On this Memorial Day weekend, people everywhere are pausing to remember men and women who've given everything and service to our country. And while this weekend is marked by mourning and remembrance for them, my heart is mourning something else today. I'm troubled, and I've been carrying this for some time and just felt like the Lord gave me the green light to talk about it today. There's something costing the American church right now more than we even know or imagine. I'm mourning the loss of conviction in the lives of those who claim to follow Jesus. I'm mourning the loss of the kind of Christianity that costs something. The kind where people don't just add Jesus to their existing way of life. They understand the call to follow Jesus is a call to come and die to your old life and be born again to a new life in Christ. But somewhere along the way, people repackaged the gospel. It was turned into a value add where you just add Jesus to your current way of living, like many other pagan religions, where you just add Jesus to the shelf of all your other idols. He never really becomes Lord, He's just one among many. We have popular preachers today that say, come to Jesus, he'll improve your marriage, he'll clarify your purpose, he'll give you a positive mindset, he'll help you reach your goals. And in many ways, there are benefits to following Jesus, and all of that may be downstream of the gospel, but none of that is the gospel. And it's not my calling as a pastor to try to convince you to follow Jesus because of how you're selfishly gonna benefit from following him, the gospel. The real gospel doesn't say Jesus will make your current life better. Jesus never said, Come follow me so you can have your best version of your life. This is the message Jesus preached. Repent, die to yourself, be born again, take up your cross and follow me. The real message of the gospel is not a message of renovation where your old life is simply updated a little bit, rearranged a little bit. The real gospel is a message of total regeneration, where a truly converted person is completely made new. Paul said in 2 Corinthians, this means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone and a new life has begun. But here's where it gets dangerous. In the lowering of our expectations of what it means to follow Jesus, and that's what's happened in the American church, the grace of God has been cheapened and preached as something Scripture never intended it to be. We've turned grace into a license. We've taken the most beautiful gift ever given, the undeserved, unearned, breathtaking grace of the Almighty God, and we've used it to justify staying exactly the way we were before we met Jesus, saying things like, Grace covers it, God understands it, He knows my heart, nobody's perfect. I'm not under law, I'm under grace. And there's a word that describes that kind of theology, that kind of teaching. It's called antinomianism. Antinomianism is the belief that that individuals are free from moral, religious, or social laws, where saved Christians are freed from the obligations of a righteous life or living by any kind of moral standard all because of divine grace. It's the belief that God's grace allows you to freely continue living a life of sin because it's all covered. And while antinomianism describes the mindset of far too many American Christians, it's not new and it's not harmless. The apostles spent much of the writing of the New Testament fighting against this idea about grace. Look with me at a little New Testament letter from Jude where Jude fights this error. Most people skip over Jude entirely. It's only one chapter, one page, or half a page in your Bible. Sits right in front of the book of Revelation. Most people don't even know it's there. Jude, the half-brother of Jesus, sat down. His intent originally was to write an encouraging letter about the beauty of our salvation. He wanted to write about the transforming power of grace he had experienced and witnessed. But he felt something pressing on him to take a detour, an urgent one. And he says in verse 3, dear friends, I had been eagerly planning to write to you about the salvation we all share. But now I find that I must write about something else. This is the detour, an urgent one, urging you to defend the faith that God has entrusted once for all time to his holy people. I say this because some ungodly people have wormed their way into your churches, saying that God's marvelous grace allows us to live immoral lives. The condemnation of such people was recorded long ago, for they have denied our only master and Lord Jesus Christ. That's the New Living Translation. Verse 4 in the NIV reads this way: They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality. The New Living Translation said these people have wormed their way into the church. The NIV says they have secretly slipped in among you. Jude is saying, these people don't come in the front door with the sign saying, I'm here to destroy your faith. They come in quietly. They sound spiritual, they use the right vocabulary. And their message, God's grace, gives you permission to live however you want. The Greek word translated license here is where we get the word licentiousness. It's in verse 4. It is Alcegia, and it means unbridled indulgence, an attitude that recognizes no restraint, that lives with no regard for moral boundaries. And Jude is saying, these people that teach this have wormed their way. They have slipped into the churches of his day, and they have slipped into the churches of our day. They have taken grace, the most costly gift in the universe, and turned it into a moral free pass. When Jude says they and their message secretly slipped in, he's saying, this doesn't ever happen with a dramatic announcement. It creeps in slowly. I recently had a preacher I know tell the story of a wedding that he was involved in. The couple getting married was a young Christian couple. All the bridesmaids and groomsmen were young Christian, they were young Christ followers. And at the wedding rehearsal, uh he overheard the pastor who was to be officiating the ceremony after the rehearsal. The officiating pastor gathered all the groomsmen together and said to those young guys, Hey guys, make sure you have fun tonight. It's all covered by grace. The next day at the wedding, one of those groommen was so drunk he could barely stand up. And there was a man at the wedding that had invested a lot in this young man, had been a part of discipling him and mentoring him. And out of love, he went up to him and said, Hey man, you're better than this. What's going on? And the young man said with total sincerity, the pastor told us last night it was all covered by grace. But that's not the grace Jesus or Paul or any biblical author ever preached. That's cover-up grace. And cover-up grace is when grace is not viewed as power for transformation, but as a permission slip. And it's everywhere. It's in our pulpits, it's in our small groups, it's in the way we talk about sin with our kids, it's in the don't judge me culture that has slipped into the broader church. You probably heard a concept being thrown around in the last few years called deconstruction. And it's this idea that people who grew up in the church are walking away from their faith, questioning everything, abandoning what they once believed. They are said to be deconstructing their faith. And the cultural narrative says Christianity has failed them. The church failed them. The gospel could not hold up under their scrutiny. But that's not the whole truth. The truth is far more convicting than that. For a lot of those people that are deconstructing, they are deconstructing a version of Christianity that was never rooted in sound doctrine to begin with. A gospel with no repentance, a cross with no sacrifice, a church experience that was built more on feeling than it was on truth. Height without holiness, platforms without prayer, crowds without conviction. Paul saw this coming. He wrote about it to his young protege, Timothy. He said, For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. They will reject the truth and chase after myths. These a lot of these people that are deconstructing were taught how to chase experiences, but they never were taught to die to self. They were never taught spiritual discipline, never taught the fear of the Lord, never taught what sin actually does to a soul, to a relationship, to a generation. They were never taught that following Christ will cost you something. So when the trials come and emotions shift, and when culture pushes back, and when prayers aren't answered on your timetable, your faith collapses. Jesus said in Matthew 7, the storm will reveal what the house is built on. People look for churches that will entertain them, not disciple them. And too many spiritual leaders today and pastors are far more interested in being liked than they are in being biblically accurate. And all of that works out really well in a culture where people want a savior, but they don't want to follow a Lord. And cover up grace serves that culture perfectly until the storms come. I want to be really careful here. I want to make sure you're not making the wrong assumptions about what I'm saying today. I'm not saying the answer to cover up grace is legalism. More rules, more performance, more religious self-effort, because one extreme does not balance out the other. That's not the answer, and that's not what I'm saying. The apostle Paul anticipated this exact confusion. And he handles this in Romans chapter 5 and in Romans chapter 6. In Romans chapter 5, he makes this most beautiful statement about the amazing grace of God. It's a staggering message about grace. And he says that where sin abounds, grace much more will abound. Or where sin increases, grace that much more will increase. That's how much power is in the grace of God. But so that nobody would misunderstand him, Paul then comes back at the beginning of chapter six and says this. If that's true, where sin is, grace will much more be. Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not. Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Obviously, after you're saved, you don't become perfect. But when Paul says we don't continue to live in sin, he's saying that a truly converted heart does not willfully and deliberately continue in the same attitudes, actions, and activities of their old life. And that phrase, of course not, in the Greek is one of the most emphatic expressions in the Greek language. It means may it never be. Absolutely not. It's the language of somebody that thinks the question itself is absurd. Should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? May it never be. Absolutely not. But notice Paul's argument here, if you read on, is that you don't fix cover-up grace by trying harder. The answer is not legalism. He says the answer is in knowing who you are. In verse 3, he says, or have you, this is the next verse, have you forgotten that when you were joined with Christ in baptism, we joined him in his death. For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives. It's all about your identity, who you are now in Christ. If you've truly been baptized into Christ, your old self was buried with him, your new life was raised with him. So to live in deliberate, willful sin is not just morally wrong. It's going completely backwards for somebody who claims to be in Christ. You are not that person anymore. In Paul's day, there were two dangerous ditches that he and the writers of the New Testament were trying to keep the church from falling in. Two extremes, two ditches. Those same two ditches are real for us today. They're the ditch of legalism and the ditch of license, or the biblical word we get out licensuousness. The ditch of legalism, it's the mindset of a legalist, is that God accepts me because I obey. And the error of this group is that it this idea is it substitutes grace with human effort and lawkeeping. Legalists treat obedience as a price they pay to earn God's favor or prove their own righteousness, often elevating man-made rules to the same level as divine commands. And this often happens to people that grow up in deeply religious communities like here in the South or you've been in church a long time. The danger is you become a legalist. You start thinking, I am more morally, I'm morally superior than everybody else because I live a good moral life and I work really hard to be morally superior, pure and superior. And so you look down your nose at everybody else you don't think is working harder, as if you are saved by your effort. And that's the result of the legalist. It leads to self-righteousness when a person feels they succeed, but the flip side is that deep discouragement or despair when they fail because deep in you you think your salvation is up to you. The ditch of license, the other extreme, the mindset of this person is that God's grace accepts me. So holiness is optional. I don't have to live a righteous life. I don't have to keep God's standards in my life because of grace. The error is that it abuses the concept of free grace, twisting it into a permission to sin. People in this ditch use freedom as a cover-up for fleshly desires, ignoring God's call to purity and his moral law. And the result? It misreads the true spiritual freedom as self-expression rather than self-denial, treating Christ as a comfort blanket for carnality, sinful living, rather than a Lord to be followed. The real message of grace in Scripture walks the path between both ditches without falling into either. And the solution to these extremes of legalism and license is a true intimate union with Jesus Christ. Being united with the gracious Christ shatters legalism because you know your salvation is already secure. You don't have to earn it. You just accept what he's done for you. Being united with the Holy Christ shatters license because you are empowered to live a transformed pure life, the one he calls you to. You don't willfully continue in the patterns of your old life. There was a time in the American church I would have told you that our biggest danger to this grace conversation was falling into the ditch of legalism. That's still the case in some places, but as a whole, the biggest danger for us right now is that the church is falling into the ditch of license where we want a Savior to forgive us, but we don't want a Lord to tell us how to live after. We just want a moral free pass. But if grace is not a license, then what is it? There's a passage of verses in Paul's letter to Titus. I think it's one of the most underquoted, undertaught passages in the entire New Testament. And if we as God's people understood this more, we would live the Christian life differently. We would talk about the Christian life differently. Titus in chapter 2, verse 11 says, For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us. Grace teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age. Let me point this out. Hear what he's saying. Paul says, Titus, you're a young man. What what this life of following Jesus in the present, your present age, it's upstream. You're walking against the current, you're going against the flow. But grace trains you to be able to live that way against the current of the culture. Verse 13, all while that's happening, all while we wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify himself, a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. What does Paul say that grace does? It doesn't just cover sin, it teaches us to say no to ungodliness. Grace is the teacher, grace is the trainer, grace is the power source that makes it possible to live differently than you lived before. John Bevere is a writer and author who, a teacher who spent years researching Christians in America and how they define grace. He commissioned a nationwide survey of believers, and they were asked one question. Thousands of Christians were asked one question: Define the grace of God. Only 2% of thousands of people said that the grace of God is empowerment. 2%. Not as transformation, not as God's enabling presence to live the life He's called us to live. And when people don't understand that biblical grace is empowerment, we either become a hypocritical legalist where we try to live the Christian life in our own strength and we fail, or we become a theological libertine, making up strange doctrines like grace covers all my sins, so I can go live however I want to. Both of those errors come from the same root, not knowing that the grace of God and his power is at work in you to transform you. Here is a strong but simple definition of grace. Grace is God's empowering presence, the divine influence upon your heart that produces the reflection of Christ in your life. It's not just favor, it's not just forgiveness, it is not a free pass. Grace is God's power actively working in you to transform you from the inside out. What did the apostle Peter say? Second Peter chapter 1, verse 2. May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord. By this divine power, his divine power is his grace. By this power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. And because of this glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. Listen to these promises provided by grace, promises that enable you to share his divine nature, escape the world's corruption caused by human desires. That all happens by grace. It's his divine power that has given us everything we need for a godly life. Not a little of what we need, not enough to get by, everything we need. Listen to this carefully. The problem is not that God hasn't given us enough grace to live holy lives. The problem is that we've taken the grace He gave us and use it as permission not to try. Eighty years ago, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a cell in a Nazi prison. He had been arrested for his resistance to Hitler. He would eventually be executed right before the war ended. Before his arrest, he had written a book that became one of the most important Christian texts of the 20th century. He called it the cost of discipleship. And it opened with a devastating diagnosis of the church's greatest enemy. He opened the book by talking about cheap grace. And when you read it, his words feel less like history and more like prophecy for 2026. Bonhoeffer wrote, Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace without price, grace without cost. The essence of grace, we suppose is that the account has been paid in advance. He went on. Grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ. Costly grace, Bonhoeffer said, is something entirely different. Costly grace is costly because it calls us to follow. And it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life. It is grace because it gives a man the only true life. He was writing to the church in Germany in the 1930s because he watched the church he was a part of make peace with its culture. A church that had traded the costly gospel for a comfortable religion. A church that wouldn't risk anything because grace had become so cheap, it cost nothing. And Bonhoeffer said, a church like that has nothing to say to a dying world. And there is something in me that grieves for the American church, what Bonhoeffer was grieving for the Church of Germany in his day. But there's something I'm noticing about young people, the future of the church. Their generation is not craving a softer gospel. They want the truth. They want to be called up to something worth giving their life for. They're craving the true gospel, the message that Jesus preached. A gospel that convicts and transforms. A gospel that extends grace and mercy while still calling sin what it is. A gospel that says you are loved beyond measure, and you are so loved that God refuses to leave you where he found you. Here's how Jesus says it in Luke 9. If you, any of you, wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way. Take up your cross daily and follow me. There are three crucial gospel commands in that one sentence. Give up your own way. This is the gospel's invitation to come and die. This is the altar moment where you lay yourself on the altar, you deny yourself, you give up the rule and control of your own life, and you truly make Jesus Lord. This is where you recognize that your appetites, your preferences, your comfort, your self-defined version of a good life, none of that gets to sit on the throne of your heart anymore because to follow him, you give up your own way. Take up your cross. In Jesus' day, if somebody was carrying a cross down a street, everybody watching knew he's not coming back. The cross goes in one direction. It's a one-way walk to death. That's why it's an image of following Jesus. Take up your cross. You gotta die so that he can live less of you, more of him. Then he said, Follow me. Not into your best life now, into his life, into the life he's building in you. One that every day looks increasingly, progressively, unmistakably more like him as you serve him. There's a huge difference between cover-up grace and empowering grace. And let me give you the clearest contrast I know. Cover-up grace says you sinned, God forgives you, you go back to your life as normal. Empowering grace says you sin, God forgives you, and gives you the power you didn't have before to live differently than you did before. Cover-up grace treats salvation like a transaction, where you exchange your guilt for God's forgiveness and you just go on with the rest of your life. That's it. You did the deal, you did what they said you needed to do to square it away for eternity. That's cover-up grace. Empowering grace treats salvation like a transplant. The old heart is removed, a new heart is put inside you, and you begin to live from a completely new nature. God said this would happen in a prophecy through Ezekiel in chapter 36. And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you, and I will take out your stone, your stony, stubborn heart, and give you a tender, responsive heart, and I will put my spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees and be careful to obey my regulations. That's the gospel. Not an attempt at behavior modification from outside, but heart transformation from the inside out. And when you have that, when you understand that God's grace is not just pardon for your past, but power in your present, it changes everything. You don't live the Christian life by straining harder in your own effort. You start living by yielding to the grace that is already at work in you. So as we stop on a weekend to reflect and honor men and women who've given their lives for something bigger than themselves, in light of their sacrifice, let me ask you a question. What are you giving? What does the life you're living for Christ actually cost you? Is Jesus just a savior, not a Lord to you, just a savior that forgive your sin and watches you go back to living the way you've always lived before? Do you just seek forgiveness until the next time with no desire to really change? Or has Jesus truly become the Lord of your life? Because if he has, if he is Lord, your life will continually be interrupted, redirected, and transformed. That's what happens to somebody submitted to his lordship. We're constantly interrupted, redirected, and in the process of being transformed. Here's what I know to be true: a faith built on current trends and cultural versions of Christianity is going to crumble with the culture. But a faith built on Jesus Christ is going to endure the storm. And the storms will tell you what kind of foundation you have. If the foundations you're building are not built right, just know the storms are coming. For some of us, they're already here, and they are the trials that will reveal whether our spiritual house is built on feeling or a firm foundation. Is our spiritual house built on the thrill of chasing religious experiences, or is it built on the bedrock of the Word of God? Because two different people can come to the same altar after a message like this and pray similar prayers and have dramatically different experiences. One guy can come down to the altar, do what most people have been taught. He lays out his sin, asks God to forgive him. He stands up and says, Amen, and goes back to his old life, largely unchanged, because in his mind he checked the box. He invited grace in. But the second person comes to the same altar carrying his sin. He lays it down. God forgives him, but he waits until something else happens at that altar. He dies. Not metaphorically. I mean the old way of being him is finished. And when he stands up, yes, he's forgiven, but he's also changed. Empowered. The grace of God has not just erased his past, it has entered his current life, transforming with the presence of God, changing him into the kind of man that is capable of saying no to what he could not resist before. The first guy knows about grace, the second guy experienced grace as the power of life transformation. Both of them receive forgiveness, only one of them truly experiences grace. Listen, Jews said they would come. People who would slip into our churches taking the grace of God and turn it into a license to live any way they please. Paul said, God forbid, may it never be that we go on sinning so grace can increase. Titus told us what grace actually does: it teaches us and trains us to say no to ungodliness. Peter told us that grace has given us everything we need to live a godly life. Jesus told us to deny ourselves, take up his cross and follow him. Bonhoeffer told us that chief grace is the church's deadliest enemy. And now I'm telling you, we need to mourn the loss of those convictions and let God restore them back to his church. Not through shame, not through performance, not through straining harder in our own efforts, but through real, empowering grace that transforms us. And when you experience real grace, it's enough to truly set you free. I want you to stand with me across this room and at every location today. And I'm gonna ask our prayer teams to come and position themselves to serve you. And I want you to listen to me and hear my heart. As a pastor, I've been battling with this for some time. This has been something troubling me and burden me. I preach in a lot of churches. I just preached in one out of state Wednesday night at a conference revival service they were having. I preach in leadership gatherings for and I see this trend worming its way in. People trying to preach grace as a moral free pass, lowering the expectations. I realize I've been dealing with this for a while, trying to prepare to preach this message, and we don't have the time for it to be dealt with in your own life today the way it needs to be. But I'm I'm begging you, don't just check the box and say I went to church on Memorial Day. Sit with this, wrestle with it as a believer. If you kind of lowered the standard in your life and kind of used grace as a hall pass to compromise and live completely different than you know the nature of God in you is, then repent. God forgive me, empower me with your grace to live the life you've called me to. He's waiting on that today. He's waiting on that from his people. If you're here today and you're one of those people considering deconstructing your faith, you know, you're kind of, I'm like, I don't know, trying to think about walking away. Can I just encourage you before you do, make sure you don't walk away from a misrepresentation and end up at the end of your life having rejected the wrong representation of the truth because you didn't dig enough until you found the real Jesus in the real gospel. Don't walk away from the American church's show of what Christianity is because it's not always the right picture. Find the truth. Don't walk away from misrepresentation. Keep seeking truth. And if you've never met Jesus today, you've never really served him, you're just kind of out there walking around. I am not gonna lower the bar and make it easy. Like my goal is not to have more numbers and say we had more salvation, it's because I made it easy. I'm not gonna tell you everything that is gonna benefit you. You know what Jesus said? Come and die. Give me your life, and I'm gonna challenge you. I think that's what a younger generation is asking for. He's that's what he's at. If you give him your life, he'll give you all the life you'll ever want. Truly give him your life. You'll you'll flourish here and for eternity. And if you've never done that, give him your life today. The greatest honor we would have as a prayer team today is to pray for real surrender, not a cheap grace prayer, not a cover-up grace until the next time, but a lordship prayer. Jesus, I'm gonna give you my life. So, Lord, I pray today that you would help us. As a pastor today, I can't, I don't really control what happens from here, but I pray, Spirit of God, you would take the anointed word of God and let it be an incorruptible seed that would convict and change and transform our hearts no matter where we are on our spiritual journey. Redirect, interrupt, transform by the power of your grace. Father, will you bless them and keep them? Will you make your face shine down on them? Will you be gracious to them? Will you turn your countenance their direction today? And will you give them more grace and more peace in Jesus' name? Amen.