In ancient times, the
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world viewed the cross
as a shameful form of capital punishment.
It was a symbol.
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This person has crossed the line.
It might be something similar to the way
that we think
about the electric chair today.
A cross is a very serious symbol.
It's a symbol
of the very graphic reality
of what Christ
did for us, and giving himself up for us.
He laid down his life on the cross.
When I see the cross, I see
all that
Jesus went through to provide forgiveness
for me.
He had his flesh ripped off.
He had his blood spilled.
He was so weak
he couldn't carry this cross.
And it was the worst
kind of public execution
that the Roman officials could devise.
It was it was done publicly.
It was done in a way that
tortured and humiliated the victim.
The way that Jesus was crucified
by Pontius Pilate
was unbelievably savage and brutal.
He's condemned to death,
and then he's forced to carry the cross
to the place
where the execution takes place.
And then he's savagely nailed
to the cross.
The Romans have a
particular kind of now
called a crucifixion nail,
and the nails get hammered
through his wrists into the wood,
and then they tie his feet
together on the bottom of the cross,
and then they hammer another nail
through his shin.
So he's
now physically nailed to the cross
and then he's hoisted up
headfirst, hoisted up.
And then he hangs from the cross.
And it's the most savage
form of punishment you can think of.
It's absolutely brutal and awful.
He was beaten, the hair of his beard
ripped out, a crown of thorns.
Even the shame of carrying his own cross
and going to the place of crucifixion,
and then being on the cross and still
being mocked,
pierced through
and facing
all of the torture that it was.
There was much physical torment
and suffering that Christ endured.
Matthew 2746.
The cry of dereliction My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?
When you understand who that was,
that that uttered that cry,
the eternal Son of God
who never deserved to be forsaken.
You never deserved to know.
One moment
of the father's displeasure
is bearing in himself
the way that I deserve to be treated
for an eternity.
He swallows that up in three hours,
and then you add all of the
the ignominious, shameful
things that he had to accept
on the way
to the cross,
being spit upon, being beaten,
being mocked,
being accused of being worthy of death.
Right? This man deserves to die.
The Sanhedrin says
there's never been a man
who's deserved to die less.
There's never been a man who's deserved
the opposite of death more.
He endured not only the physical agonies
of the crown of thorns
and the thirst
and the flagellation
and the crucifixion,
the nails and all that.
But on the cross
he also endured the full, undiluted fury
of God's wrath that burns against sin.
Even though he knew no sin,
he took our sins
upon himself on the cross
and bore the wrath of God on our behalf.
That's what a cross is.
Lukewarm.
It's not something Christ likes.
There would be no cost
that I would give to follow him.
And that's a lukewarm Christian.
They're not. He's not a Christian.
It's just someone who isn't actively
opposed to Christ.
Happy to receive any blessing
he pours out on them,
but willing to give nothing.
The following.
Lukewarm is scary, too,
to realize that that is you,
the lukewarm
Christian, doesn't really exist.
I mean, I can look back on my life
and say,
I see that in myself
and how I would have claimed
to have been a Christian doing
nothing for the sake of the kingdom.
The term really comes from revelation
chapter three, and Jesus addressed
the church.
Related to Sia,
and he talks about those
who are lukewarm as being
neither hot nor cold.
And there's so many Christians,
quote unquote, in this country who are.
And I was there. So I mean, that was me.
I was not hot.
I was not cold.
I was just doing nothing.
The Bible talks
about the fruit of your life.
So when you look at a tree
and you see a maple leaf,
you know it's a maple tree.
When you see a tree and you see an apple,
you know it's an apple tree.
Because the fruit that the tree produces
tells you what kind of tree it is.
So when we look at our lives,
we see, am I producing the kind of fruit
that shows I'm living for Jesus Christ?
Does my life resemble
wanting to know God, to follow him
according to His Word?
Not just according to what I think?
And am I willing to submit
to God and His Word?
Some people say they follow God,
but they throw out half of the Bible.
So then they make a God of their own
making in their own liking.
That's not a Christian.
When Jesus said, take up the cross
2000 years ago, people knew
exactly what he meant
because they had seen crosses in action.
A cross was a place of death,
a cross was an instrument of execution.
And Jesus was saying,
you must be willing to die for the gospel
if called upon to do so.
None of us really ponders the meaning
of the cross as deeply as we should.
For Christians, both
in ancient times and today,
the cross represents
the very epicenter of our faith
in our world today,
the cross has become,
for many people, a form of art,
or maybe even a good luck charm.
Before I was
saved, it was just a symbol,
just something that I imagined.
And I knew that
it was supposed to comfort me,
but I didn't understand.
Nowadays, when people think of crosses,
they think of something
that you just maybe
put on a pendant around your neck, or
you might find it in a church here
or there.
It's just kind of a symbol of
a loose symbol of Christianity,
whatever that means, or symbol of peace
and love, that kind of thing.
But that's that's not what a cross is.
But he was pierced for our transgress
oceans.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
Upon him was the chastisement
that brought us peace.
And with his wounds we are healed.
Verse six.
All we like sheep have gone astray.
We have turned every one to his own way.
And the Lord has laid upon him
the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53 portrays
in very simple terms,
and a very clear fashion,
that Christ was nailed
on the cross to pay for sin.
Scripture often uses
the expression of the cross
as a kind of summary
for the whole gospel,
so that when
Paul speaks about preaching the cross,
the cross of Christ,
he's talking about
more than just the wooden
beams and splitters.
He's talking about
the atoning work of Christ.
It'll mean different things
to different people.
There are unbelievers or just,
you know, merely religious unbelievers
who who have cross
earrings, cross necklaces,
cross bracelets,
even churches
that don't preach the gospel
that are pretty much apostate,
they have a cross on their church
or cross is sprinkled about,
and a lot of people use it
just because it's a statement
that says I profess to be a Christian.
The image of the cross
has been commercialized
in in our culture.
I think in the last 30 years, marketing
has just decided
we're going to plunder
whatever we can
in this Christian subculture.
And so if they like
the contemporary music
that sounds just like the world's
contemporary music
will present,
that will hype that up
with just with the Christian lyrics
and with the, you know,
a few interviews with the band
that sound somewhat spiritual
and things like that.
If we can get them to embody
certain icons or let's do that.
And one of those things
has been the cross itself,
whether it's jewelry
or whether it's an embossed
cross on a Bible cover or whatever else.
In many cases, it's innocent, right?
In many cases, it's
the cross means a lot to me.
And so when I have choices
about what
earrings I'll wear or necklaces
I'll wear or tattoos
I'll get or whatever.
These are the things that I want to show
people who I am in society.
You'll see celebrities
who obviously are not Christian
wearing the cross
like just a piece of jewelry
that actually goes against them,
that they are not indeed saved
because of how they live.
It shows that the cross to them
is just a piece of jewelry.
It's not a deeply ingrained
symbol of Christian unity.
Some people can use those things
as a crutch.
This is my jewelry.
This is my statement of who I am
as opposed to
this is who Jesus Christ is.
This is who God is.
This is who we are in light of God's law.
This is what Christ has done
to overcome who we are
and what we must suffer.
You are witnesses to a martyr row
where we get the term martyr,
somebody who stands up and testifies
to the truth of the scriptures
and the truth of the gospel
and suffered for it.
Taking up your cross
means to lose yourself,
to deny
yourself, to tell yourself no,
no.
My life priorities have been inverted.
I'll leave you for Christ.
Now, the problem we have,
we still want to save our life.
There's still a little bit of our life
that we want to save.
We want to hold back from Jesus,
want to save that for ourselves
so that we're not taking up
the whole cross.
We're living with a divided mind.
There's no remedy.
There's no further atonement.
It's a hopeless situation
for those people.
And what makes it
so frightening is Jesus says
that will be the case for multitudes.
Many people who
who think they're believers,
who profess to be believers,
who probably go to church every Sunday
and yet live their lives
under their own lordship
and don't give Christ
his rightful place
in their hearts,
and they will be
consigned to hell forever.
I have a saying that I
that I like to say often.
I said, you know, it's easy
to be like Jesus
until you have to be like Jesus.
Part of our
affections are still in the world,
part of our affections, all for Christ.
But we don't want to take up that cross,
because we know that taking up that cross
is going to mean exactly what Jesus said.
It means I'm going to have to lose
my life,
and we don't want to do that.
We don't want to do it.
Christ said to his disciples,
if you want to be my follower,
you have to take up your cross.
He was saying to us
that we need to enter into his suffering
not for the reasons of atonement,
because His atonement
paid the penalty for our sin,
but as followers of him,
we have to understand that
the pathway to glory
that he blazed involves suffering.
And so in this life we will suffer.
Scripture says,
all who live godly in Christ
Jesus will suffer persecution,
and suffering
is part of the Christian life.
The whole epistle of First Peter
talks about this, that we suffer
now, and Paul says
that the sufferings of this present
time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory that is to be revealed,
and that should be the perspective
of a Christian that we willingly accept
the sufferings of this life,
knowing that Christ suffered for us,
and therefore it's
fitting and reasonable
that we would suffer for him as well.
A Christian life that costs nothing
is worth nothing.
Modern Christianity
is dangerous, silly, easy.
It's too convenient.
There's this easy to believe
ism that people teach
and preach and promote.
And just saying I'm a Christian
and therefore I'm I'm saved.
But there is no cost.
There is no commitment.
There is no surrender.
There's just words, empty words.
Our culture in Western culture,
everything's easy.
Everything is convenient.
And that has seeped into the church.
What am I really doing
to surrender my life to Christ?
What is the cost of following Christ?
Not many people are considering the cost
of what it means to follow after Christ,
and that's what Christianity needs today.
So when he says,
if anyone wishes to come after me
right there,
that's a call to be a disciple.
Now, disciple and a Christian
are the same thing.
And you can see that primarily
John chapter 12,
where Jesus will say, verse 25,
if you don't hate your life,
you're not saved.
And so you take that text
and put it together with this one.
We're talking about salvation.
So what does it mean to deny yourself?
It's a synonym for repentance.
It's a turning from self as a authority,
as the one in charge of my life,
even to the point of death.
If I have to you,
that's the taking up your cross.
No one would have heard him
say that and think, law,
my mother in law is my cross,
which means night.
She's wonderful,
but my illness is my cross
or my spouse is my cross.
Nobody hearing him would have thought
that it wouldn't
have even come to their mind
that he's
using some kind of imagery
for a difficulty in your life.
When you take up your cross,
you're on your way to your execution.
So he's saying,
if you're going to follow me,
you as you is over, it's done.
Finished.
Now, instead of following you,
you're going to follow me.
That's what it means to believe in him.
So this is all synonyms
for repent and believe.
Somebody is just sinned greatly.
They've done a lot of bad things.
They know
they've done a lot of bad things.
They are convicted.
They are guilty.
They are just
the kind of person
that Jesus came to die on the cross for.
Jesus did not come to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance.
It is not those who are healthy
who need a physician, but the sick.
And your sin is not greater
than the infinite righteousness
of the Son of God.
The great examples,
that is the Samaritan woman at the well,
John four.
Here we have a serial adulteress.
And what I love about
how Jesus handled it, he not only dealt
with her current adultery,
he went back and dug up the previous five
adulterous relationships
that she's been in.
Jesus that you said correctly,
you have no husband.
Matter of fact, you have five
the gospel is such that
it digs up every day, every day.
So test it to by the woman
at the well who herself
ran to her fellow Samaritans
and said to them,
come see a man who taught me
everything I ever did.
This is my plea to that person right now
watching this
who thinks they're too far gone.
I urge you to come see a man
who knows everything you've ever done.
He knows it
and is willing to forgive you
not only for everything you've ever done,
but for everything you ever will do.
If only you will come to faith in him
and in his sacrificial, vicarious work
on the cross
to pay the sin death that you cannot pay.
So there's someone watching this.
I would encourage you
to read John
for the story of the woman at the well,
and understand that the same Jesus
who told her about
everything she ever did
knows everything
you've done
and died on the cross
to forgive your says,
if only you will come to faith in him.
Mark chapter eight, verse 34.
He summoned the crowd with his disciples
and said to them,
if anyone wishes to come after me,
he must deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save
his life will lose it.
Whoever loses his life
for my sake in the Gospels will save it.
For what does it profit
a man
to gain the whole world
and forfeit his soul?
For what will a man give
in exchange for his soul?
The context of that text is important
because it's very easy for people
to treat that text like a fortune cookie
and talk about it
as this is deeper life teaching.
This is
how you grow in the Christian life.
That's what this text is about.
But when you read it in context,
you realize he's
actually talking about salvation,
because we're talking about forfeiting
your soul,
gaining your soul,
giving something
in exchange for your soul.
We're talking about
Judgment Day in verse 38.
We're not talking about
sanctification here.
And he's summoning
the crowd and his disciples.
So he's got non-Christians
there in the city of Assyria.
Philippi, a hotbed for demonic ideology.
Number one, he's got his disciples, but
11 of them are saved.
One of them is a make believer.
So you've got every kind of person
in their midst right there.
When God saved me,
all of a sudden
the sin
I used to love, the sin I used to enjoy,
it didn't taste good anymore.
All of a sudden, I began to hate my sin.
I didn't want that sin anymore.
I wanted to please God.
That turning from sin and turning to God.
I was repenting. I didn't even know it.
You know, I was broken over my sin.
I didn't want to do it anymore. I.
I wanted to please God.
And when when people that I,
longstanding friends would ask me,
why aren't
why aren't you coming out with
us anymore?
The only answer I can give them was
I just found something better.
For if we go on sinning willfully
after receiving
the knowledge of the truth, there
no longer remains the sacrifice for sins.
This is an admonition to believers verse.
He's not talking to unbelievers here.
If we go on sinning willfully
unrepentantly after
receiving the knowledge of the truth,
there no longer
remains a sacrifice for us.
So that does, you know, good.
The danger of that reality
is your self deceived
and you begin to hear your conscience,
and then you,
you know, begin
to kind of lose your bearings
as to like what's right and what's wrong.
No one who is born of God practices sin
because his see that is,
God's seed abides in him,
and he cannot practice sin
because he is born of God.
So the person who is truly regenerate
does not practice sin.
Person who would in
whom God's Holy Spirit
truly dwells, does not sin willfully.
When whenever I'm struggling with sin,
whenever I'm faced
with the decision to sin,
assuming that I can actually
think about it before I act,
one of the best things
I can possibly remember
is that if I sin now,
that's going to be a sin
that God the Son took for me
on that cross,
because I'm not going to lose myself
and I am saved.
And if I sin that that is a sin, that
Jesus Christ took the wrath of God, that
I should be in hell for an eternity
for that one sin
and if I had that mindset.
That if I do this, I'm
just the person he had to take from me.
That's enough
for me to turn away from that.
If you are a believer,
you do not
go on sinning willfully
because of first John three nine.
It says you cannot
because the Holy Spirit
dwells within you,
so you cannot, as a believer,
live a habitually sinful lifestyle,
a lifestyle, a willful, continuous,
unrepentant sinning that is not to say
that even a believer
cannot be gripped by some habitual sin,
but within the believer,
even in a habitual sin
that they're struggling with,
there's going to be
that conviction of the Holy Spirit
that's going to drive them
to repentance every single time.
Willful thing is unrepentant sinning.
And according to first John three nine,
that's impossible
for the person
to who has truly been born of God.
The parable of the soils
talks about people
who, you know, the
the seed springs up
and you think it's a plant,
you think it's a Christian plant,
but the cares of the world
take it down or or the allure of sin.
And the reality
that that plant
is not actually a Christian plant
becomes clear. So.
So the risk could be
sharing your conscience.
Or if you're truly not safe,
the risk is being self deceived
and entering into eternal health
when you die. So pretty high risk.
I was getting deeper and deeper into it,
thinking that it was noble,
thinking that it was godly.
And I'd already been feeling
drawn to this order
called the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn.
And they happened
to have a cross in their symbol.
So to me,
I justify joining this occult order
because I thought as a Christian,
because there's a cross in it,
it must be okay.
If you come up to a lot of people
and say, so, tell me,
are you a Christian? Yes.
How did you get saved?
They never mentioned Jesus.
They never mention his death
on the cross.
They never mentioned his resurrection.
They never mentioned repentance
and faith in Jesus
and his person and his work
and what he accomplished on the cross.
They usually gravitate to well,
I did this.
I went forward at an altar call.
I prayed the sinner's prayer.
I asked Jesus in my heart.
I made a decision for Christ.
You know, millions of things
that they did.
No mention of the Savior.
You just say a prayer, invite
Jesus into your heart and you're okay.
You're saved
and nothing could ever happen.
And it's just such a superficial view
of what is involved
in this exchange of my life for Christ.
He took my sin. I get his righteousness.
If I can't live that out and love
righteousness and love Christ
and have no basis thinking.
I'm a true Christian
and I think the church is filled
with people like that
who've given lip service to Christ,
who've invited him into their hearts,
but they haven't given him a place there.
He has no influence there.
They live their lives as they want,
and they think they're all right
because someone told them
that as they prayed this prayer,
they were guaranteed heaven forever.
And Scripture
just doesn't know anything like that.
Scripture says.
In fact,
if anyone doesn't love the Lord
Jesus Christ, let him be a curse
which tells us that the real
designation of who is a true believer
is the answer to the question,
do you love Christ if you truly love him?
And Jesus said,
if you love me,
you'll keep my commandments.
So if your love for Christ is visible
in the way you live
as someone who lives a superficial life
filled with disobedience and
fleshly pursuits and selfish desires,
that person has no business thinking
that he's a true Christian.
I used to always think one day I'll
I'll, you know,
get right with God,
or one day I'll do what I know is right.
But for now, it just seems too hard.
But the more you send, it
snowballs and the more and more
and the weight gets heavier and heavier.
And so the enemy is a liar.
And those things,
they might seem glittery and shiny
and beautiful and fun in the moment,
but they lead to death.
Sin leads to death.
People often
say that they're Christians
and unfortunately are not.
And a lot of times that has to do with
look how good I am.
And they just look at the externals,
but they don't look at the heart.
It's it's not about your good works.
It's not about how many times
I've read the Bible.
It's not how many times I pray a day.
It's not how often I go to church.
If I go into a garage,
it doesn't make me a car.
If I go into a restaurant,
it doesn't make me food.
Well, going into a church
does not make you a Christian.
You can't earn your way to God.
So praying, going to church
Sunday, Wednesday night, chicken dinners,
all those things that I grew up with it.
Maybe you still love
hearing great music
and really being moved by that music.
None of that saves anyone.
It is the height of human arrogance
to think that we can
somehow overcome the debt that our sins
have earned,
the debt
that we owe to the eternal, infinite God.
We can perform to satisfy
God's wrath and to attain his holiness.
There is nothing that we can do
our works.
Bible says
Isaiah chapter 64 are as filthy rags
before a thrice holy God.
And that is a very gross description
in the Hebrew.
We have no hope of
satisfying God's wrath,
apart from the atoning
and proprietary work
that Christ did on the cross.
There is no amount of good works
that we can perform to satisfy
God's wrath.
God is infinitely holy.
He is infinitely just right.
And as he told Moses
when he declared his glory
to him in Exodus 34,
that he would
by no means
allow the guilty to go unpunished.
So when somebody is forgiven
by God,
God just doesn't say,
okay, I'm going to pretend you didn't sin
because he is infinitely just
every sin
that we commit must be paid for in full.
And we have two options.
Since every sin is an infinite offense
to an infinite holy God,
and since hell doesn't
sanctify us and we keep sinning and hell
it fuels our eternal destruction.
In Colossians chapter two,
we learned that our sin
actually accrues a debt,
and it talks
about a legal debt
that goes against our account.
And when we think about
what God did through Christ on the cross,
the terms they use are
that that debt was paid.
We can either pay for that sin ourselves
in the lake of fire forever and ever,
or place
our faith
in his finished work on the cross.
He then gives to us, or imputes
to us, or reckons to our account
his perfect and infinite righteousness.
And because of that,
because he takes our place on the cross,
we then are able to go free,
to be forgiven, to be justified,
to be reconciled by God
through the redemption
which he accomplished on the cross.
That the Old
Testament fits into three basic
divisions the law, the writings,
and the prophets.
We see, anticipate
portions of the Messiah suffering,
including
suffering on a cross
in all three of those divisions,
for example, in the law,
in Numbers, chapter 21,
we have the children of Israel
in the wilderness,
and God judges them
by sending fiery serpents.
And then Moses creates a bronze serpent
on a pole.
And those who look up to
the serpent are saved.
And in John chapter three verse 14,
we see that that's actually
in anticipation of the fact
that the Son of Man will be lifted up,
and all those who look to him
will be saved.
And then in the writings,
which includes the Psalms,
we have Psalms like Psalm 22, where
so much of what David wrote
there is quoted
even by Jesus on the cross.
It's an anticipation by David
of how the Son of David, the greater
son of David, will one day suffer,
including things like,
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And then when we look to the prophets,
we have
passages like Isaiah 53 and Zechariah 12
and other passages that anticipate
and predict the Messiah's suffering,
including the kind of suffering that fits
execution via crucifixion.
There is nothing that God doesn't know.
He knows all things.
Think back to when Adam and Eve
first sinned.
God.
Instead of just clothing them
with cotton or leaves, he made garments.
It says, of skin.
Whose skin was it?
It was the skin of an animal.
So that was a foreshadowing
of the necessity
of blood
being spilled for sin to pay for sin,
because Scripture says
the life is in the blood.
So when Jesus came, people ask,
well, why did Jesus have to die?
Well, he had to die
because we needed a perfect human
who never sinned without blemish
to pay
for the sins
of all those who would believe in him.
So when Christ died on the cross,
it made sure that every single
thought, deed, or action is forgiven
for all of those who believe
and trust in Jesus Christ.
Jesus couldn't go and prick his finger
and shed a drop of blood,
and everybody gets to go to heaven.
That's not how it works.
Blood shed is a
synonym for suffering a violent death.
So way back in the book of Leviticus
and chapter 16 and 17,
you have the day of the tomb,
and then you have discussion
about the meaning of the blood.
And God tells Moses that it is
the life that is in the flesh,
that when shed takes the life
meaning of the life that's in it.
So blood shed is a synonym
for death, a violent death.
The Bible tells us very clearly
that Christ was sacrificed
before the foundation of the world.
In other words,
this was always God's plan.
If God is infinite in knowledge
and wisdom, he's outside of time.
We can't limit God
by how we think
in the eternal plan of God.
He knew that when he created us,
he knew that we would fall.
He had a plan worked out in eternity.
The Bible teaches us
that God has an all encompassing plan
for everything whatsoever
that will ever come to pass.
It's called his decree.
A good text on that would be Isaiah 46,
verses nine
through 11,
where God declares himself
to be the only God,
the God who has declared
the end from the beginning
and bringing about all his good purpose.
You even see in the book of revelation
the last book of the Bible,
John, saying that Jesus is the lamb
who was slain
before the foundation of the world,
which shows you
that there was intentionality
before the universe was created,
before heaven, before earth,
before anything was created.
God had a plan to bring himself
the most glory
through Christ and the cross.
So the Old Testament
anticipates
that this is the way
that the Messiah will suffer.
And in fact,
even Jesus himself
says that he must suffer this way
in order to fulfill the scriptures.
First Corinthians one verse 18 reads,
for the word of the cross is foolishness
to those who are perishing
before Christ.
We are all perishing.
We are all dead in our sin.
We are all sinners prior to Christ.
Man and his rebellion
thinks that God's wisdom is foolishness
and thinks that the preaching
of the cross,
the preaching of Christ,
that the gospel is foolishness.
But God says the wisdom of man
is foolishness.
But the verse continues to say,
but to us who are being saved,
it is the power of God.
See, the cross has power.
The cross has the power to save those
who are perishing.
So we have to decide
who are we going to believe?
Are we going to believe
God and His wisdom,
or the world and their wisdom?
Because the two are mutually exclusive.
The world looks at the wisdom of God,
says that's foolishness.
And the gospel, the cross of Christ.
It's irrelevant.
And God looks at the world
and all of their wisdom.
And he says, that is foolishness.
Are we going to believe it?
Are we going to submit to it?
That's the crux of the matter
is what you know, what did God say?
And will we submit to what he said?
There are lots of young people today
who don't even know what the Bible is.
They don't know what sin is.
I mean, generation Z,
less than 9% of them go to church.
They're very, very secularized.
And so for them, man determines truth
because that's the foundation
that we're
giving through the public
education system.
If you went to them and said,
I want to tell you some good news,
Jesus died on the cross for you.
What?
Who's Jesus?
What do you mean, die?
Why do you die for your sin? Sin?
What do you mean by sin?
How can you explain the gospel
unless you start in Genesis
to help them understand
that there is a God
who created us, who created all things,
and he created the first man and woman,
and the first man rebelled against God.
And we're all descendants of that man.
That's why
we are in rebellion against God.
We have a problem for sin,
to define all the terms, to explain
who we are, where we came from,
that we have a problem
and what the solution is.
You have to start in Genesis,
a man brought in a death in the world.
So a man has to pay the penalty for sin,
where all descendants
of that one man, Adam.
So we're all sinners,
so we can't pay the penalty.
So God stepped into history
in the person of His son,
to be born
of a virgin, to die on a cross,
to be the perfect,
sinless son of man,
the God-Man God that man
so that he could pay
the penalty for our sin
because he conquered death.
One of the lessons of the cross
is it teaches us
to examine ourselves,
to see if we're really in the faith.
What Jesus says really,
at the end of the sermon on the Mount,
what righteousness really looks like.
And he starts with commending people
who are humble and broken
and realizing
that they're sinful and confessing it.
And yet he ends then
with saying in the judgment,
many people will say to him, Lord, Lord,
didn't we do this?
Didn't we do that?
And he will say, depart from me.
I never knew you.
That is, I think
perhaps one of the most
terrifying passages in Scripture.
Right up there next to our God
is a consuming fire.
And it's a horrifying thing
to fall into the hands of the living God.
That's what it's talking about,
is final judgment
for people
who lived their lives
thinking they were okay
because they said a prayer, or they
they kept up
the facade of Christian belief,
but they really didn't in their hearts,
own Jesus Christ or know him.
And he will say at the judgment,
I never knew you.
There are many today
who think that
because they prayed a prayer,
walked and I all signed
a card,
had some sort of experience in their past
that no matter how they have lived since
or how they are living in the present,
that because they added Jesus
on to their life at some point,
that they have eternal fire insurance
and that's the way they treat the gospel.
They treat the gospel as sort of, I, I,
I did that, I've been there
and now I can live however I want.
That's not biblical Christianity.
When I was in college,
I just felt like an empty person.
I really had no identity.
And again,
I still would have said I was a Christian
while living like the devil.
I tried meth and heroin that summer.
I was going to raves and parties
and got myself
in very dangerous situations,
just extremely empty on the inside.
Evaluating myself.
Back then, it was an absolutely
horrible, wicked human being.
And then one day, supernaturally
using radio
waves in the air and
causing static or whatever
on a station that normally comes in
is completely providential.
It's not miraculous.
I was driving, delivering packages
and stations
that I listened
to were no longer coming in,
and I got mad and I got frustrated,
but I had a job to do.
So I just hit the seek
button on the radio
and as it scrolled through
and didn't bother to stop anywhere,
it landed on a station and
the very next words were.
Well, I can prove to you
there's a God,
but you're not going to believe it.
Once you have the Holy Spirit
living in you, click.
And then it kept seeking.
So I went on to the next thing
and it didn't stop there.
Again,
on some level,
I started panicking like
I wanted to get that back.
But do you mean you can prove to me
there's a God? That's what I mean.
That was the moment
that he began to use the gospel
to change my life.
That that was the moment during
those years, college
was a very sinful time of life
for myself.
And the hardest part
about thinking back on
that as a believer now is knowing that
during that time, the whole time
I knew what I was doing was wrong.
It's like,
I know what I'm doing is wrong right now,
but I wanted to please my flesh
that badly.
I can recall times
walking into sin willfully
asking for forgiveness afterwards,
knowing that I was going to go
and do it again.
That's where I was.
I was so steeped in myself what I wanted
and praise God for his mercy
and being forgiven for that.
But sadly,
it's like I knew where I was at.
I knew something was wrong,
I knew I was in sin, but you know,
the flesh is just,
you know, outside of Christ.
It's you can't really know any better.
That's what you want.
People want to avoid God's wrath
because God is a good God.
No, it is God's goodness
that will be the reason
you experience his wrath.
But God is also loving.
He's provided a way to escape his wrath
through sending His Son,
the Lord Jesus Christ,
to be the punishment, to be
the substitute that we need.
I grew up in the Philippines.
My family are Catholics
and very religious.
So we go to Catholic Church every Sunday.
When I was nine years old,
my mom started bringing us to
charismatic church,
and there are everywhere in my small town
in the Philippines.
When they asked me,
I would say that I am saved,
but deep in my heart I know I was not.
I don't know why
I thought highly of myself
that I could meet God halfway.
It's like it's not only God who has to do
good things,
like I need to do good things as well,
and I know I can meet his standards.
And then one Sunday,
a preacher
who visit the church
and he preaches the verse Ephesians
two eight.
It is by grace
you have been saved through faith
and looking back that God has opened
my spiritual mind
to that truth of that verse,
that it is only through Christ
that my good works
will not bring me anywhere.
When we think
about conversion
from a biblical standpoint,
what we're talking about
is a total transfer
mission, a supernatural work of God,
whereby the Spirit of God regenerates
the sinner,
gives the sinner new life,
takes a dead heart
and makes it live,
opens blind eyes to the truth of who
Christ is.
And the result of that transformation
is that the sinner
now has new affections
and a new allegiance.
Instead of loving his sin,
he loves his Savior,
and instead of being a slave to sin,
he is a slave to Christ.
When Jesus addressed
the church at Laodicea,
I mean they were they were safe.
They were secure in their riches
and everything they had,
and they were clinging to that
as if like they were content almost.
And how many people in this country
could say the same thing?
We don't really come under threat
for following Christ.
So sure, we can all claim Christ, right?
Everyone can be a Christian,
and we can just go on living
like the rest of the world.
Now the cross really represents
Jesus Christ
paying for my sin in my place,
that God would love us so much
that he would send His Son
to bear my sin.
And when I think about my sin and my life
and all the ways
that God has been so good to me,
so merciful to me,
and yet
thinking of the grossness of my sin,
but the amazing
character of God displayed on the cross,
that he would bear that in my place.
It's so beyond humbling.
It was Jesse Ryle,
the 19th century preacher,
who said that
the thief on the cross was saved,
that all might have hope
until the last moment.
But he said,
but only one of the thieves were saved,
so that none might presume,
and so that counsels
each one not to put it off,
not to say, well,
the thief teaches me I can delay.
No, only one of the thieves with savings.
You've got to do it right now.
That man's life was worth nothing.
That man's life was spent
in the sin and wickedness
for which he was suffering as a criminal.
And Jesus looks at him and says, today
you will be with me in Paradise.
The Lord Jesus,
remember me
when you come into your kingdom.
I'm flinging
myself
upon the mercy of the King of heaven
who will come into his kingdom
as surely as he's
hanging right next to me now.
And that's it.
That's the appeal of a good conscience
in faith that Christ says,
the one who comes to me
all in no wise cast out.
You come to me in simple faith
with nothing in your hands,
and I will supply everything
that you couldn't.
The law of God will come looking for you,
and the law will find me,
and it will be satisfied.
It won't come looking for you anymore,
because it will have everything
that it needs.
Justly to be satisfied in your place.
That's what it is.
That's substitutionary atonement.
That's the Savior.
And no works, no rituals, no rites,
no mantras, no recitations.
Faith alone.
God made him who knew no sin.
Paul says to be sin on our behalf
so that we might become
the righteousness of God in him.
And what that means is,
is Jesus, though sinless,
was treated by the father on the cross
as if he had sinned and committed
all the sins of all those
who would ever be saved.
And they were all poured on him
when he was on the cross,
and he received the wrath of God
to pay the penalty
for all who had believe.
And so that's what the cross was about.
In Romans chapter three verse 25,
it says that are speaking of Jesus,
whom God displayed
publicly as a propitiation in his blood.
Propitiation is a big theological word.
But the Greek word Erasmus,
it carries
the idea of appeasement, of satisfaction,
and in the context of our sins,
in the context
in which the Bible uses it.
Jesus was our propitiation in that
he took upon himself the due
penalty that our sins have earned.
And God's wrath was poured out not on us,
but poured out on his Son.
And in so doing Jesus propitiate it.
The wrath of God.
He appeased the wrath of God.
He's satisfied God's wrath.
And so that's what we mean
when we say
that Jesus was a propitiation
for our sins.
The heart of God is such
that he knows we're wretched.
He knows this.
This is the God who not only knows
you, he created you.
How can you know something
more intimately
than that?
You created it
for the person who out there,
who thinks they're so far gone,
they don't understand that God's grace
is an outflow of his character,
which God by nature cannot betray.
He cannot betray his own character.
He cannot betray his own nature.
He not only is gracious,
he is grace.
He not only is loving, he is love.
I think that I'm so grateful
that the Lord, you know, saved me.
It shows his mercy.
And I know that because he's merciful
and he's a loving God, that
nobody goes to hell unjustly.
Now, a lot of Christians
have a hard time with hell.
They don't want to talk about it
because it just sounds so
mean to other people.
But I always say,
if you know
God's character,
he is never unjust because he's perfect.
He's never unjust to
anybody, anytime, anywhere.
So nobody will be in hell unjustly,
even though it's uncomfortable
to think about, God's
justice has to be served.
But he also is merciful.
I can look over a period of time
and tell that my desires had changed
when the realization sank in that
I was forgiven because I can look back.
And there was.
For some reason, I started to hate sin.
One night in my studio apartment,
I was just walking across my apartment
and I was demonically attacked
and I collapsed to the floor on my knees
and I heard myself cry out,
Jesus Christ, save me!
And in that moment,
I had the peace
that I'd been looking for my entire life.
I was delivered from that demonic attack
just like that,
and I knew that
it was the God of the Bible.
The father,
the son, and the Holy Spirit
who had saved me in that moment,
who had set me free.
I grew up in a small town
next to a swamp, and I was Greek
Orthodox and Roman Catholic,
and that was a very works based system.
And so I was involved in the Orthodox
Church, and I was serving
as an altar boy.
I'd have the incense
and I'd be walking around the church.
I'd be holding
large golden crosses and think, I'm
going to heaven.
This is my ticket to heaven.
But it was one day we
asked our Greek priest
about the Book of Revelation,
and he looked at us
and said,
I will never teach you that book.
You said, why?
Why won't you?
Why don't you teach us about the Bible?
And he said, well, it'll scare you.
And he said, what
if a priest can't
teach us about the Bible?
Then why are we even going to church?
The significance
of the cross to me in my life
is it just radically changed me.
You know,
I just grew up non-religious, professing
Catholic family was just pagan,
just lost,
didn't know anything about God,
didn't know anything about the Bible.
And it wasn't
until I understood
what Jesus did on the cross
and how he bore my sins
in his body on the tree,
and how he suffered in my place
as my substitute,
that my life radically changed.
I mean, like overnight, I got saved.
Ensley became an avid student,
an avid reader,
an avid studier of the Bible.
Just overnight, my life changed.
I, I became different.
It did.
It wasn't just behavior modification,
it was life change.
It basically made me into a new person.
It gave me a new awareness of God,
a whole new world view,
a whole new purpose for living,
new drives, new
ambitions, new goals, new everything.
As Paul says,
it changes you into a new creature
and old things pass away
and all things become new.
So that's what the cross did to me.
I was,
present in the Astrological Society
at the time,
and I started to get a compulsion to go
to church,
and I say a compulsion
because I didn't want to go to church
because I had no interest in church.
I start reading the Bible
because I thought,
if I am not doing astrology
and I'm going to church,
I guess I'll just read the Bible.
You know,
I just thought it would make sense.
So I started with Matthew
and I'm reading the passage
where Jesus is on the boat and the storm
comes up
and the disciples are scared
and they wake him up and he rebukes
AC in the wind,
which of course immediately obeys.
And then he tells his disciples,
you know, where is your faith? You.
You have a little faith.
And that passage just grabbed me,
and I kept reading it
over and over again.
And as I was reading it
for the first time, I understood who
he was.
I understood
that I had been going away from
God my whole life, that my spiritual path
was completely against God.
And and I understood
it would have led me to hell.
And I understood that he had died for me.
And so I turned my life over to Christ.
And I knew right away I was
I was a different person.
It was very clear.
It was immediate.
And here I told
people, I'm
not interested in Christianity.
I don't want to be a Christian.
You know?
And I thought, now I am a Christian.
I'm not what I wanted to be,
but here I am. I am one of.
My own conversion,
one of the first sermons I ever heard,
as a new Christian was,
sermon on the gospel from Isaiah 53.
And before that,
I had no clue
that Christ was in the Old Testament
in any way,
or that the Old Testament talked
about Christ's atoning work.
But Isaiah 53 is such a clear picture
of what happened at the cross
that I would say
one of the most important chapters
in all of Scripture.
It's a pivotal discussion
because what it does is describe
the reason for the cross,
and it is the definitive proof
that Christ's death on the cross
was a penal substitution.
In other words,
he was vicariously bearing the penalty
of others sins.
He gives us credit for his righteousness,
and we get the reward for it,
even though he didn't deserve to die.
And we certainly don't
deserve his righteousness.
But that's the way the atonement works.
And if it's anything
other than a penal substitution,
it isn't a full atonement.
It leaves us with something
to do, some example to follow,
or some righteousness
to produce of our own.
But because the cross is what it is,
a penal substitution, Christ
has not only fully paid
the price for our sins,
but also fully fulfilled all of the legal
requirements of the law
for righteousness for us.
So we get the righteousness
he took the sin.
And that's the gospel in a nutshell.
We can't trust in our own goodness.
We have to trust in Jesus Christ
and what he's done alone for salvation.
That's why we say
we've been saved by grace through faith.
It's not of ourselves.
It's a gift of God
so that no 1st May boast.
That's from Ephesians chapter two, verses
eight through ten.
And then in verse ten, God says,
he is going to create in us a new work.
He uses the term of a craftsman.
He says we will be his craftsmanship
created in Christ for good works.
We look at the storyline of the Bible
from Genesis to Revelation.
It's interesting that biblical history
begins really with two trees.
There's the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil,
and there's the tree of life.
And the first of those trees
represents sin,
because it was
by disobeying God
and eating from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil
that Adam and Eve fell and cast
the entire human race into
the tree of life represents salvation,
and as a result of man's sin,
he was cut off from the tree of life,
cut off
from the presence of God,
cut off from salvation.
And yet,
when we go
to the end of the Bible
to revelation 21 and 22,
we find the tree of life there,
and we find that
there are people
who have access to the tree of life.
And so the question is, how can those
who have been condemned because of sin
have access to salvation?
And the answer to that,
almost right in the middle of the story
is the cross, this third tree.
And that tree represents
substitution, right?
So a tree that represents sin,
that casts all of humanity
into separation
from God and into condemnation.
How is it that fallen
mankind can have access to salvation?
It's through the cross.
So the story of salvation
is the story of three trees,
one the fall, the second forgiveness,
and the third eternal life forever
in the presence of God.
For those who are in
the thief on the cross is a classic
display of grace.
It gives hope to every one of us,
because we all pray for
our family members
who are resistant and friends
who are resistant to the gospel.
And we all hold out the hope that
as long
as there's life
and breath in an individual,
there is hope for repentance
and faith in the gospel.
Because that man came
to the very end of his life,
nothing in
his life
would have testified to the notion
that he would be in heaven.
And yet,
because he met the Savior that day,
and because God gave him grace to
to see what was happening,
he responded in faith and crisis.
Today you'll be with me in Paradise.
Everyone who draws breath on this earth
was born a sinner.
We are born with a sin nature.
We are sinners by birth, by nature
and by choice and by our actions.
So we have no righteousness of our own.
We must have the righteousness
of someone else.
And his name is Jesus.
♪ O come, ♪
♪ Emmanuel, And ransom ♪
♪ captive Israel, ♪
♪ That mourns ♪
♪ in lonely ♪
♪ exile here ♪
♪ Until the Son of God ♪
♪ appear. ♪
♪ Rejoice! ♪
♪ Emmanuel ♪
♪ shall come to thee, ♪
♪ O Israel. ♪
♪ Rejoice! Rejoice! ♪
♪ Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. ♪