Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good Morning!

I’m Pastor Wayne and I’d like to welcome you all to the gathering of Ephesus Baptist Church.

It’s nice to see so your smiling faces.

If you are visiting with us this morning, please know that you are surrounded by some pretty amazing people.

Ephesus is an active faith community on a mission with Jesus.

We don’t all share the same story; in fact, we come from many different paths.

But here, we are one people giving our all to love God, love others, proclaim Jesus, and make disciples in our generation.

We have a connect card in the pew in front of you.

I invite you to take one and fill it out!

Please be sure to include your name, email, and address.

If you have prayer needs, you can let us know about those as well.

I promise our prayer team will lift you up soon.

You can place those cards in the offering plate when it comes around.

Scripture Memory

Call on Elizabeth to recite the verse

Opening Scripture Reading

Series Review

Good Morning,

In a few minutes we are going to have the incredible opportunity to partake of the Lord’s Table together as we commune with our God and with each other as family!

But before we do we are going to look at another key commitment of the Christian life.

The last few weeks we have been looking at a few key commitments of the Christian life that have the potential to take our spiritual lives to a higher level of maturity.

The commitments we looked at so far include.

1. Being Armed and Dangerous: Committed to Conceal God’s Word in Our Hearts!

From Psalm 119, we discussed how we are to treasure and value God’s Word.

How we are to seek to memorize and meditate upon it daily.

How we are to be devoted to God’s Word.

2. Sitting at the Lord’s Feet: Committed to Celebrate God’s Son!

From Luke 10, we learned that genuine worship at the feet of Jesus will far outweigh a lifetime of religious “busy work.”

We discovered that we should seek to celebrate Jesus everyday in every way!

3. Finding Strength Together: Committed to Connect to God’s People!

Last week, God showed us from Hebrews 10, that we should find strength in each other.

We learned that, as God’s Church, we are family and that we belong together.

God called us to be a people committed to connect to His family!

Introduction:

Today, God is going to remind us from His Holy Word of our calling to be the Guardians of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I love the marvel movie series “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It is about a rag tag bunch of space pirates and assassins who go to great lengths to protect the galaxy from devastating cosmic threats of a powerful orb.

It is about a bunch of cosmic criminals turned unsung heroes.

The Guardians of the Galaxy summon up every bit of their collective strength to guard the galaxy from dangerous evils.

When you think about it, we are a lot like these Guardians!

They are cosmic criminals.

They were pirates and assassins.

They stole and murdered for a living.

We are cosmic criminals.

We plundered the righteousness and holiness of God when we began to play with the dangers of sin.

When sin consumed us we became murderers and destroyers of God’s created order.

They saw a dangerous evil that had the potential to destroy everything.

We clearly see the results of sin around us everyday.

Even those who don’t believe in God, see some of the dangers of the sins of men.

They summoned all of their strength to put an end to the dangerous threats by becoming heroes, rather than villians.

They overcame the evil and were forgiven of their crimes.

We....................Well, that is where the comparison stops because we were found to be dead in our trespasses and sin.

There was no way for us to save the universe.

We couldn’t even save ourselves.

We were lost in space, drifting toward an eternal oblivion in Hell.

Utterly hopeless.

We had lost our great battle.

We became the evil.

We became by nature children of wrath, the wrath of God.

But God intervened on our behalf.

He became the Hero of all Heroes!

We were lost, dead in our trespasses and sin!

By His grace, God made us alive together with Christ!

It was His gift to us!

We didn’t deserve it, and we could not earn it!

We have no place whatsoever to boast!

If we accept His gift, we are His!

He has recreated us to walk in good works.

Primarily the good works of the Gospel!

We, brothers and sisters, have been recreated and repurposed to be the Guardians of the Gospel!

Today we are going to be primarily in 2 Cor.

5:17-20.

If you have your Bibles, then make your way there now!

2 Corinthians is in the New Testament, past the Gospels and sandwiched between 1 Corinthians and Galatians!

Our passage presents us with three powerful truths this morning that point us toward the fourth commitment Scripture calls us to this morning: We have to be committed to communicate God’s Gospel.

Three ways the Gospel Transforms Us!

1. Reconciliation brings Re-Creation.

Paul was a changed man!

Once a persecutor of the church, now an ambassador for Christ!

God had changed him at the Damascus Road.

Paul explains that change in terms of reconciliation.

He repeated the Greek terms for “reconcile” and “reconciliation” (katallasso/katallage) five times in our passage.

Paul has spoke a lot of the doctrine of Justification throughout his ministry, but he always adds reconciliation on top of it as a sweet topping of sorts.

Justification is a term used in the courts of law which means to acquit or to declare righteous.

A judge may acquit an accused person without ever befriending them.

He just announces the verdict, not guilty.

The accused hardly expects to be treated to lunch with the judge, and probably hopes that he will never see him again.

Reconciliation goes a step further.

The judge enters into a personal relationship with the accused.

God, our judge, is the one who has been wronged, He is the one sinned against.

God does not simply drop the charges against us.

God gives himself to us in friendship.

This investment is accomplished at an unspeakable cost due to the extreme nature of our offense.

Reconciliation assumes hurtful relationships, abandonment, and hatred.

Commentator David Garland summed up the idea of reconciliation well when he said.

Sin incurs God’s holy wrath, so it could not be treated lightly or swept under the rug.

God can never be reconciled to sin, but God does not turn away from sinners in disgust and leave them to their just desserts.

Instead, while humans were still in open revolt, God acted in love (Rom 5:8) { but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.} to bring the hostility to an end and to bring about peace.

This peace is not simply a cessation of hostilities or an uneasy truce.

It refers to the mending of the broken relationship that results from God justifying us (making us right) through faith and changing us from enemies to friends.