Erica, can you please read our text this morning.

³⁷ Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” ³⁸ And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” ⁴⁰ And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” ⁴¹ So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:37-41 ESV)

Amen.

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for all of our mothers. Yes, the women who birthed us, raised us, loved us, taught us, prayed for us, and gave their lives for our sake. I ask that you bless mothers of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types: spiritual, birth, adoptive, stepmom, foster mom, 2^nd mom, work mom, grandmom, soon to be mom, the grieving mom. Lord, we know you cherish all women and radically change their lives through their children, no matter how the children come.

On the cross as you hung, you gave your earthly mom, a son, in John, showing us that no mom is forgotten in grief and loss. I ask for that type of comfort for those moms here grieving. Only you can comfort that type of grief, let your people rally around those women passionately.

On the flip side, some of us on this day have immense sadness because the loss of moms, please bring those people joyful memories they can reflect on, knowing that their moms are only lost here on this reality, but are with you in glorious eternity. I ask that the power of your love come over all of us.

Today, let your mercy become known to each individual, your forgiveness reigning supremely in our hearts, and that we are filled with awe. We want to seek your glory and your presence. You deserve more than we can ever give or do. Thank you for receiving us with open arms, calling us son and daughter. Through you, we have meaning and value that the world cannot give. Continue to overflow our lives with your everlasting goodness. Open our eyes to your scripture and your purposes today. In Jesus name. Amen.

For those of you who missed last week or forgot it, go on Youtube and listen to Pastor Ken’s message from last Sunday. I going to give you the spoiler filled recap from the sermon last week. The Holy Spirit came down and filled the disciples with power and that power manifested itself in the disciples in the form of speaking various languages testifying about the power of God to a diverse group of people that were nearby.

Some of those people hearing it said, “these guys are drunk!”

That’s when Peter says to the crowd saying, “come on, that’s crazy, we’re not drunk, it’s only 9am!” At that point, Peter preaches to the crowd. Which just proves that every situation is a good situation to preach the good news of Jesus. And that’s the aspect of our culture we’re talking about: our family’s candor. The scripture we read is the aftermath of Peter’s candor with the crowd accusing the disciples of being drunk.

·        If you want to define candor, candor is conversational openness, honesty, and sincerity.

·        Conversational candor isn’t mean, harsh, combative, or manipulative.

·        In fact, it’s a way of communicating that doesn’t shy away from having hard conversations in a loving way that seeks the best in people.

Now I know you’re thinking, I thought we were in a series about family culture. Well, communication is cultural because from it, people catch what you are intentionally or unintentionally expressing to them. A few months ago, Kate was doing what little kids do and griping about something that didn’t go her way. Now, I’d like to think I’m pretty patient. But she just kept going at it and it annoyed me so much that I snapped and said, “stop whining.” I’ve never explained what whining was to her, but she knew, because she stopped whining. Later that week, she was at a friend’s house and I don’t know what happened, but she yells at her friend, “stop whining!” and I’m told after a little more whimpering, he stopped whining. Now, a good parent may have spared the child’s feelings and done some positive reinforcement, but I did something more effective! I reshaped the future by communicating that the world doesn’t need another whiner. And that effect was multiplied. Wow, isn’t that horrible advice. But that’s a true story.

I can’t be liable for any bad parenting advice you take home from here, so you should ask Pastor Ken or one of our elders and deacons or deaconesses for better advice. I can only share my failures so you don’t make the same mistakes.

The way you communicate reflects the culture you embody. So, how do you communicate?

Think about the last meaningful conversation you had with somebody face to face that wasn’t about the logistics of dinner. If you haven’t thought about it or have no categories for it, I’ll give you some, these are not my categories, this is from people smarter than me. Social scientists say there’s really four categories that define communication culture within groups of individuals: [put up graphic]

·        Protective cultures– doesn’t have a lot of open conversations to discuss perspectives and feelings, and ideas. People embodying this culture don’t bring up anything that may cause friction or conflict. This is the type of conversation you’re having on a first date or with people you want to like you. This type of communication protects people’s belief systems. This is the culture of communication you have with your grandparents or your parents, if they’re old school. This is a lot of traditional patriarchal families, a lot of immigrant cultures.

·        Consensual cultures – have lots of open conversations to discuss perspectives and feelings, and ideas. There is collaboration to get to a consensus of shared beliefs. People in this type of conversation know that conflict will not break the relationship, but there is also humility on each side to work out the conflict to get to a place of mutuality to agree on and build upon.  

·        Pluralistic cultures – also have lots openness to discuss different perspectives, feelings, and ideas, but the difference between this and consensual cultures is that there is fair amount of conflict avoidance so your conversations agree to disagree so you never get to a place of agreeing on anything to build upon. This is what we catch in post-modern western society. Everybody does their own thing. There is no right, there is no wrong, there is nothing shared except that we need to avoid confrontation or else be cancelled by people who don’t share my beliefs for having different views that nobody agrees to sharing anyway.

·        Laizze-faire cultures – No open conversation, no shared beliefs. This is what happens when you get tired of the pluralist culture – you stay in your garage or your side of the fence and pretend you don’t see other people. You just don’t care. This is worst than conflict avoidant, it’s uncaring and unloving. If you’re feeling lonely and isolated, it’s because this is what you are communicating or being communicated.

The four cultures of communication. Let me rephrase my original question now: which one of these communication cultures are we called to embody as part of the family of God?

The answer is consensual: because only in a consensual communication culture can we have communication that is open, honest, sincere and building toward shared beliefs. If that is the communication culture we are supposed to embody, then leave today with this thought:

Big Idea: Gospel Confrontation Leads to Faith

That’s me saying our communication must be open, honest, straightforward and gospel filled. That’s exactly what Peter did here in this sermon. He said, “people, we’re not drunk, it’s 9am! But since we’re talking, let me openly share with you the hope we have in Jesus Christ.”

Here’s where I want to be very careful because some of you hear what I’m saying as your need to confront people with your opinions and thoughts about how the gospel should color society. That’s not what gospel confrontation is. That type of culture of communicating can be described as one sinful, broken, overly sensitive person fighting with other sinful, broken people over opinions and viewpoints that change like the seasons.

Gospel confrontation is communicating how and why in every situation and circumstance you chose to live surrendered and transformed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel isn’t just information. When we are confronted with the gospel it’s going to lead to faith or more faith that God loves us. The gospel communicates to us that his love for us is greater and deeper than our beliefs, viewpoints, thoughts, and perspectives of God. That even though we were his enemies, he pursued us in love by sending his one and only son, Jesus, into this world to die for us, that if we believe in him, we could be adopted into God’s family for eternity. Only when we have a culture of candor with the gospel permeating our communication can we be transformed into the likeness of God here and now until we get to eternity.

My dad was a pastor and like most pastors, every situation was the right situation to talk about the impact of the gospel in my life.

·        D in math, no problem, here’s a math lesson Jonathan, you solve for D by taking Jesus’s death is for you.

·        Got into a fight, no problem, there’s forgiveness through the blood of Jesus.

·        Got rejected from something, Jesus, your lord and savior, was rejected by the people he came to save

·        You’re hungry, Jesus fasted 40 days and 40 nights, being tempted by the devil, and was found blameless

·        So on and so forth

The candor by which my dad talked about the gospel into every situation were the shared beliefs held within the gospel that continues to transform my life. I’ve shared with you that I didn’t surrender my life to the gospel until my senior year of high school when a friend of mine, confronted me with the gospel. We were ditching school when he shared how the gospel of Jesus confronted him and how he gave his life to faith in Jesus.

Who is confronting you with the gospel and who are you confronting with the gospel?

·        If you can’t think of anybody,

o   go make some friends,

o   show up to Iron men tomorrow night,

o   get in a G2 group,

o   go have coffee with the person sitting next to you.

o   Invite a co-worker out to lunch,

o   What about actually talk to your kid about what he or she learned about Jesus at Promiseland today in your car ride home.

In the gospel, we believe God is great, God is good, God is gracious, and God is glorious. But the way we live doesn’t always reflect our belief that God is great, good, gracious, or glorious. That is why we need our gospel confrontation in our lives – because we are sinful, disobedient to the will of God that is great, good, gracious, and glorious. When we are confronted with the Gospel so we are spurred to have faith that God is great, good, gracious, and glorious.

In the beginning, God created the universe (God is great). Then he created human beings, man and woman and it was good (God is good). Then one day, they decided to distrust God’s word and instead they placed their trust in the words of the devil. The first man and woman ate the fruit God told them not to eat, intentionally disobeying God and rebelling against his goodness. The result of the rebellion was sin entering into this world which brought death and destruction to those subject to sin (we ruined his glory).

We are heirs of this sin. We are subject to the penalties of those sins. We are born enslaved and cursed by sin. As a result, we could not, and cannot ever become who and what were created to be in God, that’s to say, we can’t ever be the good God intended for us. It doesn’t matter how hard we tried, or how hard we’re trying, we are condemned to death.

So God did what we could not do on our own. He sent his one and only son, Jesus Christ to earth. Being born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit, he lived sinless and then offered himself up as the sacrifice required to appease the necessary requirements of justice. He paid the penalty of our sins, our disobedience, our natural inclinations to rebel against our creator, by dying on the cross so we could live as how he designed us to live, free children, allowed to pursue what we are called to be. God is gracious.

Then God resurrected Jesus from the dead because of his righteousness. We have hope for an eternity with God because of his resurrection. That is good news for you and me. God is glorious.

The gospel doesn’t only affect our eternity, it impacts every facet of our lives. It justifies us before a great, good, gracious, and glorious father, but it also sanctifies us to become like him, how he created us. If you don’t get it by now, I want to make it more plain: our culture of communication must be gospel filled because the gospel changes what you believe and what you believe affects how you live.

That’s what faith is: living out your trust in God as great, glorious, good, and gracious. We’re going to see this in play now in this passage. Verse 37.

³⁷ Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” ³⁸ And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The gospel “cuts to the heart” or convicts us of our need of God. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been following Jesus twenty years, twenty days, or twenty minutes. Believing that we need God is going to prompt us to have faith in God to meet that need. That’s why the people said, “what shall we do?” “Do,” being he key word.

So, when we are confronted with the gospel, we are convicted of our need for Jesus and that: 

Point 1. Conviction leads to repentance (vv37-39)

Repentance is an act of faith. Repentance is making a conscious decision to turn from our disobedience and distrust of God toward God by obeying and trusting him. Repentance doesn’t mean you won’t ever sin again, it means you’re posturing yourself, despite your sinfulness to look and live toward God. So we apologize for our sins, we seek forgiveness and pay restitution where due in a humility that says I trust God and obey his commands to love him and love others.  

Embodying a culture of gospel confrontation postures us to receive God’s greatness, goodness, grace, and gloriousness for us. The Holy Spirit, whom we receive as the promise for placing our trust and faith in God, always turns us back to God, our Father.

If you have been convicted by the gospel to repent of your sins and accept Jesus’ gift of salvation for you in faith, then the next act of faith you need to take is to publicly declare that you are turning to live facing God through baptism. Baptism is the washing with water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; it signifies and seals our adoption into Christ, our cleansing from sin, and our commitment to belong to the Lord and to his church.

Collin Hansen, who is a Christian journalist, writes this about baptism:

“In baptism, I hear these words of blessing. Jesus was plunged beneath the waters of judgment, so that I might drink the waters of everlasting life. Because Jesus calls me brother, I can call God my Father. Because the Spirit descended on him as a dove, I have peace with God, who once regarded me as his enemy. Once I was outside the people of God, estranged from this family due to my sin. But now I am a brother to all who have been likewise baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The church is our home, the place where, despite our disagreements and disputes, we come together to confess that we have one Lord and one faith (Eph. 4:5). To us has been given the Great Commission to follow in John’s footsteps and call others to repentance while we point them to Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). We baptize so they might always know that God loves them, that he is well pleased with them because they now belong to Christ.”

If you have turned toward God in faith, and you haven’t been baptized, then it’s time for you to get baptized. It is the perfect time. We have a baptism scheduled for Father’s Day, one month from now. After service, you can go to the prayer station, or speak to one of our ushers, to one of the pastors or staff members. Let your act of faith in baptism communicate the gospel to the world.

Here’s my second point about embodying a culture of gospel candor.

Point 2. Faith comes from hearing (vv40-41)

Here’s where I want to wrap up today. Verse 39.

“For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”  And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

Did you see this in these verses? Gospel confrontation leads to faith and the promises of faith, which is God with us in the Holy Spirit never leaving us. Look at who benefits from our faith that comes through gospel confrontation:

·        you and me, first off.

·        Then for our children, or people we regularly interact with.

·        Then it’s for people who you don’t expect but are in conversation with.

·        This is a multiplication of faith.

When we’re having these open, honest, sincere conversations about how the gospel transform us, the people around us will be convicted by the Holy Spirit and move people to a shared belief of how God is great, good, gracious, and glorious. We need to embody a culture of gospel candor in our communication, that’s the only way we can be saved from this world we live in that fails to recognize how great, good, gracious, and glorious our God is.

If you never received Jesus as your savior, take a step in faith by turning toward the God of the universe who pursues you in love in repentance. Jesus Christ wipes away the penalty of your sins and makes you righteous before our God. You can be his child, you can be part of his family.  

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, Our disobedience and distrust led us to rebel against your will for us. God, we admit our sinfulness. We believe you sent your son Jesus to pay the penalty of our sins by dying the death we should have died on the cross. Thank you for atoning us from the penalties we owed. God we confess that it is in you that we have hope. Hope to live the life of purpose you created us for. To live in the eternity you prepared for us with you in your kingdom. We need you to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We ask that you do it and let us believe you have done it.

I pray also for those of us who have to take another step in faith. For some that means repenting and seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with the people we sinned against, but for others it means publicly declaring in baptism our allegiance and adoption into the family of God. Yet again, for others, it means that we would model your son in laying ourselves down in service to your people. Lord, confront us with your gospel, so that we can be sanctified and transformed in your likeness every single day we are here. Let us be faithful in allowing the gospel to permeate our culture of communication. Help us let the world know we are your children. Empower us with your spirit to live this way. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.