The Gospel in the Church for the Obedience of Faith through Spiritual Gifts
This is a sermon by John Piper that has had more of an impact on my life than any other sermon period. It is the foundation of Rosanna and my relationship. It is what goes through my mind on so many occasions at work where I feel like I have a right to be angry with some angry guest or a negligent team member. I do not ignore what needs to be said, but the tone of it is dictated more often than not from what hit me with this sermon.
I will never forget where I was on the way down to stay with Jonathan and Jenni Carroll, on I-35 around the Arbuckle Mountains, circa May of 2003, and heard the following statement:
When you receive grace from God, you don’t become a debtor to God. You become a debtor to everyone who, like you, needs grace.
If we would be gripped by the gospel of free grace… what a difference it would make in manifold forms of self-righteousness, so that we come out of our apartment and see the man we don’t like and just turn the other way and with all of our body language make a barbarian out of him.
This has helped resolve so many problems that I was dealing with and I am hardly in the place of having gleaned all that is possible from this meditation on Romans 1. I gave this sermon to Rosanna back in September of ‘03, when we were just friends. It’s become quite a theme for us. I figured it’s time I shared it.
I remember one person saying of me that I was drawn to “grace-heavy” preachers. This was meant as a criticism (meaning that I was drawn to people who made me feel better about myself when I sinned). I couldn’t think of a better thing to want to be drawn to, when it’s a grace like this that doesn’t just pardon a sinner but sets him free from his sinful habits and patterns of life, drawing him into more humility and debasing of himself in order to penetrate hearts with the gospel.
Anyway, this is a great sermon. It is entirely worth the download for the first half. Feel free to comment about it, I hardly get those these days and have no way of knowing whether anyone besides a couple of people are reading my updates. Maybe I should turn TypeKey off and install some other spam-preventing comment solution.
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