No Other Gospel: Getting the Message Right

How the Wolf Became the Shepherd

Big Idea: Religion can change your behavior. Only Jesus can change your heart.

Introduction & Setup

• The Context: Turn to Galatians 1:11.

• Ministry Moment ("Your One"):

  • Today's emphasis: "Who is your one?"

  • The Great Commission tells us to go into all the world—which is a tall task. We start by helping you win your world by picking one person to pray for, invite, and talk about Jesus around.

  • Every conversation you have, every person God places in front of you, is on purpose.

  • (Grab a stack of simple invite cards in the lobby for your waitress, the grocery store line, or the librarian!)

Opening Hook: Have you ever trusted your GPS when you probably shouldn't have? You're driving somewhere new, trusting the little blue line. "Turn right." "Continue for three miles." "Turn left." Eventually, the GPS says: "You have arrived at your destination." You look around thinking... No, I have not. I am in somebody's backyard.

• The Takeaway: You can be completely sincere and still end up completely wrong. You weren't trying to get lost; you were following directions. The problem wasn't your sincerity—it was the source of your directions.

• The Problem in Galatia: Paul is dealing with people receiving the wrong directions about God.

  • The word on the street: "Jesus is good... but Jesus alone isn't enough." (Galatians 1:6)

  • They were trying to add to the gospel: Jesus plus the law, religious performance, traditions, or works.

  • Paul's response: No! Once you add something to the gospel, you've changed the gospel. People's eternal lives are at stake.

1. You Can Be Religious and Still Be Lost

• Scripture: Galatians 1:11–14 (NLT/ESV)

• Paul's Testimony: He was a rising star in Judaism.

  • Extremely religious, disciplined, educated, and passionate.

  • He was absolutely convinced he was right—and he was completely wrong.

• A Chilling Reality: You don't have to hate God to be far from God. You can be very religious and still need Jesus.

  • Greek Insight: In verse 13, Paul says he tried to "destroy" (portheō) the church—a military term for systematic burning and ravaging of towns. He viewed himself as a holy executioner/terrorist of the faith.

  • Sincerity doesn't save you if you are sincerely wrong. (Example: Getting on a plane bound for Dallas while sincerely convinced it's going to Atlanta).

• Where does the Gospel come from?

  • Paul used technical rabbinic terminology (paralambanō and didaskō) to show he didn't learn this in a human classroom.

  • Illustration: Human-made religion is like a dying person in the desert refusing a free bottle of water and trying to pay for it with counterfeit money they drew on paper. Grace is a free gift received empty-handed.

  • The Tech Analogy: You can buy a brand-new phone—crisp screen, amazing camera, perfect case—but if the manufacturer never put a battery in it, it's dead. How many accessories do you need to add before it works? You don't make something alive by making the outside look better.

• Personal Application (The Bible Belt Check):

  • You can know the Bible without knowing the Author.

  • You can attend church for 20 years and never be born again.

  • The Question: Have you learned Christianity, or has Jesus changed you?

2. Grace Has to Interrupt Your Story

• Scripture: Galatians 1:15–17 (NKJV) — "But when it pleased God..."

• The Turning Point:

  • Paul was running full speed in the wrong direction as a fanatic, and then God intervened.

  • Those five words change everything: "But God..."

  • The persecutor became the preacher. The wolf became a shepherd.

• The Biblical Pattern of "But God":

  • Genesis 8:1 – But God remembered Noah...

  • Genesis 50:20 – You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good...

  • Psalm 73:26 – My heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart...

  • Romans 5:8 – But God shows his love for us... while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

• The Mountain Climbing Illustration:

  • Religions hand you a heavy manual: Climb this mountain through sheer effort. You slip, fall, and sit defeated at the bottom.

  • The Gospel: Jesus didn't stay at the top. He hiked down, picked you up, and put you on His shoulders to carry you home.

• Paul in Arabia:

  • He pulled away to the quiet of Arabia to rethink the Scriptures with new eyes:

    • Noah's Ark: Jesus is our Ark through judgment.

    • David & Goliath: Jesus is our unlikely champion.

    • The Red Sea: Jesus made a path from slavery to life.

    • Jonah: Three days in the fish pointing to the resurrection.

  • The whole story from Genesis to Malachi was pointing to Jesus all along.

• Spiritual Eyesight:

  • Before Christ, we think our vision is fine ("I'm a pretty good person"). Then the Holy Spirit hands us the spiritual glasses: Oh! There they are! I need Jesus.

3. When Jesus Changes You, He Changes Your Direction

• The Result of Transformation:

  • Same Paul, different direction. Same personality, different allegiance. Same passion, different purpose.

  • Paul wasn't just saved from something; he was saved for something (to proclaim the Good News to the Gentiles).

• Checking Your Résumé:

  • Maybe your résumé says: Never done drugs, never arrested, go to church, give money, got baptized.

  • Those are good things, but they cannot save you. Paul had a better résumé than anyone in the room—and he still needed Jesus.

• Encouragement for the Skeptical/Broken:

  • If God's grace was big enough for Saul, it is big enough for you. Nobody in your family, your community, or your past is beyond the reach of Jesus.

  • Stop trying to impress God. Start trusting God.

Closing Challenge

• Bring it back to the core question:

Are you reborn—or are you just religious?

 

 

Sermon transcript

How the Wolf Became the Shepherd

2026-10-04

All right. Good morning, early afternoon, Great Commission Church. Like Shane was saying, I get the privilege of preaching this morning, and I'm picking up in the series through Galatians that we're teaching verse by verse. The series is titled No Other Gospel, Getting the Message Right. And my sermon today is titled How the Wolf Became the Shepherd. I wanted something kind of profound sounding, and so that's what I landed on, How the Wolf Became the Shepherd. And so we'll walk through that and hopefully answer that question as we go. If you would turn to Galatians 1, verse 11. Galatians 1, verse 11. And while you're doing that, I wanted to talk about our next steps emphasis, which is who is your one? And really, we see this in the Great Commission, which is what our church is named after. And the concept is go into the world, win the world, is what Jesus commands us to do. And that is such a tall task. A lot of times we shut down when we think about the concept of winning the entire world. And so we found it easier if we just focus on one person at a time, one prayer, one person, one salvation. And we call that winning your world. And everyone has a world if you really think about it, right? It's who you work with. You go to the gym, maybe in the morning and see the same people consistently. Or maybe you're more of a Dunkin' Donuts kind of person. So you see this person at Dunkin' Donuts a little more often. Whatever it is that you consistently see, that's your world. Even your daughter has a little world. If she's in gymnastics or your kids have their own little world at school and so forth, so on. And so a part of discipleship and evangelism is reaching those people. And that is who you're called to reach. And so that's what we do. And we love praying for your one if you put it on your card and equipping you. We also like to talk about Great Commission living. And that's the concept of that as you go through your daily lives, you'll interact with people that you've never seen. And these appointments are God putting this person into your life, even for a blip, in line at a grocery store. Or maybe you're trying to pick something out at the store and someone comes alongside you and asks you a question. And instead of just casually thinking those are inconveniences, we've learned that actually God might be saying, hey, you need to encourage this person. Maybe they're a believer or maybe they don't know Jesus and you need to tell them about Jesus or at least invite them to church. And so we have these invite cards in the lobby on your way out. Grab you a stack of them. They do us no good here. They are not expensive. They are for you to take and give away. Okay, leave them places. Put them in your library books as you return the books to the library. Do people still go to the library? Okay. All right, just making sure. And it seems like there's so much information out there that you don't need to even go to the library. Anyways, so let me go ahead and start this sermon this morning. And I wanted to talk about I drive around a bunch and I use my GPS all the time. I don't even care if I know where I'm going. If I'm driving more than 15 minutes, I want my GPS on because it'll reroute traffic and all that and, you know, tell you when there's a police. Although I do not speed, so that is useless information to me, by the way. And so I'll have a tendency to blindly just follow the blue line, just trust it unapologetically. [00:40:00 - 00:48:00] You know, it's like, hey, turn right. Okay, I'll turn right. Continue for three miles. Okay, turn left, turn left. And eventually the GPS says this, you have arrived at your destination. And sometimes you look around, you're like, no, no, I have not arrived. This is not where I want to be. And you're like in someone's backyard or something. And you're like, there has been a mistake. And here's the thing. You can be completely sincere and still end up completely wrong. Did you know that? You can be completely sincere and still end up completely wrong. Because you weren't trying to get lost, right? You were trying to find some place that you were trying to go. And you were actually following the directions to a T. And the problem wasn't your sincerity. The problem was the source of your directions. And that's exactly where Paul takes us in Galatians 1. Because Paul is dealing with people who were being given the wrong directions about God. Do you see this? A quick overview of where we've been the last 10 verses in Galatians. Because the word on the street at that time was, hey, Jesus is good, but Jesus is not enough. Look at Galatians 1.6. It says, I am shocked that you're turning away from God so soon, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You're following a different way that pretends to be the good news. And what was happening was that they were trying to add to the gospel. They were saying, oh yeah, you need Jesus plus the law. Yeah, yeah, Jesus is very good and you need that, but you also need to perform religious tasks or follow the traditions that we've always done. Or here's some works that you need to do on top of Jesus. And Paul says, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a problem because once you add something to the gospel, you've changed the gospel. And here's why Paul is taking this so incredibly seriously in the first 16 verses of Galatians. Because the people he's talking to have no problem believing in the miracles of God. They fully believe that Noah actually survived a global flood with every animal species. And these people that Paul are talking to really do believe that there was a young shepherd who defeated a giant with a slingshot. And that Moses parted a sea to escape an army. And that there was a man who lived three days inside of a fish. And he believed that Daniel really was locked away in a lion's den and the next morning survived without a scratch. And so here's who Paul is talking to. And he said, there's an amazing story and you're not going to believe it. And yet I think Paul's story is one of the most unbelievable and relatable stories I've ever heard in the Bible. Because before Paul became Paul, he was Saul. And Saul wasn't just some guy who was casually uninterested in God. He was very religious, extremely religious. He knew the Bible. He knew theology. He was disciplined. He was educated. He was passionate. He was zealous. And he was a rising star of that day. And he was absolutely convinced that he was right. And he was completely wrong. And that's what makes this passage so uncomfortable. Because you don't have to hate God to be far away from God. You can actually be very religious and still need Jesus. And so today I want to ask you a question, very simple question, very bottom shelves cookie, very easy question. And I don't want you to answer it right away, okay? Like I know you're just going to have an answer and you're going to want to come up with an answer because it's so easy. But I want you to marinate in it for a second. And I promise I'll remind you of the question at the very end. And you can ask yourself again at the end, truthfully. So don't answer it quick, okay? Just have an open mind. Just say, okay, let me just see what Jacob has to say before I answer it. Because here's the question. Are you reborn or are you just religious? Okay, I told you you'd want to answer it immediately. Just wait. Are you reborn or are you just religious? And that's what we're going to look at today. Because you can be religious and still be lost. So let's look at verse 13 and 14. I know I told you to turn to verse 11. I was diagnosed with dyslexia at a very young age, so things work better backwards in my mind sometimes. But I promise for all the OCD folk, we will get to verse 11 and 12. Just hang with me, okay? It just made sense to me to start at verse 13, so let me read it to you. You knew what I was like when I followed the Jewish religion, says Paul, how I violently persecuted God's church. I did my best to destroy it. I was far ahead of my fellow Jews in my zeal for the traditions of my ancestors. Paul says, you know, you've heard of my formal life, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it, and how I was advancing quicker than anyone my age. I was a prodigy. I was good at this. I was good at religion. And he wasn't running away from God. He actually thought he was running toward God. He wasn't embarrassed about his faith. He was passionate about his faith. In fact, Paul was so passionate that he was willing to hurt people who disagreed with him. The end of verse 13 says, I did my best to destroy it. And when he says destroy it, he was using a Greek military word. This terminology was used to describe this systematic, planned out burning and ravaging of towns and villages. This is how he described, that's the word he used to talk about these followers of Jesus, how he wanted to destroy it. So Paul wasn't just casually opposed to Christianity. He viewed himself as a holy executioner, a terrorist of the faith, which brings up the chilling reality that you can be completely, 100% sincere in your religious devotion and still be entirely lost. He thought he was defending God. And here's the scary part. Paul was not pretending. He genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. And that teaches us something so important. Sincerity does not make something true. Sincerity doesn't save you if you're sincerely wrong. Imagine this, you get on an airplane that's going to Dallas, but you are sincerely convinced you're going to Atlanta. Guess where you're going to end up? You're in Dallas, but you might as well buy some Mavs tickets. You're going to be there for a minute. Because sincerity does not change the destination. And that's why the gospel is not believe whatever you sincerely believe. The gospel is believe the truth about Jesus. And so Paul... [00:48:00 - 00:56:00] to make something very crystal clear. The gospel is not human invention. Now you can go back to verse 11, and here's what he says. He says, For I would have known, brothers, that the gospel that was preached to me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through the revelation of Jesus Christ. For all the Bible geeks out there, Paul is using this term that rabbis would have used, and the thought of it was in Jewish schools. It was this passing down of oral traditions from rabbi to students. It was very guarded. It was very strict. And Paul is saying that he didn't get the gospel through these standard academic pipelines that most religious activities would have been brought through. He wasn't sitting in a classroom memorizing human commentary. And here's the point. Human beings didn't invent the gospel any more than we invented water. And just like water, we desperately need it to survive because we cannot manufacture it on our own. You see, man-made religion is like a man in a desert who is so thirsty. It's been days since he's had just a drop of water. And here you come flying in on a helicopter, and the first thing you think is, I've got to get this guy water. And you hand him a bottle of water, and he refuses it because he demands to pay you for it. And he reaches into his pocket, and he pulls out this fake money that he drew on a piece of paper and hands it to you. You see, human religion tries to hand God our own counterfeit good works to pay for a gift that can only be received empty-handed. And just like water, we didn't invent grace, and we cannot live without it. We simply have to drink. You see, human-made religion is always a merit-based system. It's a performance trap. It's built on these works that are default human heart because we love control. We love to think we've done something. We want a scoring system, right? We want to see who wins. We want to know when we're winning. And we want to look in the mirror, and we want to pat ourselves on the back and say, I helped Jesus. I did a good job for my salvation. And what the Bible reveals to us is this message that is centered entirely on a bloody cross. And this gift of grace is entirely counterintuitive, and it's deeply offensive to human pride. The gospel is so offensive because the gospel is this good news that Jesus Christ died for sinners, rose from the dead, and offers forgiveness and eternal life to anyone who trusts in Him. And we think, that is too simple. What do I need to do? Nothing. That's the point. The gospel is not about performing for Him. It's about trusting in Him. And Paul's saying, I didn't brainstorm this. I didn't make this up. Man, it broke into the darkness like a blazing flash of light straight from heaven. And he's thinking, this kind of wrecked my life. You know, one of the things that I find joy in is getting a new phone, believe it or not. I love the latest model of phone. I'm talking, I want it crispy. I want the newest, latest, greatest. I want all the features, and I'm going to use all the features. I'm weird like that. I'm going through all the settings. I want the big storage space, right? I don't want to be running out of room. And I got to put a nice case on it, or I got to keep it nice. You polish the screen off. You put a screen protector on it. It looks fantastic, but there's one problem. It's dead. What happened? I thought I got this new phone. I spent all this money on it. Why is it dead? And you realize the manufacturer forgot to put a battery in it. And here's the question. I wonder how many accessories I can put on the outside to make this thing work. Because the answer is none. In other words, how great do I have to make the outside of that phone look before the inside actually works? You don't make something alive by making the outside look better. And here's where this starts getting personal. And here's why I bring the illustration up. Because you can know the Bible without knowing the author of the Bible. And you can know the songs we sing without knowing the Savior. And you can know Christian vocabulary without knowing Christ. And you can attend church for 20 years and never be born again. See, Paul had religion, but Paul needed a resurrection life. Because what I know is information is not transformation. No one can see Jesus as the Christ without the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Because Paul knew facts about Jesus before conversion. But the veil that had obscured the Messiahship of Jesus had to be drawn from his eyes. And only Jesus can do that. And that happens when you're born again. Because you can fill your head with all the information about Jesus and never really surrender your heart to Jesus. And I think that's good for us to hear about because we live in the Bible Belt. It's this cultural Christianity where everyone's saved. And we've grown up around Christianity. We've heard the stories. We've been to VBS. We've been baptized. We take communion. We prayed the prayers. We know the whole routine. But the question is not have you learned Christianity? Something dead needs life. And that's the difference between religion and the gospel. And that's Paul's story. He was missing the battery that gave him eternal life. He didn't need a better religious resume. He didn't need more Bible knowledge. He didn't need more discipline. He needed Jesus. And so what you need to start asking yourself as you're processing this, am I reborn or am I just religious, is are you trying to make yourself better? Or has Jesus made you new? Because grace has to interrupt your story. It has to. Look at verse 15. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me through his grace to reveal his son to me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles. And this brings us to the turning point of these passages. And I think it's the most glorious transition in all of Scripture. I love it. Paul was running full speed in the wrong direction like a fanatic. And then God intervened. And my absolute favorite words in this entire passage is Galatians 1.15. The very beginning it says, but when it pleased God. And I don't want to rush past that part because those five words changed everything in that man's life. Paul has just been telling us how bad he was. He persecuted the church. He tried to destroy the church. He was advanced in religion. He was zealous. And he was going the wrong direction. But God. And those two words changed everything. Because the persecutor became the preacher. The wolf became the shepherd. Religion couldn't do that for Saul. Jesus did. Paul was headed in one direction. He was spiritually blind. He was persecuting Christians. But God. And that's the gospel. The gospel is the story of God stepping into your story. And he's done this all throughout history. All right? You ready to get a little nerdy? Buckle up. Listen to this. Genesis 8.1 says, but God remembered Noah and all the animals. And Genesis 31 says, but God did not permit him to harm me. And Genesis 50.20 says, as for you, you meant evil against me. But God [00:56:00 - 01:04:00] meant it for good. Psalms 49:15, but God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave. And Psalm 73:26, my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. And Matthew 19:26, with man is impossible, but with God all things are possible. Acts 13:30, but God raised him from the dead. And my favorite, Romans 5:8, but God shows his love for us and why we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And I want you to think about how the Bible uses that kind of language for you. You were dead in your sin, but God, you were lost, you were far away, you were guilty, you had no hope, but God. And that's what grace is. And that's when God comes into your story and says, but God, I can do it. You see, grace is God doing for you what you could never do for yourself. And notice what Paul says next. He says, God called me by his grace. You see, Paul wasn't searching for God. So many of us aren't. Paul was, he wasn't sitting there saying, you know, God, if you're out there, would you please find me? No, Paul was actively fighting against Jesus and Jesus' followers. He was trying to, Paul was trying to earn his right standing before God and Jesus came looking for him. That's grace. I want you to imagine yourself standing at the absolute base of this massive jagged mountain and the peak is hidden way up in the clouds and is lost in this complete brilliance of light. And that peak represents God. And as you look up, you start wondering, how on earth am I supposed to get up there? And you look around and you notice, oh, there's some ropes, there's some ladders, there's a little trail carved in the rock. And next to them are these guides. And it's the world's greatest philosophies and religions. And they look at you and they smile warmly and they hand you this heavy manual and they say, here's the map. And if you wake up early enough and you sweat enough and you follow those exact footprints and you climb perfectly without ever slipping, you might, maybe, just maybe, you might make it to the top if you start climbing. And so you try. And you push yourself to be better and kinder and more disciplined and the air starts getting thin. And your knees start to buckle and the pack on your back starts feeling heavy and the burden is too much. And eventually you slip. And you lose your footing and you slide right back down to the bottom and you have to start over. You're bruised, you're exhausted, you're completely defeated and you think, maybe I should try one of these other religions or one of these other philosophies. Maybe then I can make it to the top. And you realize the truth, the mountain is just too high and you're just too weak. You can't climb it. And as you sit there in the dirt, wiping away tears, you hear a footstep. Only the footstep's not climbing up, it's climbing down. And you look up and it's Jesus. And he didn't stay at the top waiting for you to prove yourself. He literally left the peak, hiked down into the dirt and sits right down next to you. And he doesn't hand you a heavier manual or a longer checklist. He doesn't tell you to try harder. Instead, he looks at your scraped knees and he smiles and he said, you know, you were never meant to climb alone. In fact, you can't. And then he does something completely unexpected. He picks you up, puts you on his shoulder and says, hold on, I'm gonna carry you. Every other voice is telling you to climb and try harder. And the gospel's the only voice that says the king came down to carry you home. And what Paul does next absolutely blows my mind. Listen to this, verse 16. When this happened, when God revealed his son to him, he said, I didn't rush out to consult with any human beings. He said, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to consult with these other apostles before I was. Instead, I went away to Arabia and later I returned to the city of Damascus. And I started thinking, why in the world is that in the Bible? Why does that matter what Paul did next? And you'd think it'd be something cool. I'd repented and I went to go confess all this. He's like, no, what he did instead of rushing to Jerusalem, Paul needed some time away. His entire identity, his entire life, his livelihood, his life mission had just been turned upside down and stripped away from him. The man needed to go be quiet for a little bit. He needed some stuff to think about. And the verse doesn't tell us what he was doing in the quiet of Arabia, but I like to start thinking, I bet he started thinking through the Old Testament scriptures that he'd known since he was a child. But now he has new eyes. And everywhere he turned, he started finding Jesus. When he started thinking about Noah's Ark, he was like, oh my goodness, Jesus is the Ark. The only way to pass through safety through the flood of judgment is Jesus. Or then he started thinking about David and Goliath, how God sent this unlikely champion to fight on their behalf and win a victory they could never win themselves. He was like, Jesus is the champion. And then he starts remembering the Red Sea where God made a path through the judgment, leading his people out of slavery into a new life. He sees Jesus through that. Or then he considered Jonah, who was in the belly of this fish for three days and three nights. And he's like, that points straight to Jesus, almost as a blueprint of his death and resurrection. And Daniel in the lion's den, when he remembers that story, he thinks of this righteous man who was condemned to death, who did not make the mistake. He was sealed in this place of execution behind this heavy stone. And then the morning he walked out alive. He's like, that points to Jesus's resurrection. And he thinks about Genesis as this promised seed who would crush the serpent's head. And now he sees Jesus. And how the law is this spotless Passover lamb whose blood shields us from wrath. And he sees Jesus. And in the Psalms with hands and feet pierced, centuries before crucifixion was even invented, he's like, it was all about Jesus. And the prophets, he reads through and he remembers Isaiah's suffering servant, and he sees Jesus now. You see, Paul, for the first time ever, realizes they're not just moral stories about courage and inspiration anymore. They're rescue stories all pointing to Jesus. And I imagine Paul's heart pounding as everything came into focus for the first time. The law, the history, the Psalms, the prophets, every single thread of the Old Testament was pulling towards one undeniable point. It was Jesus. It's all pointing to Jesus. Not one book, not one section. The whole story from Genesis to Malachi was written pointing to Jesus. And Paul had new eyes that he could see that now. And then Paul says something incredible. He said, God pleased. God was pleased, verse 16, to reveal his son to me. You see, Paul had known about Jesus, but suddenly Paul saw Jesus for who he really was. And that's what happens when someone's born again. Jesus [01:04:00 - 01:12:00] being just a historical figure or someone your grandmother used to talk about and love. Jesus stops being merely just the guy you hear about when you go to church. And suddenly, Jesus becomes real. And the Holy Spirit opens your eyes and you begin to see your sin differently and you begin to see grace differently. You begin to see your situation differently because you start seeing Jesus differently. And you don't simply become more informed about these things, but you become transformed. And you think your eyesight's fine. And you walk into the eye doctor and the person says, I need you to read these numbers. And you think, uh-oh, I can't read those numbers. Because you thought your vision was fine because you didn't know you couldn't see. And he hands you a set of glasses and you say, oh, there they are. I can see the numbers now. And that's just a picture of spiritual blindness. Because before Christ, you don't realize that you're blind. You think, I'm fine, right? I've got this. I'm a pretty good person. I believe in God. God would know my situation. But then God opens your eyes and you suddenly see, oh, I need Jesus. And that's grace. Because when Jesus changes you, he also changes your direction. Now here's where the sermon gets super practical and we'll land the plane, okay? Because sometimes we talk about salvation as if the only thing that matters is what happens in us. But when Jesus changes what's inside of you, eventually that kind of oozes out and changes the things around you. You notice that? Look at Paul. He was trying to destroy the church, right? And now you fast forward in his story and the man's trying to build the church. The one thing he was trying to destroy, now he's the builder of the church. And he was persecuting Christians and now he's preaching Christ and building up Christians. And he was using his life to fight Jesus and now he's using his life to proclaim Jesus and will die for Jesus. It's the same Paul, different directions. It's the same personality, different allegiance. It's the same passion but a different purpose in life and that's transformation. And I love what Paul says about why God revealed his son to him. It wasn't so that Paul could have a better life. It was this in verse 16, to reveal his son to me so that I would proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles. In other words, Paul wasn't saved just from something, he was saved for something. And that's true of you also. God didn't save you so you can simply come to church once a week and feel better about yourself. God saved you so your life would become a living testimony of Jesus Christ. So let me bring you back to the question that we started with and you can begin to answer that now, maybe more honestly. Are you reborn or are you just religious? And here's how you can begin to answer that. Are you trusting Jesus or are you trusting your resume? Maybe your resume says, you know, I've been a Christian my whole life. I've never done drugs. I've never been arrested. I've never cheated on my spouse. I give money. I go to church. I serve and I've been baptized. And all of those things are very, very good. But none of those things can save you. Paul had a better religious resume than probably everyone in this room and he still needed Jesus. Now let me take you back to Saul before he became Paul and imagine meeting him before this incident on the road to Damascus. And you look at this guy and you think, there's no way a guy like that is ever going to become a Christian. There's no way. I'll bet my house on it. There's no way. And then Jesus steps into his story and the man who was trying to destroy Christianity becomes one of the greatest proclaimers of Christianity the world has ever seen. That's grace. And here's why Paul's story matters so much and why I wanted to share it with you this morning. It's because maybe you're sitting here thinking, God could never really change me. Or maybe you think, I'm too far gone. I've messed up too badly. My family is too broken. My past is too ugly. I've been running from God for too long. And I want you to hear me very clearly if you have not heard anything else. If God's grace was big enough for Saul, God's grace is big enough for you. There's nobody in this room beyond the reach of Jesus. I want you to hear this too. There's nobody in your family beyond the reach of Jesus. Please keep praying for them. There's nobody in your community beyond the reach of Jesus. There's no past that's so ugly, no sin that's so deep, no rebellion that's so stubborn. And maybe your problem isn't that you're running from God. Maybe the problem is we're trying to impress God. The question at the beginning that I asked, it was not, are you a good person? I did not ask you if you go to church. I did not ask you if you believe the Bible. I did not ask you if you believe in God. I asked you, have you been born again? Are you reborn or just religious? And if you're not quite sure how to answer that, man, you're in a good place. We love to have conversations about Jesus. And the best thing you could do before you leave is to take that welcome card, mark on it, I'm ready to trust Jesus. And we'll take it from there. We will answer questions. We will get you resources. We will pray with you. And we'll talk to you about Jesus. All right? Hey, let's pray with each other. I'm going to pray for you. Prayer team can come forward. In fact, everyone go ahead and stand up. Prayer team will get set up. Let me pray for us as we go out into the world.

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Join us this Sunday at Great Commission Church for a welcoming and uplifting worship experience. If you’ve been searching for a church near you, you’ll discover a warm, authentic church family ready to help you grow in faith.

We are a family-friendly, non-denominational Christian church in Olive Branch, serving individuals and families throughout DeSoto County and the greater Mid-South. People looking for Christian churches in Olive Branch often discover a vibrant community where faith comes alive and lives are transformed through the Gospel.

Whether you’re new to faith or have followed Christ for years, you’ll find welcoming Sunday services, practical Bible teaching, and a place to belong. We are more than a congregation — we are a church family united by a mission to follow Jesus and live out the Great Commission.

A Place for the Whole Family

Families searching for a church with strong children’s programs love our engaging Kids Ministry and safe, caring environments. Students can connect through our Youth Ministry, and adults of every stage can find community through groups, prayer, and discipleship opportunities. As a multi-generational church, we love seeing every age grow in faith together.

Meaningful Worship

Experience contemporary worship with modern Christian music, heartfelt prayer, and Gospel-centered messages designed to help you encounter God personally. If you’re looking for vibrant worship near Memphis, you’ll find a place that feels both authentic and inspiring.

Grow in Your Faith

We offer Bible studies, small groups, and discipleship opportunities that help you understand and apply God’s Word to everyday life. If you’re looking for a place to grow spiritually, you’ll find support and encouragement here.

Connected to Our Community

We are passionate about serving our neighbors through outreach and local partnerships, making a positive impact in Olive Branch and beyond.

Conveniently located in Olive Branch, we serve families from surrounding communities, including Southaven, Germantown, Collierville, Lewisburg, and Byhalia.

You’re Invited

If you’re looking for a church family, meaningful community, and Gospel-centered worship, we would love to welcome you.

Join us this Sunday at Great Commission Church — where faith, love, and community come together and lives are changed by Jesus.