We're Sinners. And We Need Jesus.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors. We're in our sixth week of our Extraordinary Series. We've just been kind of walking through talking about the concept that God has ordained. He's kind of set up in the way he created the world for our normal lives, our everyday going to work, cutting our grass, buying groceries, eating, going to sleep, tying our shoes, teaching our kids how to tie their shoes, like the normal everyday stuff of life.
He's set it up so that he intends to use that for his glory and for the good of others, that he intends to use the normal everyday stuff of life to change the eternity of those around us as we get to interact with them in a way that points them towards Jesus. So that's what we've been talking about for the past five weeks. This is our sixth week and it's the last week in this series. And let me just kind of tell you a little bit about how we do stuff as a church. We're pretty simple, straightforward. On Sundays we gather, we're going to sing some songs because the Bible commands us to, calls us to.
There's something about singing that helps things become real to us, become true to us. You know how you can get a song stuck in your head and it will not leave? Okay, God designed that and he designed us to use that as a way to remind ourselves of his truth. Nobody ever just had a really good sentence stuck in their head and they couldn't get it out. That's not how it works, but you do get songs stuck in your head. And so God, we're going to gather together.
We're going to sing to God. We're going to remind ourselves of his truth, his word. And then throughout the weeks we gather in community groups. And our community groups have group leaders, male and female group leaders in our community groups, are considered deacons in our church and they're kind of the front line of pastoral care and training and discipleship. We ask a lot of our group leaders. And they actually will go through training, leaders in training, so that we can launch more community groups because we believe that healthy groups multiply and that healthy disciples raise up more disciples and train more people.
And that's pretty much it. That's what we do. We're going to preach on Sundays. We'll pick, we do series, which instead of just doing one random thing every week, we kind of pick a topic and focus on it for a little while. A lot of times we just study straight through a book. So this is our last week in this series.
Next week we'll kind of go into studying some Christology, which is just the theology of Christ. We'll study that for a while. I'm pretty excited about that. Then we're going to go spend the rest of the summer in the Psalms, just learning how to worship personally from the Psalms. And as we do that, we usually, we have a groups team that writes content that pairs well. So for our community groups, group leaders are given some, hey, here's some questions, here's a way to lead a Bible study.
Group leaders have a lot of leeway in how groups are led. But we try to write group content that means if you're in a community group and you're not here on Sundays, you still understand what's going on. That's why we say it pairs well. Like a good red wine and a nice steak. Or for our more Baptiste people here, pizza and Mountain Dew. Like it just goes well together.
And so that's what we're doing. We're finishing up this series today. And so I just want to kind of start us off by asking this, kind of thinking through this. Let's say you've been here. You've caught most of this, the weeks you miss, maybe you listen to them online. And you've started to actually apply this.
You're in community groups and you started to say, okay, I'm going to do, actually have this filter into my life, this extraordinary series as we begin walking through this. And so maybe you started looking at your schedule a little bit differently. Maybe you started kind of praying over your schedule. Maybe you started questioning what was taking up your time. Maybe when you went to work, you were more prayerful in the fact that you're now going to get to be around people who don't know Jesus. And so how can I serve them?
How can I love them? How can I relate to them? Maybe you started looking at your schedule a little bit differently. Maybe you started making some invitations. One of the things we've said throughout the series is that if we'll be intentional about inviting people into our lives, not just inviting them to hang out on a Sunday or hang out with a group, but actually just into our lives that we'll begin to see people come to know Jesus, because that's the way God designed this to work, that we would be joining him in mission and normal everyday life. And so maybe you started making invitations into your life.
Maybe you started listening a little bit differently to the people around you, trying to hear ways that their story interacts with the gospel as we had spent the time talking through creation, fall, redemption, restoration. So maybe you started doing that. Maybe you invited someone into your home, your sanctuary, your refuge that you intentionally built with brick walls so that no one could get in unless you let them. Maybe you actually invited someone to come eat around your table or to just hang out and have some coffee or to eat some watermelon in your backyard. Like maybe you actually began to make some invitations and invite people into your house.
Maybe your group's been intentional about throwing parties or hanging out with people. And so the question we're looking at today as we finish up this series is, why on earth would we do that? Why? Why? I'm talking to some of you. It's like, why would you invite someone into your home?
And some of you are like Raz, who actually talked about that that Sunday, and you love having people in your house. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to my wife. Who he describes, who gets to press a button and ride into a shelter where a wall lifts up and press another button and the wall closes and no one can get to her and she's safe. Why would we have people come sit around our table? Why would you do that?
Why would you go out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable? Why would you? Why? That's all we're looking at today. Why on earth would we intentionally look at our schedules differently, begin to pray before we go to work, begin to invite people to be around us that maybe we don't even like? Why would you go sit with them at the break room?
Why would you invite them to get dinner after work? I'm going to pray, and we're going to try to answer this question this morning. God, we ask that your word would change us, that you would help us more clearly than we can on our own see the truth of what we're looking at this morning, that your Holy Spirit would be at work in us. We love you. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.
Grab your Bibles. Go to 1 Timothy chapter 1. If you have one of the white Bibles on the road, it's going to be on page 576. We're going to be in 1 Timothy chapter 1. This was written by the Apostle Paul. Paul was a Jewish leader, and we meet him in the book of Acts.
He's not one of the original apostles, one of the 12 apostles that followed Jesus around. We actually, when we first meet him, he's overseeing an execution of a Christian. He holds the coats of everyone who stoned Stephen, one of the first deacons. They stoned him to death, and Paul oversees this. And then it says Paul was very zealous for the persecution of the church. So he was a Jewish leader who thought that Christianity was subverting the good Jewish rule that was causing problems.
And so he was going around and rounding up Christians and arresting them and having some put to death and some put in prison. And while he's in the process of doing this, he's actually riding to a new city to do this. And Jesus shows up, who did live in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee. He died. He was buried. He rose again.
And Jesus shows up and basically knocks Paul down, makes him blind, and says, why are you trying to start something with me? That's the South Carolina version. That's not exactly what he says in the Bible. But he says, why are you persecuting me? And then he basically says, okay, I'm actually going to take you and use you for my kingdom and my glory. And so Paul becomes a Christian and a missionary and begins to travel around planting churches, starting new churches.
All the churches were new at this point because the church was new at this point. Christians were new at this point. The gospel was new at this point. And so he begins to travel around and plant churches. And this letter we have is a letter written to a new church and a young pastor. And he's writing to him, talking to him about how to pastor, how to lead.
And we're going to just look at this one small section at the very beginning of this to help us answer this question today as to why we would spend money and energy and time going out of our way to be around people who don't know Jesus. Pick up in verse 15. The saying is trustworthy trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. So he's talking about, there's a saying, there's a common saying, and it's trustworthy and it deserves full acceptance. So you should believe this.
You should memorize it. You should write it down. You should cross stitch it on a pillow. Put it on your coffee mug. This is a good one. That's what Paul's saying.
Saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. So let's read that again. This is the saying, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. So let's, we're going to spend the majority of our time just breaking that sentence down. It's pretty dense, so let's just kind of walk through. He starts off with Christ Jesus.
Okay. Christ is a title. It's like king or president. It's not Jesus' last name. So you hear Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ.
It means the same thing. Christ, the word Christ means Messiah, promised one. And so what he's saying here is that Jesus, the Jewish guy that lived and trained the apostles that died on a cross that rose from the grave, that Jesus was the promised Christ from the Old Testament. That all the promises God had been making through his prophets and through his law and everything that we have in the Old Testament, all of those promises that someone was going to come fix this problem of sin, all of those promises are met, fulfilled in Christ, in Jesus. He is the promised Christ. So here's how the Old Testament kind of plays out.
God makes the world and it's good and beautiful. And then he makes humans and they're good and beautiful. And it's amazing. For about two chapters. And then humans botch it up. Adam and Eve, our first parents, rebel against God and sin enters the world.
And at that moment, God begins to step in and throughout the rest of time begins to promise that he's going to fix this. He's going to fix the problem of sin. That this sin that's wreaking havoc and causing problems and breaking down relationships and tearing everything apart, that he's going to fix it. That there's going to be someone who comes and sets up our kingdom. There's going to be someone who comes and atones for sin. There's going to be someone who comes.
Like he keeps promising that. And when he says Christ, that's what he's talking about. The fulfillment of these promises. That Christ Jesus is the deliverer, the promised redeemer. So Christ Jesus came into the world.
Okay, so what he means by that is if you refer to your birth as the moment that you came into the world. Like it sounds a little bit braggy. Like if I was like, yes, I came into the world in the late 80s. You'd be like, okay, that's weird. Like that's a weird way to describe that. There were, some of you would be like, there were the 40s, the 50s, and in the 60s, I came into the world.
Like it just, when he says that, he's pointing to something beyond just a normal birth. What he's saying is that Jesus existed eternally and then he came into the world. That it was actually God entering the world. That when Jesus came, he came into the world. He was born of a virgin. God was his father and he came into the world as a fully human, fully divine, fully God, fully human, and he actually entered the world for a purpose.
Now, the next word in this sentence is two. So it says, Christ Jesus came into the world too. So now we're about to find out what he's here for, what his purpose is. And we should all kind of hold our breath. If this is the first time ever reading this, ever understanding that God became a human, there should be a little bit of tension here because we're not doing great. so if God joins us, there's an assumption that that may be bad. Like I was, some pastor friends that I know where they were at a church plant and they were meeting in another church's building and that church put on their marquee, their little sign, the little church sign out by the road.
They put, don't make me come down there in quotations and then they put dash God. Don't make me come down there, God. And one of the pastors went to the pastors of that church that they were renting from and they were like, you need to take that sign down because he did come down here and that wasn't his attitude. But there's something so easily connected with in that statement that we would believe. Like if you say, don't make me come down there and God said it, we do immediately think, yeah, if he comes down, this isn't to give out high fives. Like we're not doing great.
Y'all realize that, right? Like humans are the biggest problem. Like we're the ones causing the issues here. I've told this story before. When we would go to my grandparents' house, we lived in West Virginia. They had a three-story house.
Their basement is where all the grandkids had to stay and they would put us in there and they would tell us to go to sleep and there was like a thousand sleeping bags on the ground. And then, we would not go to sleep. And so, there would be these moments where we're laughing and having fun and staying up way later than we should and I was little so I don't know if it was two in the morning or like 10.30. I just used to go to bed at eight. I have no clue. It just was really late, you guys.
And the door would open and as soon as the door opened, it was like that door sucked all the air out of the room and everybody was like, I'm feeling like you sleep. Lights are on. We all just fall down like. And you would look to try to see whose feet were coming down the stairs because there was this little wall and all you could see was feet first. And your hope was that it wasn't your parents' feet because your parents can only hit you. They don't just get to beat your cousins.
If it was my granddad's feet, that's equal opportunity beatings. Like he can hit anybody he wants. Complete immunity. But you would just kind of look real quick. There was never a moment when that door opened and feet began to descend that I thought, maybe they're bringing treats. Never happened.
There's never a moment where I was like, maybe they wanted to play with us. No. There was this immediate knowledge of this is not going to be good and there's that tension here when it says that Christ Jesus came into the world. We should all hold our breath a little bit. We're the problem here. Why is he coming?
But it says he came to save sinners. Okay. I think most of us still have a good handle on what the term sinner means. But the Bible's teaching on it is that everyone is a sinner. All humans are sinners, have fallen short, have missed the Mark, have not lived the way we ought to. You may want to debate with whether or not that's actually real, whether or not there is actually a God and whether or not sin actually matters.
But at least most of us I think still understand the concept. The Bible will say that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That there is none righteous, no not one. We're described as dead in our sin, enemies of God, that all of us have joined in the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Here's what I know and it's enough about Adam and Eve to know that you could swap them out with any one of us. Any couple in our church could swap out for Adam and Eve and this story would look very, very similar.
You can put any couple you want there. It could be Matt and Katie Freeman. It'd work out the same. Chet and Anna Phillips. It'd play out the same. Beyonce and Jay-Z.
Oprah and Stedman. Barack and Michelle. It doesn't matter. Put whoever you want there. It's going to play out the same. We're all bent and twisted towards our own pride, our own esteem, our own sin.
And all of us have fallen short. All of us have joined the rebellion. One of the ways I can most clearly see this in my own life. Most days, I think pretty highly about myself. I think I mostly have it together. The Bible tells me that's sin.
So that's a problem. But one of the ways I see this really clearly is if I look at the relationships with the people around me that I love most and that mean the most to me. So you take my parents, you take my brothers, you take my wife, you take my son. And I can point to active times and places and instances where I have personally gone to work to harm them, to tear that relationship down. And these are the people I'm most committed to, should most care about, be most selfless towards, love the most. I'm not talking about me in traffic.
I'm talking about me at my house. I'm not talking about people who don't like me. I'm talking about people who care about me and I care about that I can point to instances where I've actively chosen to tear that apart so that when the Bible looks at me and says, you are a sinner, I'm forced to nod along. Now, there's this idea that if Jesus came, because we're all sinners, how's he going to solve this problem? I got to thinking about this as I was working on this. I think if God came to me and said, I need you to figure out what are my options.
Now that I made a good creation and it rebelled, I need you to tell me what my options are. I need you to lay out for me what I can do to fix this problem. Now, I'm not, that smart. So I came up with three. There may be more. You might come up with more.
I came up with three that I think I would come back to God and present him with. Like if I got in on this plan, I think I'd come back and say, okay, I've come up with really kind of three basic options. Option number one, you cannot care. So you can just kind of stop being the way you are. You can let them do this and not care that they're harming each other, that they're tearing your world apart, that they're hurting each other. Like, because mostly the issue is humans.
I mean, yes, we have some natural disasters and yes, you may have a dog bite you, but I go to bed at night, I lock my doors to my house. That's not because I'm afraid of bears. I don't think a bear, like, I think human might try to get in my house because we're the ones causing problems. So I basically come back and say, you cannot care. You can just kind of turn a blind eye to them hurting each other. And I think, pretty quickly, that one would be ruled out.
It'd be like, okay, I kind of knew that was you weren't going to change and you were going to still be good. So let's move to option number two. Option number two is you can just control all their brains and perfectly control all of them and make them not do this. You can, like, Stepford-wise them, you can robot them, make them not do this. This is one of the things people will say periodically is like, if God's so good, why couldn't he have made us better? Like, why did, if we're all going to naturally sin, why couldn't God have made us better?
Y'all know that would be worse, right? The more good stuff God puts in you, the more capability you have. As long as you have a choice, the more capability you have for good or evil. Let me explain this. Y'all ever met a hamster? Hamsters don't have a whole lot going on.
Not a whole lot poured into the hamster. A hamster, a really good hamster, does what? Like, I don't know, lets you hold it? A really bad hamster bites you? Runs away? Like, there's never a hamster that saved a family from a fire.
There's never a hamster that massacred an entire town. Like, hamsters don't do that because they don't have that much in them. But you take a dog, they have more capacity for good things or bad things because more has been poured into them. You take an eight-year-old, more capacity for good things or bad things because more has been given to them. You take an adult, healthy adult human, because God has put more into them, there's more capacity either for good or for evil. The only way to fix that is to take away choice, not to make us better.
The most dangerous creature in creation was one of the creatures that God poured His most beauty and power into. That's why we believe that there are spiritual beings that cause havoc on earth and that are at work. That's what the Bible, Satan, is a being that God poured a lot into. But because He didn't take away choice, it has the ability to go better or worse. This is like every plot of every science fiction movie. Scientists make a thing and it's amazing and then they look at each other and go, could you imagine if this ever fell into the wrong hands?
Because it's so good, it's so big, it's so powerful, obviously it can cause more problems and that's how it works. So I would say option two, take away choice. Just robot them. Because just saying make them better with a choice would still mean they had a lot of capacity for really heinous things. You know that, like even just humans that are more intelligent can cause more problems, more charismatic can cause more problems than like less intelligent, less charismatic humans. They can still do stuff but it's just not on the same scale.
Option three, you can get rid of all the humans. I think sometimes we like to think that God could just get rid of the bad humans but where do you draw that line? Bottom 50%? You do realize as soon as you do that the top 50% are still going to cause problems, they're still having issues, they're still harming each other, they're still selfish, they're still mean. You could just get rid of the humans. I think those are the three options I would come up with.
Maybe you're more intelligent, maybe you could come up with four or five. I don't think any of us would have come up with the option that God came up with. You see, when he promises to save sinners, what he's got to do is take care of sin without getting rid of us. But sin is in us. So Jesus became one of us.
God said, how about I become a human, live perfectly, righteously on their behalf. I do what all the humans were supposed to do but were never capable of. None of them ever accomplished. What if I live perfectly, righteously on their behalf and then die a gruesome, painful death that they deserve. What if I, God, swap places with them? That's the option he came up with.
To get rid of sin, to pay for sin without having to get rid of all of us. Without taking away choice, without changing his nature, it perfectly blends these together where God says, I'm going to stay holy where I hate sin. I'm going to stay loving where I love humans. I'm not taking away choice. I'm actually going to join them and accomplish for them what they could never accomplish. That was his plan, to save sinners without destroying them.
You see, our sin deserves punishment. We've rebelled against God. Our sin has torn apart his good, harmonious world. And he can't just let us off and act as if we haven't. We aren't guilty. People at times will say, well, why couldn't God just forgive us?
Why does there have to be a system for this? And the answer to that is I don't know. I don't fully know why it has to work this way. I do know he did more than what you're asking of him. When people say that at times, they're saying, why couldn't he just wipe it all away? It's like he did.
It just cost him more. And in some ways, that just makes me love him more than if he just magicked it. He actually, no, sin had to be paid for, but he chose to take it on his own back. So Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, to give forgiveness of sin. That only through faith in Christ can you be saved. Can you be a sinner, which all of us are, and be forgiven?
So why does this matter? Why would we do all the things we've been talking about this whole series? Why would you go out of your way to meet your neighbors, to invite them into your house, to get to know your coworkers? The reason why we would do this is that everyone is a sinner deserving of punishment, but Jesus came to save sinners. That our world is so insanely hopeless, and the gospel is hopeful. That we have all been marked and broken by sin, but there's hope in Christ.
That's why this matters. Because we, as Christians, believe this. That this was us. Just to tell you a little bit about our church family, we've held really closely to this the whole time we've been around. This is one of the main things that we fight for. We believe, and we'll tell you, you are a sinner.
So when you hang out with our community groups, and we do confession in our community groups, which means we just talk about how messed up we are. When you confess something, first of all, it's kind of, confession, and this is even just to help the Christians in the room, it's kind of like when you're sick, and you know you're going to throw up, and you try to fight it, and it's the worst thing ever. This is kind of a gross analogy, but this is how this works. And then after you throw up, you feel amazing. That's the way confession works. It is the worst thing ever.
And then you confess. You talk about what you did. You talk about how you've been treating each other. You talk about stuff that no one would ever know unless you told them, and then immediately you're like, especially in a group of people that believe this, that you're a sinner that needs Jesus. Here's what happens. We confess sin, and the people in our community groups go, yeah.
Because we gather together because we all believe we're sinners who need Jesus. And then we say to each other, isn't Jesus good? Isn't it beautiful that he saves sinners? Let me tell you something. When you confess sin in our church, we're just finding out which brand. We knew you were a sinner.
The only people we give a hard time around here are the people who act like they got it together. It's hard on y'all around here. I'm sorry. We're going to give you a hard time. Every time you hang out with your community group and you go, well, I almost thought a bad word, and then I stopped myself. We're like, oh my goodness.
You are the worst sinner here. And because we're sinners, we want to choke you. Like there's just this level of we're going to fight for you're a sinner. But it's not just that. It's that Jesus saves sinners. That's what qualified us for a savior.
That's why he came. That's why he's good. That's why we gather. That's why we worship. One of the things that happens periodically, and this answer for me has not changed, that in pastoral care, pastoral counseling, there are times where I've sat across a table from somebody. I've sat in a little circle of chairs in a community group, or I've been on the phone with somebody, and you can see tears in their eyes, or you can hear it in their voice, or they're just talking about something, sin that has wrecked their life.
They're telling somebody something they've never said before. They're talking about things that have been going on that they've been hiding. And after that moment of just laying it out there, I usually end up just saying the same thing because it hasn't stopped being true. If Jesus didn't save sinners, we wouldn't be doing this. This church would never have gotten started. If this wasn't a safe place to be messed up, this wasn't a safe place to have baggage and pain, I'd go do something else.
Because Jesus saves sinners, sinners, we all have hope. That's what this is about. There's a story in the book of Numbers, chapter 21, where Moses is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. They're in the wilderness, and they come to a place where they've been grumbling against God, and then all these snakes start biting everybody. The Bible calls them fiery snakes. I don't know if that meant like venomous, or if they actually were on fire, which would be terrifying.
But these snakes start biting people, and people start dying. And so Moses comes to God and says, can we do something about the snakes? And God says, I want you to make a fiery snake. They make one out of bronze. They put it on a stick, and they post it up. And if you get bit by a snake, and you're going to die, a venomous snake, you look at the fiery bronze snake on a stick, and you don't die.
That's a crazy story. Jesus is talking in John chapter 3 to a religious leader who would have memorized most of the Old Testament, and he says, the Son of Man, like Moses raised the snake for the Israelites, the Son of Man is going to be raised up as well. You see, they had to look at a fiery snake to have their venom taken away, and Jesus says, I'm going to become sin so that sin can be taken away. He says, I'm going to be that snake. I'm going to be raised up on a cross when people look at me, their sin will be taken away. And here's what's beautiful about that.
I would have loved to have been a doctor in Israel at that time. I'd just take all the snake cases. When they came to Israel's ER, I'd be like, broken leg? I don't do that. Snake bite, come here. Have you looked at the bronze snake yet?
They'd be like, no. I'd be like, I got this. I'd hand them a prescription. They would just say, look at the bronze snake, stupid. That's it. I could solve all of them because there was one thing that saved them.
It wasn't anything special or magical that they did. It was that they, there was something that was there to save them. Jesus says, that's him. There's a pastor called Dr. Martin Laurie Jones. He was a pastor all through kind of the 1900s in England.
He used to be a doctor and I heard him talking one time and he said, one of the biggest differences between being a doctor and being a preacher is this. He said, when he was a doctor and you came to him with an ailment, he had to ask you all kinds of questions. Tell me your family history. Tell me your symptoms. Tell me everything that you think is inconsequential but I need to know it all. He said he would have to sit and ask people tons and tons of questions just to try to be able to then say, here's what you ought to do.
He said he loved being a preacher. He said, because when he walked up and opened the Bible, he already knew what everybody's problem was. He already knew the disease everybody had and he already knew the cure. He said, it didn't matter whether they were wealthy. He said, I didn't care if you were wealthy or poor, whether you're getting drunk on beer or wine, it doesn't matter. Sin's still your problem.
It didn't matter if you were intelligent or non-intelligent, cultured or not cultured. He said, everybody had the same disease. And this is why we, why this matters, why what we've been talking about for the past five weeks matters. Everybody we know has been bitten by a snake. Everybody we know has sin pumping through their veins. And everybody we know is hopeless without Christ, but Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
I cannot see through the walls of my neighbor's house. I cannot read the thoughts of the people I have the chance to work with, but I can tell you that sin is tearing their lives apart every way it possibly can. And I know that Jesus Christ saves sinners, so it's absolutely worth it that we would go out of our way to see whomever we can come to know Jesus. Verse 16. But I received mercy.
So remember, this is Paul talking. Oh, sorry. Back into verse 15. I skipped something. That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom, of all the sinners, I am the foremost. That means some Bible verses will say chief.
Paul says, I'm the worst. The worst of all the sinners. But I received mercy, meaning that I did not get what I deserved, but that Christ offered mercy to me, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. See, we believe that sin kills us. That there's an eternal death that we will face because of our sin, but that Jesus Christ died in our place for our sin, atoned for our sin, and that there's an eternal life offered in him. And what Paul says is, I'm the worst one.
Some of you in here today maybe came in thinking, I'm a terrible person. How could God ever love me? Maybe you came in because you're trying to fix your life right now. Maybe that's why you've started hanging out with our church families because you're trying to get it together. You think stuff's going poorly in your life and you think, well, I need some Jesus. I gotta start behaving.
I gotta start acting right. I gotta quit talking like this. I gotta quit acting like this. And here's what Paul says. You're not worse than me. I tried to fight Jesus.
You may have done some messed up stuff. Paul says, I tried to fight Jesus. I was killing Christians. I was rounding them up. I was actively fighting against the church. And Jesus Christ gave mercy to me, saved me, redeemed me, so that I could be an example to everyone.
Jesus Christ saves sinners and not based off of anything they do. Paul was not headed to Damascus to get his life together. He was headed to Damascus to snatch the lives of Christians. And Jesus saved him. And what Paul says is, I'm an example to everyone that Jesus Christ saves sinners. You don't have to have it together.
You don't have to be moral. That's not the point. It's that Jesus was good in our place. Some of you are thinking, well, I don't deserve this and I'm not worthy. Right. That's the point.
You don't deserve this. You're not worthy. Jesus Christ saves sinners. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the moral. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the smart. It doesn't say Jesus Christ saves the well-behaved.
It says he saves sinners. And then it says this, verse 17. To the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, the honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. When Jesus saves sinners, he gets all the glory. You see, if you come to Jesus and you present to him your good life, your good behavior, your nice attitude, your good digestion that makes you easy to get along with, if you come to Jesus and you present to him all of the good things that you have, do you know who gets glory?
You do. Look at all your gold stars. You're so precious. Jesus Christ doesn't save good, moral, well-behaved people. He saves the busted, the broken, the sick, the sinner. He saves the person who's been bitten by a snake and knows it.
And then you know who gets all the glory? Jesus. There was not a person walking around the Israelite camp that was like, yeah, I defeated snake bite venom. And they were like, how? I looked at the stick. It's like, okay, well, the stick did it, weirdo.
That's the gospel. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. And there's something about being a Christian that helps us all line up with Paul and say, yeah, I'm the worst. I'm the foremost. And we all believe as Christians that he's going to keep doing it. That's what he does.
And that there's hope for our neighbors and our friends and our coworkers and our family members. Because there's hope for us. You know who's sitting in these chairs right now that's a part of our church family? A whole bunch of people who never thought they would be sitting in these chairs and be a part of a church family. It's one of my favorite things about our church. There's a whole bunch of people that were like, yeah, I thought this was stupid.
Just being real. A whole bunch of people that were like, yeah, I was mad at the church. I didn't like Jesus. I thought this was weird. Some of y'all grew up in the church. I'm not saying anything bad about y'all, but I'm just saying a whole lot of our church family is a bunch of people that thought they'd never be here.
But you know what? Jesus Christ saved sinners. And they don't show up. We don't show up as a church family to keep doing our good deeds. We show up as a church family to continue to remember that I'm a sinner who needs Jesus and he's good and glorious and holy. And that's why it matters.
That's why you'd invite somebody in your home. That's why you'd start praying over your schedule. That's why you'd try to get to know your neighbors. you'd rather be coming to know their story. Okay, come on.