Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Five more minutes. 45 more minutes. What am I doing here? There we go. All right. Good morning, church.
[00:00:22] It is good to see you this morning. My name is Craig McAlevy. For those of you who do not know me, I am one of the pastors here at Emanuel Fellowship.
[00:00:31] I want to thank Kurt for sharing and thank the students for sharing. How articulate are those students that shared? Those are middle schoolers and high schoolers.
[00:00:41] I was nowhere near that articulate when I was their age. It took me two weeks to be this articulate for what I'm about to share, and you'll be the judge on just how articulate this is.
[00:00:53] But it is a blessing to be here once again this morning. Before we start, I want to remind you folks that our lead pastor, Sam Tinell, is on sabbatical. He is on a seven week sabbatical, and he is out for another two or three more weeks with his family, his wife Kim, and four small children.
[00:01:12] And so I just say that to encourage you to continue to pray for Sam.
[00:01:16] For one. The other is, Sam leads our every other month prayer meeting on Sunday evenings, and we will have that tonight. I will lead that, that will be here in the sanctuary at 530 this evening. If you would care to join us, please do so. If you can't make it, that's fine. If you have any prayer requests, I would echo what Jim said. Feel free to share that. There's a box in the corner, and you can just take one of the cards that are in the back and fill out your prayer request and drop it in the box in the corner there. You don't have to put your name down if you don't want to. You can be anonymous. That's okay. The Lord knows who you are. But if you want to put your name specifically, that would be all right as well. And we will pray through those tonight, as well as other matters. We will pray for Dave ameling as we prayed earlier. Thank you for doing that, and for Sally and for their family as well. So I just wanted to spend a minute inviting you to our prayer meeting this evening at 530 in this space. It will be about an hour, won't be any longer than 1 hour, but I want to welcome you all this morning. Turn in your bibles to Romans, chapter ten.
[00:02:23] As Jim said, we are in a series called asking for a friend, and we are in week five of a seven week series where we're answering some of these big questions that people have in life. And as Jim said, today's question is, can I know what's in store for me after this life?
[00:02:43] And we're going to answer that question. We're going to try to answer that question this morning. From Romans, chapter ten, verses nine through 15, can I know what's in store for me after this life? And when we ask that question, as I studied this, there are two logical follow up questions to this. One, can I know what's in store for me after this life? There is a what question that one would follow up with. What is it that's in store for me after this life? That would be a logical follow up question. And the other question would be, how can I know what's in store for me after this life? So a what question and a how question. And we're going to address both of those this morning a little bit. But before I start answering how and what questions, I have another question. And it's a why question.
[00:03:36] It's a why question. Why do we feel the need to even ask these types of questions, whether it's a how question or what question or any of the questions that we have posed in our series so far, questions like, how can I know that I'm right with God?
[00:03:56] Does God have a purpose for my suffering? Does God have a plan to fix this messy, broken world?
[00:04:03] Questions like last week that Jesse answered, how can I know I'm secure in God's love? Or today's question, can I know what's in store for me after this life? And then in the next two weeks, we'll be answering the question, can God really use me to make a difference?
[00:04:19] And the last question, how can I find peace with those who hurt me? That's a very big question. Why do we feel compelled to ask, to ask these questions?
[00:04:32] Well, human beings by nature are inquisitive. If you've spent any time around a kindergartner, you know that unlike kindergarteners, we may not verbalize all of our questions, but we do. We have, we have questions just like kindergarteners do, just like small children. Questions of all kinds, right?
[00:04:53] We long for answers to questions like we're posing in our series and many more. And it's because there's a yearning within every human heart that longs for something more.
[00:05:06] And that's regardless of whether you are a believer in Jesus or not, we just somehow know that the world isn't right.
[00:05:14] There's something in us that knows that there's something bigger, there's something better, there's something more. We desire to understand the bigger picture, the bigger questions in life, and we desire to know how and if some of the small details of life, how they fit into that bigger picture.
[00:05:35] Human beings uniquely, this is a uniquely human being trait, yearn for three meaning, purpose and identity. That's a uniquely human trait.
[00:05:49] And what else is a uniquely human trait is we will look anywhere to fill those needs.
[00:05:56] Anywhere to fill those needs, to fill those yearnings. But where do these yearnings come from?
[00:06:03] Well, in the book of ecclesiastes contains the reflections of an old man, the preacher, he's called. In that book, it's commonly thought to be King Solomon. And in ecclesiastes, chapter three, verses ten and eleven, this is what he writes. He says, I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. And then this is the answer to this question I'm posing. He has put eternity into man's heart. God has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end, God himself has put the idea and the desire for eternity into our very hearts.
[00:06:53] And furthermore, it seems that God has made us to long for it, to ask questions about it, and yet to have a difficult time figuring it out on our own.
[00:07:04] That's the key phrase, on our own.
[00:07:07] If you read the book of ecclesiastes, you would know that Solomon searched everywhere and did everything possible to search for meaning, purpose and identity. And it was all, as he said, vanity.
[00:07:20] So this reveals something to us about God's heart. For us, this yearning for eternity, I believe, is the single yearning that puts the yearning for meaning, purpose and identity into its proper place.
[00:07:34] And this is why we ask questions like this, because God has designed us to ask questions like this. God has designed us to yearn for answers like this, even if we're not able to fully comprehend eternity in this life, especially left to our own devices.
[00:07:54] But we can on some level, comprehend and embrace the means to experience eternity, which is to understand the very heart of God for us, which puts us then on a proper trajectory to then seek for those other yearnings of meaning, purpose and identity in their proper place, which is in God himself.
[00:08:18] I mentioned this a couple weeks ago when I was up here. This is all, we forget this. This is all very supernatural stuff, very supernatural stuff that we're talking about. And we have to embrace our human limitations. We have to embrace those human limitations and look to the only one that can help us, and that's God himself, because his heart and his desire is to do just that. And even more, God has so much more for us than even these questions that we are asking. So I want to ask us all to do something this morning. It's not going to be asking you to get up and move around and greet anybody or do anything awkward like that, but I want you to do something, me this morning, because this is likely a fairly familiar passage to most of us. And so I want to ask you to put aside any preconceived notions that you may have.
[00:09:12] Put aside your religious baggage, put aside denominational affiliations, put aside your theological presuppositions, and listen this morning. Listen with an open heart and an open mind to how the word of God answers our question this morning, and let your heart engage God's heart.
[00:09:34] More importantly, let God's heart engage your heart.
[00:09:38] Let me pray for our time, and then we'll read the passage and we'll talk about it. Lord, thank you for this morning. Holy spirit, we need you.
[00:09:45] We need your guiding hand in our hearts. Lord, I need it in my heart, and we all need it to listen, but not just to listen, to actually take in what you have for us this morning, Lord, to let it rest in our hearts and in our souls for us to wrestle with what these questions mean, particularly the one today.
[00:10:10] And Lord, help us to know deeply how much you love us and have for us even this morning.
[00:10:17] We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:10:21] So Romans chapter ten, verses nine through 15. Let me restate the question. Can I know what's in store for me after this life? To which the text in Romans chapter ten says, if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved.
[00:10:43] One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation. For the scripture says, everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame, since there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same lord of all richly blesses all who call on him.
[00:11:06] For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
[00:11:11] How then can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent as it is written? How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news. And this is the word of the Lord. This morning Paul gets right to the matter, right to the heart of the matter in verse nine.
[00:11:39] For all of the hard to understand passages in the apostle Paul's writings, this is not one of them. He's very clear. Paul states the answer right up front in verse nine. He does this with a very logical argument. He does this all throughout his writings. He uses if then clauses, and then he gives three statements that further explains his answer. Each one starts with or intimates the word for before it. And finally, he asks some rhetorical how questions, which we'll talk about at the end. But let's first look at verses nine and ten. And again, our question, how can I know for sure what's in store for me after this life? If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. That's it. That's the answer. That is how you can know what's in store for you after this life. It's very simple. We just sung about it. As I said, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved.
[00:12:44] This is Christianity's oldest confession of faith. Jesus is Lord.
[00:12:51] Now, don't get too hung up again. This is one of the reasons that I asked you to kind of put aside some of your previous preconceived notions. Don't get hung up on the fact that in this opening verse, Paul puts a verbal confession first and then a heart belief. That's not typically how we would think of expressing the process if we would be so arrogant as to express in human terms the process of salvation. In fact, he changes the order from verbal to heart to heart, from heart, from verbal to heart to heart to verbal. In verse ten, he says, one believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.
[00:13:32] In verse nine, Paul is merely following an order that he's written about and quotes from the Old Testament in the preceding verse eight that we didn't read this morning, where he quotes from deuteronomy and he says, the message is near to you, in your mouth and in your heart.
[00:13:51] What message?
[00:13:53] What's the message? That answers the question, can I know what's in store for me after this life? It is near you. It's in your mouth, and it's in your heart. What's important for us to understand is that when it comes to the matters of saving faith, confession, verbal confession, and heart belief are both inward and outward aspects of the same thing. Of that saving faith, what's perhaps of greater importance is the confession itself that we're going to talk about. And there's two parts the first is Jesus is Lord.
[00:14:28] It's quite simply a declaration and an acknowledgement that Jesus, who, remember, if you think of this in the context of the first century, he was initially followed as a simple rabbi, right? He was a teacher. He was a good teacher, one among many in the day, who would have been rabbis, who, people would have followed this jesus, this rabbi, is actually God himself, which gives ultimate weight to his teachings and his work then, just as it does now, that is to say, when we confess that Jesus is Lord, this truth, that truth, if that is true for you, this truth, which is truth, is to have ultimate weight, ultimate sway in everything we do, as we pursue answers to questions of meaning, purpose, and identity in this life, and ultimate weight and ultimate sway in our understanding of our hope for the next life.
[00:15:33] And this confession is linked to believing in our hearts, not just in this passage, but in one corinthians twelve, Paul says that no one, no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
[00:15:49] It's a supernatural thing, which means if God has not opened and illuminated your heart to your personal sin and to his holiness by the power of his spirit, than a verbal confession is meaningless.
[00:16:06] Anyone can say the words.
[00:16:08] It's not a magical incantation to be saved. It is a deep heart change.
[00:16:15] This is a truth that must be revealed to you by God's spirit. It is born out of a faith that has taken hold of your inner being, that has broken and humbled you before a holy God and has compelled you to cry out to him for salvation.
[00:16:33] So the question is, are you simply following Jesus as a great teacher?
[00:16:38] Is he just a great man to you?
[00:16:41] You may not cognitively think that, but is that how you're living out your faith?
[00:16:47] Or is he Lord?
[00:16:49] Is Jesus Lord? Is he savior?
[00:16:53] The second part of the confession is God raised him from the dead.
[00:16:58] Not only is it important that we believe, it's critical what we believe.
[00:17:05] Many believe that Jesus was a great rabbi, many in that day did. Many today still believe he was a great rabbi, a great teacher, and many even believe that he died on a roman cross. But that's where their understanding ends, and that simply has no lasting power. There's no lasting power, and there's no salvation in a great teacher or a dead martyr. But there isn't a living savior.
[00:17:32] The reality is that Jesus, God himself, took on my sins, and he took on your sins, and he took them to the cross, and he took them in our place, and he took them to the grave, and he buried there for all eternity. Satisfying the wrath of a holy God. And then God raised him from the dead, which signified Christ's triumph over Satan, sin and death itself. And what we get out of that is righteousness. The righteousness of Christ. What a trade off. Again, we sang about this in the hymn cornerstone. Our sins were placed on Jesus. His righteousness was placed on us.
[00:18:18] I think Jim called that in his sermon the very first week of the series. The great exchange. Indeed, a great exchange.
[00:18:27] Our sins laid on our savior. Your personal sins, not the theoretical idea of your sins, your actual sins, past, present and future, on Jesus, his righteousness on us.
[00:18:45] If we don't believe in the resurrection, if that's something that is not true in our minds, if Jesus is simply a good teacher, Paul has some definitive words for us. In one corinthians 15, he says, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, he says this. Listen. He says our proclamation and our faith are literally in vain.
[00:19:05] He says our faith is worthless and we're still in our sins. These are strong words. He says our hope is in Christ for this life only, which doesn't sound like a bad thing, except for he says we should be pitied for that more than anybody.
[00:19:23] Belief in a Jesus who simply was born, who grew up to teach amazing things, from which, by the way, we pick and choose which ones to follow, then died, was buried, end of story. Belief in that Jesus is not a supernatural faith. In fact, it's quite impotent to do anything at all. But maybe scratch an itch in this life, maybe temporarily, if it even does that.
[00:19:52] A supernatural faith given by God through Jesus Christ believes that Jesus is alive.
[00:20:02] And, friends, there are consequences in our lives for that. There are implications to that kind of faith, one of which is that you too were made alive.
[00:20:14] Belief in the resurrected Jesus as your lord and savior answers the question of how you can know what's in store after this life.
[00:20:23] How can I know? By believing in Jesus. By confessing that Jesus is Lord. And if you have the faith to believe this, the gift of faith to believe this, you will be saved.
[00:20:38] This statement, you will be saved is good news, is it not? It is good news, but it is in this statement of good news how we know what is in store for us. So let's talk about what is in store for us, because it's in that statement, you will be saved, that we understand what is in store for us. The tense of that phrase, you will be saved, is what? It's future tense, which means what?
[00:21:11] It's in the future. Yeah, it's not that complicated.
[00:21:17] Paul here is talking about the final judgment of God, where we will all stand before a holy God to give an account. Now let me pause for one quick second. This doesn't discount the fact that God sees us. If we are confessing Jesus as Lord and he has risen from the dead, that doesn't discount the fact that God sees us already as saved. All right, we live in the already, but the not yet right? There's a whole lot more we could say. I trust you know what I'm talking about. Many of you do. If you don't, I would love to talk to you about that. But that doesn't discount. Bless you. That doesn't discount that truth that we live in the already and the not yet. Okay?
[00:21:57] This is what is in store for us after this life. And our belief and our confession of Jesus as Lord is what gives us the assurance of hope, of literally standing humbly, yet confidently before a holy God. That is the eternal, ultimate consequence of that confession. And on that day of judgment, God's either going to see you as he sees his son Jesus Christ, literally see you as he sees his son Jesus Christ, clothed in his righteousness, that is, received and exchanged for your sins, where you can then join in with the prophet Isaiah when he says, I rejoice greatly in the Lord. I exult in my God, for he has clothed me with his garments of righteousness, or, excuse me, his garments of salvation, and wrapped me in a robe of righteousness, as a groom wears a turban, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
[00:22:56] And being clothed as such, standing before God, we are then invited to dwell with God, where he will be our God. We will be his people. God himself will be with us, and he will be our God. He will wipe away every tear.
[00:23:13] Death will be no more. Grief, crying and pain will be no more, because those things will have passed away.
[00:23:20] And at the final judgment that awaits us all after this life, we will stand before a holy and a just God. And he will either see us this way or he won't.
[00:23:34] There's no middle ground.
[00:23:36] There's no halfway point. There's no transition plan.
[00:23:40] The only alternative to believing and trusting in God, in the good news that Jesus is Lord and that he has been raised from the dead, and God seeing us as he sees his son Jesus clothed in righteousness. The only alternative to that are the words of Jesus in Matthew seven, which are frightening words.
[00:24:00] He says, not everybody who says to me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven. And on that day many will say, Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name? Didn't we drive out demons in your name and do many miracles in your name?
[00:24:19] Then I will announce to them, Jesus says, this, I never knew you depart from me, you lawbreakers.
[00:24:27] Now you may be thinking, Craig, this sounds, this doing the will of my father sounds more like believing in my heart and confessing with my mouth that Jesus is Lord. Sounds like there's more necessary there. Sounds like I need to add some work to that. And that's not at all. In fact, Jesus tells his disciples in the gospel of John that the work we have to do literally is believing. That's all we have to do is believe in the one God has sent Jesus Christ. Which brings us back to the issue all over again of our heart. Our good works are simply an outworking of the faith that God has given us. An evidence, if you will, of our faith, the gift of faith leading to repentance to God for our sin. And a confession that Jesus is Lord will produce fruit.
[00:25:17] James chapter two says, what good is it, brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but doesn't have works, can such faith save him? If a brother or a sister is without clothes and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, stay warm and be well fed, but you don't give them what the body needs, what good is that?
[00:25:39] In the same way, faith, if it does not have works, is dead by itself.
[00:25:45] The faith that God gives us by grace through faith in Jesus Christ will have evidence of good works in our life. But you are saved by the grace of God through faith. And this is not of your own doing. It is a gift from God. Ephesians says, not from works, so that no one can boast because God gets the glory in this whole thing. This is the gospel. This is the gospel that Paul says in the first chapter of this book of Romans. He says, I'm not ashamed of this gospel because it's the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew and then also to the Greek.
[00:26:29] For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.
[00:26:38] Which transitions us to the next couple of verses, verses eleven through 13, where it says, for the scripture says, everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame, since there is no distinction again between jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him.
[00:26:58] For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
[00:27:04] Paul's focus here is on the importance of a faith that is necessary for salvation, and also the fact that the gospel is for everyone.
[00:27:15] And this gives us insight into a little bit of the larger context of our passage this morning and what's exactly going on that has prompted Paul to specifically write to Christians about their confession of faith. Now, we can't go into a great deal of detail regarding this context, but it's important that we go into some detail this morning. In verse twelve, Paul says there's no distinction between Jews and Greeks. That word Greek also can mean gentile, which just means you're not a jew, right? I would venture to say most of us in here today are gentiles.
[00:27:52] So that's another way of saying Greek is another word of saying gentile. And the reason that he says this is because he's writing this letter to the church in Rome, where the church is made up predominantly of gentiles. However, there must have been a substantial majority of Jews in the church. Based on his writings in this book, the church in Rome had not yet received the teaching of an apostle.
[00:28:16] So Paul, his primary theme in this letter is to lay out the basics of the gospel, right, the good news of God's plan of salvation and the righteousness for all mankind, as he says here, for the Jews and for the Gentiles. And so if we zoom out a little bit farther from this passage this morning, we're going to find that we're in the middle of a larger section in Romans, particularly specifically chapters nine through eleven. And in those chapters of nine through eleven, Paul is specifically writing about the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, as it relates to the Jews, as it relates to the Israelites. And the reason he's writing about them is because if the gospel is righteousness or right, standing before God by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord alone and not by our works, then what does that mean for the chosen descendants of Abraham who believed they were righteous before God, based on ethnicity and law keeping?
[00:29:15] That's what their relationship with the Lord was, based on, their idea that they were the chosen people of God, right, the ethnic jewish people, and that keeping the law is what kept them in God's good graces and saved. Paul's answer is the same. It's all by God's grace. Righteousness has always been through faith alone and not by works. When God told Abraham, who was called Abram at the time, if you would recall. And he said that you and your wife, Sarah, who was Sarai at the time, they were advanced in age. They were 75 or plus. And he said that your air will come from your body.
[00:29:55] He told these old folks this. That's a relative term. The older I get, 75 is really not that old.
[00:30:04] But for our sake, he took Abram out into the. Into the. Into the dark. Now, just a minute. There's no light pollution, so they're looking up at the stars, and he says, abram, can you count those stars? Can you just imagine what he saw up there? Can you imagine how many stars, how many billions of stars his eyes saw? And he said, abram, your offspring are going to be that numerous.
[00:30:28] Believe that. That your air is coming from your body, your old body that can't seem to bear children, and your offspring will be that numerous. And what did Abraham say? What did Abram do? It said he believed God, and God credited that to him. That belief is righteousness.
[00:30:50] You see, the problem for the Israelites is rather than submitting to God's righteousness through faith, they were trying to establish their own righteousness through law keeping.
[00:31:02] And the law was never intended to save.
[00:31:05] The law was always intended to create a futility within them and lead them back to the belief in God's original promise to Abraham. Because you cannot keep the law 100%, you cannot do enough good works to get in God's good graces.
[00:31:20] Instead, what they did was make even more laws, fence laws, to keep them from even approaching God's holy law. And Paul here says, no, no, no, no. On the contrary. The message of faith is near you. It is in your mouth. It is in your heart. It's not out there somewhere. It's not difficult to obtain. There is no need for additional work here. The work has been done.
[00:31:48] And this is pertinent to us today because we have a hard time believing in the amazing, free grace of God. If you're piling up your works, thinking that you're gaining God's favor, favor. God calls those good works filthy rags.
[00:32:05] It's not through morality. It's not through religion. It's not through law keeping. It's not through looking the right way, saying the right thing. It's not even through giving enough money that saves you.
[00:32:18] Paul says, this is the message of faith that we proclaim Jesus is Lord.
[00:32:25] This is a message of grace, the grace of God that is free to everyone who believes it. It doesn't matter what ethnicity, what background you come from. It doesn't matter what sins you committed or keep committing.
[00:32:40] God's grace covers that. Do you understand what God's grace does for you?
[00:32:47] The grace of God takes your feelings of unbearable guilt. It takes your feelings of unbearable shame and embarrassment and inadequacies and unworthiness because of that sin and nails them to a roman cross by the way of his own beloved son, Jesus Christ.
[00:33:06] And everyone who calls on the name of Jesus on that name, will be saved.
[00:33:14] This is a message of God's grace. And it has always been about God's grace. And it always will be about God's grace. Finally, verses 14 and 15, Paul asks a series of rhetorical questions again. There could be much more we could say about this, but he says, how then? How can we call on him who they have not? How can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they're sent as it is written? How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news.
[00:33:54] Paul has been showing the way of God's righteousness is grace and not legalism, not by works. And this message of grace has been clearly evident for the jewish people throughout their history.
[00:34:05] Missed it time and time again. We see stories in the Old Testament of God's stubborn, rebellious, idolatry people, idolatrous people, continually being called back to God by his grace. Grace is clear throughout scripture.
[00:34:23] And if the Israelites did not know it, it was because they had not taken sufficient notice of what God had said to them and what God was clearly doing in their midst. It was all there. It was in their history. It is in scripture.
[00:34:39] All they had to do was believe and have faith in God's promises, because God church is trustworthy.
[00:34:47] What about you today?
[00:34:49] Have you taken sufficient notice of what God has said to you? Perhaps even today?
[00:34:56] I would think it's safe to assume it's likely. All of us in this room have heard the gospel before, whether it's from a preacher, from a pulpit, or someone living, sitting in your living room or at a coffee shop, perhaps even at work.
[00:35:09] You've likely heard the good news brought to you by a faithful servant.
[00:35:14] Have you heard that message of what Jesus Christ has done for you?
[00:35:19] And if you've heard that message, have you listened to that message?
[00:35:25] And if you've listened to that message, have you let it penetrate your heart?
[00:35:30] Or are you still putting up barriers?
[00:35:33] Have you believed this beautiful, life changing message of God's grace that is available to you today?
[00:35:45] And if God is stirring your heart, or maybe he has been, have you acted on that faith?
[00:35:53] It is through believing this gospel of Jesus Christ and confessing that Jesus is Lord and believe that God has raised him from the dead, that you are saved.
[00:36:04] And this is how you can know what is in store for you after this life.
[00:36:09] And what is in store is to stand confidently and yet ever so humbly before a holy and just God, knowing that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you have been covered in the righteous robe of your savior Jesus Christ, and will then be invited into eternal communion with the Father, the son and the spirit.
[00:36:35] Band, you can come up. Let me pray.
[00:36:38] Father, thank you. Thank you for this truth and forgive us.
[00:36:44] Help our unbelief. Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief.
[00:36:51] We can hear this message every day. Perhaps we've even acted on this message. And yet we still find our hearts at times far from you. And so we ask for you to call us back, God. And for some, maybe for the first time, grow that seed of faith that you've implanted into our heart and let it flourish into repentance of our sin to Jesus Christ.
[00:37:16] May we believe in Jesus as our lord, that he was raised from the dead, that he is who he said he was, the Lord of all.
[00:37:25] Lord, let that truth change our lives and change our trajectory as we walk out this door this morning, regardless of whether we have claimed Christ as our savior, I pray that these truths redirect our path today as we leave to live out our faith, to live as if we really have been made alive through Jesus Christ.
[00:37:52] Father, we thank you for this truth. We trust you.
[00:37:56] Continue to work it into our hearts, deeply and out through us as we go out into the world, into a world that desperately needs to hear that message.
[00:38:07] Pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:38:15] Experience eternal communion. I said at the very end that we are going to experience and be invited into eternal communion with the Lord. This is a good transition to a time of communion. We would invite you, if Jesus is your Lord and savior, that you would participate in communion with us. If you need some of the elements, if you have not received one yet, Pastor Jim is walking around with a basket. He would be glad to give you one. If you raise your hand, he will bring one to you.
[00:38:55] The word communion itself is a great word, signifying union with Christ.
[00:39:07] And a lot of what I just said today, I'm reminded, sounds very self focused in a way, and it is. Salvation is individual. It's very personal, but it's never private.
[00:39:25] We are to share our faith. We are to let others know about the good news of Jesus Christ. And we are to celebrate the gospel as we do on Sundays together. That's why we gather. That's why scripture has some very strong words about not forsaking the gathering. It's important that we are together to celebrate. So we have this union with Christ as individuals, but we come together in the community of a church in this context, Immanuel fellowship, and we celebrate this gospel together. The gospel, by the way, this is a tangible form of the gospel in very simple, ordinary elements, right? A little wafer and some juice.
[00:40:04] And so Paul, Paul says in one corinthians, he says, I received from the Lord, and I pass this on to you. Again, an old, old, ancient tradition. He passes this on, and he says, on the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took the bread, and when he had given thanks, he had broken it. And he said, this is my body, which is for you.
[00:40:30] Do this in remembrance of me. So as you take this wafer and perhaps break it in your own hands and take it and internalize it, remember what Jesus has done for you.
[00:40:49] In the same way, he took the cup at their dinner table. It was a cup of wine, and he took the cup and he said, this is the cup of the new covenant in my blood. It's a covenant of God's grace.
[00:41:06] And he said, do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. And he says, for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. And as we just learned, Jesus is Lord, and he's been raised from the dead, so he didn't stay dead. You proclaim the death, but we're proclaiming his resurrection as well. So we are proclaiming the gospel. Take and drink.
[00:41:34] Father, you are too good to us, giving us the gift of salvation, giving us these simple reminders of a profound truth, the most profound truth in the history of the universe, that Jesus is Lord, that he came and that he dwelled among us in a real time, in a real place.
[00:42:04] And he traveled and he taught and he healed, and he died in our place for our sins, putting his righteousness on us as he took on our sins. And then he died, and he rose again. And he is right now interceding at the right hand of the Father on us and our behalf right now.
[00:42:30] Father, thank you for that truth.
[00:42:32] Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate the gospel. This morning.
[00:42:37] We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
