Grace Changes Everything, October 12, 2025

Well, good morning, fellowship. Man, what a joy it is to be here with you all today. When I say fellowship this morning, I do mean all of fellowship across all of our campuses. This is what we call a broadcast Sunday. We are one church in multiple locations. And even though we have six, soon to be seven, with North Little Rock launching this year, new campuses, we're not six or seven church plants. We are one church. We are one church in multiple locations. And usually we have live teaching on all those campuses every day. But every now and then, we like to have the same conversation from the same teacher across all of our church family together at the same time. And that's what we get to do today. So I definitely want to welcome those of you joining us in Benton and in Cabot and in Maumelle and in Midtown. Of course, here in the worship center and the chapel and online at home and all across the world. We're so glad that you're here today. And for any who are relatively new, my name is Ben Parkinson, and I'm one of four we call teaching pastors here at fellowship who have the privilege, along with Mark and Justin and Brandon, of coming alongside our campus pastors on all of our campuses to lead and teach the church in the team-oriented way that we do. And so if you're new this morning and new to that idea, man, we're so thankful you're here. We'd love to get to meet you. Say hi. If you're on this campus, I'll be at the connection center after the service, and I would love to meet you.

And we are kicking off a new sermon series in the book of Galatians that I'll get to in just a moment, but I want to put it in context for us before we dive in this morning because it's not a random decision for us as a church family to talk about Galatians together. If you remember, we shared on Vision Sunday this year that we want our church to focus on praying the part of the Lord's prayer that Jesus laid out when he said to his heavenly father, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Your kingdom come is what we set our theme for the year is. And incidentally, if you haven't picked up one of the prayer cards that we've been laying out every month for you guys, man, please grab one of those and begin to pray those prayers with us. That's one of the things we said we want to do as a church family this year is pray for God's kingdom to come in all these different aspects of our lives in our community, in our city, in our world. And so we'd love for our church family to be sending those up to him as a fragrant aroma in prayer. Please join us in that if you get a chance to do that. But as we said, we want to see God's kingdom come, his will be done, earth as in heaven. On the one hand, we know even to say that is an impossible thing, isn't it? And we're not going to fully see that on the earth completely until Jesus returns one day and comes to make all things right. At the same time, we love that being our theme this year and looking and focusing in on that idea because even though we won't see the fullness of it across the earth until he returns, he has asked us as what he calls his body left here on the earth until he returns to be a picture of that kingdom that's coming,

to be a glimpse to the world around us of the kingdom of grace and glory that is on its way when he returns. That's our calling, to be the kind of community with each other that displays that grace and that glory to the world as well as to begin to spread that throughout the world around us in the way that we treat our neighbors and our coworkers and our communities and see more and more people believe in what we're going to talk about today to continue to see his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So there's a not yet aspect to it, but there's also, and already we should be displaying that as that city set on a hill Jesus talked about, as that light in a dark place, which is why our main initiatives we laid out for you on Vision Sunday this year are to display those things. We're going to have a Global Missions Weekend looking at what our church is doing around the world, in God's heart for that, and calling hopefully many of you to come and join us in what he's doing all over the world in a Global Missions Weekend because in God's kingdom, when his kingdom comes, there will be people from every tongue, every tribe, every nation, the scripture says, worshiping him. That's why we said this year we want to launch our seventh campus in North Little Rock and continue to spread the good news of Jesus in the different communities around us because when his kingdom comes, every community will be worshiping him and gathering together in communities

that are glorifying the God of the scriptures. That's why we said this year we want to engage in a feeding initiative for underserved children in central Arkansas because it's one of the biggest needs our state has. We know that when God's kingdom comes, no child will go hungry. And we wanna be a picture of that, a glimpse of that to the world around us of what the kingdom of heaven is gonna be like when it finally fully arrives. We wanna see his kingdom come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. It's why we do everything we do as a church family. It's also why our mission is what it is, to make disciples who live by God's grace and for his glory at home and across the world. Because if we're gonna see more of God's kingdom being lived out on the earth as is in heaven, then we're gonna have to embrace the reality that it's not gonna come the ways that sometimes we try to make it come. It's not gonna come by conquering those who are enemies of the kingdom of God with military might. It's not gonna come through conquering those who are enemies of the kingdom of God with governmental control or with superior intellect or with external social pressure or all the other things that we're tempted to try to use to force the world around us to behave and act more like the kingdom of God.

Now, Jesus told us how he's gonna spread the kingdom of God across the earth. He told his 12 to go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And lo, I'm with you even to the end of the age. Jesus said, that's how the kingdom of God is gonna spread like that mustard seed across the earth that seems so small and insignificant and humble, and yet that is what is going to go and change the world, he says. And he said, the way you become a disciple, talking to Nicodemus in John chapter three, isn't just by tweaking a little bit of your behavior here and there, isn't just by trying to get a little bit better by pulling up your bootstraps and trying a little bit harder according to what God said in his word. He told Nicodemus, no, you've gotta be completely born again. You gotta start from scratch. You've got to die to your old self, to that fear-based, law-controlled behavior manipulation that the world uses to try and gain control of life. And no, you've got to be born again into a new grace-based, unconditional, love-driven heart transformation, Jesus says. That's the only way that you're gonna truly be changed, and it's the only way that the world around us

is going to truly be changed for the better. True Christ-like theology does not produce what philosophers have tried to make it out to produce, just an opiate for the masses to make us passive and make us just endure any level of persecution that comes our way because we believe there's a greater coming one day of heaven to earth. No, it's actually the one thing that truly changes the world in the here and now. It's the one thing that makes all the difference in the world. God's kingdom is a kingdom of grace and glory. It's a kingdom where he's constantly glorifying himself by the grace he pours out on us, and here's what the Scripture is telling us. The more and more people who believe that, who place their faith in that, who trust in that kind of unconditional love for them, and then pour that out on those around them because they believe it's been given to them so they have the strength of the Spirit in them to give it to those around them, and he says the more that spreads all over the earth, that's what's gonna change the world. That's what's gonna transform the things that we wring our hands about and that we cry about and that we pray about and that we beg God to change in the midst of that. That's how the kingdom of heaven comes to earth. And the Scripture lays out for us

that there are two fundamental ideas that are really at war with each other on the earth. They're truly at war with each other, and it's not always the things that we think it is. When you read the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, what you don't see is it talking about the two fundamental ideas that are at war, and one's gonna win and one's gonna lose, and whichever one wins is gonna determine the fate of the world. It doesn't say it's conservative politics versus progressive politics. It doesn't say that it's democracy versus communism. It doesn't say that it's capitalistic economics versus socialistic economics. It doesn't even say that it's biblical morality versus worldly morality. Our morality is a symptom of what we believe, but that's not even the fundamental battle going on on the earth, the Scripture says. Now, the fundamental issues that are at war with each other for the heart and soul of the earth is grace and law. Grace and law. When I say law, I'm not just talking about the biblical Old Testament mosaic law, although some of us turned that into the kind of law I'm talking about as well that we'll talk about here in just a second. But every subculture on the planet has its own set of laws.

And to the degree that you live by, subculture set of laws, they'll accept you. And to the degree you don't live by those set of laws or fail at them, they'll reject you. Every subculture on the earth that's not built on the grace of God through Jesus Christ and what he's done for us lives by some kind of law. And our value and our rejection is based on that. The subculture of athletics has its own laws that dictate who's valuable in that world and who's not. Academia has its own set of laws. And if you play by the rules right, you're valuable. If you don't, you're not. The artistic community has its own laws. The LGBTQIA plus community has its own laws. Social influencers have their own laws. Party culture has its laws. Wealthy communities have their laws. Poverty communities have their laws. All kinds of different racial groups have laws and how well you obey them determines whether you're a good white person or a good black person or a good Latino person or a good Native American or not. We all have our rules that dictate whether we're good at something, bad at something, acceptable, unacceptable. Whoever lives by them is the most valuable and whoever doesn't live up to them is out. Even religious groups, of course,

make up their own laws that they're not based on the Bible to live by and that determines who's in and who's out. And unfortunately, even those who believe in the scriptures, in the God of the Bible, in this book, in Jesus Christ, the author of grace, it calls him, even we can turn following Jesus back into a system of laws, can't we? They treat people in the church based on the idea of law instead of grace, that accept and reject people based on how well we think they're living up to God's commands or how much we don't think they're living up to those. Which is why we say here at Fellowship, our mission as a church is not just to make disciples, but what do we say? We say it's to make disciples who live by God's grace and for his glory at home and across the world. Because the fundamental idea that God's introduced into the world to transform it, to change it from the inside out is the idea of grace. That's the one thing that the gospel changes about everything else in the world. Grace is the revolutionary idea. Grace changes everything, Fellowship. Which is why we wanna spend some time preaching through this letter

that God wrote through the apostle Paul to the church at Galatia. If you wanna turn to Galatians with me this morning in your New Testament. Because in this letter, Paul wrote to the Galatians. He wrote all about the difference between living by grace and living by the law. Now, to be fair to the scriptures, that's really what every book of the Bible is about. From Genesis to Revelation. So really the whole scripture is about that. But Galatians gets at it in a unique way. Because Paul's writing to a church who, although they'd received the good news of Jesus in joy, placed their faith in him and believed that he did what Paul taught them he had done on the cross for them to forgive their sins. After he left, there were a group of teachers that came behind him. Jews who came along and said, that's great that Jesus came and died on the cross to forgive your sins. But if you really wanna please God, if you really wanna be on his good side, if you really wanna work your way up through the spiritual ranks and be the apple of his eye, if you really want all the blessings that he promises in the scriptures, it's up to you to obey the Mosaic law. To do everything he asked you to do.

And even though your relationship with him may have begun by grace, how it's gonna continue, how it's gonna be determined, your experience of it is gonna be based on your level of obedience to him in your relationship with him. If you wanna stay in that relationship with him, you're gonna have to earn it. If you're gonna be blessed by him, you're gonna have to earn it. Grace may have gotten you in the door, but the law is what keeps you in the door. These teachers known as Judaizers, or Paul will call them the circumcision party in Galatians, because they were coming saying, the first thing I do is be circumcised into the Jewish community of faith if you really want God to consider you a full follower of his, right? There's these things you gotta do, these boxes you gotta check. Which is why it's a great letter for us to preach and to talk about in this phrase in our mission about living by God's grace. Because even as I described what's going on in Galatia 2000 years ago, if a lot of us are being honest in here, in 2025, a lot of us are sitting here going, well, yeah, isn't that kind of how the Christian life works? I mean, isn't that what I was maybe taught in church,

depending on what church I grew up in, or at least felt from the people in my church, depending on what church I've been a part of, that you're saved by grace. Sure, Jesus came and died on the cross to forgive me of my sins, but now that I know that, now that I've received that, man, moving forward, his love for us. me, his acceptance of me, whether I'm still in his good graces or not, that's all based on how I act moving forward because I know better now. Isn't that what the Bible teaches? No, we get just as looped in and locked into this idea of grace saving, but law sanctifying us. And the scripture says, no, it's grace that saves, it's grace that sanctifies, it's grace that's gonna glorify, it's grace that's gonna change you, it's all about grace. And Paul calls that out in the first few verses of Galatians chapter one, verse one through nine, look at it with me. He says this, Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. We'll come back to that at the end. And all the brothers who are with me, he says, to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,

who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever, amen. He says, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, he says, there's only one true gospel, but what he's talking about is people who would trouble you, he says, and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we've said before, so now I say it again, if anyone's preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. The very words of God. And we're gonna talk about all kinds of different aspects of grace and what it does in our life and how it changes and transforms us over 15 weeks we'll be in this book. So I'm not gonna try to say everything there is to say about grace here this morning. If you walk out of here with some questions and saying, okay, Ben, I hear that part, but what about this? Just hang in there, we got 15 weeks in it. We're gonna be talking about grace for a while.

I'm excited about that. But right out of the gate in this letter, we do see God answer three pretty important questions for us as we enter into this conversation about grace in these first nine verses. And the first question that he answers here is simply, what is grace? Paul gives us a great definition of what we're talking about. I mean, after all, the fundamental idea that we're gonna talk about is that grace is what changes everything and we need to know what we're talking about. And verses three through five, he lays it out for us with three very specific phrases. The first phrase that he points out there, he says, what grace means, a part of the definition of grace is that you're at peace with God. We're at peace with God for those who are in Christ Jesus. Look at verse three again with me. He says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to you and peace from God. Paul's constantly tying these two words together in every letter that he writes to every church that he writes it to, he begins it with grace to you and peace from God, and then he ends every letter with grace be with you. It's bookended in grace. Go and look at all of them. Ephesians chapter one, verse two, he says,

grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Philippians one, two, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Colossians one, two, grace to you and peace from God our Father. First Thessalonians, grace to you and peace. Second Thessalonians, grace to you and peace. First Timothy, he amps it up a notch, grace, mercy, and peace, right? He puts those mercy in there. Second Timothy, grace, mercy, and peace. Titus, grace, and peace. Philemon, grace, and peace. And I'm not summarizing those phrases. That's how they're there in those verses that they kick off to every letter. It's always grace and peace. Why is that? Why does Paul link those two things together? He links those two things together because one of the fundamental ideas that transforms the world and that transforms us when we come to truly believe it, placing our faith in Jesus Christ, is that God is at peace with us. God is at peace with us. He's not angry with us. He's at peace with us. He's not disappointed in us.

He's at peace with us. No matter what you're walking through right now in your life, guess what? It's not his punishment of you in Christ. It's hard for us to believe sometimes. We feel the negative things going on in our life and the first question we ask is, why is this happening to me? And why do I not see it happening to everyone? God must be mad at me. What did I do to deserve this? And we assume he's punishing us for something or everything will be going great. right, in our life, and the gospel comes and says, no, he actually loves you, he loves you perfectly. That's what Jesus Christ done the cross for you. He's at peace with you, that's not what's going on in this moment. It's actually part of this perfect love for you that he's having you walk through what you're walking through to conform you to the image of Christ, to help you let go of the things you're tempted to cling to that are gonna be bad for you. You know, we don't have to worry about what happens to us when we die, which is one of the biggest existential questions the minute you're born on the earth is what happens when I breathe my last. He says, what happens to you in Christ

is you're at peace with God, and you're gonna live with him forever in a relationship that is at peace with God. No, we can be at peace because grace tells us that no matter what's happening, it's not because God's mad at us. No matter how bad it gets, the worst thing that can happen is we go to be with him for eternity in a relationship that is at peace with us. Grace means we're at peace with God. It's a fundamental reality that's meant to deal with most of the fears in our life, if we're being honest. But the good news just keeps getting better about what grace is, because grace doesn't just mean we're at peace with God. He also gives us the reason that we're at peace with God, and that's very critical after verse three. At the first half of verse four, speaking of Jesus Christ, he says, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil age. He says, you're at peace with God. That's part of the gospel, but guess why you're at peace with God? It isn't because of something good that you've done. It isn't because of something that you've earned from him. It's because Jesus gave himself for our sins on the cross. That's the sole reason we're at peace with God.

Because of what Jesus did on the cross to pay for anything that would keep us from being at peace with God. Anything that you would think, well, but how can God love me because of this thing I've done? That's why Jesus went to the cross. Well, but how can God love me because of this other thing that I've said or the way I treat this person or this thing that I did to him? That's why Jesus hung on the cross. It's meant to give us confidence and hope. And we're meant to look at the cross and say, okay, I know I've disappointed him, but he loves me and he loves me so much he sent Jesus to pay for that so that that's not between us anymore. Not only that, but I'm allowed to forgive myself. I'm allowed to be at peace with myself because of things I would beat myself up for and feel shame over and guilt over and say, but God, I don't deserve it. He can say, I know that's why Jesus came and hung on the cross. So you can know I've forgiven you. So you can know you can forgive yourself. And guess what? What Jesus did on the cross is enough to pay for anything anyone else has done to you

so that we can forgive those around us whether they're asking for it or not because Jesus has paid for everything that should keep us from being at peace with God, at peace with ourself, at peace with our neighbor and those around us. And here's the beauty and the joy of grace, this otherworldly crazy thought and idea because I didn't do anything to earn it. It's all because of what Jesus did to earn it for me. I can't do anything to unearn it. It's secure. It's finished, Jesus, down on the cross. You don't have to worry about whether it can be taken away from you once you receive it in grace. We're completely off the spiritual treadmill in our relationship with God when it comes to his love for us, when it comes to his acceptance of us, when it comes to his desire to be in a relationship with us. Now, I know when I say that, you're like, so Ben, doesn't obedience mean anything at all? It does, if you're asking that question, that means you're hearing me rightly because in every letter Paul writes, he comes around and has to answer that question because what he's saying is so otherworldly to people. They're like, but wait a minute, what about obedience? And then he always gets, we're gonna get to it.

It's in here, okay? I know some of you are like having like hot flashes, right? You're like kind of cold sweats. Like, but aren't you gonna talk about obedience? Yes, obedience is important. He loves us. This is his love to us. But here's what's ironic about the way we tend to view obedience and the way that the scripture does. Oftentimes, we beat ourselves up for not obeying God and the way that we interpret in our hearts is, is man, I'm not taking his judgment serious enough, which is why I'm doing what I wanna do. I'm not taking the threat of him removing his love from me enough, which is why I'm tempted to kind of not obey him. We tend to think we're not taking his judgment seriously enough. What the scripture is trying to scream at us about grace is if we're not obeying God and walking in his word and following him, it's because we're not taking his love for us good enough. We're not taking his unconditional love serious enough. Because if we believe that he loved us as much as he did, if we believe the cross was as incredible as it was, I want you to say, man, if he loves me that much, then all this must be love. All this must be for my good. All this must be the best possible thing

I can experience in this life. I would ever want to do anything different. Look at how much he loves me. That's how grace transforms our hearts. That's how grace changes everything in our relationship with God. And why did God decide to be at peace with me? Why did Jesus decide to take on everything I needed to be at peace with him? Well, that's the rest of verses four and five. It says, look at it with me, according to the will of our God and father, to whom be the glory forever and ever, amen. Notice what it doesn't say there about why we're at peace with God and why he poured his grace on us. It doesn't say because some of them were really impressive. Some of them were so great, man. I just, they were too good to let suffer. So man, I, you know, I kind of looked out on the earth and I picked the best ones that were trying the hardest. And that's why I sent Jesus to die for at least their sins. That's not what it says. It says according to the will of our God and father. The reason why he sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, to pay for everything that would keep us separated from him so he could be at peace with us, we could be at peace with ourselves, we could be at peace with one another,

the whole reason he did it was according to his will, simply because God willed it out of love for us. He looked down on us out of love. And he said, I'm gonna do that because I love them, not because they're loving me the way that I wish they would. Scripture says in 1 John 4, God is love. He's the very essence of love. That means he can't not love, because he loves to love us. That's what the Bible says. We didn't earn it, we don't deserve it, but that's okay. He doesn't love us because we earned it or because we deserve it. He created us because he loves to love people. He's at peace with us by his own grace towards us because he loves to love people. That's the revolutionary fundamental idea that changes everything when you actually believe it and embrace it, that's grace. Our church has a different way of summing it up. It's the same definition, just said with a few different words. We talk about grace around here as the sovereign love of God in the redeeming actions of Jesus. Grace is the sovereign love of God for you in the redeeming actions of Jesus. It's the same thing we just walked through, it's just said a little bit differently. What we're saying is grace is God using all of his sovereign power on the earth.

He can do whatever he wants. And what grace says is he's using all of that sovereign power to love us perfectly all the time because of what Jesus already paid for on the cross. That's grace, that's grace. His actions alone, we can trust it, we can believe in it. That's the hard part, right? That's why the disciples say, Lord, we believe, but help our unbelief. That's why I can say I place my faith in the grace of God through Jesus Christ on the cross, but I still struggle to believe it every day. I mean, really believe it. Really believe he loves me that much and he cares for me that much and that I don't have to keep striving and trying to earn his love and his affection that much. That's what I struggle with the most that causes me to either follow him, not follow him. Man, treat people in a loving way, treat people in a selfish way. It's me struggling to believe in his love for me, struggling to trust that he is loving me all the time perfectly, which begs the question, so why do we keep talking about grace all the time around here? I mean, after all, we just preached through the book of Romans, which was all about law versus grace. Year before that, we preached to the book of Hebrews,

which is all about law versus grace. We've looked at the idea of law versus grace in Genesis and in Jonah, in the Psalms, in the Gospels. We talk about a lot around here as a church family again and again. We always say we don't graduate from the gospel, right? The gospel isn't something that saves you and then you move on to the deeper spiritual things, but we say you gotta keep going down deeper and deeper into it to keep growing in your walk with Christ. You gotta keep mining that field of grace over and over again to keep growing in what it means to follow him. Why do we talk about it that way? We talk about that way because when the Bible says that we're born with a sin nature that is bent on walking away from God, that's bent on disobeying God, that's bent on falling away from him. On the one hand, it does mean we struggled to obey a lot of the commands in here, that's true, but those are just symptomatic of the real issue. And the real issue that we're gonna talk about in the book of Galatians is that our hearts are bent towards law-like living. That's what it is. And we're on a world with 8 1⁄2 billion other people whose hearts are bent towards law-like living. That's how the world is in the turmoil that it's in. So at every turn in our lives,

we're constantly tempted to revert back to trying to earn love from God, which causes all kinds of problems, or trying to earn love from each other, which causes all kinds of problems. Or we can... that God wants us to earn love from him, even though that's not what he's asking us to do. Obedience is not about earning his love for us, but we think it is. And so we get frustrated at that, we get mad at that. We say that's not fair, even though he's not asking us to do it. And then we reject this false God of law. And we say, you know what? There is no God, I'm gonna do what I want. All because we're believing in a law-like system that he's not asking us to believe in. Because we believe no one's ever gonna love us. God's never gonna love us. We'll never be good enough. So then we're tempted to start to take love from one another in unhealthy ways, demand love from each other in unhealthy ways. We're tempted to steal security, steal wealth, steal the things that we need, because we're scared and we're fearful that we're never gonna have a God, sovereign God taking care of us out of love. We oppress each other out of that fear,

because we're convinced the world's all about earning and taking. And if we happen to be talented enough, or beautiful enough, or wealthy enough to earn that love from others, and whatever subculture we're in, then we keep believing the lie that the law works. But if we aren't those things, then we get frustrated and we decide the world's unfair and God's unfair and we hurt each other over and over again, trying to get what we feel like we deserve, but we can't earn on our own, because we don't have the gifts it takes to earn those things. We weren't lucky enough in this life. And we're not at peace with God, and we're not at peace with ourselves, and we're not at peace with anybody else. Now, we keep talking about grace over and over and over, because we're all tempted, like the Galatians were, to do what Paul says in verse six, right? Look back again at what he says right out of the gate. I mean, he gives like three verses of encouragement, and he's right into it, isn't he? I'm astonished that you were so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ, and are turning to a different gospel. He says, I'm shocked how fast that happened. You believed in the grace of Jesus Christ

when I came and told to you, you were overwhelmed by it, you praised me for it, you couldn't believe how much God loved you in the midst of all that, and how quickly you're right back to law-like living, and to treating each other in that way. Now, we keep talking about this, because we're all tempted to desert grace, like the Galatians were, and turn back to that view of the world. We're constantly tempted to feel like we need to earn God's love in our guilt and shame. We're constantly tempted to wanna earn God's love for us in our pride. Listen, there's a reason why we're tempted to revert back to it. This is part of where our dark hearts go, right? One of the reasons is because we feel too much guilt and shame over the things that we've done, and we don't think God could ever accept us for it. And so we wanna enter back into a law-like relationship to prove to him, to earn it back from him, because we just keep beating ourselves up. We can't trust that Christ paid for it. We don't believe that was enough to pay for what I've done, so we keep trying to add to it by our own good behavior to prove to God that we're really sorry. Or we constantly are tempted to wanna earn God's love in our pride. Some of us, we feel like, man, I'm kind of bent to follow this stuff.

Like, this is what I enjoy doing, and I kind of do it better than a lot of people around me, so I kind of like the idea of having to earn God's love. Because if I look around, I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job of it, and God's happier with me than others, and I like that way of working in my relationship with God. Some of it's out of our pride. We like to revert back to that. We don't like how grace levels the playing field and tells us we're all truly equal at the foot of the cross. For some of us, that bothers us. Or, for a lot of us, quite honestly, it's because we're scared to death of what's gonna happen to us in this life or to the people that we love. And we wanna try and control that in some way, shape, or form, our fear and our desire for control pushes us back into a law-like relationship with God because we wanna convince ourself that if I do my part, he's gonna have to do his part. And if I can just kind of corral him like a genie in a bottle with my obedience, then he'll have to come through and do the things that he said he was gonna do for me. Sometimes it's out of control. We revert back to a law-like relationship with God because just trusting him that his grace, his love for me is gonna provide a better life for me

than I would provide for myself if I could control him, that's hard to believe. That's hard to trust. We feel our life go in a certain way and certain things happening. We're like, well, that's not the box I would put my life in. That's not the picture I had of my life so it doesn't feel like God's loving me so maybe that grace thing isn't real. Maybe it's not working. Maybe I need to get back and say, God, I'm doing this and this and this for you so I need you to do this and this and this for me. Whatever journey you have me on, I don't really love right now. It doesn't feel like love. We doubt his grace, we doubt his love. We doubt the journey he has us on and so we wanna control it again. There's all kinds of reasons why we fall back into a law-like relationship with God where we prefer law over grace in our hearts. The reason we keep talking about it around here as a church family and we'll continue to is because if we're being honest, grace is actually strange to us. Oh, grace, I love grace. I love being kind to people, I love being nice. We interpret grace as graciousness.

I like being gracious to people, so I love grace. Actual grace, what the Bible means by it, it's strange for our hearts. It's hard to trust and it's hard to believe in. We actually kick against it at every turn because it demands that we believe that God loves us and we gotta trust him, that what we're walking through is his love for us, that is hard. So we either think it's too good to be true and we're tempted to fall away from it or we don't think it works and we're tempted to fall away from it. We rarely experience it in our relationships with each other as fallen human beings, so we don't think that it's real. It's just too amazing to believe. And yet Paul says here to this church and to us in verse eight, look again, he says, but even if we are an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be a curse. Paul says, listen, I don't care who comes to you and preaches anything different than the grace of God through Jesus Christ to you. I don't care how glorious or impressive or incredible the messenger is. He says, even if I change my mind later and come to you and tell you, hey, I was kind of out there, listen, don't believe in grace.

It really is about earning God's love. He says, don't buy it. He says, even if an angel comes to you, someone from another dimension in all of its glory, I mean, when angels show up in the Bible, people fall down like dead men and women because they're scared to death of how glorious this being is. He says, the power of the gospel is not in the messenger, it's in the message and the power of it is grace. That's the difference. That's the difference between everything it's trying to communicate and what we're tempted to revert back to. Grace is the good news and nothing else. That God so loved the world, he gave us only begotten son. He loved us, so he gave his son to pay for everything that would separate us from him to make peace. That's grace, he says. That's the gospel. It's not the messenger that has the power to change the world, it's the message. Truly believing that God doesn't ask us to earn his love and acceptance, guess what? That's what lets us stop asking our spouse to earn our love and acceptance. You wanna transform your marriage? It's not through law. It's not through saying I'm gonna obey better.

It's through grace. It's through believing you've been loved that way and you're gonna pour that love out on your spouse and work through things in that way. That's what transforms your marriage. Jesus on the cross saying, father, forgive them for they know not what they do. That's what transforms the way you parent your kids. That's what transforms the way you treat your neighbor. That's what transforms the way that you walk through this life. That's why we say grace changes everything. Believing that Jesus earned eternal life through living a perfect life, but then instead of keeping it for himself, he gave it away to us on the cross as a gift we didn't deserve. That's what transforms you from being a natural hoarder to being a generous giver. Believing that's been done for you is what empowers you through the spirit to do it for those around you. It's what changes your heart. Trusting that God is sovereignly in control of the world and loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us is what allows us to disagree with others politically, but not get so scared they're gonna ruin our lives that we hate them and try to get rid of them and eradicate them in violent, terrible ways. What changes the world is believing God loves me and he's in control.

I can disagree with you, but I don't have to get rid of you. I don't have to hate you because God loves me despite my stuff. God loves you despite your stuff and he's in control and he's loving me through whatever's gonna play out on the earth today, he is loving me. I don't have to be afraid of that. Perfect love casts out fear. It casts out fear. It truly transforms the world around us. That's why we talk about grace so much. That's why we're gonna continue to talk about grace so much. And guess what? That's why we're constantly tempted to desert grace like Paul put it to the Galatians. It's the fundamental idea that truly changes everything in our lives for the better, even though we struggle to believe it because it just sounds too good to be true. Which leads me to the last question that Paul answers here in Galatians, one that's so important to this conversation. Because I know it's hard to believe what we're talking about. That there's a God who created all of this for his glory and for our good. There's a God who's sovereign over it all and powerful enough to do whatever he wants to us and to it. And even when we walk away from his unconditional love

for us over and over again, that that God looks at Jesus on the cross and says, I still love you. I still forgive you. I've paid for whatever you're worried about in my relationship with you. Just trust me and walk with me. And I'll show you how everything else I've told you is also my love for you and encourage you in walking in that. And when you fail, I still love you. And when you ask for forgiveness, I'll always give it to you. And every day you wake up, he says, my mercies are new. Every morning for you, every morning you wake up on the right side of the bed with God. I'm always excited to see you every day. Even if you did something I didn't love last night, I'm still excited to be in a relationship with you today. That kind of love begs the question, how do we know it's true? How can you possibly know that is true? It seems way too good to be true, which is why I said when I read verse one, we're gonna come back to that, look back at it with me. He says, Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, look at it, who raised him from the dead. That's why we know it's true, fellowship, because the tomb is empty.

We know it's true because the resurrection is real. We know grace is true because if Jesus was a fallen sinful human being who had to die for his own sins, just like us, he would still be dead. He would still be in the ground. Just like every other false messianic figure who's ever claimed to be God and walked the earth. But the difference between Jesus and all of those false messianic figures is they had to die and stay in their graves to pay for their own sins. Jesus paid for yours and mine because he was truly innocent, which is why the grave could not hold him. It's why death could not contain him. And because his death for us is what gives us the grace we need to be forgiven by God, to forgive ourselves and to forgive others, because that's the basis by which God does what he does, we can be absolutely sure that it's true because of the empty tomb. Grace changes everything. And the resurrection is the proof that it's real. And listen, I don't know who you are today or where you're coming from. Maybe you'd say, yeah, Ben, I believe all that and have for a long time, praise God for that. Maybe you're in the camp like me where I'm like, I believe it, but God help my unbelief

because I still struggle to really embrace the ultimate effect of it in my life every single day. Or maybe you're someone who's like, man, I was raised around Jesus and I was raised around the Bible and I was raised around the cross, I was raised or all that, but I didn't ever hear that version of it. But man, I wanna believe in that version of it. Or maybe you're someone who's walking in here today and you're like, I really haven't ever bought into any of this, I'm just checking it out and trying to see who God is and if he's real or not. But man, I'd love to talk to someone about that. Please come and talk to us. Don't leave today, it just takes a simple conversation with God to say, I trust in you, I believe in you, I believe what Jesus Christ has done for me, I wanna walk with you. You can begin that kind of grace-based relationship that will transform your life today. And the connections there in the plaza afterwards, if you're here on our West Little Rock campus, I would love to talk to you about that. Man, please, if you're on another campus, campus pastors, worship leaders, there's elders there, connections, I would love to talk to you about that. You can begin that kind of relationship with God today. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your goodness to us. Jesus, we thank you for the revolutionary,

transforming idea that grace is. Help us to understand it, help us to wrap our minds around it, help us to really play out in our day-to-day lives the effects of it. It's meant to transform us. Jesus, let it transform us. Show us how it can transform our relationship. Show us how it can transform the way we think about ourselves. Show us how it can transform the way we engage the world. God, we wanna begin to see your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Lord, show us how trusting in your grace to us can show the world what that's like and begin to help that happen, to permeate all the different relationships we have, the places that we work, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we go to with the grace of God. But we beg you, we know it's strange, we know it's foreign, we know it's hard to embrace and to live by, so we need you, your power in us, the Holy Spirit in us. You tell us you'll never leave us or forsake us, but you'll be with us always as we try to show the world what grace is about. God, we beg you, you've gotta do that in us. We can't do it on our own. We ask these things in the precious name of Jesus. We'll see you in the next one. Thanks again for listening to the word of God.

We are blessed to reach you throughout the week through whatever platform you're listening on. If you're needing prayer or you want to talk to someone about your walk with Jesus, reach out to us at fellowshipar.com contact. Have a great week.