One Sunday 2026

JT English (1:10)

Hey, good morning. We are so glad you're here. We hope you came ready to celebrate. Will you stand with us? We're gonna lift up the name of our God. Let's lift up a voice of praise together. We'll sing together. This is.

Praise the Lord.

SPEAKER_2 (6:04)

Let's continue to sing to Him.

SPEAKER_3 (10:11)

Amen. Good morning, Storyline.

Hey, Jesus Christ is king. Amen?

Amen. Hey, my name is JT. I have the honor of serving as a lead pastor here. And I don't get a lot of time today because we have so many baptisms that we have the privilege and honor of celebrating today. But I also want to just do my part and welcome you to Storyline if you've never been here before, or if you call this your church home. Oh man, before we jump in, can we also just thank everybody who made this happen today? Guys, this is an enormous amount of work, whether we're talking production, facilities, securities, parking, hospitality connections, baptism teams, you name it. It is just a ton of work. We did this as our service, I think for the first time about five years ago. There was about 150 of us here. We parked in this parking lot. We didn't have to park all the way over there. We just opened our trunks. It was bring your own chair. One guy decided to bring his own Coleman grill and was cooking bratwursts while I was preaching, like a fragrant aroma to the Lord. So this has changed a bit over the years, but isn't the Lord, God is the same, our message is the same, and God's mercy is the same. Amen? So here's what I want to do. If you're new, maybe you haven't been to this service before. Again, maybe you have, and you know exactly what we're doing. I just want to reorient our hearts and our minds to why we would be here, why we would put this much work in to a service like this, to celebrate baptisms. Great organizations typically have one message. They're known for one or two things. At Chick-fil-A, they're known for great chicken, and when you say thank you, they say, my pleasure. At Starbucks, they're known for outrageously expensive coffee, and getting your name wrong, you're like, my name is JT, how did you mess that one up? But inevitably, they do.

More like the Marine Corps. They're known for a phrase called Semper Fi. Now, the church is not like those organizations in a number of ways. We're not an organization in that way. We're a family, a family that belongs to Jesus Christ through the power of his resurrection and his blood. For 2,000 years, for 2,000 years, churches across the globe have been gathering to celebrate exactly what we are here to celebrate today. Storyline's not unique in the fact that we just believe the good news that 2,000 years ago, God sent his son to live a perfect life in our place, to die a death in our place, to resurrect, ascend into heaven. And he's right now in heaven, reigning and ruling over all churches, including this one, and sending us the power of his Holy Spirit. So I want you to know, at the heart of Storyline Church, and at the heart of today, is a simple message. You ready?

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever, whoever, whoever believes in him can have everlasting life. Amen?

Whoever believes in him. So it's important, as we think about what the gospel is, let me just remind you briefly what the gospel is not. I don't have good advice for you today. This is not a pick yourselves up by your bootstraps sermon. The gospel is not therapeutic. This isn't primarily a way for you to fix anxiety or some kind of self-esteem issue.

The gospel is not some kind of moral example telling you, you should follow Jesus because he has a better way, though you should. The gospel is not an afterthought. It's not something we believe once and then graduate from or move on from. The gospel for the Church of Jesus Christ is everything. And it's really a message of life and death. I want to just highlight two passages for you that I think get at the heart of what we're doing today. And the first, you don't have to turn there because I know you probably don't have your Bible. There's nothing in front of you. But Romans 6.23 gets at the heart of the good news of the gospel where it says this. For the wages of sin is, do you know what it says? Death. The wages. I want you to think about wages for a second. A wage is something you're paid. It's something you've earned. There's a cost to it. And the cost to your sin is a wage of death. It's the payment of death. It means spiritual separation, physical separation from God. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, my sin's not that bad. I haven't sinned as bad as the person next to me, or perhaps I've not sinned against somebody the way that I've been sinned against. Have I really sinned that bad? And is my sin really that serious? You know, this is exactly what the people of God were thinking when Jesus shows up on the scene in the first century. They were thinking, I haven't broken the law that badly. If you read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, he shows them that he's not just interested in external obedience. He's interested in the internal transformation of the heart. So he asks them questions like this. He says, you know, you've heard it said that you should not murder, but I say to you, if you've been angry with your brother, you will be subject to my judgment.