Do you honestly believe that what your life is missing right now is more sin?
Pastor Marlon puts his main idea on the table in the first two minutes: because Jesus saves us by grace, we don't obey to earn salvation, we obey because we trust and love the Savior who saved us. He starts at the cross with the criminal hanging next to Jesus, a man who had nothing to offer and no time left to offer it, and who received the assurance of paradise anyway. Salvation rests entirely on Christ. But that doesn't make our actions irrelevant, and the question we usually ask about them is the wrong one. Instead of "is this a salvation issue," try asking whether life actually gets better or worse when we align with what God says. Genesis makes the point better than any argument. God's command in the garden was to eat freely of every tree, with one exception, and the serpent's whole strategy was to make that one exception the entire picture of God. Pastor Marlon admits he has done the same thing himself, describing his faith to curious coworkers as a list of things he doesn't do. Jesus goes after something deeper in Matthew 5, where anger and contempt land in the same category as murder, because he was never interested in list keeping. The message closes with his own story: baptized at 10, then a theology degree, then a master's, then ordination, then years of ministry. Was he more saved at the end of all that than he was at 10? No. So why do any of it? Because it blesses other people, and because it's how saved people live.
Scripture:
Luke 23:39-43
Genesis 2:16-17
Genesis 3:1-5
Exodus 20:8
Matthew 5:21-22
Cloverdale Seventh-day Adventist Church – Boise, Idaho
Want to dig deeper? https://prmarlon.com/blog-2/how-then-shall-we-live
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https://www.cloverdale.org/
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