Gospel Community Church Sermon Podcast

If we believe what Paul has already told us that we have peace with God, that we are standing in the grace of God, that sanctification is rooted in God’s love and secured because of the work of Christ, then we should also believe God’s word when he tells us the power of sin has been defeated in our lives as a result.

If you try to bridge the gap between you and God, sanctification is always going to seem impossible, but when we stop trying to bridge the gap and remind ourselves of the truth that Jesus already has, it not only becomes possible in our minds and hearts, it becomes what was promised.

Because we are justified by faith, one day you and I will stand before God complete, whole, perfect, righteous, fully experiencing the glory of God for all of eternity, and God is going to use everything in your life to accomplish that. Sin and Suffering. Good and Evil. Your failures and your successes. Nothing is going to prevent God from accomplishing his plan of sanctification for your life.

We cannot overcome sin by doing good, but only by believing in the only one who is good. We can never earn our way to God; God isn’t looking for us to make promises to him he knows we can’t keep, but to believe the promises God has made and kept for us.

The bad news is we are unrighteous, the good news is Jesus is righteous. The bad news is we are all sinners, the good news is Jesus has come to save sinners. The bad news is we deserve the consequences of our sin, but the good news is God in his mercy, has provided forgiveness of sin and as a gift of his grace promised to give us his righteousness through his son, and all that is left now is for u...

Our good works will never reconcile us to God, because then we would be able to take credit and we can’t. Salvation is only, entirely and exclusively the work of God and God alone in order that God alone, entirely and exclusively gets all the glory for it.

The gap between our sinfulness and God’s holiness is massive. The law showed people they could never bridge that gap; they could never do everything God required, and so they needed God to do for them what they could not do for themselves. God’s word shows us our sinfulness, but it also points us to the hope that we have despite it, but what is this hope?

If we don’t preach about God’s judgment against our unrighteousness, then we won’t see our need to place our faith in the righteousness of God. If we think we can do it, and that God just exists to help you be the best person you can be, you aren’t going to come face to face with the reality that Jesus isn’t your life coach – he’s your judge, your king and your savior.

Too often people believe caricatures of God’s judgment instead of the truth of God’s judgment scripture reveals. It is important that we understand what is the basis for God's judgment in order to understand our great need, and once we see our great need we will truly understand the beauty of what God has provided.

We have to answer the question, “Do we believe God is the one who practices judgment against the unrighteousness of men or do we think we need to practice it for him?”

God never gives people what they didn’t choose. His judgment is not just at work in the past, and in the future but it is actually being revealed today by him giving people over to the very thing they choose – either to his salvation or to their sin.

As we grow in faith in God’s righteousness and in the truth that he has provided us his righteousness through Christ we will grow in living our lives by faith. I think it’s important to understand that faith is not a one time thing. It’s not just something you did 20 years ago when you prayed a prayer. The Gospel of God’s Son is the provision for everything we need to be saved. And it is faith in...

Faith in the Gospel of God is rooted in the work of God, (he loves you and has called you and so we are) and faith in the Gospel of God’s Son should be encouraging one another (both yours and mine; we need to be involved in each other’s lives), and faith in the Gospel is eager to see the fruit of new faith and the fruit of growing faith (so be eager to share it).

The Gospel of God is all about the Son of God, who he is, what he’s done. But if we’re not careful, we will be tempted to think that the goal of the Gospel is us, we will be tempted to think that the goal of the Gospel is to simply get us saved and it’s not – the goal of the Gospel is not the people of God. The goal of the Gospel is the glory of God, by the grace of God, through the people of God.

The book of Romans is a book all about God. It teaches us about God’s son, about God’s grace, and about God’s provision. It teaches about God’s promises, and about God’s person. It teaches us that it’s because of who God is that he has done the things he has done, and it teaches us that the purposes for which he has done all these things is his own glory.