Welcome to the Paul Tripp podcast, where pastor and best-selling author Dr. Paul David Tripp

connects the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life.

In this episode, we'll listen to three segments from a series Paul did called The Gospel in Your Neighborhood,

which emphasized how we can be better witnesses for the gospel. In this first segment, Paul explains why we need humility if we want to be gracious and

loving with our neighbors. Here's Paul.

I want to read you a passage of scripture that helps me when I think of ministering the gospel to my neighbors,

being a presence of the gospel right here where God has placed me.

This is 1 Timothy Chapter 1. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full

acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost. But I receive mercy for this reason that in me as the foremost

Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him

for eternal life. You know, I'm deeply persuaded that one of the reasons we don't do well around our unbelieving

neighbors, that we aren't the kind of presence of the gospel that we should be is not because we forget who they are and we

forget their need. It's because we forget who we are. I'd like to say this. It's very, very

important if you're ever going to meet those people where they are

and incarnate the transforming love of the Lord Jesus Christ,

you have to confess that you're more like your neighbors than unlike them.

Because the minute you begin to think that somehow you are fundamentally unlike them, you begin to have a more self-righteous,

condemning, negative, sort of cast in the nature of your relationship to them. I love this passage. This is the

Apostle Paul saying, Jesus Christ came to save sinners. It doesn't say next, and thankfully, I'm not

one of those. What he says is, I must be the biggest and baddest of them all.

Notice, he's talking in the present tense.

He doesn't say I was.

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