Transcript
I want to read you a passage of scripture that helps me when I think of ministering the gospel to my neighbors, being a presence of the gospel right here where God has placed me. This is 1 Timothy 1.
Christ Came to Save Sinners, of Whom I Am the Foremost
15The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 16But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life.
You know, I'm deeply persuaded that one of the reasons we don't do well around our unbelieving neighbors, that we aren't the kind of presence of the gospel that we should be is not because we forget who they are and we forget their need. It's because we forget who we are.
I like to say this. It's very, very important if you're ever going to meet those people where they are and incarnate the transforming love of the Lord Jesus Christ, you have to confess that you're more like your neighbors than unlike them because the minute you begin to think that somehow, you are fundamentally unlike them, you begin to have a more self-righteous, condemning negative sort of cast in the nature of your relationship to them.
I love this passage. This is the apostle Paul saying Jesus Christ came to save sinners. It doesn't say next, "And thankfully, I'm not one of those." What he says is, "I must be the biggest and baddest of them all." Notice he's talking in the present tense. He doesn't say, "I was." He says, "I must be."
Why God Saved Paul
And then, he says something that I just love. He says, "I get why God saved me because He's going to use me to demonstrate how patient He actually is." Paul's saying, "I'm so messed up that it's going to take a long-term commitment by God to get me where I need to be."
Listen, if you move out to your neighbors with that humble confession of what a mess you are, how even today, you get it wrong, that you think things and say things and do things that you shouldn't do and that your only hope is a dramatically merciful and a dramatically patient God, you then are ready to be patient with your neighbors, to be gracious with them, to find joy in loving them.
It just means this -- that no one gives grace better than a person who's deeply persuaded that he needs it himself. And if you begin to think of yourself as a grace graduate, you will not do well with your broken neighbors. Humility is what fuels gospel ministry.
