Just a few moments we are going to explore God's Word from John chapter 4, but before we do that this morning Let's take a moment to bow our hearts before him in prayer Our Lord and our God it is with great joy and with great reverence that we approach you in prayer You are the King of kings and the Lord of lords They're the one who is the creator and sustainer of all things You created all things out of nothing by the word of your power and all very good You have knit each one of us together and our mother's womb You promise us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made You know the very number of hair on our heads The angels and the arch angels and the cherubum and the seraphim Surround your throne and they sing holy holy holy Is the Lord God Almighty the whole earth is full of his glory Your transcendence and your holiness and your majesty humble us But you also remind us that you have drawn near to us You're the God who has sent your only son to us to take on human flesh and to display your glory full of grace and truth out of you the fullness Of yourself we have received grace upon grace your son Jesus Christ Though he was in the form of God Did not count equality with God to be a thing to be grasped But he made himself nothing and he took on the form of a servant and he was born in the likeness of men But being found in human form he humbled himself and he became obedient even to the point of death even death on a cross So you remind us in your word that you highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name that is above every name So that that name of Jesus every knee would bow and every tongue would confess that Jesus Christ is Lord for the sake of your glory Father you promise us in your word that your love for Your people reaches to the heavens and your faithfulness stretches to the skies Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains and your love is like an ocean tide We thank you for that truth and the glorious truth so we've already sung of this morning Though we have sung My name is written on his hands. My name is graven on his heart I know that while in heaven he stands no tongue can bid me thins to part that is true That's a promise that we have and How can that reality leave us unchanged? How can those realities Lead us to be a church that's dry and dull and callous and bored Father, I pray that this church that first Presbyterian church here in Biloxi Would see this that we would be renewed and be transformed by who you are and what you've done for us And that we would throw away those puny little things that grab our affections and that we would begin more and more to become captivated by you We pray that you would change our marriages and our families and our friendships and our worship and our desires and all of our Thinking and doing and speaking because it is Christ who lives in us who has given us the hope of glory So we pray that you would give us attentive ears and open hearts this morning as we prepare to hear your word We need your word to feed our souls just like we need food to feed our bodies Your word has been breathed out by you and it's profitable for teaching and Reprove and correction and training in the way of righteousness that we might be competent and equipped for every good work So I pray that we would receive it as such as we hear it read and preach this morning for the sake of your glory and for the sake of our joy This we pray in the name of him who came such a distance for us our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen Well, please turn with me if you will in your Bibles to the Gospel of John chapter 4 We are in John chapter 4 this morning and if you were with us last week You were called that we were Exploring the well-known story of the woman at the well where Jesus encounters this woman who was at the well Seeking water she had been married and divorced five times over and had a live-in boyfriend And so she was a social outcast in every manifestation and Jesus comes to her and he engages with her in The midst of her idolatry and the midst of her her building her identity upon weak lame relationships with men who used her and who she used She had an idolatry conscience within her heart and idols do that Idols promise things that they can't deliver because she was seeking from these men pleasure security comfort Satisfaction, that's what these relationships with these men that she had been pursuing had promised her and they failed And so idols do that they make promises that they fail to deliver on they're like soft drinks They they promise to give you an energy boost that caffeine and that sugar promises to build you up and it does It fulfills on that promise for a short period of time until you get the sugar low and you feel like at two-thirty in the afternoon You want to slip into a coma That is my day-to-day experience So I know about idolatry and soft drinks Jesus confronts her with this But when he confronts her he doesn't wave a bony little finger in her face and Try to guilt trip her into anything He confronts her with her sin but and confronts her with the fact that she's thirsty for something she's thirsty That's what she's been seeking and all these relationships with all of these men But what she's really thirsty for is spiritual life She's she's thirsty for life She's thirsty for grace and forgiveness and all the things that the pursuit of those men had promised her but failed to deliver and Jesus is offering that to her in the gospel because he's the only one who can provide for her living water There's a beautiful thing about this story that we looked at last week and I made mention of it And it's the fact that it reminds us of who the gospel is for That's passage that we read last week and what we're going to continue to read this week is really just a commentary on John 316 which tells us that God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever Believes in him Might not perish but have everlasting life and that's true for people like Nicodemus who were Intelligent well-educated, upwardly mobile high society high status people in the culture or Whether they're like this woman who was probably a single mother who had been married and divorced five times over Who had a live-in boyfriend the gospel is for whoever will believe so what I want us to discover today is as Paul Harvey would say the rest of the story What happens next after Jesus engages with this woman? We're going to discover that as we read the passage this morning So let's begin reading in John chapter 4 and I want to begin in verse 23 just to give you a little bit of context here as to where we're going Jesus says this beginning in John 4 verse 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth For the father is seeking such people to worship him God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth The woman said to him. I know that Messiah is coming. He who is called Christ When he comes he will tell us all things Jesus said to her I who speak to you and he Just then his disciples came back They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said what do you seek or why are you talking with her? So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people Come see a man who told me all that I ever did Can this be the Christ? They went out of the town and they were coming to him Meanwhile the disciples were urging him saying rabbi eat But he said to them I have food to eat that you do not know about So the disciple said to one another has anyone brought him something to eat Jesus said to them My food is to do the will of him who sent me to accomplish his work Do you not say there are yet four months then comes the harvest? Look I tell you Lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life so that the soar and reaper may rejoice together For here the saying holds true one so's in another reaps I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor Others have labored and you have entered into their labor Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony He told me all that I ever did So when the Samaritans came to him they asked him to stay with them and he stayed there two days and Many more believed because of his word They said to the woman it is no longer because of what you said that we believe For we have heard for ourselves And we know that this is indeed the savior of the word world Amen. This is God's holy Inspired and an errant word and we ask that he would write its eternal truth upon our hearts this morning One of the things I was mentioning on Easter Sunday if you were here with us in worship that morning Was that over the course of the last 50 years Especially in our country we've experienced a rather profound change in the way in which people view their spiritual life and the way in which they Characterize themselves in a religious sense the Christian underpinnings of much of what we believe even in a cultural sense Have been in many ways washed away We're seeing things that can be somewhat disturbing in our country Ten churches per day close their doors in America never to open again ten churches per day I mentioned a couple weeks ago that The percentage of Americans who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ has decreased 10% in the last seven years alone Despite the fact that the evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming And so what Americans are more and more prone to imbibe and to believe in is this man-made self-manufactured Kind of religiosity that bears very little resemblance to biblical Christianity at all And so we're seeing in our culture an increasingly hostile posture towards Christianity and Christians in general but I want to suggest to you that in our neck of the woods and our part of the country and in many of the circles that we Surround that ourselves with It's probably not so much that people are hostile to Christianity Is that there's so much just over it They moved on they might still characterize themselves as Christians because that's The socially acceptable thing to do and they need to do that in order to be accepted in their social circles But in many respects, they've just moved on because things other than Christ have really captivated their souls Their affections are upon something other or someone other than Jesus Christ and Christianity just doesn't move them in the same way And the reality is is that that may be true for some of you this morning Maybe you're here and and Christianity is just really kind of stopped moving you I don't say that to guilt you at all because we all need to be on guard for that There are times when the gospel doesn't really grip me And we need to ask ourselves the questions what and what is it that moves our heart What is it that really moves your heart What specific area of your life Have you had to apply the gospel recently? Do you have answers for those questions maybe you don't Maybe those are hard questions for you to deal with Maybe Christianity for you has become boring and tired and dry Well, if that's the case then what we need is to have our affections for Jesus Christ rekindled then don't we We need to have a reinvigoration of our affections stirred up for Jesus Christ because so many of us have a palette that will only Accept junk food the junk food of more vacations and more toys and more experiences and more comfort and all of that stuff of life That stuffs us up to the brim to where we don't even have any more room in our souls for Jesus Christ and the things of the gospel And any of us have that and so we need to be aware of that I'm preaching this to myself as well I'm not the poster boy for everything that this passage impresses upon us this morning It's passage that convicts us, but it's also a passage that shows us that Jesus is utterly ravishing here There's a woman that comes into contact with Jesus and she's changed. She's just not the same person anymore That's what Jesus does when he grabs the hearts of people I'm just point out a few things that I want us to see in this passage First of all the woman Anything that even resembled godliness was just not even part of her reality It was not part of her experience. It's not part of who she was And that's why she was trying to seek satisfaction Somewhere else in her life and had failed several times over to find that satisfaction in relationships with these men who used her And who she used We don't even know what her understanding of god was like other than the fact that she was a Samaritan And the Samaritans only believed in the Pentateuch This is it which is the first five books of the Bible so she had a famished depleted understanding of the history redemption and of who god is and what he has done and what he's come to do with his people And so she'd been cut off from what god revealed about his people in his word when Moses completed the last sentence of the book of Deuteronomy But then you also add to the gumbo that her lifestyle showed little as anything at all of anything resembling godliness And you can pretty much assume that she had a wildly skewed understanding of who god is and what he came to do He just wasn't a great a person of great interest in her life She'd moved on beyond that He wasn't a person of great interest in her life until she encountered him as he truly is Until she came face to face with herself in Jesus Christ And when the woman encounters Jesus there's a there's a transformation that happens within her life And she is not the same person anymore Jesus starts talking to her about things like living water and worship and her personal history And how that somehow ties into what Jesus is all about and what he has come to do and when he reveals to her That in fact he is the Messiah and verse 26 of this passage She's so utterly bold over that she leaves her water bottle at the well and she runs back into town to tell people about Jesus She runs back to the same people the same woman women Who gossiped about her who slandered her who pointed the finger is that sleazy woman She probably went back to maybe some of the men who she had been in relationship with And she comes and she says Come see a man who told me all that I ever did and there was a lot to tell by the way Come see a man who told me all that I ever did Could this be the Christ See the reality of who Jesus is changed her It wasn't a ho hum experience For her when she engaged with Jesus Jesus became greater She became less and she thought of herself less because Jesus had convicted her Of her sin of her idolatry of her propensity to build her identity upon some kind of cheap fake counterfeit thing She she thought of herself less because of that but then she thought of herself less because she thought of Christ And his living water and his mercy to her in the gospel more It's a beautiful things what the gospel does it reminds us of what John the Baptist experienced when he encountered Jesus and he says he must become greater and I must become less And when he becomes less and Jesus becomes greater his joy gets aroused When she when this woman thinks of herself less when she comes to grips with her sin and she's not thinking so much about appeasing her own personal appetites anymore because she's become ravished with who Jesus is she's full of joy There's an experience of life that comes out of her and that's what we're seeing in this woman here And so she goes back to the town and the people get a glimpse of Jesus from her testimony from what she has to say about him And they're interested in hearing more and spending time with him You know if this woman can be changed then anybody can be changed She must have really seen someone who matters And so they're interested too. They asked Jesus to come back. He spends a couple days with them And the people believe not only on the grounds of the woman's testimony about Jesus Christ But they believe because they have seen him face to face as well
The reality is is that nobody goes and tells people about Jesus Unless their heart and their affections for him are stirred up You just don't go do that you don't go tell people about Jesus with with any sense of of doing so out of a posture of grace rather than obligation unless your heart has been stirred up For Jesus Christ This woman's testimony was awful. I mean it was a It didn't fit the the the the methods that you know, we would prescribe It's it's an awful testimony. She just she just goes back and says come look at this guy who told me all the day that I've ever done Maybe this is the Christ That's a possibility and Something that obviously happened to her as a result God was no longer boring and tasteless and bland to her There was there was a there was a spice to that relationship He came to her in the flesh to reveal his glory full of grace and truth and to heap out bucket load upon bucket load upon bucket load of grace To this woman who'd been a complete disaster from start to finish Jesus sought her out Jesus changed the object of her worship and affections and then she went out to tell people about it So this passage is about So let me focus on the seeking part first You may have noticed in your bullets in this morning that the title of the sermon Is making first Presbyterian church a galaxy Seeker sensitive Probably some of you just about went into cardiac arrest when you saw that What's this crazy new preacher from California doing to our church send them back
Because when we use language like seeker sensitive It conjures up all kinds of ideas in our minds of what the church is about that The church is really become a business at the point when you start talking about Being seeker sensitive because it operates off of the presupposition that the foundation that it's really people That are seeking after God. So like a business. We need to cater our business Which is the business of ministry to the consumer who is the potential buyer of the goods and services that the church sells But the reality is when we look at scripture That no one seeks after God right in our unregenerate state before the Holy Spirit comes in and breathes new life into our Dead souls and causes us to be born again. We don't just naturally seek after God David talks about that in Psalm 53 Paul talks about it in Romans 3 We don't seek God. We may be seeking inner peace or personal fulfillment Or stronger families or how to have our best life now But in our own natural state we don't just seek after God So what we learn is that the seeker in the story is not the woman and it's not the disciples And it's not the people in this little obscure Samaritan town somewhere the seeker in the story is God That's who the seeker the seeker in the story is Jesus Christ if you look in verse 23 This is what he says here the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the father and spirit and true For the father is seeking such people to worship him God is spirit and those who worship him must worship and spirit and true Now if you remember back in chapter 1 John writes that Jesus is the light of the world And in him there is no darkness at all So what light does is it comes and it seeks out the darkness and it chases it all It seeks it out and it removes it and there's this ongoing theme in John's gospel that the darkness Manifests itself and how people understand Jesus in fact they Misunderstand Jesus. That's one of the ways in which the darkness kind of rises to the surface and John's gospel Look at how this kind of plays out here in John chapter 2 Jesus says this he says destroy the temple and in three days. I'll raise it up again That's when he's in the temple and he's cleaning it out and the people say to him It took 46 years to build this temple and you're talking about rebuilding it in three days. You're crazy What's the point Point is that Jesus is the temple That the place where you meet God is not between four walls The place and where you do business with God Is in the person and in the work of Jesus Christ. He's the temple. He is what that temple pointed towards Then you get into chapter 3 Jesus is talking to Nicodemus again, and he says that you must be born again and Nicodemus Says That's ridiculous. You can't go back into your mother's womb and be born again. How does that happen? What are you talking about? That's crazy talk Jesus says that he's talking about spiritual birth. That's the point of being born again He's talking about how he needs to be born again of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ Then you get into chapter 4 this passage that we read last week And Jesus is talking to the woman to the woman and he says that she should be seeking after living water and that he provides that living water And she says Living water you don't even have a bucket Where are you going to get this living water? How are you going to give me this? What's the point? The point is that Jesus is the living water, right? Jesus is the water. He's the one that cleanses and purifies and quenches our spiritual thirst and provides spiritual life Then you get further into the story The disciples tell him to eat. That's what they had done. That's why Jesus was alone there Jesus was alone at the well and the disciples went to market to go get food And they tell him to eat when they come back and Jesus says that He has food that they don't know anything about And they wonder goodness did someone bring him food? Did he find a McDonald's or make David's whatever it would be in Israel at that time to go through and grab a bite to eat? And he says no that's not the point the point is that it is My food to do the will of the father who sent me That's that's a bizarre thing to say. I don't know if that caught your eyes. We read that That's just such a strange thing to say. Where do you hear people say it? It's the my food is to do the will of the father who sent me The point is that his strength His sustenance his vitality derives from doing the father's will. That's that's how he gets nourished And what is the father's will for Jesus Christ? To come and seek out and save That which was lost See the the whole drama of redemption here unfolds in the midst of the blindness of the people in the midst of their own personal darkness And it shows us that Jesus is the one doing the seeking here and when he finds those who he seeks after their eyes are open The scales literally are removed from their eyes and they're able to see him as he truly is Their hearts are awakened Their lives become surrendered to him
John the gospel writer Who's writing this story Was the only one of the disciples who was not murdered For their unwavering faith in Jesus Christ And even he was exiled to this island out in the middle of nowhere All Of the disciples Suffered to the point of death Because of who Jesus was and what he came to do
You don't suffer for someone who borrows you
You don't suffer for someone Who makes your life a ho hum experience You suffer for someone who's worth suffering for who's worth laying down your life for And he's worth laying down their lives for because he laid his life down for them That wasn't just an issue of theological interest That was an issue of personal reality for them And to change their lives So the point is that we want first Presbyterian church and the Lexi Mississippi to be a seeker sensitive church But we want to be sensitive to the one who's doing the seeking and the one who's doing the seeking here is Jesus Christ The one who does the seeking is God And as we are sensitive to him As we are sensitive to him as the one who has sought after us and has saved us and has redeemed us at the cost of his own life That arouses our joy And that makes us a seeking people an outward postured people It makes us a worshiping people What about worship? What does this passage have to say about worship? That's the second thing I think that we need to see here And I think we need to ask the question what does it mean to worship someone or something Let me see if I can just illustrate this for you a little bit I'm sure many of you have seen that show on PBS called the antique road show That's what you watch when there's really nothing else to watch on television The antique road show it's this show where People get to snooping around they're attic and they come across some painting that Aunt Gertrude left them after she died And they don't know anything about it But it looks pretty cool So they go to this antique show and they take it to an appraiser and the appraiser starts mentioning all the intricacies of the painting and the certain stroke that the artist used and all about the painter and and Spelling at all these interesting things about the painting and then the appraiser asks the person how much do you think this painting is worth And they may say something like A thousand dollars maybe and then the appraiser will say no It's actually worth closer to a hundred thousand dollars Wait a minute that painting when you realize that it's worth a hundred thousand dollars It's not up in the attic anymore with all the spiderwebs And you don't let your three-year-old run around with her peanut buttery fingers touching the painting You take out an insurance policy on it You start thinking about this painting. It starts to grab your heart And you start to feel a sense of security because you have something that is worth significant value What have you begun to do if that's you you've begun to you guessed it worship You began to place your heart and your identity upon this object And and that's what that's what happens when the the fundamental reference point For which we understand the world the fundamental reference point of our joy and contentment Starts to take root in our lives and it affects the way in which we relate to people and go about our tasks and picture ourselves and all of that And that object of worship can be an old painting in the attic It can be our jobs It can be our families can be our pleasures It can be all sorts of different things and from that we are going to derive our security and our confidence and our pleasure And it'll be our chief pursuit in all life What Jesus is saying here is not that people don't worship Everybody worships everybody worships in a zealous way too They worship and the question that we need to come to terms with is What is it that we're worshiping but what's the chief object of our worship What is it that drives you in life that motivates you What is it that deeply satisfies you What angers you or brings you grief
Who do you most desire to please in this life or who are you most fearful of letting down
What is it that you honestly feel like if you lost it You'd want to die The life would no longer be worth living When you look at your life later on this week Over the course of the next year or 20 years or 50 years What is it what kind of person do you want to be? How do you hope that that thing or those things Change you into the person that you want to be Because how you answer those questions Reveals to you what it is that is the object of your worship Everyone worships but not everybody worships in spirit and in truth What does that mean some of you are wondering what that means what does it mean When Jesus says here that we're to worship him in spirit and in truth A means that we need to be born again Of the holy spirit that that the spirit of the true and living God needs to come and breathe new life Into our dead and weary souls That he needs to come and dwell within us And as we receive him by grace through faith in Christ alone the spirit of God leads us to worship the true God As he is in Jesus Christ who Shows us in John 14 that he is the way and the truth in the life See it's not true worship in spirit and truth to just Worship whatever for many past lead to God or I found another way to be satisfied. It's not what Christianity is about It's about worshiping in spirit and in truth worshiping the true God delighting ourselves into him Having our affections placed upon him Having our desires stem from what he desires from loving what he loves and hating what he hates And going after what's important to him and avoiding things that that are ugly to him It's a worship looks like it's using Jesus Christ's our fundamental reference point by which we understand our lives And our world and ourselves and the way in which we go about lives and it changes what we say and think and do As we set our affections upon Jesus Christ and we worship him in spirit and in truth That's where our joy comes from That's where we find ourselves Delighting in not in the cheap stuff of all this world Do you see how worship progresses in this passage? It's an amazing thing to just do a little study of it and verse 6 Jesus is referred to by his first name chapter 4 verse 6 Just Jesus Then in verse 9 the woman comes on the scene and in verse 9 Jesus the woman acknowledges Jesus as a Jew And in verses 11 and 15 and 19 the woman calls him Sir or Lord with a lowercase L just a term of respect Then you get to verse 19 the woman calls him a prophet Then verses 25 and 29 we discover that Jesus may be the Messiah In verse 31 the disciples call him rabbi or teacher of the law And then you get to verse 42 The people have encountered Jesus. They've spent time with him They've talked with him. They've spent two days face-to-face engaging with Jesus Christ And now they understand him as the savior of the world That's just an incredible thing So it happens when a person's heart gets gripped by Jesus Christ Jesus had moved from being a nice safe mundane accessory to their lives to be coming the defining reality of who they were It became the rock upon which they built their house hit upon the savior of the world And when they began and when you begin to see yourself and relate to people and go about your parenting and your marriage and your business and your leisure and everything else through that grid you start to see him as saying Jesus Took what I didn't deserve What he didn't deserve Which is my sin and my condemnation and he gave me What I don't deserve Which is his grace and his forgiveness and his righteousness and it actually moves you outside of yourself It Takes you away from this myopic naval gazing posture and it moves this outside of ourselves Because whatever you truly enjoy Whatever it is that truly grabs your heart is going to be something you're going to tell people about You go to a great restaurant. You're going to tell people about it When Rebecca and I found out that we were having Sarah we didn't just go well You know she'll be around in nine months people will just figure it out. I'll just figure out. You know, we'll have
Rebecca's ability is kind of taking this all-blown shape. They're just going to figure well. She must be pregnant after a while When we found out that we were having our baby we called people everybody that we knew everybody was Important in our lives and we called them and told hey, we're having a baby isn't that great Because it was something that we were excited about Was something that grabbed our hearts Wasn't something that we were just going to wait and Boy, we just hope people figured out Little girl walking around you tell people about that So the point is that Since God is a seeking and saving God And since he has sought us out at the cost of his own life His people should be about the business of seeking To we ought to be about the business of seeking because when you taste and see that the Lord is good You want other people to taste and see that he is good as well So Jesus is trying to get across to the disciples here in verses 33 through 38 He's saying that the fields are white For harvest Interesting he says that the Samaritans were these kind of white clothes Saying that the fields are white for harvest harvest time is not in four months from now harvest time is now It's not after you learn more of the Bible It's not after you take a class or read a book It's not after your kids get older and go off to college It's not after you retire It's not after you have more free time and less stress in your life That's never gonna happen Jesus is saying no lift up your eyes and see now is the time for harvest So church what he's saying to us He's saying that we need a wake up call He's saying that you and me need to wake up and smell the coffee He's saying lift up your eyes The fields are ripe God has his people out there He's reminding us not to get so preoccupied with the stuff of life and the stuff of even the church To forget that we are Christ's ambassadors and that we are his witnesses and he's called us to go
He doesn't want us to forget that the church has been given a great commission to make disciples of all the nations And the front of your bullets and you notice that there's a mission statement the bottom of it and it says that the mission A first Presbyterian Church of Baluxy is to share and apply the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ kingdom To ourselves and to our Mississippi Gulf Coast neighbors Communities culture and to the world
It's easy To share and apply the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ's kingdom To go out of law It's easy to reach Africa and Asia And South America with the gospel It's difficult to reach Baluxy Mississippi with the gospel Because to reach meluxy Mississippi it means that we have to pour our lives in people That means that We have to live with an open posture Towards those who don't believe I means that we have to be intentional About taking this good news that each of us have received and that has Changed us from the inside out and a secure to place in glory for us It means that We live open to those people to take the gospel to them not to treat them as projects People can tell if you're treating someone as a project Jesus doesn't treat this woman as a project and he's not calling us to treat people as projects either He treats this woman with respect. He treats this woman with honor. He meets her where he's where she's at Jesus figures out what this lady's thing is it's relationships And he's prepared to talk to her about those things and about what she has built her life upon and he reveals to her That she's built her life on a pile of sand But he doesn't shame her He finds out what it means to be her what her experience and her reality is like In the ways in which she's looked for freedom and for joy and security and dignity and hope And he says My friend You've been seeking those things in cheap imitations and he says that They're dirty water And toxic water But I'm the living water I liberate I adorn you in the clothes of my righteousness and grace I provide the joy and the hope and the peace and the security that you were looking for in those relationships that you never found I take your shame and your guilt So you get my grace
That's the message of hope that we have to share with the people that God has so graciously placed in our lives So do you know what it means to be a gospel witnessing person and a gospel witnessing church? It takes coming to terms with understanding how Christ came to seek and to save you From heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride With his own blood he bought her and for her life he died That comes the theme of your life Is that ever or lately made a hill of beans difference in your life Has the width and the breadth and the height and the depth of the love of Jesus Christ for you in the gospel Made any change in the way in which you understand yourself and the way in which you live your life Has the reality that your debt has been paid for that your sin no longer condemns you because in your place condemned he stood Has that reality Brought any kind of inward change at all Because if it has How is it that you can keep silent about it and if it hasn't What are you waiting for? Let's think about that as we come to him in prayer father you have come Into a world of darkness and decay and sin in your son Jesus Christ To seek and to save that which was lost We were a people At one time dead and our trespasses and sins without hope and without God in the world Hossil to you and you hostile towards us until you came and bestowed grace upon grace to us You stood in our place You bore the wrath that we deserve You gave us the righteousness that we don't deserve and the grace that we have not earned And you have secured a place for us in your kingdom that can never perish or spoil or fade You have done it We've just received it And oh what great news that is for us How that changes Our relationships how it changes Our lives How it changes the way in which we understand you May it do so May our appetite Be craving after you all the time May we see you as glorious and beautiful as you all And may that glory and beauty Drive us out of ourselves and drive us to other people and drive us to worship you and spirit and intrude We ask this all in Jesus name and for his sake amen