Grace Church Indiana Sermons Grace Church

With God’s provocative call to the husbands in our minds, we now consider what the Spirit may want the wives within our spiritual family to hear. To that end, we turn to Colossians 3, in which the Apostle Paul speaks directly to the families of the church in Colossae. Yet again, Paul is speaking into a highly patriarchal culture, but his encouragement goes far beyond the customs of the day: inviting followers of Jesus to “clothe themselves” with the characteristics of Christ. As we reflect on our own culture, which so often infantilizes, demeans, and enables unresourceful husbands, the wives of Grace must consider what it would mean for them to be champions of mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience in their marriages. Perhaps through this posture of self-giving love they can demonstrate to the world that there is, even in marriage, another way to live.

Continuing with the theme of generational respect (or lack thereof), we turn to the children of Grace Church. Raised in a culture that idolizes youth and disrespects the elderly, “kids these days” – even well-meaning Christ-following ones – have a lot of bad habits and worldviews to unlearn. If the younger generations of Grace want to experience the best that life has to offer, they must learn how to accept wisdom from those who have come before, as Proverbs 4 teaches so well. If the young people of Grace can learn how to humble themselves and learn from their elders who have walked with Christ for many years, they may find new direction and hope in this confusing and anxious time.

Every generation in human history has had its own version of elders bemoaning “kids these days” and discounting their passion and new ideas as nothing more than youthful exuberance. Never before, however, has such a deep and profound level of disrespect for older generations become so accepted among the young. Into this context we seek the wisdom of God about how the older generations of Grace can become “worthy of respect,” as Paul exhorts Titus to teach, even when elders no longer have the implicit respect of the culture at large. Perhaps, through the humility and self-giving love of Grace’s elders, we can demonstrate even in our modern world that there is another way for different generations to live together.

It is a very difficult time to be a parent. From the deeply powerful technologies monopolizing our kids’ attention to the vile and horrific content they are being exposed to at earlier and earlier ages to the growing isolation brought on by the breakdown of healthy community, the role of a parent has never been harder. Sometimes it seems that no matter how hard a parent works, they are always falling short. Because of this, it is appropriate to consider what God might be saying to the parents of Grace today. Psalm 127 is a passage which famously refers to children as “gifts from the Lord” and compares them to “arrows” in a warrior’s quiver. However, it also makes a provocative claim that “unless the Lord builds a house” (by extension, a family or household), the labor of the builders is in vain. Thus, the question is raised: are we attempting to build our families under our own power? Or are our families being built by God? What might it look like to surrender control and allow God to be the driving force behind the raising of our children?

For much of human history, marriages were guided by strict cultural norms rooted in patriarchal expectations of gender roles. Common beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of women, led to deep inequalities (and often abuse) within marriages. Thus, when the Apostle Paul suggested in Ephesians 5 that husbands should practice self-sacrificing love for their wives, it was a shocking and provocative call. In this message, as we understand the true weightiness of this passage in its original context, we will discover that it continues to be a challenging invitation for husbands today, even in the vastly different context of modern marriage. It is an invitation for the husbands of Grace Church to demonstrate in their marriages a radically different way to live.

The final disciple of Jesus we will explore is one who may have never met him in person: Saul, later known as the Apostle Paul. Beginning his journey as a hater and persecutor of Christ-followers, Paul would go on to be a leading voice in the Church bringing the gospel of Jesus to the Gentiles and establishing Churches across the Roman world. What could have changed such a zealous Pharisee into an apostle zealous for the gospel? And what does the transformation of Paul’s life trajectory teach us about the grace God has for the broken?