We're seeing this Christ is our firm foundation
Where We put our hope and our trust.
Christ is my firm.
Everything around Shake
won.
That's good news for somebody today. He won.
I still, I
He's never,
come on.
Let's say he won.
He won. We say he won't.
He won't,
won't
Fail.
He Won't. He
Won't.
He won't.
Come on. He won't. He won.
Won't. Let's go. Let go. Christ,
He won't
In the good and in the bad.
Jesus is faithful on the days
that it seems like it's all coming down.
Jesus is faithful.
We can stand in peace and trial because of who Jesus is.
Come on, we're gonna sing. Rain came and the wind blew.
So I
Won't.
He won't.
No, he won. Do you believe that today?
Church, come on.
Come On. We believe that He is
Christ.
What a beautiful, what a beautiful name.
The name Christ.
What a beautiful
what a beautiful the
What? A wonderful
Name is the name of Jesus
Christ. What a wonderful
Name is.
What a wonderful
The name Jesus.
What a wonderful The name
To you.
Father death.
Not hold
to silence
The,
The glory for you.
You Have no,
You have no now
Yours.
Yours is the glory.
Yours is the name.
What a what A
Christ.
What a
powerful
Jesus.
You have no
Christ.
What a
Jesus a
Jesus A
Let's give Jesus some praise,
some thankful for Jesus.
Come on. So good. So good.
It's because of Jesus that we can be a family
that loves God, follows Jesus and shares hope.
Whether you're in the room or if you're joining us online,
it's a good day to be gathered together
as the family of God.
Let's turn around. Let's greet those around us.
If you're online, hey,
we don't want spectators, participators.
We're in this thing together. It's good to see you.
Welcome to Hope.
Alright, hope Community Church. My name is Matt.
I get to serve as a Quy campus pastor. Way out in 2 7 5 2 6.
I gotta tell you something, uh,
this young man over here, where'd he go?
Jake, are you still in here?
Uh, one of our cameramen, Jake serves on the volunteer team.
Where'd this dude go? He's going to college.
This is his last night serving here.
And we are so excited
and grateful for everything Jake has done.
He's going to South Dakota to master metal
and be an engineer.
Super excited for Jake. Uh, that means two things.
If you're new here, uh, Jake won't be here next week.
We have a serving opportunity.
If you wanna run a camera, we'd love
to have you right up here.
But we do want to connect with you.
Uh, if you're new, or even if you've been coming for a while
and you just haven't found your people yet, uh,
we have people here that are ready to love you.
As Rob said, we're a family who loves God, follows Jesus
and shares hope so you can stop at next
steps on your way out.
Or if you're watching online, go to get hope.net/next.
All right. Uh, Sunday night. Go ahead and have a seat.
I should have said that already. Y'all are like,
this dude just keeps talking.
He's running outta breath. Uh, on Sunday night,
our church had an annual vision night.
And it's super special
because all of our campuses come together right
here at our Raleigh campus.
Every community we represent is in this room as a,
it feels like a family reunion.
Uh, and Jason Gore, our lead pastor,
shared some wins from the last year.
What God is doing in baptisms,
what God is doing in community,
what God is doing in the life of our church.
And he talked about some other things.
We, and it was so unifying.
We thought, Hey, let's share this with the whole church.
So, sit back, we've got a little update from
Lead Pastor Jason Gore.
Thanks.
Before we look to where God's calling us, I,
I just want us to stop for a minute and,
and celebrate some things that God's doing in,
in our church, our Homework Club.
Uh, we serve about 225 students this year across three
different locations through the Garner Community Ministry.
And I say, you know, garner Campus,
but it's not just about
where you gather together on the weekend.
Um, because of our investment in that school, the school,
for the first time ever, a Wake County School invited us
into do our homework club on site.
Um, the entire football team, they show Yeah.
Uh, is showing up at this thing.
Uh, the cumulative GPA on the Garner football team is like
above a 3.0 for the first time, maybe in the history.
Yeah. So that's a big deal.
Uh, but while we, we celebrate academic wins, um,
and, and support families in our community,
the greatest celebration through
that whole thing is a couple weeks ago, I had the privilege
of baptizing a student who came to know Christ
through the relationships
that he had at the Homer Club, at our Garner campus.
So, God's not just about changing
grades, he's about changing lives.
That's not gonna change. Uh, that's a big deal.
Ship outreach. We're still invested in Ship Man.
We, I think we contribute about $120,000 a year
annually to their ministry.
They've got Bread of Life, which feeds thousands
and thousands and thousands of people throughout the year.
They've got the shipyard. It's a, a weight room
where kids from that community right
behind South Saunders Street, come and work out.
They get mentoring. Uh, they've got a ministry
to rescue vulnerable women out
of trafficking situations outta drug addiction situations.
Provide them housing
where they can help them get back up on their feet.
And this is the one that we really need to celebrate.
'cause at the end of the day, if you said, Hey,
you can celebrate anything,
like any one thing, what would you wanna see?
And what's the thing? You'd be a little discouraged if you
didn't see, um, baptisms.
God is doing a work in our church right now
that I cannot fully explain.
I'm gonna try to, but this is
how you know there's fruit this year so far,
we've seen 194 men, women, and students.
That's 55% over where we were this time last year.
God is up to something. Here's our vision, alright?
For our communities in all the world where we live, learn,
work, play Judea, Samaria, the end of the earth
for our communities and for all the world to know
and experience the love of God
and the life that Jesus came to make available.
How do we do that? This is our mission.
This is where you've heard the identity
stuff start to come out.
You know, over the last 12 months.
We move towards this by living life as a family
who loves God follows Jesus and shares hope.
That's our mission. This is what we do.
We make disciples of Jesus by teaching God's word
and helping people align their lives
and relationships to it.
That moves us into our strategic plans of 2024, uh,
or 20 25, 20 26.
One, an intentional focus on teaching God's Word.
Two, we're gonna continue
to share hope collectively, locally and globally.
That's not gonna go anywhere. Um, the third is, uh, we are,
we are stepping into a, an,
an intentional, I would just say this.
What is it? Well, it's a, it is a discipleship pathway.
We as a church need a clear transferable
discipleship pathway for people
to grow in the foundations of their faith.
You're gonna see a much higher investment in our small
groups, in our community groups here at Hope.
The reality is though, um,
why we should never stop celebrating what God's doing,
being loving, uh, as a church means sometimes talking
through some hard things as well.
But I believe these challenges, if we face them together
as a church family, they're gonna become opportunities
for us to see God do even more.
But I wanna be honest with you about 'em. Uh, two areas.
One, attendance, attendance across all of our campuses.
Um, it's down. So we had about 5,500 averaging across all
of our campuses in 2024.
This year we're averaging about 4,500.
Now it's the summer months, right? It's down.
People are on vacation. But
that's a real thing to pay attention to.
And secondly, it's finances.
Um, our giving is down about 15% year over year.
And so we came into 2025 thinking, Hey,
let's just carry this $16 million budget
over forecasted right now.
Uh, they hurt me on this.
It's not really 13, we're forecasting about 13.2. Okay?
So it's a little bit more than that.
But 13.2 to 13.4 being very clear.
We actually do have a cash flow challenge
right now in front of us.
Um, I I, I'll say this, it's not,
I would not correlate it to the drop in attendance.
Uh, and here's why of 4,500, first of all is
that's a large church.
Um, uh, secondly, uh, when you talk about a couple
of other churches that are about our,
around our size in the area,
and I'm not gonna name any names,
but, uh, there is one church around this area that's, uh,
they're about 2,500 on the weekend.
Um, their, their contributions.
We have close relationship with all the churches around,
not all of them, but those
that we kind of run in the circle with.
Uh, their forecasted budget this year is about
$11.5 million.
Uh, they're a church of 2,500 gathering on the weekends.
There's another church in the area, uh,
that's probably just over double our size.
I'm not even gonna tell you what their budget is.
Um, but if you take either one of those churches
and you do the math on, Hey,
let's take their average week in attendance
and then what their forecasting contributions are at a
current level, and then you take that number
and then apply it to 4,500,
our budget at Hope would be about $20 million.
Okay? And so what I would say is we,
we're not outta line in the ministry
that we're trying to do.
Um, we have a, a challenge as it relates
to the resources that we have available to us.
Notice I didn't say that the money's not here.
I mean, we're gonna see in a minute.
God says, I, the silver is mine. The gold is mine.
The cattle on a thousand hills. That's all mine.
But right now, if something doesn't change,
we're gonna have some very difficult decisions
to make all the ministry that we just heard about.
And we're gonna celebrate, and I'm not gonna harp on this
too much longer, but we're gonna have to, we're gonna have
to be strategic about areas of ministry
and actually pull back and we look, we can do that.
We can be strategic, but we have to be good stewards.
So we're taking a three tiered approach, uh,
as a strategic team.
And we're saying tier one, here's what we do.
Um, we curb ministry expense to the best of our ability.
I'm gonna go and tell you we're doing that.
And then we try to exit our administrative offices.
We have some offices over off Pinedale, off Kerry Parkway
that are essential services used to house.
Now here's the truth.
We've been trying to get out of that lease for a while.
Um, we're actually already in the tier one right now.
That's tier one. Tier two is gonna force us
to take a hard look at staffing costs relative to budget.
Um, what does that mean?
Uh, point Blake, that means there will be some men
and women who are currently on staff at Hope Community
Church that would be exited from a paid position here.
That's tier two. Um, tier three kind
of bumps down into further change in staffing.
And then we gotta have a conversation
about campus consolidation.
What does that mean? Uh,
I'm not gonna go into any specifics.
There's no, there's no
specific decision that's just been made.
This is just, Hey, we're here together as a family.
We gotta recognize if we've got empty seats at Raleigh
or if we've got empty seats at Apex that we have
to pay a lease on,
and then we're paying 160 to $170,000 to lease a school,
man, that's some money that we could potentially save.
We do have to evaluate some things over the next six
to eight weeks so that we can make some decisions
to get our, our budget in line as we head into 2026.
It's incredibly important.
So what's the call to action here?
'cause we've got some challenges in front of us.
One, I want you to pray, alright?
And like what we saw in Haga, I want you, I want you
to ask God to, to rekindle our
hearts, the hearts of our people.
Rekindle your heart right towards
what it is that God's calling you to.
And I'm gonna ask you to set an alarm.
Whatever time works in your schedule, I want you
to set an alarm daily to stop
and to pray for what it is that God is doing in your heart
and in the life of Hope Community Church.
Second, participate. I want you to take a next step.
If you want to be a part of leading one
of these community groups that you're ta
that we're talking about right now,
you can text the word lead, the 7 2 9 8 9,
you'll get a link set to you
and then we can talk about how to help you take next steps.
And then lastly is provide, um, what do you mean by that?
I mean, you know what? We've got some financial challenges.
I mean, let's give sacrificially, I want you
to provide financially to what it is that God's calling to.
And I know you guys like, man, we're most
of you're in here might already be
giving, but I did some math.
Um, we could bridge a gap of about a million dollars
if 2000 families.
Alright? So we said 4,500 people across all
of our campuses on the weekend.
You know, everybody doesn't come at one time.
But if 2000 families said that,
I'm gonna give an additional $500 above
and beyond my current giving over the next five months.
So that's a hundred dollars a month, alright?
Above and beyond my current giving,
we could bridge a million dollar gap.
And so there's a reason why we set up recurring giving, man.
They may just, it makes it easy to make sure
that we're being disciplined in what it is
that God has called us to do.
Now here's the deal. I know some people hear that.
They're like, there's no way I can give an additional
$500 over the next five months.
That's okay. But the Bible talks about the widows might,
it talks about responding with
what it is that God has busted with.
There's also some of us in this room
and in our church that could probably cover somebody else.
We could give a thousand dollars, $2,000, $10,000
and not even not even miss it.
And so, if that's you, I just wanna encourage
you go before God in your prayer.
I'm praying that there would be somebody
that can't even leave the parking lot.
'cause the Holy Ghost is still just getting them.
Just getting them. I can't go.
Maybe the car won't start in Jesus name. That's fun.
In Jesus name. I'm sorry if your car breaks down.
I don't know. We got a couple of great mechanics here.
They'd love to, to help you out. Derek Fox, where are you?
Okay, here's what I wanna do. Isaiah 43, 18 and 19.
Remember not the former things
nor consider the things of old behold.
I'm doing a new thing now at Springs fourth.
Do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness,
in rivers and the desert, God is doing something new.
We've seen 194 baptisms this year.
You read scripture, God created
a world, said it was very good.
Man did about everything they could to mess it up.
So God set Jesus on a mission.
He made it way for things to be right between us.
And God, God Jesus goes back to heaven.
He sends down the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit's on a mission.
The spirit comes inside of us
and then sends us on mission to the world around us
until Jesus comes back.
We are not a church that's a country club.
We're not a church that just comes and receives.
We are a church that takes the gospel to our communities
where we live, learn where it can play.
Period. That's who we are.
We pray because it matters.
So church, what I want you to do right
now is I want you to stand to your feet.
If you're at home, I want you to stand at your feet.
If you're driving, don't stand to your feet.
But listen, we pray because it matters.
God has brought us a long way.
And every single day we're gonna depend on him
to take us wherever he is that he wants us to go.
The thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna do it together.
So let's pray. Father God, we thank you
for your mercy and your grace.
And we know that you are a faithful
and just God, that all of our church
and all of our lives are in your hand.
So we can mission ourselves into that.
We believe you Father, we trust in you, father.
And we pray against any attack of the enemy.
We pray for a unified church under our king
and Savior, Jesus and Jesus.
Then we pray. Amen.
Come on, let's worship one more song together.
The
Holy
Redeem.
Sing the song forever.
The highest
halls and
name stands above, above our church.
Come on. Is the
highest, is the
The king
be
Holy.
Thank you Jesus. Yes.
Holy forever. That is our King Jesus church.
You may take a seat. See.
Hey everybody. Glad to be with you all here.
Um, for those of you who don't know, uh, my wife Morgan,
uh, until a few months ago worked
for the federal government.
And, uh, if you've been watching the news,
2025 has been a fun time to work for the federal government.
Uh, if you've been keeping up with things earlier at the
beginning of this year, uh, we had a, uh, new branch
of the military or the military of the government, uh,
that went into action called Doge.
It stood for the Department of Government Efficiency.
And ultimately what do's purpose was, was to say, Hey,
let's try to cut down on some of the overspending
that's happening throughout the government.
And so my wife being a federal employee for a couple
of weeks, for months, uh, her job was on the line.
And one of the ways that they tried to figure out, Hey,
who are we gonna keep around
and who are we gonna get rid of, was
by having every single federal employee.
This is around 3 million people, uh,
send in an email every Monday morning
with the headline over the subject line,
what did you do last week?
And in this email, these federal employees had
to give at minimum five bullet points
of what they did last week.
And the purpose of this was just prove
that you're worth keeping around.
And I wanna ask you, have you ever had this feeling
or this sense that you had
to prove your worth to somebody else?
Have you ever had this feeling that you had to, uh, come up
with a list of reasons why you were worth keeping around?
Are there any remote workers anywhere here who, uh,
maybe you're at home and you're working
and you feel your eyelids getting a little bit heavy
and so you think, well, lemme just go wiggle my mouse a
little bit so that my team's icon shows green.
And people think that like, God forbid I have
to go use the bathroom or anything, I need people
to know I'm a hard worker around the clock.
There's way too many people smiling and laughing
and nodding to know that that's a story, right?
But why do we feel that way?
We feel that way because, well, I have to justify
earning a paycheck every two weeks, right?
Let me ask you this. Do you ever feel like you have
to justify yourself?
Maybe it's not with work. Maybe, uh, some
of you get creative like I do when it comes to money math.
So, uh, every year, uh, I go down
to a church conference down in Orlando.
And you know what else is in Orlando Islands of Adventure.
It's my favorite theme park.
I love going to Islands of Adventure.
And every single year I get my ticket to this conference.
And my wife says, not this year,
go for what you're going for.
We don't need any
extracurriculars or anything like that, right?
But then this past year,
something interesting started happening.
Well, for one, I got my ticket to the conference for free.
I decided to drive instead of flying.
'cause honey, that saves money. We use
points to book the hotel.
And so, you know, with all this extra money I spent, well,
I think, I think I've justified buying myself a ticket
to islands of an adventure this year.
Let me ask you one more time, do you ever try
to justify your actions?
Do you ever feel like, man, if I get the job,
I can justify all of my student loan debt?
Or if I get the grades, I can justify staying up
late and studying all night.
Or maybe if we try to think about the ways that we appear
to other people, we say, well, if I accomplish X, y, Z
by this imaginary finish line that I've created for myself,
well then I can prove to
other people that I'm not a failure.
If I get married by this time, then, then I can try to prove
to myself that I have my life together.
If I get the house, I can justify skipping work to pick up a
or skipping church to pick up a few extra hours at work.
So then I set myself up
somewhere better down the road, right?
We try to justify ourselves.
And in life it can feel so easy to pile up receipts,
uh, to prove that we are somehow enough.
Because on some level,
I think it's a question that all of us ask.
Am I enough? Am I good enough? Am I worthy enough?
Can I produce enough? Can I fill in the blank enough?
But if you're not careful, that mindset can easily creep
into your faith as well.
I mean, come on, God, if you, if you had the responsibility
to send God once a week an email
of the five things you did this week
to grow in your relationship with him,
that would honestly feel a little bit
easy to some of us, right?
We'd be like, okay, I went to church, I prayed,
I read my Bible, I served and I give, I'm a good Christian.
Gimme a gold star. But that is a mentality that
so easily creeps in.
Listen, as much as I want all of those things to be true
for you, I want you to also know
that they don't ascribe your worth or your value to God
or to other people around you.
In Matthew chapter seven, uh, Jesus talks about, uh, the day
of judgment, when there'll be people
who will come up to him.
And basically what they'll say is, Hey, Lord,
look at me and look at all of that.
I've, all that I've accomplished.
They'll say things like, Lord, I prophesied in your name.
I cast it out demons in your name.
I perform miracles in your name.
And Jesus says that He will look at those people
and say, depart from me.
For I never knew you. It's a scary thought, isn't it?
That you could do and do and do
and accomplish whatever you want and,
and do things even in the name of God.
And somehow that will not be the thing that proves
that you are enough.
But here's the beauty of the gospel, the message
of the gospel and the message of the crosses,
that you are saved and made righteous
by grace through faith.
Each of us has sinned against God
and our sin has built up a, a bill that none
of us could afford to pay.
And so what Jesus does is Jesus steps in our place.
He, uh, uh, takes the penalty for our sin,
places it upon himself, and the debt owed to God.
Uh, uh, the debt that God, um, um, that we rightfully owe
to him has been settled through Jesus.
And now we have nothing to prove, nothing to earn.
And we can stand before God not needing to be justified,
because in Jesus we are justified before him.
Colossians three, three teaches
that we are hidden in Christ.
What does that mean? It means that when God looks at us,
he sees the righteousness of Jesus.
But do you ever still feel like you're not enough?
Like, man, the gospel's good and we can hoop and holler
and get really excited about it.
It, but the reality is we all still feel at times like
we have something to prove.
It happens to the best of us.
It even happened to, uh, a man named Peter who was one
of Jesus's first followers.
And it led to a bit of drama
that we're gonna read about here now.
So if you have your Bibles, go ahead
and turn over to Galatians chapter two.
Um, if you're going digital, feel free to, uh,
switch over to the NLT.
That's the translation that we're gonna be looking at today.
Um, but for now, let me set up what's going on here. Okay.
Uh, the Apostle Paul, he's the author of the letter
of Galatians.
He's writing this to the people who live in Galatia.
This is the same Paul who wrote the letter to Titus
that we looked at over the summer, okay?
And the reason why Paul is writing this letter is
to refute the claim that Jesus requires anything
other than faith to be justified before God.
His goal in writing this letter is
to combat this false teaching going around that says, Hey,
faith in Jesus is good, but it's not enough.
There were people who were saying that, listen, in order
to really be saved, you have to follow Jesus.
But you also have
to follow the Jewish law laws about circumcision.
In observing the Mosaic law, the false teaching
that was being spread was this Jesus
plus the law equals salvation.
Now, it's easy for us to point a finger at the Galatians
and say, man, how could they possibly think that?
But really, how many of us think the same way?
Like we'd never actually say it, right?
But how many of us think, man, if I cry during worship
and somebody else sees it, well then man,
they're really gonna know that the
spirit's working inside of my heart.
You know, something's really happening.
Then maybe you thought, man, listen, I've,
I've been battling this addiction for years,
and if I could just get over this, then God would love me.
Then everything between me and God would be cool.
Maybe if I just, if I have the right answers
to everybody's theological questions,
then somehow I can prove
that I'm a next level Christian, right?
We do this all the time.
We may never say it out loud,
but subtly we can end up doing exactly
what the Galatians were tricked into believing.
They were pushing a performance-based gospel that was rooted
for them specifically in their ethnic
identity and in rule keeping.
So the great sin that we see in Galatia, it wasn't
that people were rejecting Jesus,
that would've been bad enough,
but it wasn't that they were rejecting Jesus.
The problem was they were adding to him.
And Paul says, this is not just a slight misunderstanding,
this is a total distortion of the gospel.
And even Peter, the one who had once walked with Jesus,
had fallen into this trap.
And so that's gonna pick us up where we're reading today.
Uh, Paul is writing to the Galatians
and he's, he's, uh, referring to an interaction that he had
with Peter sometime before this.
And so if it feels like we're picking up kind
of in the middle of the story, it's
because Paul kind of picks up in the middle of the story,
like he's talking to them about something
and then he says, oh, well, let me just kind
of tell you about this interaction that happened
between me and Peter a while back.
So starting in verse 11, it says, uh, Paul, Paul is saying,
listen, when, when Peter came to Antioch, he said, I had
to oppose him to his face for what he did was very wrong.
When he first arrived, he ate with the gentile believers
who were not circumcised.
Now, to the people in Galatia, they would've heard this
and would've said that Peter's, uh, atrocity his sin.
The thing that Paul wants to call him out on is
that he was eating with Gentiles
because, uh, this was considered a spit in the face
to Peter's Jewish heritage.
For him to be able to sit down
and eat with gentiles, this would've been a big no-no
to their culture in the day.
Now, here's the problem that Paul is about
to address what he's about to call out.
He said the problem wasn't
that Peter was disrespecting his Jewish heritage.
It's that Peter forgot that
because of his faith in Jesus, he has a new heritage.
He's a part of a new family with new rules and new standards
and a new way to behave.
And so, uh, imagine the scene, Peter's sitting down,
he's eating with these gentiles who
on paper he shouldn't be sitting down and eating with.
So let's keep reading it says,
but afterwards, when some friends of James came, so some
of Peter's Jewish friends came around, says that he says
that Peter wouldn't eat with the Gentiles anymore.
Why? Because he was afraid of criticism from these people
who insisted on the necessity of circumcision.
As a result, other Jewish believers followed Peter's
hypocrisy, and even Barnabas was led
astray by their hypocrisy.
When I saw that they were not following the truth
of the gospel message, I said to Peter, in front
of all the others, since you a Jew
by birth have discarded the Jewish laws
and are living like a gentile, why are you now trying
to make these gentiles follow Jewish traditions?
So Peter's hanging out with gentiles,
he's living out the gospel reality, right?
Everything is going great for,
for all the world to know type stuff.
Just like Jason just talked about from our vision night.
This is Peter is actively living into that.
But then some Jewish people comes around,
he starts acting differently.
He shuns the Gentiles, he pretends like he doesn't know him.
And thank God this is just a Peter problem.
Thank God none of us act any differently
around our Christian friends than we do from everybody else.
Isn't it true that for so many of us, we just like Peter,
tend to default to our fear
of other people when we have an opportunity
to live into the gospel reality
that we all claim to believe.
You see, we call that hypocrisy.
But Paul saw
that there was actually a deeper heart issue happening.
Paul recognized that Peter's heart had a spot
that hadn't been touched by the gospel yet.
And that's the reason why he responded the way that he did.
And I think this is one of the first lessons
that we can note out of this passage, man.
This is the reason why it's so important for us
to have healthy Christ-centered friends around
who don't mind calling you out when they see a part
of your life that isn't aligned with the gospel.
Man, Peter desperately needed someone like Paul.
I mean, I know this is true of my own life,
that when I'm not surrounded by godly healthy people
to call out the sin in my life
and to point out the areas where I'm not living like Jesus,
man, if it weren't for those people,
I would very easily revert back into my many
of my old behaviors and own ways.
And lemme tell you something else. They notice stuff.
I don't, they call out things when I don't recognize it.
See, for Peter, what he was doing was probably some sort
of like defense mechanism, but to Paul, Paul saw it as sin.
He said, listen, you think you're trying
to protect yourself, really, you're hurting yourself.
So let me step in here
and I just want to ask you, do you have a Paul,
do you have someone who is deeply concerned about your
whole, your personal holiness to the point
that they can call you out
and approach you even when you don't approach them?
I think sometimes we have people who are like, yeah,
I think I could go to this person
and tell 'em about when I'm struggling.
But man, what if you had somebody who is like, Hey,
listen, we're tight.
I know it's an open door policy.
At any point I can come to you
and tell you if I see something that doesn't align
with the Bible, listen, I,
I hope you have someone like that.
I hope you have a Paul.
But how many of us also push our Pauls away?
How many of us push our Pauls away for being too judgmental
or for being holier than thou
or man, they don't really know me.
They can't really speak into my life like that.
Listen, what Paul's doing here is totally biblical.
Paul is publicly rebuking Peter
for pulling away from the gentile believers.
Not just because Paul was offended, he wasn't like,
I don't like what you're doing, so
I'm gonna say something about it.
It's not that he was offended
because he saw that his friend wasn't living
like an image bearer.
And he said, man, you were made for so much more than that.
So let me gently and humbly restore.
You see, Paul's goal wasn't just to correct behavior.
He's saying, Peter, you're actions are actually out
of step with the gospel.
The issue that Paul is calling out is
that Peter knew the gospel but defaulted to fear of others
and their opinions and their traditions.
But then Paul notices something else,
and this is something he's definitely not going to let fly.
Uh, the problem, one of the problems
that Paul noticed about Peter is he says, Hey, listen,
what you're doing is wrong.
But Peter Barnabas
and some of your friends, man,
they're following your example too.
And Paul is definitely not going to let that fly.
He wasn't going to allow Peter to set a poor example of
what it means to be a Christ follower.
And I think again, this is something
that we can draw out away from this text and,
and apply to our lives
because I think that one of the issues in our culture,
specifically in like Western Christian culture is
that we've created a Christian subculture that some
of us assimilate to without even realizing
that it's a church culture, but it's not the faith.
So what I mean by that is, is
that there are certain just Christian behaviors
that we all do and that a good Christian should do, right?
Like, oh, you watch the chosen
and you listen to K love and you learn how to dance.
The Forest Frank's new song like you must be a Christian.
But nowhere are any of those things prescribed
to us in scripture, but we just do it.
Why? Because we see other people doing it.
I wanna challenge you with this and,
and hopefully this actually changes your perspective on
what it means to live the life that Jesus came to offer.
Did you know that nowhere in the Bible, not once
does Jesus ever look at someone
and say, you should be a Christian, not one time.
You know what he says? He says, follow me.
Why would he do that? Maybe it's
because Jesus knows that if he were just
to say be a Christian,
then we would just look at other people
and say, that's my example.
But instead Jesus says, follow me
because he is the only example any of us should ever follow.
How dare we allow anyone else,
any other fallen broken human being to be the barometer for
what holiness is When we have direct access to view
and follow Jesus himself, this is
what Jesus invites us into.
This is the life that he wants all of us to have.
And the problem is, is that when we become more concerned
with following the Christian down the street
or the church down the street
or any other person instead of Jesus,
we end up playing this game of religious telephone
where we just resemble American Christianity
and we get so far away from the life
that Jesus came to offer us.
And that was never the goal.
The goal was always to follow Jesus himself.
Now, that's not to say anything about discipleship, right?
Even Paul writes, man, follow me as I follow Christ.
But if you're walking behind somebody
and they're claiming to lead you the way
that Jesus leads you, at some point you need to kind of look
around and be like, Hey, who are you following?
Let me make sure we're going the right way.
Let me make sure that even the way
that you're training me up
and discipling me is accurate with the word of God.
Because this is what Peter's starting to do.
He's setting a bad example for other believers.
And so Paul goes on to set the record straight and,
and as we read this next part, here's what I want you to do.
I just want you to, to kind of have your, your mind
and your eyes attuned to see if you notice anything
repetitive through this next chunk of scripture, okay?
It's a little bit of a big chunk. And so I just want you
to look out for, for key phrases.
This is verses 15 through 18,
still in Galatians chapter two, Paul writes to,
to Peter, he says this to Peter.
He says, you and I are Jews by birth,
not thinners like the Gentiles.
That's sarcasm, by the way.
Yet we know that a person is made right with God
by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law.
And we have believed in Christ Jesus so
that we might be made right with God
because of our faith in Christ, not
because we have obeyed the law
for no one will ever be made right with God
by obeying the law.
But suppose we seek to be made right with God
through faith in Christ, and then we are found guilty
because we have abandoned the law.
Would that mean that Christ has led us into sin?
Absolutely not. Rather,
I am a sinner if I rebuilt the old system of law
that I already tore down.
I want to ask you, did you notice a key phrase that pops up
through that over and over again?
We'll go ahead and throw the full
passage up on the screen here.
Have you, do you notice anything
that stands out in this big chunk?
There's a phrase, it's four words made right with God.
Let's just go ahead and highlight so we can see it.
Four times Paul includes in this, in this passage.
This is how you are made right with God.
The the theological term for being made right
with God is justification.
Paul's deepest concern is he wants
to make it clear, abundantly clear,
because Peter seems
to have gotten it mixed up somewhere along the way.
He says, listen, Peter, the way you were made right
with God, Galatians, the way y'all are made right
with God hope community church, the way
that you are made right with God, the way you are justified,
the way you are proven to be enough is not by anything
that you do or that you try to conjure up out of fear
of acceptance from other people.
The way that you are justified and made right with God is
because of the gospel and what Jesus has done for you.
Nothing else. This is Paul's main
concern for all of us.
He wants Peter to know Peter, there is nothing
that you can do that will ever be enough to justify.
The Old Testament talks about this as well.
Isaiah 64, 6, the prophet Isaiah writes, we are all infected
and impure with sin.
When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing
but filthy rags like autumn leaves.
We wither and fall
and our sins sweep us away like the wind dirty rags.
I I don't wanna get too, too graphic here,
but man, that's Paul is saying that everything that we do,
it's, it's useless.
That word that's actually used, I'm sorry, I said Paul,
Isaiah, the word
that's actually used in the Hebrew language,
I'll let you use your imagination,
but originally it referred to culturally, um,
basically a cloth that a woman would use
for personal hygiene once a month.
I'll let you use your imagination there.
That's what Isaiah is comparing your good works to.
He says they're autumn leaves, they're dead.
They're on the ground. Maybe you can can use 'em
to start a fire, but that's about it.
I want you to imagine that you're standing in court,
you're on trial for a crime,
and the judge is saying, Hey, listen,
I'm gonna give you one more chance to prove to us
that you're innocent and you stand up.
Maybe you're still shackled
and you say, your Honor, did you know
that an octopus has three hearts
and when it swims, two of 'em stop beating.
Maybe you get some cheap amusement out of that.
But guess what? It serves no purpose to your case.
That has literally no weight, it has no bearing.
If that feels completely outta place, completely irrelevant,
completely useless.
Isaiah's saying you and you're trying your absolute best.
That's how good it is
to contributing to your own righteousness.
You might as well have thrown it out.
You didn't, you didn't even have a case to try
to raise up for yourself.
And p and Paul looks at his own life as an example of this,
in Philippians chapter three verses two
through 11, Paul writes this.
He says he's, he's talking
and addressing the same issue that's facing the Galatians.
These people who say you need Jesus plus something else
in order to be made righteous.
Paul is saying, uh, Philippians two, sorry,
three verses two through 11.
He says, watch out for those dogs, those people who do evil,
those mutilators
who say You must be circumcised to be saved.
For we who worship by the spirit of God.
Shout out to Rob Jones in the message last week.
We who worship by the spirit of God are the ones
who are truly circumcised.
We rely on what Christ Jesus has done.
We put no confidence in human effort,
though I could have confident in my own
effort if anyone could.
This is Paul talking. He says, indeed, if anyone has a right
or has reason for confidence in their own efforts,
trust me, I have even more.
And then look at what Paul does here.
He starts running down his resume.
He says, I was circumcised when I was eight days old.
I'm a pure blooded citizen of Israel
and a member of, uh, of the tribe of Benjamin.
I was a real Hebrew if there ever was one. I'm a member.
I was a member of the Pharisees
who demand the strictest obedience to Jewish law.
I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church.
And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault.
Hit sin. There's the five things I've done this week.
Look at me, look at what I've accomplished.
Look at how good I am.
And this is what so many of us try to do.
God, look at all I've done for you.
Look at all the reasons why I'm worthy.
But let's keep reading to see what happened,
what shift took place in Paul's life.
He says, listen, I once thought these things were valuable.
Before we keep reading, I
just want you to think about your life.
Think about your accomplishments.
Think about the things you've done.
Think about that place where pride creeps in.
Maybe, maybe it's not church related.
Maybe it's something that you've done in the business world
or or something that you've done at school
or some way you've performed somehow
that you take genuine pride in
and say, man, I know I'm the best at that thing.
My prayer is that what happened in
Paul's heart would be true of us.
That at one time maybe you did think those things were
valuable, but now he says, I consider them worthless
because of what Christ has done.
Yes, everything else is worthless when compared
with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus.
My Lord, for his sake, I have discarded everything else.
Counting it all as garbage.
If you thought the Isaiah reference
and the history of that language was interesting,
you should go back and look at
what Paul meant when he wrote the word garbage.
If he were to repeat it on this stage, you say, get
that guy outta church because that is how uh,
worthless he thinks of his, his acts.
He says, garbage, why I get rid of all that stuff? Why?
So I can gain Christ and become one with him?
Paul is saying, listen, all of my accomplishments,
all the things I took pride in, they isn't,
they weren't actually a barrier to my unity with Jesus.
But he says, when I let go
of those things, now I can gain Christ.
So I can become one, one with him.
I no longer count my own
righteousness through obeying the law.
Rather I become righteous through faith in Christ
for God's way of making us right with himself.
There's that phrase again, depends on faith.
He says, I want to know Christ
and experience the mighty power
that raised him from the dead.
I want to suffer with him sharing in his death so
that one way or another I will experience the
resurrection from the dead.
Listen, Paul is confident.
He's confident enough to call all of his efforts garbage.
And I just want to ask you, are you,
because a lot of us find our confidence in
what we've accomplished, but Paul is so confident
and so spiritually mature
that he looks at the best things on his resume
and says, I don't need 'em.
It's just window dressing. It's, it's not important.
It's nothing because Jesus' way is so much better
and he knows he has nothing left to prove.
Paul knows you can argue Paul's accomplishments.
You can't argue with Jesus's.
You can look at what I've done
and you can tell me it's not enough.
But you can't look at what Jesus did on the cross
and say, that wasn't enough to make me right with God.
Back to Galatians, Paul says, when I tried
to keep the law, it condemned me.
Have you ever felt that way?
Have you ever felt like, man,
I'm every day I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna read my Bible.
And then you sleep through that alarm
and you think, man, I'm a terrible person.
That's what Paul said. He said, listen,
I set other people, set these standards for me.
I set the standard for myself.
And when I didn't live up to that, it condemned me.
So guess what? That standard wasn't
God's will for me to begin with.
Instead, God's standard was,
Hey Paul, can you just be with me?
Can you just rest with me? So this is what, what Paul does.
He says that I died to the law.
He said the law was condemning me. So I died to it.
I stopped trying to meet all of its requirements so
that I might live for God.
My old self has been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.
So in this earthly bo,
so I live in this earthly body by doing what?
Trusting, not working, not earning
by trusting in the son of God who loved me
and gave himself for me.
I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless.
He talks about this in other parts.
Listen, I, I don't just say, oh God gave me grace
so I don't have to do anything.
I'm just gonna sleep all day and eat Doritos
and wait for Jesus to come back.
Like that's not what he's saying.
What he's saying is, is man,
because of this grace, well now the fruit is
gonna come out of my life.
He says, I don't treat that grace of God as meaningless
for if keeping the law can make us right with God.
Here's the, here's the main point
of everything we're talking about today.
If keeping the law could make us right with God,
there was no reason for Christ to die.
Listen to that again.
If your effort could be enough, then Jesus's effort wasn't.
And I pray that we would never be the type of people
who feel like we have to add to what Jesus did on the cross.
I think there are two shifts that are evident in Paul's life
that will transform ours
as well when we allow the Holy Spirit, uh, to help us
to make these shifts in our lives.
And the first one is this, it's an identity shift.
This whole series we've been talking about identity.
And I want you to recognize Paul is the type of man
who stopped identifying himself with his accomplishments
and instead identify himself as someone
who has been crucified with Christ.
And I just want to ask you, is that what God wants
to do in your life as well?
Do you find your identity in the
things you have accomplished?
Or do you find your identity in Christ?
Paul is beginning a life of looking in the mirror
and seeing himself as Jesus saw him.
But in order to do this, it says that he had
to die to the law first.
And I just wanna ask you, what do you need to die to?
What expectations from other people
or from yourself do you need to put to death?
So that can stop being your barometer for good enough?
The second shift that happens is that we have to recognize
that our salvation is not Jesus plus my effort.
It's Jesus instead of my effort.
In other words, if you need a simple way to put this, Jesus
plus nothing equals everything.
As long as I have him, I have everything that I need.
One more time. Galatians 2 21, I I, by the grace of God,
I hope this punches you in the chest.
If righteousness could be gained through the law,
Christ died for nothing
because my effort will never be enough.
Here's the, here's the bad news.
The bad news, you'll never be good enough.
The good news, you don't have to be.
And this is what makes the gospel different.
Every other arena of your life expects something of you,
expect something of you in order to declare your worth.
But guess what? Man? Jesus defined your worth at the cross.
He says, I love you so much. I'm gonna to die for you
and spill my blood for you.
That's how much he loves you. Jesus declares our worth.
When these shifts happen, that's when we realize
that we have nothing to prove to anyone.
So if you didn't have your quiet time
this morning, guess what?
God still delights in you.
If you blew it in a relationship,
maybe you made somebody
angry and you didn't mean to do that.
Hey, come back to Jesus. 'cause there's grace.
If you didn't get the job or the house
or the recognition, guess what?
Those things don't define you.
My wife said something when she
was pregnant with our daughter.
I'll, I'll close with this. She said,
when our kid gets here, she says,
I never wanna place an expectation on her
that God doesn't place on her.
And that was so profound to me.
And ever since I have been trying to live that way myself,
man, God, I don't wanna place any expectation on me
that you didn't put there.
And the gospel gives us the freedom to do that.
This is a quote from John Mark Comer in
his book called Live No Lies.
He says, the gospel gives us the freedom to fail
because we are loved no matter what happens,
whether we succeed or not,
whether the business venture works out
or not, whether we get into that school
or have to settle for second, Beth, whether she says yes
or he doesn't return your call, it doesn't matter.
Our self-worth doesn't come from any of that,
which means we are free to risk, to fail,
to get back up and to try again.
It's okay. And that is a beautiful reminder of the gospel.
Lemme pray for us. Father God, I just pray that all of us,
that you would just help us to get a glimpse
of how you see us.
God, my prayer is that you would just help us to, uh,
stop defining ourselves by all of these fake metrics
that other people have imposed on us.
Lord, there's stuff, there are people in this room
who have stuff that somebody told them when they were seven
or eight years old, that
that still deeply informs the way that they live their lives.
God, I pray that you would rip that stuff out from the root
and that you would replace it with the truth that said,
you are worth the, the blood of my son Jesus.
And God help us to find security in that.
Help us to find our identity in that We love you.
We ask all these things in your son's name, we pray, amen.
Amen and amen. Um, speaking of prayer, uh, across all
of our campuses on Sunday, August 24th,
every campus is gonna have a family prayer gathering.
And I encourage you to come to that.
Uh, we we're gonna pray with one another.
We're gonna pray for our communities, for our schools,
for our church where God is leading us.
Because here at hope, we pray because it matters.
And I have one more update for you. Uh, next Thursday.
Uh, this room is gonna be filled with people
who I'm from Texas Field.
That's how we say that in Texas.
It's gonna be full of people
who are worshiping, uh, king Jesus.
But they will be all from NC State.
We've invited cruise ministry here.
There's 800 students that'll be in this
room on Thursday night.
So we will not be having Thursday night service next week.
We've invited, we are leveraging the building
that God has blessed us with for ministry.
So I would encourage you, since we won't be here to pray
for those students, pray for college students, pray
for college and ministry.
'cause God is moving in this young generation,
and we need to be praying for those folks.
All right? We love you guys. We'll see you next week.