Grace for Your Day September 6

September 7th, 2021

We have recently been blessed as a church to hear some great messages on the subject of the Gospel. To begin with, one of our elders, Kevin Laser, preached on First Corinthians 2:1-2 which says:

And when I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come as someone superior . . . For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

Kevin used that passage to show us that, when you share the Gospel with someone, you do not need to be eloquent. You just need to teach the Bible and trust that God will use it for His purposes. Afterwards, another elder, Quentin Smith, preached on the well-known text of John 3:16 which says:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.

As he taught on that, Quentin showed us that, while there are a lot of good causes in the world, nothing compares with this one. You need to believe in Jesus. You need to put your life in His hands because it is the only thing that will give you eternal life.

However, as I was reflecting on all of this, it occurred to me that there is one more passage that we need to study in order to complete this discussion. It is Luke 9:23-24 where Jesus says this:

And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, this is the one who will save it.”

Here Jesus tells us that, if you want to follow Him, you must do three things:

Deny yourself
Take up your cross
Follow Him

If you notice, Jesus puts this in the strongest terms imaginable. He minces no words because he says that, if you follow Him, you will save your life or go to Heaven. If you do not, you will lose your life or go to Hell because salvation is free but it is not cheap. It has no cost in monetary terms but it will cost you everything you have because you must give Jesus your very heart. He has to be Lord of your life or He will not save you at all which is what we are going to talk about this Sunday morning at Grace Fellowship Church.

This week we are going to talk about the high cost of following Jesus. The sermon will be available at our 8:30 and 10:15 services. It will also be available Sunday morning on our You Tube Channel and website for all who cannot be with us in person. The temptation to water down this passage is everywhere in our world today. So many people want to pretend that they can follow Jesus by just praying a prayer or walking an aisle but the Lord never says that. He says that salvation requires so much more from us and please join us as we study that together. It will be a convicting time. - Jeremy Cagle

Posted in Grace For Your Day