One Sunday afternoon, Dawn and I were working in our yard, and our neighbor noticed us working and came over to see if he could help. The difference between us and our neighbors, is everything that we try to do, they actually have the tools to do. So he came with his tool and the job actually got done.

As we were working, we got to talking.

He, like most of our neighbors here in Southwest Detroit, is Catholic... and being that it was Sunday, we had both gotten home from church not long before this moment... and it was fresh on our minds.

Knowing that we pastor one of the only protestant churches around, He began asking all sorts of questions about our church, trying to understand if there was a difference between our church, and the church that he took his family to that was three blocks closer to his house.

During the conversation, the concept of "confession" came up, and he couldn’t believe that we don’t do “confession” at Courage…

I tried to explain to him as simply as possible, that where we believe in confessing our sins both to God (1 John 1:9) and to one another (James 5:16), we believe very strongly that we don’t have to live in the mistakes that we make every day until we can get to that booth, and that to us, the gospel is not about us doing something wrong… it is about Jesus doing something right… and about us becoming ALL THAT HE IS because He became all that we were when He died on the cross in our place.

and as we talked through our obvious differences, He couldn’t believe it… He loved the idea of being a part of a place where He didn’t have to go to “confession” every time he made a mistake… he had the biggest smile on his face.

but even though He loved the idea… you could tell that he didn’t quite buy it.

Like it was just a little too easy.

That was a huge reason for the Protestant Reformation in the first place… the Protestant Split from the Roman Catholic Church. The selling of indulgences for the forgiveness of sins. A free gift, that had been monetized. A gift that was for everyone, yet not accessible to all people.

and this verse was crucial in that:

Ephesians 8 - 9:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

If you read the whole section of Ephesians 2:1-10, you will notice that this is the SECOND time in this short set of scriptures that Paul says “its by grace you have been saved.”

I love the way that this says “this is not your own doing.” -

He has to spell out what it means that it is by grace…

YOU DIDN’T EARN IT… THERE IS NO MERIT BY WHICH YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS!!!

people often ask me about this phrase: “born again.” - what does it mean to be “born again” - and that is obviously a COMMON QUESTION, because when Jesus was talking to a man named Nicodemus, and He said to him John 3:3) “you must be born again!” Nicodemus responded like any of us would respond, He said

“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:4)

Because it seems so backwards… really it seems so strange… how can a person be born again? But really, it is the absolute greatest image for what Jesus actually does to us…. Its just like how Paul talks about being dead, and the dead being made alive in Christ.

Birth and death are really the only ways to describe it…

Think about when you were first born… you were in your Mother’s womb. The truest statement that nobody can ever refute is this: You did nothing to earn your life.

The breath in your lungs, a heart that beats inside of your chest. You didn’t work for it, you were handed it. Two people came together, your mother carried you, giving up essentially her own body for 9 months and then many aspects of her life for the years that followed… you had nothing to do with you being made.

There is NOTHING about a child being born that has ANYTHING to do with the child. Life is an amazing image of grace. and that is what makes the idea of “being born” the perfect picture of what happens when Jesus comes into your life.

Jesus did everything… and we did nothing.

We contributed nothing to our first birth, and in the same way, we contribute nothing to be born again in Christ.

Otherwise it wouldn't be “being born”

and what Paul says here is so significant… it is not by your own doing…

but here is where it gets sticky…

A lot of people believe that IF grace really is that great… then why not keep living the way that we want to live, and clinging to grace. But first of all, if you actually are thinking that way, it is proof that you have not comprehended the first 9 verses of Ephesians 2. It is clear that you are still dead in your sins.

Even Martin Luther, who championed the reformation and concept that we are saved by grace alone said this: “We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.” Otherwise it is just a mask… its an act… being poor in Spirit doesn’t mean you stop sinning… it means that you realize you are sinning… it means you realize that you are destroying your eternity, and the lives of others around you… it means you make Jesus Christ the Lord of your life and in order to call Him Lord, you still need to do what He says…

Paul addresses this in Romans… (Romans 6) He says what shall we do, just keep on sinning so that grace can keep abounding? but Paul says NO! BY NO MEANS! and in fact, in the same way that Paul says in Ephesians that we were dead in our sins… He says in Romans, that when we come to Christ… we become DEAD TO OUR SINS. and I understand why this can be a lot to grasp… because you aren’t saved by what you do… but only by what Jesus does… but the evidence of whether or not you are following Jesus is by the FRUIT OF YOUR LIFE.

So though its not by works... its still work.

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This blog is part of a series called "POIEMA" - telling stories and inspirations behind our video "POIEMA" (below) if you enjoy the video, please share it with someone who you think will be blessed by it. 

In early 2016, we began promoting that we wanted to start an internship/ discipleship school… a live in program here in Detroit.

and whenever people would ask me, “what will it be like?” the only thing that I could think to say was “a blank canvas.”

This post is part of a series we are doing called "poiema" - based on the video below (if you enjoyed the video or this post, please share it!):

and I know that it is a bit cliche to say that “Detroit is a blank canvas” - people around here hate that… and maybe Detroit isn’t… but Courage Church most definitely is. Our church is in a place where if you come in, and if you want to try something, and you have the capacity to do it, we will empower you, and do our absolute best to equip you to do it. It is not a machine, where you come here, and are instantly programmed to doing things the way that we do them… yes, we will teach you as much as we can, but we have a place where whatever you have to contribute, we absolutely want and believe there is space for.

So our angle here was, and still is, that this is still a place where you can come, and help be a part of creating… you can help us shape it. If that is something you are interested in being a part of, please reach out to us!

And what we did as our first video promo for the program, was we had our friend Jimmy (who is an AMAZING PAINTER) paint the Petersboro mansion in Midtown… so we went there, and set up, and he painted this broken down mansion, that literally had entire sections missing (it looks like an enormous bulldozer just destroyed half of the mansion.)

But in the video, what Jimmy did was he painted it, exactly as we saw it… he put the holes in it, the giant gaps, etc. So for the first half of the video, he painted what is.

Then, for the second half of the video, he stepped back, looked at it again, then began painting what could be… He started filling in the gaps, he painted a nice stairway… he finished the castle the way that he saw in his mind that it could be.

A castle that FOR YEARS, laid, wasting away. Ruined. Hopeless. Most people figured it would eventually get torn down… but in our video, we dared to dream again for that old castle.

While we were filming, several people walking by came up to us, and looked at the picture… and one man in particular, he looked at the painting, then he looked at the castle, then he looked back at the painting again, and he said to Jimmy: “oh, you finished it. you finished the castle… thats amazing.” then he said this:

“thank you for finishing it, instead of burning it down.”

Because that is what happens to a lot of the old houses here… at one point, somebody decided that they didn’t want to stay there anymore, so they moved out, and it sat. And as it sat, it rotted… people would break in and steal anything of value, and before long the weather would begin to destroy it because everything that protected it had been stolen, and eventually, you have neighborhoods full of historic homes and buildings that people are petitioning to have torn down because of the eyesores and dangers that they had become.

But God has called the church to rebuild the broken places.

Isaiah 58:12 (the Message) says:

“ You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,

rebuild the foundations from out of your past.

You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,

restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,

make the community livable again.

The ESV puts it like this: "You shall be called the repairers of the breach"

That is why we do what we do.

That is why we buy houses that are broken.

That is why we pour our lives into people who can’t give us anything in return.

That is why we give out backpacks, and Christmas’s to families… its why we show up at peoples doorsteps and see if they need anything… it is why we bought the first Courage House, and why we want to fix it, fill it with people, and then get another, and another as the Lord allows.

A little over a year after filming the first video, we went back to Petersboro street,

and that castle that had sat deteriorating for years had years had actually been restored (see the video “poiema”)! They were putting the finishing touches on it, and it looked just like what Jimmy painted!

We aren’t naive enough to think that our little video inspired the mansion to get rebuilt… our city is going through an amazing rebirth, and people are taking ownership of their communities. Still it was so incredible to see it, almost finished. The city is so alive, and the only reason that it has bounced back so quickly in the recent years is because a lot of people decided to see what nobody could see… they saw the castle finished, when everyone else saw it getting torn to the ground.

a match could have solved the problem a whole lot faster… but it would have left the city a bit little more empty.

And to me, there are not many greater images of the gospel.

Seeing hope in a broken down block, that was so contagious that it actually caught on.

Greater things truly are still to be done in our city.

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