This morning I am beginning a new series entitled “The Practical Gospel.” The idea for this series comes from what Paul said in Philippians 2:12-13, where he told the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” In other words, now that you have been saved, now that you have believed the gospel, and now that God is working in you through His Holy Spirit, who you received when you put your faith in Jesus, work out the implications of the gospel into every area of your life as God works in you. Not “work for your salvation” but “work out the implications of your salvation.” My goal in this series is to examine what the implications are of the gospel for various areas of our life – love life, parenting, work, money, friends, church, personal growth, and the world.
The gospel summary statement I will be using in this series is this: “We are sinners who have been saved and justified by grace, learning to live as new creations according to God’s will, trusting in a certain and glorious eternal hope and future.”
If you read that statement closely, you will recognize that it has a past, present, and future dimension. Today, we are going to use those three aspects as our framework and examine what the implications of the gospel are for your love life.
We are sinners means that we are all rebels against a holy God, separated from Him and staring at an eternity of separation from God and all that is good. And we are so full of wickedness that we can not save ourselves by our own good deeds, can not make ourselves right with God on our own. But the good news is that Jesus lived the perfect life we could not live and died a sacrificial death on the cross in our place, to take the punishment we deserve, to save us from the penalty of our sins, and to restore us to a right relationship with God. To be justified means that we are declared not guilty before a holy God. And this is all a gift of God’s grace, an undeserved gift given by an unobligated giver.
Ephesians 2:8-9 - For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
