God meets us where we are but He does not leave us there.

Help Church Family:  We are going to pause at Luke 7, for the next several weeks to do a series on “How the Gospel Changes Us.”  I believe that understanding how the Gospel changes us is crucial to living lives that are not held hostage to a life dominated with sin and hopelessness.  God has created us for so much more!  He has come offering hope to all of us.  Jesus has come for us to have “life abundant” (John 10:10).  

To understand how the Gospel changes us is to understand redemption.  To understand redemption is to understand God’s desire to recover everything that was lost and broken as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden.  That one sin reordered God’s design of perfect creation into what we know it to be today.  Creation itself was completely and totally subjected to futility and bondage to corruption (Romans 8:20-21) because of the disobedience in the Garden.  That means that the natural state of fallen humanity, that we interact with daily, comes from the corruption of sin and curse of futility upon creation.  This is where all of our life struggles originate.   We are effected daily by a fallen, corrupt humanity.  Think about how you have been effected today by this corruption.  Have you said words that were divisive?  Have you been distracted?  Do you isolate yourself?  How about marriage struggles, sexual addiction, chemical dependency, avoidance, love of money, gossip, hatred, vain imagination, pride, inconsistency, apathy, lying, hate, death, disease, pain, etc. etc. etc.  All of these make up the natural state of fallen humanity.  This is who we naturally are because fo the Fall.  This world is really messed up and broken.  Yes, thanks Steve for that discouraging word.  Yes, it is bad news.  However, when good news permeates the bad news the good news is so much greater!  In order for us to fully understand the good news of the Gospel we must understand the bad news totally.  And yes, there is a fix!

This corruption and futility is not how God intended His creation to be.  God has set up His story of redemption to recover everything that was broken because fo the Fall.  His plan is to redeem a relationship with us.  He wants us to understand that we cannot fix things but He can and His remedy is the Gospel.  He has a remedy to fix every struggle, every circumstance and every relationship.  God meets us where we are but He does not leave us there.  God meets us to redeem us making all things new through the work of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Be encouraged!  Through the power fo the Holy Spirit and the Work of Jesus Christ we can rise above our natural state of Fallen humanity and find hope, strength, perseverance, reconciliation, relationship and a conquering of sin and death.

What persistent sin, that is a natural part of your fallen humanity, do you still struggle with?  God has come to redeem you from that sin and to bring renewal and new life.  

I look forward to worshipping our redeeming God with you Sunday, Steve