Matt Chandler - The Gospel in the Air

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those; that will be our primary passage this morning. I want you to be able to look at certain things I want to draw out of it as we dive into the proclamation of His word this morning. It was three days before my 18th birthday when what theologians call the work of illumination happened to me. My friend had been sharing the gospel with me. I thought that Christianity belonged to guys like Ned Flanders and certainly didn’t belong to a guy like me. My background had a bit of violence in it and a bit of perversion. I had spent a year with my friend sharing the gospel with me, taking me to church with him on the weekends and on Wednesday nights to a thing called JAM, which stood for Jesus and Me. I would go to that, and then I would try hard to stop doing the things that my heart was drawn to. I don’t know if you’ve tried that before, but like I said, I was prone to violence and prone to perversion, probably due to some family dynamics that created that mess. That was my bent, and I had a hard time not finding those things. Oftentimes, those things would find me. I don’t know if you feel like that, if you’re not a Christian; sometimes that stuff just finds you. That’s how my life was going. I didn’t have to look for violence; it would sometimes find me. I didn’t have to look for perversion; sometimes those girls would find me. So I was stuck. I had spent a full year going to church with Jeff and trying to stop my compulsions from manifesting in my life. That was my story. Three days before my 18th birthday, the light came on, and I could finally believe. I wanted to believe but couldn’t quite get there. I couldn’t get there because I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could be a Christian. I also couldn’t get there because it was hard to believe that the gospel was as simple as believing in the finished work of Christ on my behalf. I kept convoluting and misinterpreting the moral law of God, which is good, beautiful, and right, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which says I don’t have to do anything but believe by faith alone in His grace alone to be saved from what’s most wrong in me. I had spent all this time trying to manage my behavior to become a Christian when all the while, the offer of salvation was on the table. I was trying to handle what I’ll describe as fruit—or maybe, since we’re in Texas and summer might actually be over, I was trying to treat my sin like crabgrass. I was just mowing over it, trying to make it less visible, while there was actually a deeper and more serious issue in me: the issue of sin. I kept trying to mow over the crabgrass, and then the next weekend, it would pop right back up, and I’d have to mow it down again. Then it would pop back up, and I’d have to mow it down again. And that was the rhythm I found my life in. I wanted out of it, but I couldn’t get out of it. Three days before my 18th birthday, the Holy Spirit did the work of illumination, and I could see it and believe it. Thirty-two years later, I have not recovered from that moment. I gave you last week my 12-second testimony, which was that there was a season in my life when I was a violent man and a perverted man, and someone preached the good news of the gospel to me: that the death of Jesus Christ on that cross took away all of God’s wrath toward my sin—past, present, and future—if I would believe in it. He did so fully, freely, and forever. That was the gospel—period. I didn’t even know how to think about Christianity outside of moral rules and laws. But once I became a Christian, I could see certain things. For example, I could see in the Bible that God gets His people out of slavery before He gives them the law. I could see that Abraham was counted as righteous 420 years before the moral law of God was even given. There’s this movement of grace toward people who are far from God, in which God is trying to save them from what’s most wrong with them—not the stuff they might identify as most wrong with them, but what is actually most wrong with them: a heart twisted and diseased by sin. That’s a thing we cannot fix ourselves. We can mow over it, try to poison it, or cover it up, but we can’t get it out from inside us. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can do that. I heard it, and I’d heard it a thousand times, but on that day, three days before my 18th birthday, 32 years ago, I could hear it, and I received it with such gladness. The only way for me to understand the gospel really from that point on is…