When does God just give up on us?
WATCH
What We Believe, 7 of 11 from July 20th, 2025
"We depend on God to save us every step of the way."
Salvation by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon explores the concept of salvation through the lens of God's unwavering grace. It emphasizes that salvation is entirely a gift from God, not earned by human efforts. Pastor Michael explains the three stages of salvation: justification (being declared righteous), sanctification (ongoing transformation), and glorification (future perfection). The message underscores God's persistent love and the inclusive nature of the gospel, while also acknowledging its exclusive claim that salvation comes through Christ alone.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 Have we trusted Jesus to declare us righteous before the Father?
💬 What dead way of living does Jesus want to save us from?
💬 How does anchoring our hope in eternity change how we approach this week?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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PLEASE NOTE: The following transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.
[Music]
Well, Good morning, church. Morning. Thanks for bearing with me. Is pulling double duty.
I used to do this pretty frequently. And then about the time that the Lord led me to, like, hey, Michael, stop trying to do everything. He brought Carlos along. And so it's been so beautiful to see how God has built a team and how we can kind of COVID for one another. And grateful for his ability to take some time and be with his family.
Completely unrelated to those comments, though, is my introduction question. So I'm not talking about Carlos, but when do you give up on somebody? Never. All right. No hesitation.
Well, that just undermines the whole rest of everything I have to say. Thanks. That's good. When do you give up on somebody?
I'm sure you can imagine going out of your way to make friends with somebody. Maybe you know that they've had a rough go of it. They don't have the kind of family support they come from a bad family or a family that's just kind of unreliable. And so you kind of go out of your way to make friends with them, and they kind of respond. And you try to be kind and generous with them, and so you kind of give them and share with them and try to bring them into your life.
And you really love this person. You want what's best for them, and so you kind of order your steps and order your life out of consideration for them and making sure that they've got an opportunity to come along with you. And you really go out of your way to love this person. And you just kind of notice that whenever they're with you, they're thinking about somebody else or doing something else or they're never actually, actually there in the room with you. They're always preoccupied or distracted or they're just constantly on their phone or whatever it might be.
And you're like, I don'is. This being reciprocated? Are we on the same page? When do you ask that question? When you say, hey, what's going on here?
Where are you trying to be? And then they stop responding to your invitations and they kind of stop showing up. And when do you just say, oh, well, I guess we had a good run. When do you give up? Well, maybe that's a little bit premature.
So you continue to reach out, you continue to invite. You kind of show up and insert yourself into their life and say, hey, I'm really concerned about you. I love you. I wanna care for you. No, no, no.
It's good. And Then you notice that they're choosing to actively hang out with somebody who is completely the opposite of you and actually is doing harm to them. They're in a harmful relationship. And you're, hey, this is. This is like, I love you.
I care about you. I don't want you to suffer in this way. Like, I'm concerned about you that they just persist and your invitations are rejected and your affection that you're trying to show is kind of shunned and shut down. Can you imagine something like that? When do you give up?
Maybe. Maybe you persevere. Maybe you say, no, no, no, I love this person. Maybe I didn't at first, but I've gotten to know them and they just have a really beautiful spirit. And I just want to see them succeed and have a full life.
And the choices they're making are really destructive, and I'm really concerned, and so I'm willing to take a stand. But I also want to care for them. And they just are running the opposite direction. And they even get to the place where you're trying to see and meet them, where they're at, and they turn and look you dead in the eye and say, leave me the heck alone. Maybe I've filtered myself a little bit.
Just leave me alone. Get out of my life. I don't want you. I didn't ask for you to be in my life. I didn't ask for the stuff that you get.
Like, it was nice when you were doing these things for me, but, like, I'm over it. I don't need that now. I don't need you. I've got this other life that I've built for myself, and I don't want what you have for me. And they curse you up and down.
I don't want what you have. When do you give up? Maybe you send a mediator. Maybe you have, like, a mutual friend. And so you send that friend to go and talk to them and say, hey, like, I don't know what happened or what's gone sour here, but I really think that you should, like, consider being friends with this person.
You send a mediator and they curse the mediator out.
Even gets to the place where they just are so hostile and aggressive that they, like, are violent towards the help that you try to send. This is exaggerated. This may be a stretch of our imagination, but we've had those instincts, haven't we, that when somebody has cared for us, we've rejected all help and we've rejected the ways that they have sent help to us. And we just said, no, I don't want any of that. And we have had violent impulses in us.
So when do you give up?
Pastor Oren shared with us last week, God created man and woman in his image, and as a result, all people are bearers of that image. We are made to be like him. We are made to be in relationship with him. However, Adam's subsequent sin resulted in a condition of spiritual death which all people since Adam have experienced, marring the beauty of God's image in them in every facet of life. This condition of spiritual death has rendered all people unable to save themselves and leads to physical death.
Therefore, new birth is necessary for salvation.
I wish the story were hypothetical. I wish you didn't have such an easy time imagining somebody responding to you in that way. But that story is our story.
Over and over in Scripture. That's how we respond to God. I didn't ask for you. I didn't ask to be born. I didn't really want to be put into this situation.
And now you're coming in here telling me how to live my life. No, just get out. I don't want you.
And so the question is, when should God give up? And when does God give up?
It's our habit together to pray. The disciples prayer. And I don't even know if I have it in here, do I? Yeah, I do. Sweet.
And so pause together and pray as we begin to wrestle with that question.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Your kingdom come and 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.
This summer, we're through walking through a series that we've called what We Believe. And we're taking our statement of faith, our doctrinal statement, and kind of taking an article by article and diving deep on what does the whole Bible say about kind of each of these categories. So our category today is salvation. And this is the statement. This is like the textbook statement.
But I hope that by the time we get to the end of this, we feel this a little bit differently than we may read it initially here. Like, what does the whole Bible teach about salvation? The salvation brought by God is a complete and eternal salvation by his grace alone, received as the free gift of God through personal faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ and his finished work, as he declares believers righteous in him. I. That's kind of textbook.
Like there's some good words in there, but I don't know that I feel that quite yet. Right, Joann, you feel that yet? No. Okay, so we'll get there. That's all right.
What I'm gonna do this morning, I'm gonna invite you to turn with me to a little letter called Titus, the Book of Titus in chapter two. And I've tried to pick all the passages really, that I'm gonna focus in on from Titus, chapters two and three. So we're gonna zero in on one passage in particular, but then I'm gonna quote some other passages that are nearby. And then there's one that's kind of out in left field, but it'll help you. So if you wanna turn to Titus chapter two, I'd encourage you to do that.
It's on page 1241 in the blue Bibles. That's the one I'm reading out of this morning that are tucked under the chairs in front of you. 12:41 Little book, just three chapters, the book of Titus. And this letter is interesting. It's written by kind of an older pastor, his name is Paul, an older church planter to a young guy that he kind of left pastoral responsibilities to in a really, really difficult culture.
It was like a culture that was kind of self centered and just focused on like living their best life and fulfilling their own truth. And they have a reputation for just kind of being lazy. They're on an island and so they just kind of live in paradise and do whatever they feel like. Like we can't relate to any of that. It's all ancient stuff.
But that's like the idea this older pastor's rightiting this younger pastor. And how do you talk to people like that? And usually what Paul does is he will explain a bunch of like deep theological truths and then he'll say, if these things are true, then this is what you should do. But in the book of Titus, it's actually reversed. He says, this is what you ought to be doing and this is why.
And so here in chapter two, we're gonna look at verses 11 through 14. When I get there, 11 through 14, and I'll read through the whole thing, but then we're gonna piece through it in a couple of different pieces. I mean, this is the why. Why should you do the things that he's telling this young pastor to do? For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly Passions and to live self controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who were zealous for good works.
So what is the whole Bible teach us about salvation? What does these vers show us about salvation? Look at this in kind of three parts. And the first part is keyed in on this first bit. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people.
Okay, I want to know what salvation is. What is the salvation for all people that God's given? It's at the end there. The salvation is Jesus Christ gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. So the grace of God, the gift of God, the.
The blessing of God, the thing that you could not have earned from God that he's freely giving to you is salvation.
It's a gift that's received through faith in Jesus. Like, I don't know if you know this, but, like, the foundational message of Christianity is that there's literally nothing you can do to make yourself right with God. That even when you, like, decide, okay, I'm gonna be a good person, I'm gonna try to do the things that I know are right, we don't actually have the ability in ourself to do the things that we know we ought to do.
It's one of those things where you will hear philosophers or different people that talk about, like, a utopian society. And we have this picture of what it would look like for human society to work together and for all men to kind of love one another. And we can describe that and it makes maybe a good story. But when it comes down to how I have to live on a Thursday, it ain't gonna happen. Like, there are some people that are religious enough and zealous enough that they can force themselves to be good people.
I don't know what your conceptions are of me as your pastor, but I'm not that guy. I'm not smart enough or strong enough or spiritual enough to force myself to be a good person. And if you don't know that about me, you will learn that over time. Like, at some point I am going to disappoint you. And you're like, wow, came to the wrong church today.
The thing is, as you get to know any Christian, not just pastors, as you get to know any Christian, you'll realize, o, you're not as good a person as I thought you were when I first met you. Like, you had taken a shower and you kind of smiled at me. But I'm seeing you in your mess. I'm like, o, I'gon find some new friends. The message of Christianity is not that we get ourselves polished up and we do a bunch of moral stuff so that God is now happy with us.
The fact of the matter is, like, even the good moral stuff that we try to do when we do it for selfish motivations, makes it despicable to God. So the message of Christianity is that Jesus came and his death made it possible for us to be right with God. And it's just a gift. It's not something that you can earn. It's just something that you can ask for.
And here's the crazy thing, and this might unsettle you a little bit, but it's not even just like the asking that makes it possible. It's God's grace that he answers your asking. He puts the ball in your cor. Says, hey, I want you to ask me to make you righteous. But then like, okay, well, God, you have to do it because I asked you.
No, he doesn't have to do it because you asked Him. It is even his grace, it is even his kindness that he responds to us when he asks us, as he has instructed us to ask Him. We're completely dependent on God. Not just for the idea that we should ask, not even just for the ability to ask, but that our asking is answered in the affirmative. He's under no obligation to answer our requests.
We have been the people who have cursed him to his face. We have been the people who have, like, shook out the heavenly bank account to squeeze out the blessings of God and then to use them in our own selfish purposes, like he owes us nothing from the get go. But he says, if you ask me, I'll give. It's a free gift. Titus will say this in chapter 3.
Look at chapter 3 vers. 4. 7. You might have to flip a page there. But Titus 3:4 through 7.
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness. Salvation does not come because of anything we do, the believing or the asking. All that is a gift too, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. It's just a gift.
So there's good news and bad news.
The good news is you can't do anything. And so God will do it all if you let Him. The bad news is you're still going toa want to do it.
There have been times in my life where I have, like, looked God in the eye proverbially and just said, like, you owe me. Do you know how good I repented last time? I cried in everything. I had all these tingly feelings on my spine, like I had an experience. God, you owe me.
And God said, I don't owe you anything, my friend. But I'll tell you what. I love you. I tell you what, like, I have done all the work so that I can forgive you. You just get down off your high horse, little boy, and you trust me.
Because even in the knowing to ask, I have given you a gift.
These verses here in chapter three say that whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Justified. That's kind of the theological term. We've been justified. And that's, I think, the first section of salvation as we think about salvation, justification being justified.
Justification is a legal term. It's like a court case where the verdict has been declared and the verdict's been declared and the guilty party has been declared free of all charges. Justification means that you do not have any penalty for the things that you know, you earn. So picture with me a court case, and I want you to picture with me a court case in which you are the defendant. So you're the one who has done wrong, and you're the one who's on trial, and you go before the judge who's, I don't know, creator of the whole universe, who not only knows all of the things that you did, he knows all the good things that you were supposed to do that you kind of didn't, and he knows all the reasons why.
He knows the thoughts and the intentions of your heart, and he's gonna judge you. Now, there are some religious people who believe that they can do enough good stuff to outweigh the bad stuff that they do. But I'm just gonna put on there all of your motivations, like on those scales, all of your motivations, every selfish thought you've ever done, every good thing you've ever done for a selish reason. Like, see if maybe in that calculation, you can do enough good stuff to outweigh the bad. I don't have the ability to do that.
But as you're walking into that courtroom, you look at Jesus, you say, hey, I can't survive this case. I'm guilty.
Will you take my place?
And Jesus steps up to the Father as the defendant in your case, and the Father declares you righteous, free of the penalty of your sin, based on Jesus'performance in his life. It takes your place now. So that's like the court case. Justification is that Jesus saved us and Jesus saved us from the penalty of sin. I have no idea where I am in my slides, but I'll give you this one.
Yeah. So justification. Jesus saved us from the penalty of sin. Usually I have a preview in the back and it's not working today. And it's my fault.
I should have fixed it, but it's. Whatever. Here we are. Justification freeses from the penalty of sin. So here's the question, and this may be the most important question.
It's a question that Tyler posed a couple of weeks ago. Who do you say Jesus is? And have we trusted Jesus to declare us righteous before the Father? He said, jesus, will you take my place in this court case? Will you apply your righteousness to me?
Because I think to do that, you should agree with him that your sin condemns you. You should agree that your sin is sin, and your sin will condemn you before God, and it will kill you as you let it fester in your life. Agree with God and then trust that Jesus sacrifice something about his righteous life and his death.
Not just a murder that happened in history, but he died for our sin. Like his death had a purpose. That someone in his perfect life and his death and his resurrection shows that God is willing to accept Jesus payment on behalf of sinners. Jesus, I just trust you to sort this out with the judge. I agree with you that I'm condemned, and I trust you to sort it out with the judge and then ask him, will you forgive me?
And he promises that he'll answer that prayer. And so have we trusted Jesus to declare us righteous before the Father? Have we asked him to forgive our sin? Cause I think sometimes we talk around it, don't we? And it can be easy.
Sometimes coming into church and singing the songs, like, we kind of sing around it. We kind of think about the idea of it, but we never just say, like, hey, what about for me, Jesus, for me, will you forgive me once and for all? All the sins that I know of in the past, Even the ones that I don't know in the past. Like, will you forgive me those? Will you forgive me the sins that I'm doing right now?
Because I'm convinced for me that as long as I'm breathing, I'm sinning. There's some kind of selfish motivation there' there's some kind of hate that's stirring in me somewhere. Jesus, will you just forgive me for the sins that I don't even know that I'm gonna do yet? And he says, I will if you ask once for all.
Because we depend fully on God to save us every step of the way.
Pastor Oren shared this quote from Paul Tripp last week. Our greatest need is not to be strong, but to be dependent on the one who is infinitely strong. So whatever it is that you would have listed as your need today, the thing that you came thinking, the problem that you came thinking you needed to be solved, Jesus says, your primary problem is sin, and I've paid for it in full. So will you come to me and trust me to take care of that?
And everybody who calls in the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved.
Are you guys good with that?
A lot of people are.
Your neighbors are gonna be offended by that. What do you mean? Do you mean I got to trust in Jesus? What about all the other religions? There's all kinds of, like, good religious, nice people.
There are all kinds of beliefs that, like, I like better than just believe in Jesus. You mean to tell me that the wickedness, vilest murderer, the commander in Hamas, could come to the end of his life and say, you know what I think of all? I have accumulated a life full of sin. But here on my deathbed, I call out on Jesus and ask him to take my place, and Jesus will just do that for him. That's not right.
That's not fair. I don't like it. That's too exclusive. Is it just my neighbors? Have you heard that, too?
You like it's too exclusive? Here's the deal. Made the rules, and he made the way. But as exclusive as that message is, that there is only one way for us to be made right with God and to be eternally in perfect union with him forever is through his son, Jesus Christ. As exclusive as that is, it is the most inclusive message on the Market.
Who is it that Jesus took his message to?
Because the religious people of the day, the people who had taken showers and polish themselves up and made sure that they didn't work too hard on the Sabbath, those people were really Frustrated with Jesus because he was taking his message to prostitutes. He was taking his message even to gentiles, to the demon possessed, to those involved in witchcraft and all kinds of wickedness.
Jesus took his message to women, which at the time was a little bit unusual, that all people are equal. At the foot of the cross is literally the most inclusive message that there is.
The justification is salvation from the penalty of sin. The penalty of our sin being deathaf Jesus would give us life. And so the salvation that is applied to you when you agree, trust and ask is eternal. Like, here's the deal. Like, when you trust in Jesus, he brings you into eternity with him.
This salvation is eternal. I'm looking for the one Peter Pass. I think it is up here. There it is. So 1 Peter 1, 3, 5.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, his caus us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, cannot die undefiled, is completely pure and unfading. It will not get old kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for his salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. At the point that you trust Jesus, God does something supernatural. When people pray for the first time to surrender their lives to Jesus, to ask him to forgive their sin, God does a miracle.
He brings the dead to life. And at that point, the Holy Spirit, who is himself fully and completely God, regenerates your dead soul, baptizing you into Jesusus church, submerging you, fully incorporating you into Christ's body, bringing you into this church, fully sealing your destiny with his personal guarantee, and begins for the first time in your existence to live in you. God lives in us. The theological term would be the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. All of that happens at the moment of salvation.
And so have we trusted Jesus to declare us righteous before the Father?
Because our life from that point will be empowered and infiltrated by the Holy Spirit.
Okay, Michael. Well, you said that Jesus, their biggest problem is sin, and Jesus deals with our sin. So what do we do with the Holy Spirit then? Like, what's going on? Why does he need to be in us?
Like, what's the Holy Spirit gonna do at that point? Well, think back to our court case, right? So you're walking into court, you know you're condemned. You ask Jesus to take your place. Jesus says, I got you, boy or girl.
And he stands on the stand and the the Father stands In heaven, he drops the gap. He says, I find this person not guilty on the basis of the righteousness of Christ. When God looks at you, he sees Jesus righteousness. Okay, all right. And you would expect then the court case was over, right?
But you know from your experience that that is when the enemy starts to present the evidence. Now this would not work in any other court case. You would never come after the verdict. And now let's hear the deliberations. Right?
Usually the deliberations come first. Jesus circumvents all of that and says, no, no, no, this one is mine. He is righteous. She is righteous. She's a child of God.
And the enemy hears that declaration of your justification and begins to bring about every accusation of every sinful thing that you deserve to be condemned by. That Jesus, by his death on the cross, has already obliterated from God's record. Don't you know that from your experience? As soon as you are, like in a space where you feel like, okay, I'm right with God, now you've got this little voice on your shoulder reminding you of all of those times that you just were a little bit selfish, or all of those times where you actually were a lot of bit selfish and you manipulated the situation to get exactly what you wanted. Or that time that you just continue to give yourself over to that besetting sin, regardless of the people in your life who are pleading with you to get out of it.
Like the enemy continues, continues, continues to accuse and accuse and accuse, regardless of what the gavel has dropped on you. That's why the Holy Spirit comes to live in us. Because the case is still ongoing in this weird way. But that brings us to the next step, the next phase of salvation. So Jesus has saved us from the penalty of sin.
That's justification. But there's another part of salvation that we call sanctification. You say sanctification. San. Ye.
You guys have been kind of quiet, so I feel like I need some sanctification. Sanation. All right, cool. I'm just making sure. This is the idea that Jesus is saving us from the power of sin.
Jesus is saving us from the. So he has saved us from the penalty of sin. Our eternal destiny is set. But now we still have the accuser going in our head. And so Jesus is saving us currently, continually from the power of sin.
And as he sets us free from the power of sin, we no longer have to do it. I don't know if you know this. I don't know if anybody else will tell you this. I Hope you read it in God's Word, because that's where I got it from. But you don't have to sin.
The devil don't get to make you do nothing. You can choose to do what's right in Christ's power.
And I'll get that from the next bit of Titus when I find it. There it is. Okay. So for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. We call that ###ation justification.
Yepah. Good. A little bit of ahead. Okay. We call that justification.
Now, sanctification, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age. Like we're in the present age and the accuser is constantly bringing to mind all of these old dead sin things. And like, we're kind of still into them, aren't we? I kind of don't know. I know Jesus says that's a sin.
I know he says he's forgiven me, but I just kind of enjoy it. It feels comfortable to me.
Salvation begins a lifelong process of becoming who Jesus has declared us to be. You're not currently who Jesus says you are. And so we are in this process of becoming who Jesus says that I am. There are all kinds of spiritual truths that he has locked into place that we're just catching up on. There's a lot of legal realities when we trust Jesus that he's made true that I was unaware of at the time.
Sanctification is salvation from the power of sin. It's kind of like being adopted.
If you're adopted, the idea underlying that is that you started in one family and'being brought into another family. Right?
All right. O look, I'll keep going. If you're asleeeping, it's okay.
So start in one family, move to another family. So when you legally get, like, your name changed to belong to the new family, you now legally belong to this new family. However, have you ever been in, in a relation, like been visiting another family and been at the dinner table and been like, this is weird. These people are psychopaths.
I'm fully convinced Pastor Todd before me used to say every marriage is a miracle. I think every family is a miracle. I don't know how you people live with each other. Every family is strange. And so if you've been adopted from one family into another, even if you're legally brought into into that family, you still have to learn how to act at the dinner table.
So when you were spiritually dead and in the kingdom of death and in a self serving sinful household that was solely fixed on you and you learned all of these ways to cope with life and how to make it through, suddenly God has justified you, he's given you his own name and now you're sitting at the table of the Kingd of Heaven. And that I don't feel like I fit in this chair very well. I'm not sure that I belong here. I don't know how to act. Why do t we do with all these forks?
And it takes some time. It takes some time because A it's something that's new and B, you've got an accuser over the back of your shoulder telling you all the reasons why you don't belong there. And so you're in this constant intsion of hearing these voices, of having this 10 of trying to learn the new rules and of just every now and then, every now and then we can pull our eyes up and we can glance at the head of the table and we can see our Savior who has welcomed us with open arms and instead of banquet a feast of true life, who has filled our cup with living water that we have no lack.
It's hard. It's a process. The big word is sanctification. And salvation begins a lifelong process of rejecting and unlearning our natural sin tendencies. So what dead way of living does Jesus want to save us from?
There's stuff that you had before Christ that he's like, hey, I want that out of your life. What are the dead ways of living that Jesus wants to save us from? If you want some ideas, there's some here in Titus, in chapter three and verse three, he's describing life before Christ. He says, we ourselves were once foolish, we were once disobedient, we were led astray, we were slaves to various passions, slaves to various pleasures. We passed our days in malice and passed our days in envy.
Just looking and wanting and wanting and wanting, hated by others and hating one another.
What dead way of living does Jesus want to save us from?
What old rule from the old table is he asking you to just throw away? You don't need that gnarled spoon. I've got the silver one here for you, son.
Because sanctification is the process of learning how to see every aspect of my life and every aspect of my character and every aspect of all of my relationships through the lens of the Gospel. It's like learning how to put on glass. Y'all are blobs, which is maybe better. And I'll it's saying, okay, okay, God's telling me I have this new life. He's saying that Christ has defeated every sin.
And so now I have to learn how to see the way that I eat through that, or I have to learn how to see this one conflict I have at work through the lens of the gospel. Because. Because if Jesus has died and forgiven every sin, that means he has fully paid for the sins that other people have done against me. And if he's died for the sins that other people have done against me, and I have trusted him to forgive my sins that I've done against other people, then what right do I have to hold grudges against people who've sinned against me? Like I have to forgive as I have been forgiven.
I have to forgive my debtors, says I, as I have been forgiven my debts.
I don't know about that. But we depend fully on God to save us every step of the way.
We got one more step.
Sanctification or justification. Jesus has saved us from the penalty of sin. Sanctification. Jesus is saving us from the power of sin. And now we go to the last section.
There is glorification. This is the fun stuff. You want to talk back about this? So, for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, to live self controlled and upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, who are zealous for good works. Let me just make a note here.
Depending on what translation you're looking at, if you're not looking at the esv, this phrase, our great God and Savior Jesus Christ might be split up in different ways. Like grammatically, what he's saying here is that Jesus Christ is our Savior and our God. It's a very explicit statement that Jesus is God. And so people who don't like that statement try to translate it in different ways, but it's actually really, really clear. So like when we talk about Jesus, we're talking about God.
But here's the deal. Nobody masters the Jesus way of life this side of the sun. None of us are gonna get it perfect. None of us are gonna be able to do everything that God has asked us us to do or everything that would make us perfect in God's sight. No one masters the way as long as we're under the sun, the Scriptures teach clearly that there's go going toa be toil and there's gonna be a war against sin and against its destructive influence.
And so although we have salvation from the penalty of sin, and although we are growing to understand our salvation from the power of sin, we and all the world with us are groaning for salvation from the presence of sin. And the promise is that we are moving towards a glorification when Jesus, our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, appears, when he returns, we will be made completely and perfectly like him, free from the presence of sin. We no longer have to deal with it. It'be dealt with once and for all.
In Titus Chter. 3, 4, 7, when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior of purity, saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirrs according to the hope of eternal life. What he's doing, what he has done, the completed work of Christ that is being applied to every situation of our life is moving us towards a conclusion that is perfect.
Our hope is not that we would get our act together, that every relationship that we're in would be completely removed of tension, that all of our difficulties would just kind of go away and we just kind of chill. But our hope is anchored in eternity, where the presence of sin is obliterated from creation and we can be together with one another and with God, free from any kind of influence of sin.
And that's a different way of living, isn't it? Like, thinking about that is different from, like, thinking about, this guy's going a long time, it's time for lunch, right?
Rather than just making decisions in the moment, for the moment, about how I feel. If we anchor our hope in eternity, it changes the calculus of how we live. How does anchoring our hope and eternity change how we approach this week?
If I'm thinking long term, if I'm thinking like Jesus is doing work in me, he is sanctifying me, he's setting me apart for his purpose. He's helping me to see every aspect of my life through the lens of what he has done for me. How does that change how I approach my work?
How does that change how I approach this conversation I'm getting ready to go into, or this conversation that's coming at me that I don't know that I'm ready For how does anchoring our hope and eternity change our leisure time and the things we entertain ourselves with?
And ultimately, if you have this hope, if you say, yes, I trust Jesus, I believe I've been justified. I'm declared righteous before God. I'm in the process of sanctifying and he's working on me. I'm looking forward to glorification. Then who do you know that needs this hope?
Who do you know who's still sitting at the old table just trying to make it work?
Because the gospel is exclusive.
It's faith alone in Christ alone by God's grace alone. But it's also inclusive to every man, every woman, every child, every enemy, every friend, every family member, every politician, every immigrant, every person living in rebellion from God, every person who's doing just enough to make sure that everybody thinks I'm a good person, but I'm still holding out this little caveat from Jesus'reign Every religious pharisee.
Because when does God give up?
He doesn't. Jesus, we thank you for your mercy. We thank you for your grace. Lord, I pray that as faces come to mind as we reflect on who needs your hope, God, that you would give us the courage to share the gifts that you've given to us.
Lord, I pray that your spirit would do the work that only you can do of changing hearts. Lord, if there's someone who's hear in my voice that hasn't trusted you for salvation, that Lord, today would be the day they do that, that they would say to you, Jesus, I don't really understand the how of how it works, but I know I'm condemned. I know that the scales would not tip in my favor if I were to be judged for my life. And so I don't know how you paid it all. I don't know how your death applies to me, but I trust you to sort it out with the judge.
Would you forgive me, please?
And would you help me to understand my new place at your table?
And for those of us who that's an old message or it's a familiar story.
God, I pray that you would kindle in us a fire for those who are still lost and far away from you, who are feasting at the table of death unto death and separation from you, would you help us to love them the way that you have loved us and to never give up until you return. In Jesus name we ask. Amen.
