Faith in Focus

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Here it is, August 11th, and the countdown to the last day of 2019 is underway. There’s only 135 days left to get your Christmas shopping done and everything else. Now, if that makes you freak out, rejoice. We still have 20 more Sunday mornings until then to gather as a corporate body and sing his praise. And as we do so, we remember that our help is in the name of the Lord. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. For He has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.

He will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation. Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of God, of Jacob, Selah. And Father, we gather this morning to offer our sacrifice of praise and worship to you. We acknowledge all that is, belongs to you, and exist ultimately to glorify you. May we be counted among those who have clean hands and pure hearts so that we might ascend your holy hill. At your will, nations rise and nations fall.

Men foolishly believe in their autonomy and trust in their own wisdom and ultimately perish for it. We are not like them because you have made our eyes to see your majesty and our ears to hear your word. We declare unashamedly that you are our God. May our lives individually and as corporate body and be a fragrant aroma to those who are being saved as we live out the gospel of Jesus Christ before this unbelieving world. We pray this in the name of your Son Jesus Christ. Amen. The last time I gave the confession exhortation I described two ways that we can mess up the gospel message. One way was by living as though we are without hope and the second way was through the absence of good works. I want to bring to our attention today then a third way that we sin and mess up the message of good news. Acts 15 records a meeting of the Jerusalem Council to discuss a problem that had arisen among the saints. At issue was the question of whether or not the New Gentile believers needed to be circumcised in order to be saved. The proponents of this requirement felt that

it was necessary for the Gentile converts to keep the law of Moses. After much debate it was decided that circumcision was not a salvific requirement and that there should be no extra burdens placed on the New Gentile converts. In other words, the gospel should be preserved in its simplicity and extra burdens should not be added to it. The temptation to enhance the gospel with extra requirements has plagued the church from its beginning and continues into the present. If you’ve been saved for any length of time, you have heard or read of somebody taking a verse or two and deriving a principle that adds another layer of complexity to what it means to be a quote, good Christian.

There is no end to the list of suggested ways to live God’s way with regards to dieting, dating, parenting, praying, observing days, not observing days, educating, entertaining, dressing, and voting, just to name a few. It is true that our faith should affect how we do all of the above. But sin comes in when we start to advocate these things as the essence of true faith and turn the simplicity of a pure and sincere faith in Christ into a burdensome set of laws that no one can keep.

Piling on the do’s and don’ts has never brought anyone closer to Christ. If we’re guilty of being the pilot on or the piled upon, we need to repent and return to a non-burdensome devotion to Christ and let the Spirit of God, using the Word of God, guide us in matters of faith and practice. If you’ve been guilty of the sin of making the gospel more burdensome than is biblically warranted, or if any other sins come to mind, then now is the time to confess those sins. And as we do so, you are invited, if you’re able and desire, to kneel as we privately confess our sins to God. So let’s take that moment now. Father, we thank you for the beauty and the simplicity of the gospel. You know our tendency to try and build rickety scaffolds to heaven made from works of the flesh. We must confess that those such efforts are foolish we are still tempted to succumb to the latest secret to a more abundant life in Christ. Like Paul, may we be resolved to know nothing else but Christ and Him crucified. May the daily manifestations of our faith come from a pure and sincere

love for you rather than an external attempt to impress you with our spirituality. We think of Jesus’ words when He said, Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.

for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Thank you that the true gospel in its simplicity has the power to save the vilest of sinners. Amen. You’re invited to stand. And our assurance of forgiveness this morning is found in Psalm 25 6 or 7. It says, Remember your mercy, O Lord, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions. According to your steadfast love, remember me for the sake of your goodness, O Lord. And so as those who have been set free from the law and live now under the grace of Christ, let’s sing like we know it. Our scripture reading this morning comes from Isaiah chapter 26 verses 1 through 8. Isaiah 26 verses 1 through 8 and I will be reading from the English Standard In that day, this song will be sung in the land of Judah.

We have a strong city. He sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. Open the gates that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy. The path of the righteous is level. You make level the way of the righteous in the path of your judgments. Oh Lord, we wait for you. Your name and remembrance are desire, are the desire of our soul. Let’s pray together. And Father we pray that by your grace it would be the desire of our soul to know and love your word, to do your commandments.

May we identify with the psalmist of 119 who loves your statutes and commands, and we may be identified with Christ whose very food was to do your will. We are grateful for the promises of your word and that if we will obey it, we will enjoy blessing. It may not be an easy life, but it will be blessing. It will bring you honor and we are grateful too for the work of your son and that because of his work we can come before you in obedience and with confidence. We do that now and lift our intercessions to you in his name.

We do want to pray for Debbie Wold as she continues to battle cancer and we ask you to continue to use her and her broad platform for influence to impact others with medical conditions like hers and we ask for her complete healing. For Josh Walton and his episode in the last week and a half with the cellulitis in the neck, we pray that the antibiotics would be effective for killing that presence in his neck and this small mass that they’ve discovered at the base of his brain that is impairing his vision. May the doctors be able to remove it as minimally, invasively as possible. May he enjoy immediate improvement as a result.

And we just pray that you be able to give him some good rest because he’s been exhausted of late. Give him grace and patience along the way. For Ralph Durden, as he is undergoing chemotherapy and battling his ongoing medical issues, give him grace and healing. We pray for Mary Kay as she works hard to try to care for him and has neck and eye problems of her own. Please heal her and grant them both wisdom as they try to determine and navigate the waters ahead, logistically and physically and otherwise. For Bruce Clingan, who has had multiple strokes and has a host of other very serious medical issues, we take comfort in knowing that your arm is not so short that it cannot save, and neither is it so short that you cannot rescue and heal.

We ask that you would heal him completely, and that it would be even medically inexplicable and you’d be glorified in the outcome. And that would be our prayer as well as we think of so many others with medical issues in our congregation and may their focus be on you. May their longing be for heaven. We ask you to bring healing.

It’s our joy and privilege to be able to partner with a few ministries and we think of Project 92 as Matthew Smith and Project 92 try to mobilize and support ministers in very spiritually dark places. We ask that you would open doors for the gospel. I know that would be their primary request, it would be that the gospel see that they would cast to fall on fertile spiritual soil and provide for their physical needs as well. For I squared ministries under the direction of Josh Lingell, we ask that you would help I squared as they do labor to see the Great Commission fulfilled among completed among the Muslims. And as they equip Christians to take the gospel to those in the ugly bonds of Islam, we ask you to grant them effectiveness and vision as they help faithful Christians to evangelize Muslims in their own communities from Marysville to Myanmar.

We pray for Antioch adoptions, and we know that foster care for children is a great demonstration of gospel love. It’s what you’ve done with us when we were needy and did not ask for it. You have rescued us. You have adopted us as your own sons. And please raise up many Christian families in western Washington to do the same in this life for those who will join with Antioch in caring for those souls. For Kids Town International, we pray this morning for Chuck Valle as he labors faithfully to lead kids town for he and his team. We pray that you grant them joy and steadfastness in the process. And Sajja and Yancey Thomas at the Good Shepherd Children’s Home give them grace and direction as they try to shepherd those young ladies with effectiveness and may the fruit of their labors be reaping spiritual dividends for generations to come there in Southern India.

We pray for Evangel Classical School as the summer is winding down very rapidly. You know our logistical needs as a school. We ask you to provide on the facility front, make your will very, very clear. And as we continue to add families, we ask that you would bring the right families at the right times whom we can assist as they are trying to faithfully raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We’re grateful for the other churches in Marysville that are faithfully proclaiming the gospel. And we want to pray for a few of those this morning. We think of Damascus Road as they’re going through a very difficult time of transition in the life of their church.

Under the pastoral direction of head pastor Chris Rich, may they have a culture that is rooted in the gospel. May they be aggressively welcoming to guests and to the lost and do give them grace as they endure a hard transitional season in the life of their church. And we ask that their shepherds would be humble and would be wise in their leadership. For Marysville Community Church, under the direction of Chris Taylor. They’ve also, they’re currently going through the church membership process, and that has been very fruitful, as it has culled a number of their attendees, and those that remain are very excited about what’s happening, and we pray that they would be happy to be identified with that local body.

We pray for the fruit that’s come up there adding additional leaders to their team. We pray for their wisdom. We pray too for the holiness of their church members, where they’re treasuring of Christ, their faithfulness to take the gospel to the lost. We’re grateful for the now generational influence of Allen Creek community in this community under the direction of Rick Thiessen. We pray for the steadfastness and effectiveness of the church as they serve our community, particularly we wanna pray for Pastor Rick’s son, Jaden, who has some sort of health issues and his need of healing. And as all Christians in Marysville grow and work to love our community and neighbors and coworkers give us grace and effectiveness that our local culture may be deeply impacted by the gospel.

May that be the case of those who are gathered here this morning. May we be faithful as we submit ourselves to your word, as we consciously behold you and worship. We pray that by your grace you would shape us this Sunday, yet again, more and more to the image of your son. And we pray this in Christ’s name, amen. Great teacher, teach us the way of your statutes and we will observe them to the end. Give us understanding so that we may observe your law and keep it with all our heart. Make us to walk in the path of your commandments, for we delight in them. Incline our heart to your testimonies and not to dishonor us gain, and turn away our eyes from looking at vanity.

Revive us in your ways. Establish your word to your servants that it may produce in us reverence for you. Turn away our reproaches which we dread, for your ordinances are good. See, Lord, our longing for your precepts. Revive us through your righteousness. Amen. It’s a privilege to have the chance to come and speak with you this morning for the very few of you who do not know me or have changed my diapers or otherwise been involved in my life from its very beginning. My name is Chris Martin. I am the son of Jim Martin. And there really is just a special blessing to have a chance to come and to share God’s word with so many of you that have shaped my life and also even to follow along in the footsteps of my father as he already led a number of our liturgical elements this morning, also wearing orange in honor of one of my mentors.

You can try to guess who that might be. I would invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to 2 Corinthians chapter 11. Second Corinthians chapter 11. For you younger folk finding your way there, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Acts, and the Romans, first and second Corinthians. Second Corinthians chapter 11, we’ll be looking this morning at verses 3 and 4 and follow along as I read those. Second Corinthians 11 verse 3 says this, but I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. For if one comes and preaches another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or you receive a different spirit, which you have not received, or a different gospel, which you have not accepted, you bear this beautifully.

I had the blessing this last week to spend some time touring around Washington, DC. How many of you have been there before? OK, a lot of you. Yeah, I’m just catching up. And it was an amazing experience to see all these places that I had grown up looking at pictures of and history books and the photos of paintings that you grew up seeing. And then there’s the actual painting right there. And you can get close. And then the security system says, step back. You are too close to the exhibit. It’s like, it’s right there. It was a really wonderful experience. And of course, we visited an obscene number of museums. And one of them, the National Art Museum, it’s split into two wings, and we were touring the modern art half of that, and that was, of course, an interesting experience.

Many of the works of art there, and I was doing my best, were still pretty much unintelligible to me. But one of them managed to communicate something quite clearly, and in a way, I think it summarized a lot of everything else that we saw there, and hopefully you can see it up on the screen behind me. And in a way, there was this image played out across the city, where the older the buildings were, and the older the artifacts were, and the older the art was, and the older anything was, the more explicit was its objectivity. But as it faded to the recent, you could also see that objectivity fading away, intentionally being subverted into a morass and a malaise of ambiguity.

And I’m concerned that we as a church, we as individual Christians can be subject to that same impulse, that same force that we see at work in our culture. It so easily happens here in the church. Ultimately, our Christian faith must either be sound and clear and becoming more so, or lost and becoming more so.

A sound faith knows where it’s at, knows where it needs to be. If you could track the sound-faced believer using God’s providential surveillance, or GPS, you would see this little blip moving doggedly and moving directly towards the middle of the map. But too many believers, sadly, are also moving doggedly, if not quite so directly, in all manner of bewildering directions heading towards the edges of the map. How does this happen? How do we keep this from happening? How do we preserve our faith clear and focused and strong so that we may honor Christ and pass on a faith that is clear and focused and strong to the next generation?

How do we triangulate our position spiritually and avoid becoming that most pitiable of all wanderers, the confident, lost person? And buddy ever been that guy? I know exactly where I’m at. This street isn’t supposed to be here. If there is one church in all the New Testament that seemed to instinctually run in the wrong direction, nine times out of 10, it was probably Corinth. Paul administered in that city a planted church with great patience and faithfulness, and yet, like a rebellious toddler, every time he turned away for a second, they seemed to immediately get into trouble again. And I know you recently finished studying a number of their exploits, and your time spent in 1 Corinthians.

Since that book has ended, Paul has written yet another letter to them, a severe letter rebuking them. And he is now writing a fourth letter, which we have in our Bibles as 2 Corinthians, to celebrate some signs of repentance and also to warn of further spiritual dangers that need to be addressed. And so we’re going to look at those two verses this morning that we read in 2 Corinthians 11, verses 3 and 4. Because Paul here is addressing what to him was one of the most frustrating obstacles to his ministry. And that is people who would swoop in behind him and teach a false gospel while undermining and attacking the character of Paul and the apostles.

And so Paul is engaging in a little bit of what he calls foolishness to prove his apostolic bona fides, his credentials as an authority in the early church. This is not a vain exercise and some kind of nerdy chest thumping. Paul understands that at this stage of the church, his credibility is linked to the credibility of the gospel, and the gospel must be believed in its pure form to be truly good news of any kind. And so look with me as we look at our passage, 2 Corinthians, beginning in verse 3, as we see Paul focus his argument on the importance of trusting in sound faith. Look at verse 3. am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

Paul is afraid of something. That’s not insignificant. Some of you younger folk look down at around verse 23 and shout out some of the things that Paul has been through that he wasn’t afraid of. If you find somebody shout it out. I know speaking in church. Ah! What are some of the things that Paul’s been through? I heard it. Persecution. Specifically, what kind of stuff has he been through? What’s happened to him? Beatings. 40 lashes, which is a lot. Plus one. Imprisonments. Shipwrecked. This guy has had a few experiences in his time. If something is causing Paul to be afraid, it is something much more significant than a bad weather report, hurt feelings.

Paul is afraid because he sees a real threat to the souls of those that he has ministered to for so long. He is afraid they are going to lose something very precious. And what is that thing he is afraid they will lose? It is the simplicity and the purity to Christ. You’ll notice in your translations, if you have that phrase of devotion, it’s in italics. He says, I’m afraid you’re going to lose the simplicity and the purity of your orientation to your Savior. Simplicity there, meaning a sincerity which comes from single-mindedness and purity, a reference to the untainted gospel message Paul had preached and which the Corinthians had believed.

If you look up just a verse in verse 2, Paul says, I betrothed you as a pure virgin to Christ, and now I’m afraid that you will lose that pure devotion to which I have committed you. How is this going to happen? How will they lose this precious treasure of a sincere, single-minded, pure commitment to their Savior? Well, there’s somebody running a play the other direction, isn’t there? There’s somebody who is trying to muck things up. The serpent who has deceived Eve of old is trying to be as crafty and clever today as he was back then. And Paul is concerned that the church will come to the same end as Eve, a loss of innocence.

At the hands of the same villain as Eve, Satan, using the same tactics that were used successfully on Eve, crafty schemes. And notice in our passage where this ensuing battle that threatens the souls of the Corinthians will take place. And this is something that I think often gets missed, not only today, but throughout church history. So someone tell me, where does our great enemy attack and undermine the clarity of our faith? Our fingers? Our minds? Do you see that? that we would be led astray in our minds. We must beware a false diagnosis of the problem, of the danger that our souls face. There are certain medical conditions sometimes where the pain experience does not correlate to the location of injury.

And the church often responds to the attacks of Satan by running to fix the wrong part of its spiritual anatomy. If we see here that Satan is a unique kind of headworm that invades our thinking, the church often responds to his advances by trying to address not the mind where the battle is taking place, but the heart and the hands. The first response I often see in church history in particular is that the church responds to perceive spiritual coolness by inflaming the emotions, by pumping up the heart. We seek to stabilize our faith by chasing spiritual experiences. When we read of the amazing things that God has done throughout church history, I see certain patterns that repeat over and over.

And one that I just mentioned is that the church, when it fears it’s been thinking too much, has this outbreak of some kind of a pietistic movement. And in its best form, that can be a movement that reminds the church that we need to worship with everything. Our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. But very often these movements are not in addition to studying truth, they are an argument against it. We see this today as well. Does God feel distant? Are we tired of hearing about doctrine and theology? Have you been caught up in endless debates about apologetics, philosophy, and culture, and everything just seems like a muddled mess?

Well then, turn the brain down to simmer and turn your heart up to the clean oven setting. But the problem with this is that it distracts us from the very place our problem is occurring, which is in our mind. Satan leads our minds astray in order to lead the rest of us astray as well. Even thinking that the problem is our mind is still an act of thinking, and that is a scheme of the enemy. Like Paul, like Priscilla, like Athanasius, like Augustine, like Catharina of Onbora, Martin Luther, Spurgeon, Susanna Wesley, John Piper, our hearts should be inflamed with passion as a result of deep thinking about God, not as a substitute for it.

Sound and fury can still signify nothing. And there are massive movements within the professing Church of Christ today that do just that. But there is another perhaps more sinister for our neck of the evangelical woods temptation. And that is to think that we have achieved the heights of godliness by measuring ourselves against a moral standard.

Because conformity to the law is also not by itself healthy faith. We sometimes forget that the moral standards by which we live are downstream from the affections that rule our heart. And I’m using affections here in the sense that Jonathan Edwards uses them as the controlling desires of our will that govern our lives. If the tick reaction of the church to muddled faith is pietism, the talk of that clock is holiness movements. Do we feel that our Christian identity is threatened? Lock down all the rules. But as we have seen over and over in history, this alone does nothing to stop a church or an individual’s drift away from a close walk with God.

And in fact, it often provides external cover for a decaying soul. As one commentator commented, Paul saw that the principal danger confronting the Corinthian church at the time of writing was intellectual deception, not moral corruption, but a deception that could lead to spiritual apostasy. And that is a big deal when you consider just how much moral corruption was going on in Corinth. And Paul realized that is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Paul isn’t afraid to address areas of moral failure as 1 and 2 Corinthians illustrates very well. Satan, however, is quite happy with both immoral debauchery and legalistic moralism, as long as the gospel is lost in the midst of either.

So experientialism and moralism are not the solution to the challenges of our soul. They are not what will clarify our faith in such a way that it may be treasured and trusted and transmitted. They will not protect us from Satan and his schemes. So what will? If we are to hang on to the simplicity and the purity of our lives before Christ, how do we defend against the attacks on our mind that could lead us astray? When our second verse this morning, Paul confronts the Corinthians for buying into the lives of the false teachers at three points. And these points are not selected at random, as it was when Paul wrote, so it is today we will win or lose the battle for our faith at these three points.

So let us look at them carefully as we triangulate our faith and hold off the blurring effects of Satan’s lies. So our second point this morning, and if you’re taking notes, you’ve got your kids’ corners, we had trusting sound faith. And now we have triangulating sound faith. Ha ha, tricky, same word in the blank twice. Yep. Look at verse four with me, 2 Corinthians 11.4, for if one comes and preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted, you bear this beautifully. Paul, as you might guess, is getting a little sarcastic here.

The Corinthians were a church that had the reputation of constantly bulking at the true teaching and preaching of the gospel. And in contrast to this, Paul says, If someone comes to you with a distorted Christianity, all of a sudden you are enduring teaching with perfect obedience. It’s important to note that that for if at the beginning of verse 4 is not a hypothetical question. The Greek grammar here tells us this is a situation that is assumed to actually be happening. Someone is actively preaching and teaching these things and the Corinthians are actually fine with it. And these aren’t hypothetical threats today either.

Paul is going to identify three major landmarks of faith that help us to triangulate our relationship to Christ. I’ve used that word a few times. I think triangulation is so cool. Remember the first time someone explained to me, well, if you can find three points and know where they’re at, you can figure out where you’re at precisely. I was like, mind blown. And this is the basis of so much that we do. This is how GPS works. This is how so much of our navigation in our world works. If you can anchor down several key landmarks, you can always have confidence and clarity about where you are and where you’re going.

And Paul here gives us three, three points that must be clear and fixed in our faith. And if they are, we are safe and sound. But if these three points are veiled or moved, then we are lost and in great spiritual danger. What are they? Well, simply they’re Jesus, the spirit, and the gospel. Jesus, the spirit, and the gospel. He begins first with Jesus. The first threat to the soundness of the Corinthian faith was a distorted Jesus. In Corinth, they likely faced the usual distortions that Jesus was not truly God, but only a good man. Jesus was not truly man, but only appeared to be so. Jesus wants us to follow the Jewish law.

Jesus never rose from the dead. Jesus is crazy. These are some of the messages that swirled in the time of Paul, and each in its own way has the same terrible consequence for us, a Savior who can’t save. Many of those arguments are still swirling around today. But there’s another form of dominant Jesus distortion that I think we most often see today, and which is perhaps the most dangerous. And that is that the church today has this terrible habit of putting words in Jesus’ mouth. One of the markers of this problem is the phrase, my Jesus. My Jesus doesn’t defend a biblical definition of marriage. My Jesus would never call anyone a brood of vipers.

My Jesus is a socialist refugee. My Jesus is a Republican capitalist. My Jesus demands social justice. My Jesus would never hate anyone or anything. And the problem here isn’t the use of the word my, As the old hymn rightly declares, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine. The problem is not saying my Jesus. The problem is customizing the Jesus we claim to possess. It’s the Christian version of Mod Pizza. We decide what we want to believe, and then we decide that’s what Jesus would have wanted too. We then appeal to our personalized Jesus as the authority for enforcing our preferences on others.

It’s as though we want to say, Lord, command these people to observe how correct my opinion is. And to such a culture, Jesus declares, no, but rather, you should correctly observe all that I have commanded. When Paul preached Christ and him crucified, he did so on Jesus’ terms. He admitted up front that the message was foolishness to the Gentiles and scandal to the Jews, and he preached as one unashamed of his Savior. Those who are enemies of the gospel distort Jesus to fit an agenda. But sadly, those who claim to be friends of Jesus often distort him to avoid cultural embarrassment. The former try to hide the pillar of Christ as a landmark for the soul, and the latter try to move Christ to a more culturally acceptable location.

In both cases, our spiritual compass is then useless, having messed with Jesus. So read your Bibles, young children, read them well, and study your scriptures, you older saints. We’d love to celebrate that Jesus calls us to come to him just as we are. It is adamant, however, that we come to him just as he is. And as we do so, we will find both help and resistance in our hearts, because it is a spiritual battle that we are engaged in. And more specifically, as we’re going to see next, it is not only a spiritual battle, it is a battle of spirits. Look at that next warning. Paul rebukes to Corinthians in verse 4 for listening to a preacher of another Jesus, whom we have not preached, but secondly, for receiving a different spirit than the one one that they had received.

Paul warns them that our spirits are meant to worship. And what’s more, we are designed in such a way that we conform to what we worship. And for this reason, our spirits always ultimately conform to some other spirit. For the disciple of Jesus, that spirit is to be the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Otherwise, we are inevitably controlled by the spirit of this world. We talk often about the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. But behind all the changing zeitgeist is a single weltgeist. Is that close? I have a wife that can actually speak these languages, so I have to be a little careful. A spirit of the world. This is what Paul addressed in his earlier letter to the Corinthians.

I’m sure you studied through this passage. Many of you will remember it. 1 Corinthians 2, 12 to 16 says this. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the spirit, combining spiritual with spiritual. But a natural man does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot comprehend them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.

For who has known the mind of the Lord that he will instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. The believer is to be filled and controlled by the living and divine Holy Spirit. As the Spirit operates within us, he performs his sanctifying work that forms the drive train of Christian living. He causes us to give glory to the Father and the Son by directing our minds to a comprehending study of Scripture producing a love-based life of holiness. I asked my daughter last night what she thought it meant to live a life controlled by the Holy Spirit. And I think her answer is very practical. She simply said, it means believing, obeying, and showing that obedience to others.

That’s pretty good. In Galatians, we will look at more in a moment, which we will look at more in a moment. Paul calls upon the believers to not abandon the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives and replace it with some earthly effort of the flesh. He focuses his exhortation on an accurate understanding of the gospel and an honest life of true virtue, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. This, in contrast to the spirit that rules the world. The spirit we all operate under naturally apart from Christ. Paul reminded the Ephesians of this spirit in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 to 2, when he said, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

So how does the spirit work in the sense of disobedience? Well, in the way in which all of Satan’s schemes ultimately work. Deception. Deception. Think of each aspect of the fruit of the spirit for a minute, and you will be able to identify some way in which the spirit of this world uses the same term but with a distorted definition. Even think of each aspect of the gospel, justification, sanctification, redemption, sacrifice, resurrection, glory, mention any aspect of the gospel, and you can find the spirit of this world using the same concepts, but with some distorted and disobedient definition. Christians as individuals and collectively as churches, we need to become a lot shrewder in engaging the issues of the age without imbibing the spirit of the age.

Christianity can and must speak to all sorts of challenges as they arise. The Christian faith must address slavery, suffrage, justice, immigration, social media, pornography, sexuality and gender identities, racism, government, science. Throw out a couple more. What are the issues of our age? Was that? Socialism. Climate change. Education. Abortion. These are all issues to which the church must speak because they are the issues of the day. These issues are not the gospel, but they are the points at which the gospel must come to bear on individuals’ lives and our culture. Historically, the church has not done well here.

We keep either avoiding saying anything or letting the spirit of this world sneak in and change the definitions in our dictionary. And soon, we are expositing the lies of the enemy instead of exposing them. Two years ago, Barna conducted a poll of practicing Christians in America, so not just nominal Christians, but those actively attending church, active in living out their faith. And they asked the individuals polled a number of questions, do you agree or disagree with these statements? And the statements reflected the major tenets of a variety of worldviews opposed to the Bible. And the results of that poll should be a wake-up call to the church.

61% agreed with ideas rooted in new spirituality. 54% resonated with postmodernist views. 36% accepted ideas associated with Marxism. 29% believed ideas based on secularism. 38% even agreed with some of the central ideas of Islam. All thinking that they were marking yes to what they thought were statements affirming Christianity. While, again, touring around that nerd mecca that is the Smithsonian Museums of Washington, DC, it was clear that the spirit of this world has perfected the art of communicating his message. From art to history to geology, there is a single narrative for how to understand the world and what it takes to be a good person.

And that narrative is pervasive. It’s an atmosphere that covers our country and indeed covers much of Western civilization. Our Christian faith will be blurred and diluted until it becomes that malaise documented by sociologist Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist-Denton, a moralistic, therapeutic deism. Or more bluntly, without a good deal more discernment and reliance upon the Holy Spirit, Christians will redefine Christianity into extinction. So brothers and sisters, to prayer and to scripture, this is how we will escape the smog of this world. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, we can observe the heavens properly only when we are freed from the distorted haze of this earth.

What does it mean to love God according to the Spirit of God? What does it mean to love our neighbor according to the Spirit of God? What does it mean to live in a world with tribalism, transgenderism, and Trump according to the Spirit of God?

As a church, as members of the community, as parents, as grandparents, or as at least friends with somebody who is one of those, we are either standing in the tradition of Jesus and Paul in teaching these truths faithfully, or we are standing in the tradition of those false teachers, Paul feared would rob the Corinthians of the gospel. And speaking of the gospel, that is the third and final landmark by which we bring our Christian faith into sharp focus. Paul was a man absolutely enthralled with the gospel. When Jesus grabbed a hold of this man, there was little in scriptures that Paul was not already an expert on, but he had missed the very heart of those scriptures. Once his eyes were opened to the good news of grace through the substitutionary death of Jesus, Paul was a man obsessed. And he should be. And we should be. The message of the gospel that God declares guilty sinners, not guilty, who who placed their faith in the work of Jesus on their behalf is the only hope for man.

So don’t mess with the gospel. Few things invited the swift apostolic spanking of Paul, like messing with the gospel. We see one of the clearest examples of this in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, who were mixing works back into their grace. In Galatians chapter 1, Paul begins by saying this, Paul, an apostle, not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brethren who are with me to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Here’s the gospel. Who gave himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore, amen.

Hello, my name is Paul, good to meet you. Here’s the gospel and now right into you. Verse 6, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, He is to be accursed. Children, what did Paul say is to happen to anyone who preaches a gospel but the true gospel?

He is to be accursed. What if it was Paul who changed his mind or even an angel from heaven? He is to be accursed. I love that summary of the gospel in this passage. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave Himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age. According to the will of God our Father, to whom be the glory forevermore. That is the gospel. Don’t mess with the gospel. A gospel that saves slaves from slavery but doesn’t save souls from sin isn’t the gospel. A gospel that preaches love for all but doesn’t preach repentance isn’t the gospel. A gospel that gives any credit to the merits of man for his own salvation robs the glory of both the Father and the Son and isn’t the gospel.

A gospel that wants heaven but doesn’t want heaven’s king reigning over the will isn’t the gospel. A gospel that makes peace with this present age rather than rescuing sinners from it isn’t the gospel and we could go on. In the age in which we live, most false gospels revolve around two errors. First, there are gospels which rely in some way on the merits of man. And second, there are gospels which see man’s problem as structural rather than relational, meaning we are trying to achieve salvation by manipulating the institutions of society rather than dealing with our sin against God. The true gospel is the one in which you bring sin and God brings grace.

Do not be ashamed of your Savior. Do not be ashamed of His Spirit within you. Do not be ashamed of the gospel. Fix your mind on these truths. Meditate on them. like precious gemstones in a rock tumbler. They will reveal their beauty increasingly as you let them turn over and over in your thoughts. So children, learn your songs and your hymns, memorize your verses, give attention to your instructions and catechisms. Hide these patterns of sound words deep in your minds so that they will tower over every other thought and be nearer to your memory than everything else. And you saints in your youth, weaponize these truths.

Let them dwell in your heart richly so that you, as John wrote, may overcome the evil one. And you adults, do not forget or despise the simple and pure truths of the faith. Mount Rainier does not care if 1,000 naive fools gather on its foothills and mock its size and grandeur. It will outlive them all, and its majesty is untarnished by their low words. We must not fear for our faith, though the whole world call it foolish and scandalous. Lead with your minds. True faith is the evidence of things hoped for. It is the conviction of things unseen. It is therefore forensic. It is volitional. It knows there is glory hiding where this world sees nothing. Remember I mentioned the Hubble telescope a little earlier. It is interesting that the Hubble telescope, its most famous image of the glory of the heavens, was the one it made by aiming itself at the spot in the sky.

Every other earthly telescope could only see inky blackness in, and there it found the glory of innumerable galaxies. The mind thus fixed on simple pure truth will be the mind that beholds with clarity all that God wishes to reveal to us. And that revelation will spread from the mind to encompass the whole man, as surely as a sailor in a storm trusts the beacon of a lighthouse with his mind for navigation so he will trust it with his whole being for deliverance. I want to close our time in the Word with just a few short encouragements, with the desire that this church and all here this morning would never find themselves on the receiving end of the biting rebuke given to the Corinthians.

First, a simple and pure faith is a solid faith. Cling to Christ, to the Spirit, and to the Gospel. And in that and that alone will we find the stability to navigate any external circumstances, any ideological opposition, any scheme Satan has ever invented or ever will. A simple and pure faith is second, a surviving faith. This is the faith that is able to be transmitted from generation to generation. A faith customized to fit the spirit of this age will be as obsolete and useless to the next generation as the spirit of this age is. Third, a simple and pure faith is a substantive faith. Do not mistake a simple and a pure faith for a shallow faith.

You will never reach the depths of Christ, nor of his spirit, nor of the gospel. This is not a light task for the mind to fix upon these three pillars. This is a life-consuming, all-encompassing, endlessly interesting pursuit of all the mental faculties that God has given you. A simple faith, lastly, a simple and a pure faith is the faith handed down once for all, as Jude says. To have a faith that is not clear about who Christ is, his spirit and his gospel is not to have the faith at all. For Christ, for his spirit, for the gospel, we must contend earnestly, as Jude said. All other ground is sinking sand. So help us, God.

Would you pray with me? Father almighty, Lord of heaven and earth, you have made for us a strong city with gates open wide that the righteous may enter. You call the faithful one to yourself. You have promised that the steadfast of mine shall be kept in perfect peace as we trust in you. So may we trust in you forever. By your spirit, fix our hearts upon you, our Jehovah, our everlasting rock. You bring low what this world raises high. you dash the fortresses erected by the sons of disobedience. The great works of this world are destined for dust. But you make smooth the way of the righteous. O Father, we worship you for sending your Son, the upright one, to make the path of the righteous level and to justify the unrighteous ones by faith that we may walk upon it.

So this is the path we would walk. Make us to know your judgments and in knowing them, to follow them. Make us to follow you as the substance of our love for you, a love in response to that love which you have first shown us. Indeed, we wait eagerly for you, your name, all of who you are, your glory. This is the desire of our souls. Enlarge our desire, sharpen our understanding of your words, fit us for obedience and set us as a city upon this hill, and through us draw many, we pray to yourself. This we ask in the name of Jesus, amen. That was great, Chris, exactly focused on the gospel. And how can we beat you for that, right?

The reminder that Christ is the center is always there to remind us. And it really does solve the problem, whatever problem you have. If you’re in sin, you go to him for forgiveness, and turn about, and walk straight. And don’t lose the essence of the gospel as you live your life, as you’re out in your workplace.

Remember how God has changed you from that jerk that just made you mad. and behave that way. And there’s not another Jesus that can cure your ills. I think it’s fascinating that one of those presidential candidates that’s debating right now is the spiritual advisor that Marianne Williamson person. It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook. And yet, she is saying Christian words in kind of that fuzzy way, trying to make everybody believe she’s going to bring peace to everybody. But it’s straight from the pit. Without God making the peace, it ain’t gonna happen. So with all of those reminders and all of that, we in our services every week, we have communion.

And I love pounding on this. I think, and my witness of being here since we started, this is the thing that’s changing us. Supernaturally as we come together to have communion in remembrance of what he’s done from us every week, I believe it changes those of us that believe. It convicts us through our liturgy of confessing our sin and hearing the word and the whole package, and then we get to this, the culmination, where we as believers participate with him, and we do it to celebrate what he’s done for us, not to whip ourselves and oh, there’s nobody, you know, honorable enough to come forward and have the elements and all of that nonsense.

That’s why we have a open communion. If you were a believer in Christ and have been baptized, come up and participate with us in the communion. You’re part of his group. You’re part of what he saved. We are the church, all of us that did that. So if you’ve been baptized by the body and believe and repented and put your faith in Christ, you are welcome to participate with us in this. We do it all together. Everybody comes up, you’ll just follow the procession down and then they go back in their seats. And then after we get the bread and wine, then after we sing and get all of that done, then we will participate together.

Now’s the time for the commission. It was interesting, I didn’t know what Chris was going to preach for a while. I realized I was going to do this part of the service. But we have a list that Sean’s compiled of good benediction sections. And I had that open on my computer and I looked at it and I said, man, I hope I can use this one. And it was amazing when we saw the verses Chris was going to preach on. I think this is absolutely like in another way, you know, the Bible repeating itself, oh, it does that, you know. And it really is absolutely perfect for today’s service to close with this. So our benediction today is take care, brothers, lest there be any of you, an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God.

but exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ if we indeed hold our original confidence firm to the end. So in that we hold our confidence firm to the end. That’s Hebrews 3, 12 through 14. So now go hold your confidence and conquer.