Today, I hope that you will leave here uncomfortable and determined. We’re starting a new four week series, called the The Fourfold Gospel. See in the Alliance, we have a way of presenting the Gospel of Jesus in four aspects. Christ our Savior, Christ our Sanctifier, Christ our Healer, and Christ our Coming King.
These things are not unique to the Alliance, but this is a part of our heritage as a denomination and what motivates us to get out into the world and share Jesus with people. It’s on the global Alliance logo, where each symbol represents one of these four aspects of the Gospel message, which are then put on top of a globe.
In the next four weeks, I’m not going to go into the history of each, in the sense of how they were integrated into the Alliance’s heritage, but rather how these four aspects run through the whole of Scripture. And because they are at the very core of the Gospel, we’ll also address how they are to impact us today. This isn’t going to be a series on how good the Alliance is compared to other denominations or ministries, but rather, we are using this Alliance idea as a jumping off point as to why you and I should take seriously the call of God on our lives when we are to be witnesses of what he has done in us.
So today, I hope that you will leave here uncomfortable and determined that God has called you to a great purpose, to join in his life saving work.
One of my favorite things to do is people watch, and try to figure out who they are by the clothes they wear, and their interactions with those who they’re with. If you do the same, do you create stories about how they must have traveled from x to see x because of x? Or maybe they’re just starting a budding romance. Or maybe they’re just tired parents because the kids are just needing a nap.
Lately, people watching for me has changed. In the past, the questions in my head have swirled around what got them to this moment that I’m observing. But lately my thoughts are, how is God seeking them? In what way is God using his people to reach out to this husband, wife, mother, father, child with the Gospel message. And, should I say something?
See Jesus states in Luke 19:10 that, “…the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
And so, as a disciple of Jesus, I ask, Jesus how are you seeking to save this lost person?
This is the overarching theme of Scripture, that God is the Savior. In Isaiah 43:11, God states, “I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior.” The Bible makes clear that there is only one Savior, and that’s Yahweh. The God who created Adam from dirt and Eve from a rib. He is the God that called Noah to an ark, and Abraham to the land of Canaan. Yahweh is the God who called Moses to bring his people out of Egypt, and Joshua to conquer a land of milk and honey. This God is the one who spoke prophecies of blessing and calamities. And unlike the gods made into wooden idols, Yahweh is true and living; he brings blessings, stands against injustice, and grants peace to those in storms.
But why does he call himself savior? Is it because he seeks to protect people from physical, or emotional harm? Yes, but it goes deeper than that.
The ill of humanity is not as simple as a physical hurt, or an emotional scar; it goes deeper than that. Psalm 14:1-3 tells us, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.' They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. 2 The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. 3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.”
This corruption is at the heart of the reason God is Savior. It’s humanity’s corruption or what God’s word says is sin. Sin is the distortion and rebellion of humanity against God’s original design for his creation. It’s the distortion truth into a lie. It’s the distortion of life with murder. It’s the distortion of trust with theft. It’s the distortion of purpose into chaos. It’s the distortion of holiness into wickedness. And it’s the distortion of love into hatred.
And when we choose to participate in lies, theft, murdering in our heart with anger, or the myriad of other things that distort God’s original intent for his creation, we engage in that corruption and sin, and add to the evil that’s in the world.
The Bible tells the story of the first human sin. It was the belief of a lie against God’s truth. And every time we sin, we agree that given the opportunity we would have done the exact same thing those people did, if give the chance.
And so sin leads to the opposite of what God intended for his humans. God intended that they would experience a physical life that was eternally connected with him through their reliance on him. But in their rebellion to choose that which he did not intend, or to say it another way, they chose to try and say they knew a better way, separate from God, that access to eternal life was taken away. Because if they had access to eternal life in their corrupted state, there would be no saving. Evil would continue, not just for a little while, but for all eternity. So God moved into action. And so, sin ends in death, both in a physical and spiritual sense. This is why, in Romans 6:23, we’re told, “For the wages of sin is death…"
So all of humanity is headed for this place of death. A death not just that ends when you close your eyes for the final time, but an eternal death. Because we were meant to be eternal, and so eternity awaits us. And this eternal death that awaits is not a decaying body, as if we were a mummy wrapped in cloth, but a conscious understanding that we are separated from God forever unable to regain even the hint of joy, or peace, or love that we have in snippets here on earth.
It’s a said state, and so God tells us in Ezekiel 33:11, “…As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live…”
And in 2 Peter 3:9 were told of God, that, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
The greatest misconception of who God is, is that people tend to think that he is foaming at the mouth, hoping we mess up so that he can punish us. But it reality it is more like a parent weeping that their child was kidnapped. To use humans terms, God’s heart breaks as he watches his creation fall ever further into the corruption of sin and destiny of death.
This is why God is Savior. Because God doesn’t just leave us to our own eternal deaths. He seeks to save those who are lost in corruption and sin. He seeks to give a new path for those who are a path of death.
This is where Jesus comes into the mix. In the eternal nature of God, there are three persons. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit. All at once God, and all at once unique within the being that is reveled to us as God.
It is the Son who willingly descends to the earth at the purpose of the Father. Where sin entered humanity by that first person so long ago, sin’s power over humanity can be broken by one as well. And so, Jesus begins to forgive sins, but the religious leaders scoff at this, because they know, only God can do that. So Jesus states in Matthew 9:6, “‘But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he then said to the paralytic, ‘Rise, pick up your bed and go home.’” That crippled man stood up in their presence, showing that this Jesus was God come down.
And because Jesus was God come down, he was the path to which one would need to follow to leave the destiny of sin behind. And so Jesus stated things like this in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus’ path, his teaching, his work, that’s what one must follow to escape the destiny of death that sin holds over every human. But it’s not just following teachings. There are teachings that are similar to Jesus’ because they are truths that come from the creation itself. Love instead of hate, mercy instead of power. These are things many people can see as virtuous, but death is an all consuming black hole and needs something to satisfy it. And since there was rebellion, there must be a punishment given.
And so were told, in Hebrews 9:22, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” It’s not just Jesus’ teachings that we must follow, but his sacrifice on our behalf. Death owns us because of sin. We deserve it because we participate in the corruption of God’s perfect creation. So what does God do? He steps in. Jesus not only teaches the perfect way of God, he lived, and then he died for it. But here’s the problem, death only comes to those who sin. It only comes to those who participated in the corruption. Yet those that knew Jesus declared that, “in him there is no sin (1 John 3:5).” So why did he die? That’s the sacrifice, death needed a sacrifice that could quench its eternal hunger. That’s why God descended, the eternal satisfied death’s appetite, but because he had no sin of his own, death could not hold him. His sacrifice broke death, and at the same time was a pleasing payment for the rebellion of humanity.
God himself fix the problem we found ourselves in. This is why Jesus’ closest disciple, Peter, declared in Acts 4:11-12, “11 This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. 12 And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
Jesus’ teaching, his life, his sacrificial death, and his resurrection all open the path for those who would accept to move from death to life.
But that’s the issue, the path away from the corruption of sin and the destiny of death has been blazed by Jesus, but we have to accept it. See the Bible states in Romans 10:9, “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
To confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord is to recognize that Jesus is God. See in the world that the writer of Romans is in, people would declare Cesar as Lord. Meaning that they believed Cesar was like a god himself, and that what he said was right and true. The writer of Romans, Paul, is saying, no Jesus is God himself and what Jesus said is right and true. So you must recognize that Jesus has come down to save. That means you accept that God created this world, that you have sinned, and are in need of Jesus the Savior.
That leads to the second part, to believe in you heart that God raised him from the dead means, that you accept Jesus’ sacrifice for you. That without it, you’re destined for death, but you accept that Jesus died for you to forgive all your sins and bring you into eternal life, a life that starts at the rising of Jesus from the dead.
And this acceptance then moves you from being a child wrath to a child of God (Ephesians 2:3ff). A citizen of darkness to a citizen of heaven. But always to remember what is said in Ephesians 2, “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (v. 8-10).”
You see we did nothing in this process except that we accepted the gift of Jesus’ work. But in doing so, we are now tasked with sharing that same message with everyone whom God brings into our lives to share it with.
And that’s were it gets uncomfortable. Does God want the Family in the suburbs to hear this message that they might be saved? Yes! Does he want the family in the lands of Africa to hear this message and be saved? Yes! Does he want the senior couple driving their RV to hear this message? Yes! Does he want the homeless person to hear this message? Yes! Does he want the Trump supporter to hear this message? Yes! Does he want the Antifa follower to hear this message? Yes! How about the little children? How about the Taliban fighter? How about the gender dysphoric? How about the Chinese Communist? Or the Buddhist monk? What about the homosexual couple? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
No matter who you are, no matter what the ethnic, political, social, sexual, economic or whatever else background you have, you need the message of Jesus. That we are separated from him by sin, but he is loving and comes to us to die for us that we may live for him. And that our life turns away from what he calls sin and embraces his teachings. But it all starts with a moment where we agree with him, I have sinned and am destined for eternal death, therefore I accept that I cannot fix it, but Jesus lived the perfect life, and died that I might live. I call him Lord because he is God, and I believe that he resurrected because his sacrifice covers my sin. I will now follow him, allowing his word to change me until the day he calls me home.
If you have never accept Jesus as your Savior, this is what it means. This what we teach, because it’s what he taught us. I was a sinner lost in death, and only the free gift of Jesus’ sacrifice could save me from that destiny. I accepted that fact and now I know I’ll spend eternity with him. Jesus is calling you who are still in sin to not go into that eternal destiny, Jesus is seeking the lost, and we’re following his lead. And so I ask and plead with you do not go another day without coming to know Jesus as your Savior, because tomorrow is not guaranteed and eternity is just one breath away.
But if you have accepted Jesus as your Savior I want to challenge you that in your bulletin there was a random picture placed in it. I want you to pray for the people in that area. Whether it be the Antifa member, the suburban family, the homosexual couple or whoever. Pray that the message of Jesus would get out to that group, that people would turn from sin and come to know Jesus as their Savior. (If you’re reading this, take one of these listed above and begin to pray for them)
This is what the Christian and Missionary Alliance is about, getting the message that Jesus is Savior out to the world. Let us, no matter our denomination or ministry background, take the call of Jesus to share his saving work seriously and follow him in it. Amen.
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