only one message here. But there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. So there are cheap imitations of the gospel that people are peddling and trying to get you to buy into because they want to trouble You.
He says it's exclusive. It doesn't matter how an alternate gospel comes about. There's only one, even if we. So he's saying, if I come back and I start preaching you a different gospel, you ought to punch me in the nose. If we come back and try to give you a different gospel, we should be accursed.
Or if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preach to you, let him be accursed. If there are spiritual entities showing up on your doorstep, super cool. That sounds like a great experience. If that entity preaches a gospel other than the true one, he should be accursed. It doesn't matter how shiny and glittery he is.
He's a demon.
And we can chuckle, but we have neighbors whose foundation of their faith is that an angel came to somebody and preached a different gospel, and now they have the true gospel.
The gospel is exclusive. And I heard it. The gospel is good news. So gospel is an interesting word to me because it's super churchy. Now, like when we talk about gospel, we're probably talking about like a genre of music or we're talking about like the four biographies of Jesus, the gospels of Jesus.
Anytime somebody is using the word gospel, they're trying to like get us to think about churchy stuff, right? But the word gospel existed in the culture before the church existed. So this was a word that was like in people's vocabulary before Jesus came and did what he did, and he started using that word to describe what Jesus did. The word gospel, just like translated literally means good news. But the way that it was used is that if you had seen like an enemy army walk by you, now you're a farmer, you're locked into your land, you're kind of going through the daily grind.
And the daily grind is really grindy when you're a first century farmer and you see this army go by like, hey, where are you guys going? Like, hey, there's an invading army that's coming in to take over this land and we're going to go stop them. Like, okay, cool. I thought my week was really hard, but now I'm really concerned about that thing that I didn't even know impending disaster was over the hill. And you watch that, watch the Roman army go over.
And if the Roman army went over and they won the victory, they would send heralds back, they would send messengers back proclaiming the good news, proclaiming the gospel, proclaiming the gospel that Rome had won the victory and there was nothing to fear. Back home. Which is good to know if you watch the army walk by. Which is good to know if you have this sense of impending dread that everything that you love is getting ready to be taken away from you by somebody that is hostile and opposed to you in your way of life. The gospel is a message of good news.
But it's better good news than a military victory. It's the good news that Jesus has faced death and won.
The good news is that our biggest enemy has been hamstrung on the field of battle, that we celebrate a risen Savior. It's just been a couple of weeks, but remember, he popped out of the tomb.
He's not a philosopher who taught some good stuff, and now he's dead and gone, and we just keep going back to his writings. He is the risen Lord of creation who has gone face to face, toe to toe with death, drinking the penalty of death, all the way down to the dregs, and walked away unharmed.
The gospel is the good news that Jesus offers us God's grace. In fact, the only good news is God's gift of a transformed life, that if we turn to Jesus and trust him to deliver us from what our sin earned us, which is death, that he transforms our life. That's the only good news. The only good news is God's gift of a transformed life. It's like, well, I want a transformed life, but how transformed are we talking?
I want a transformed life, but can't I, like, pay you back something?
I want a transformed life, but I don't want to take anything for free. So let me do some work on the front end and make sure that I'm worthy. The only good news is that Jesus has given us God's gift of a transformed life. Death to life. Because the gospel is exclusive.
There's no other message. The gospel is good news, and the gospel is that only Jesus delivers. Remember, grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. That's good news. We have a way out.
The pressure that is constantly piling on top of you and trying to get you to perform and conform. Jesus has lifted it and invites us into a grace of God's love and his mercy that is renewing us day by day.
The good news. The only good news is God's gift of a transformed life. I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting him, who called you to the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one. But there are some who trouble you and who wanted to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one that we preached to you, let him be accursed, as we've said before. So now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one that you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God, or am I trying to please man? If I were trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. We've kind of defined a couple of terms here.
We defined grace, and grace is costly and undeserved, and it's a gift. And we've defined the gospel, which is exclusive good news that only Jesus delivers.
But what about approval for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? What does it mean to be approved by God?
What does it mean to be approved at work?
What does it mean to be approved in your family?
Oh, I put them all on the same slide. I don't have one. That's just one. The first one. Oh, okay.
Well, I guess I'll give them to you all, because that's what's going to pop up. Approval is granted after testing through Jesus only, and it's available. So first approval is granted after testing. How many of us have had, like, a job or some kind of an interaction where you were required, although you had done all the work, you needed somebody else's approval for the work to count for something. Right.
And if you don't give that person approval, it doesn't matter. And we get really frustrated if we need somebody's approval, but they don't verify the work or they don't know how to verify the work. Like, we've got supervisors that don't know how to do our job, but I have to get their approval before I can, like, finish doing my job, which I know how to do, but they don't know how to do, but I got to have them to do it. And that's frustrating for us when approval comes without testing.
We got there right? Which means that if we're to be approved by God, there is a validation, there is a testing. Like, God doesn't rubber stamp our life. If we come to God just hoping he's going to give us a rubber stamp and approve everything that we already naturally want to do, we will be incredibly surprised when. When he's like, actually, that's not grace.
Actually, that's not mercy. Actually, your life is not for you. Actually, you're not meant to satisfy all of your own desires. Actually. You can learn to say no to things, actually.
But when we come to God just kind of looking for his rubber stamp, we get frustrated when he's not. But like, approval comes through testing.
Our first instincts aren't going to be enough. Like, however we come to God, that first instinct of what you think you ought to do in order to be a good person. If that was enough, then God wouldn't have had to send Jesus to deliver you from this present evil age. If everything that you learned from your family history and everything you learned from watching TV and everything you learned from reading books from, from this present evil age was enough to make things right in your life, then there would be no need for God to intervene. He just lets you do your own thing.
But God looked at your life and said, actually it's necessary that I should send my only beloved son and that he should be brutally executed in order to make a payment for the sin that is in your heart. So that I can take your heart of stone and exchange it, transform it to be a heart of flesh. That that's necessary for you.
Your first instincts for how to live a good life are not going to be satisfactory. What we think we know about how to be good is going to fall apart eventually because we make idols of literally everything. We worship anything other than the God who is inviting us to worship him.
We seek earnestly for the approval of other people.
That's what Paul says. His first temptation is here. Verse 10. Am I now seeking the approval manner of God. I'm writing to you.
I planted this church, I came in, I preached this message. You bought in this message. And so in some sense you approved me. But maybe now you've approved me and you've tested me and you think that something's lacking. He's like, I'm writing to you now to correct something that's going wrong with you.
But am I writing because I need you to like me?
Or am I writing because I'm sent by God and I have. I need his approval. I need to pass his test. And there's times where we're like, okay, I need to pass God's test. And so I need to make sure that as I pass God's test, I can do it?
And so we'll invent a system. We'll invent a test that we can pass. Have you ever done that? It's like, oh, that sounds really, really hard. I can't do that.
So let me generate a list of things that I actually can do, and I'll do those things. And when people ask me, did you do this? They say, well, I actually did these other things. It's like, great. Didn't ask you that.
Like, okay, great. So have you ever noticed, like, when the dishes need to be washed? And this is just me. This is just a hard issue for me, right? When the dishes need to be washed, I don't like washing the dishes.
And so instead of washing the dishes, I swept the floor and I mowed the grass and I folded my laundry and put it away, right?
Because I just wash the dishes. Well, I didn't wash the dishes, but I did these other things, right? We invent a test that we can pass because we can't pass the one that's in front of us. And when we do that with God, when God says, actually the standard is perfection, we say, well, I can't do perfection. But what I can do is I can make sure that I take a nap on Sunday so that the Sabbath day is holy.
And I can make sure that I don't say certain words out loud, although I say them in my head and my heart to everybody in traffic. And I'll make up a list of things that I can do in order to please God still, which is perfection. And approval comes by testing. And God is not confused about what the test is or what the answers are.
Hey, Michael, I don't think I want God to test me.
I don't think I need that kind of pressure. I got lots of stuff on my plate right now. You don't even understand. I understand. What if I don't pass?
Approval is granted after testing. That's by definition. But approval is through Jesus only. Because remember where I started? I started with grace.
Grace is exclusive and grace is undeserved. And grace is a gift.
Our approval with God is not based on how we perform. It's not a transaction. The transaction has already been made where Jesus exchanged his life for our death and gave us a new heart. Not so that we can continue to try to beat ourselves into submission and be conformed to the patterns of the religious world, but so that we can walk in newness of life, transformed by his spirit. Approval comes only through Jesus and in walking with him.
What if I fail God's test? Spoiler alert. You will.
What hope do I have then? The only hope you have is that you are hiding yourself in. The only good news is God's gift of a transformed life. That's all I have. Well, what about these things that I failed?
Repent, agree with God that what you did was wrong and turn to Jesus like, he's, well, what if I did it again? Like, okay, well then repent and do it again. Well, it's the same, yes, but it's the same over and over again. Returning to the gift that you got for free that you didn't deserve, and drawing from the well of living water to pour out to others. The only good news is God's gift of a transformed life.
And that's available.
The message is exclusive in that you can only have that life and that abundance through Jesus. But it is unexclusive in the sense that Jesus invitation is extended to every single soul on the planet.
It's available. There's an author. His name is Aw Tozer. He's been dead for a while, but he's a real smart dude, real smart. But he just had a way of, like, saying the meanest things, right?
He says, you have as much of God you want.
You have as much of God as you want. If God's grace is free and his gift is extensive and he wants to bless us with his presence and his presence is the primary fact of creation, you already have as much of God as you want. So the problem is the wanting. The problem is the desire. And I think the question is, whose approval directs our life most of the time?
Time. Whose approval directs our life most of the time? Do we live our life in a way that our kids think that we're good parents?
Do we live our life in a way that our co workers are happy with our performance? Do we live our life in a way that alleviates our spouse's frustrations so that they don't pick on us?
Whose approval do we live our life for the most? Or is it just you?
As long as you think that you're doing good, everything's fine. I just need to satisfy my own self. As long as I can make peace with myself, I'm approved. Nobody can tell me what to do. I'm going to live my truth out here all by myself and get out of my head.
Whose approval do we live our lives for most of the time? Because if the only good news is God's gift of a transformed life, that means we need to live for God's approval. Am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I just trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
The only good news is God's gift of A transformed life. Let's pray.
Jesus, there's all kinds of challenges and all kinds of ways that I think that maybe we're hearing this this morning. There's some of us who are trying to square well, what do I do? How do I gain your approval? What does it look like to lean into the approval of Jesus when he's already granted it as a free, free gift?
And Lord, in our time this morning, I don't know that I'm able to articulate all of that. But I pray that for those of us that are wrestling with those questions, we would not be able to just walk out here and forget that we would be haunted by those questions and that those questions would drive us back to you, that we would bring those questions to you, that we would wrestle with you in them, in your word and your spirit.
For those of us who think there's lots of good people in the world that don't know Jesus, there's probably some other good news out there, too. Lord, I pray that you would be working in our hearts to convince us that there is no message like yours.
There is no teacher who ate death whole.
And Jesus, for those of us who just feel the pressure, feel beat up and chipped, knocked around, I feel like for every time that we take a dip Jesus stuff, we just come out dry again.
Jesus, I pray that today would be the day that they turn to you and ask for a new heart.
Jesus, would you not just let us add a little bit of you to our life? But Lord, would you take all of it and would you completely remake us?
Would you take our heart a stone, make it a heart of flesh? Help us to be receptive to your spirit. Help us to be soft and sensitive to you and what you're doing. And Lord, would you care for us when we're wounded?
Would you help us to trust you and would you completely reshape our lives?
Just going to give you a couple of minutes. There's some questions that we revisited here on the screen as we went through this conversation for you to reflect on. But I just want to give you a couple minutes to tune in to how the Lord is speaking to you this morning. I trust that Jesus is the shepherd of his flock. He's the leader of this congregation, and he's the Lord.
LINKS
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
