Salvation Through the Ages - Part 2 — Westlake Bible Fellowship

0:00 The wonder of salvation

Well, morning, everyone. Good morning. Lovely to be together on this beautiful autumn day, and thanks to the people who have worked so hard to provide this lovely hospitality. And we are grappling with a very, very large subject, and I confess I feel a little bit sometimes like I'm wrestling with the Kraken, you know? There are just so many topics to be covered, but one of the things that so encourages my heart as I studied the Bible is to see how God maximizes the blessing. He

He takes a little truth, and then it grows, and then it grows some more, and then it makes another connection, and another. And finally, I realized that the Bible is a body of truth, and everything is connected to everything else, right? It's the ultimate hyperlinked book, and when bone comes to bone, you know, when you... It's almost like you're looking at Ezekiel's Valley, and all of a sudden, this idea clicks, and then this clicks, and that clicks, and you start to see that the universe that God has given us, the universe of truth, right, just like when we look at this wonderful world around us, and everything is interconnected, right, the sun is shining, but it isn't just shining on itself, it's shining into everything else, and everything else benefits from the sun, and everything grows as a result, and that also is interconnected, right? So when I sit down to a big potato and a piece of steak and some vegetables, the cells in the plant life and the animal life, when I eat them, they actually are elevated to become part of the kingdom of man, right?

And you see this amazing organic interconnectedness of everything in the universe around us, and all the symbiotic relationships where one thing benefits another. Well, when we look into the Bible, that's exactly the same thing we see. So sometimes when we study the Bible, it's a bit like dissecting a butterfly to see how it flies, and then it doesn't fly anymore. And so sometimes we try to separate everything out to such a degree that we lose the beauty of the wholeness and inter the reaction of one part with another part. So we don't want to do that, and sometimes we just have to stand back agape at this magnificent universe of truth and say, that's amazing.

And so I hope we don't get to the point where we become so analytical and so clinical that we lose the wonder of it and the joy of it. And so I just wanted to start reading you a couple of lines. This is a fellow who was saved just a few weeks ago, and he's he's telling about his first attempt at speaking to the guys in his in his section of the prison about about a truth from the Bible. Okay? So he's just been saved a couple of days, and he's already up trying to talk to these 130 men about what he's learning. So

So this is what, this is, he wrote us this little note, and he says, Just a few days ago, Jesus entered my body. Okay, so that's how he describes getting saved. And he says, I was speaking in front of the zone of men that I'm on. I was giving a speech about James three, controlling the tongue. He said that's something I've been fighting for almost my whole life.

I felt the holy spirit inside of me, and ever since that day, he said he just broke down weeping, thinking that he, of all people, was speaking about controlling the tongue, because he had had a terrible time with his temper, and he says that, he says, I hardly recognize myself. Something has happened to me. I didn't do it to me, God did it to me. Right? And he says, it felt so good to finally have God dwelling inside of me.

I feel that fire every day now. Oh, how I thank God for saving me. He says, he thanks the Lord for us coming, he says they did what God sent them to do, how he got saved, and brought me closer to God than I've ever been to Jesus Christ. Amen. My life is much better. I

I don't desire to harm people or even have those thoughts anymore. So, and then he concludes this way. He says, My godliness will lead me forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect me from behind. That's a big deal with these guys, they have to sleep with one eye open, you know. He says, the glory of the Lord will protect me from behind.

I love serving God and the son of God, Jesus Christ. Yeah. So all of this, we don't want to lose the wow factor. We don't want to lose the wonder of it in getting clinical, right? We want to see the beauty of it and the thrill of it, And just to think, I mean, brothers, sisters, can we take it in?

The God of the universe died for me. And he not only died for me, he lives in me. And he's made available to me everything he has. He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with a... Also freely give us all things?

We are so blessed, and it's so wonderful to be saved, and we don't want to get so tied down to details that we miss the big picture and beauty and wonder of being saved. And this is how the Apostle Paul writes, we already quoted this verse once, in Romans chapter 11. This is where we need to end up. You know, if if you're talking about the doctrines of salvation, and you end up wrangling with your brothers and sisters, you ain't got it, man. That that's not that's not the end product. That's

That's not what God intended. Right? When you read Ephesians chapter one that talks about election and predestination and all these things, what does it lead you to? Worship. Right?

Praise to the father. Praise to the son. Praise to the spirit. It's a it's a pen of praise. And here in Romans nine through 11, people go at it over this passage all the time and never seem to quite get to the punch line.

What what is the bottom line here? We read in verse 33 of chapter 11, Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor or who has first given to him and it shall be repaid to him. For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever.

Amen. Right. Paul's point here is, where did God ever get these wonderful ideas from? Would you have thought of suggesting this to him? Hey, God, I've got a great idea.

Why don't you leave heaven and come down to this sorry world full of rebels who hate you without a cause, and live a beautiful life and do only good, and let your creatures take you and spit in your face and buffet you and hang you on a tree. And don't just forgive us for murdering you. Use it as the basis of forgiving us of all our sin. And then, rise from the dead and go back to heaven and redecorate heaven so we'll feel at home there. We've messed up your earth, so so make heaven our home so we can move in with you.

And and if it would be alright, make us children in your family, like, so we can be sons of God, sons and daughters of the most high God. And would it be alright if we were heirs, you know, like give us everything you've got? In fact, would you mind budging over on your throne and letting us sit on your throne with you and rule the universe with you? We never would have thought of it. But he thought of it.

Who has been his counselor? These were all his ideas. The greatest, the grandest, the glorious ideas that God could conceive of, that would never have come into our mind. So when you get to heaven and have a look around, nobody's going to say, yeah, pretty much what I thought. Yep, it's okay, good, good.

10:33 Salvation as an enlargement

Well, no, it's the Gospel of holiness, right? Sanctification is as much salvation as justification is, and so is glorification. They're all part of the same stream of blessing, that he not only justified me, but he sanctified me, and he glorified me. That's all part of this big word, salvation. And I mentioned here that it comes from a root word that means to be open or wide or free, to to be enlarged.

That's that's really the idea. The enlargement. Right? We're constrained. We're we're slaved. We're

We're trapped. And and he sets us free. And he enlarges our thinking. He's brought us into a a broad place, into a large place. Right?

And so it's the privilege of the child of God forever and ever to go exploring and to discover all that we have in Christ. And we'll never get to the end of it. These fellows in prison, they're discovering little things. It's exciting to see them discover it. I've been doing this for sixty years, and I I feel like them, like, wow, look at... Well,

Well, I never saw this before. And there's another one, and another one. And we never come to the end of it. And that's the point he's making. Right?

Who has known the mind of the Lord? He calls them unsearchable. The depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God, they're unsearchable, but I'm gonna give it a try. I I know that I'll never discover it all, but I'm going to keep searching, and he's going to keep revealing it to me. You see, this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

So when the scripture says, who has known the mind of the Lord, we think, that's impossible then, except that Paul goes on to say, we have the mind of Christ. He not only transferred to us his life, but he transferred to us his mind, so that we can actually think God's thoughts. So people will quote half the scripture when they say, oh, that it hasn't entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him. But the next verse says, but he has revealed them to us by his spirit. And so God says, not only will I give you my word, I will give you the mind of Christ, and then I will give you the Holy Spirit, right? In

In order to see, you need an object, and you need a receptor, and you need light, right? And the light travels from the object to the receptor, whether it's a camera or an eye, to see. That's what happens when we see. And so here he says, the receptor is the mind of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is able to to transfer the thoughts of God to your mind so that you can think with God. No wonder it says we need to love God with all our minds because it's a big task he's given us. It's

It's a delightful task. It's a wonderful task. And the scripture explains to us here, only God would have thought of such a plan, and only God could have afforded it. Right? He goes on to say, who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid. Right?

Right? No one else could have afforded this. You talk about a king's ransom, the richest person in the universe became poor in the process of securing your salvation. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor. He exhausted his wealth in this one grand project to bring us into the fullness of all that God had in mind for us.

That's what salvation means. In its broadest sense, in its fullest sense, salvation is an enlargement, and nobody knows where the edges of the universe are. You know, people laugh at us and say, oh, read Genesis and it sounds like Earth is right in the center of the universe. Chuckle, chuckle, and say, well, so you know where the edges are? If you don't know where the edges are, nobody knows what the center of the universe is.

I'll tell you where the center of the universe is, it's the heart of God. It's the heart of God. Everything circles around the heart of God, And he is drawing us to the center. He's drawing us to himself. And as I said last evening, this is one of the chronic problems in the church today. We've

We've lost sight of Christ. I I almost remembered to the day, a generation of young people, the first generation that all went off to university. My father's generation that was pretty spotty because of the war. Some did, some didn't. But the next generation, they were able to all go off to university.

And a lot of them came home and it's like, our elders don't even know the questions, let alone the answers, you know. They like big words, they were enamored with intellectualism, And they said, you know, we really need to get over this. Like this Christ centered ministry, it's like, you know, you say blessed and beloved enough times, you give everybody a warm feeling like they've stepped out of a hot bath, but there's nothing practical there. We need to get practical. And so they went from Christ centered ministry to crisis centered ministry, from thinking about the answer to thinking about the problems.

We've never had more seminars, more experts, more books, and more problems than we have today, because you don't solve your problems by thinking about the problems. You know, the man lying by the pool for thirty eight years, he knew what his problem was. What he needed to do was to look away from himself to Christ. And that's what everybody needs to do. So when we read about the Lord Jesus in the Bible, it's not esoteric. It's

It's not, you know, pie in the sky by and by. He says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. This is real practical. Jesus took full responsibility for all the sins that got in the way, even though he was responsible, he was guilty of none of them. Right? And

And he's saying to the men, don't you wait for your wife to come crawling to you and say I'm sorry. You take the initiative every time. You are the initiator. Your wife is the responder. You may not say, I'm sorry, I get it. You

You can say, I'm sorry it happened. Our relationship is too precious to let this get in the way. That is what the Bible is teaching us from the example of Christ on how to deal with that issue. Do you know how many days, weeks, months are wasted with people playing tennis? Mind games over who's right and who's wrong, instead of saying, I'm responsible to to deal with this, and I'm... I

I wanna deal with it now in love, the way Jesus did. I've been talking to a brother, and there are people that are bad mouthing him, and he's all wrought up about it, and he can hardly get over it, and every time I talk to him, he gets back to that, and I said, Brother, you know, the Scripture says that you go and you try to set it right, but if you can't, if they insist on doing this, what do you do? Follow the example of our Lord Jesus, who when he was reviled, reviled not again, when suffered he threatened not, but committed it to him who judges righteously. You can't run a business constantly chasing down bad debt. You hand it over to the collection department and say, we'll let them look after that. I've

I've to get on with my business. And so, when these things happen, you try to reconcile, and if they insist on carrying on like this, then you just say, Lord, this is for you, you to look after. It's too big a deal for me, I don't want to spend my life chasing these things down. Right? When we look at the subject of humility, that we should have the mind of Christ.

And what does that mean? He didn't wait until people put him down to become humble. He chose to be humble while he was still in the glory. Right? And when I do that and people put me down, I say, well, for helping me, that's where I want to go. Thanks

Thanks for the hand down. Right? I get God's plan. God's plan is that we humble ourselves and go down. If you want to go up, you got to go down.

If you want to get, you got to give. If you want to live, you got to die. And this Jesus modeled for us. So Jesus isn't placed in the scripture as, oh, that's a nice little devotional thought. No. Every

Every time he's introduced to us, he's introduced as a real solution to life's problems. That's what salvation is. Salvation is not something happened to me when I was a little kid and I prayed at my mother's knee and that's it. No. Salvation is the whole package from start to finish.

From taking me as a poor, ruined sinner and ultimately presenting me in such a way that you may confuse me with the Lord Jesus. We shall be like him. That's the plan, to make us like his son. And so the the scripture explains to us that these huge impediments that stood like sentinels in the way, that barred our way from everything our heart longed for, we didn't have peace, we didn't have joy, we didn't have certainty, we didn't have purpose, all the things the human heart longs for, we were blocked from those things, why? Well, because we were under the curse, we were under sin, we were under the elements of the world, that is the compromises by which the world functions, and we were under the law.

Right? So these things held us down, and God wanted to bring us to enlarge us and bring us into freedom. And if the sun makes you free, you're really free. He opens up to us all the possibilities of being like God, godly, of being at rest, of being satisfied, of being filled with joy, of being an influence for God so that other people thank the Lord we ever came their way. Right? The

The possibilities are endless. But they all start with this, that that Christ himself must take our place and be made a curse for us and made sin for us, that he must be made of a woman, made under the law for us. And then to burst the bonds, to burst the bonds of sin and death and hell and defeat all our foes, bringing them out openly on public display, every one of them defeated, and then invites us to step into that victory with him. Right? This is what we have in Paul writing to the Ephesians. He

He gives us two battle scenes, and in the first battle scene, we have Christ, who, when he rose from the dead, gave gifts to the church, and gifted the church, enriched the church, right? It was always the way that the conqueror got the spoils of war, But instead, the Lord Jesus said, I want you to have the spoils of war. I'm going to give those to you. So we have Christ's victory, but we enter into the good of it. We get the blessing.

In the last chapter, now we have our battle. Chapter four describes Christ and his battle, but chapter six describes our battle, but it's our battle, but it's his victory, right? In chapter four, it's his battle, but it's our victory. But in chapter six, it's our battle, but it's his victory. He's the one who triumphs gloriously.

He leads us in triumph. Thanks be to God, who most of the time leads us in triumph through our Lord Jesus Christ. No, always, always. He always wins. Isn't it great to side with God? He

He always wins. Even when it looks like he is defeated, he turns it to victory. And that's the story of the cross, right? He always wins. Well, here, I've listed seven points that I think are helpful in thinking about salvation.

26:07 Only two kinds of people

You are. Well, where do you want to go? I really don't know. I I I have no idea where I'm headed. Oh, you are lost.

Well, where'd you come from? You know, I I'm really... I I have no idea. And I said, well, you know, a person who doesn't know where they came from, and they don't know where they're going, they really are lost. That's modern man, isn't it? He

He has no idea where he came from, and he has no idea where he's going. And the wonderful thing about the road map that's given to us in the word of God is that it does show us where we came from, and it shows us where we need to go, and it shows us exactly how to get there. And there's only one road there. It's not all roads lead to heaven. There's only one.

Jesus said, I am the way. Right? There's only one way. And so everybody stands on either side of the cross. The son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.

And so, everyone is one or the other, you're lost or you're saved. And God only knows two classes of people. So, we need to have that clarity when we talk to people. And a lot of times today, people have all sorts of disguises, right? If you say to someone, are you a Christian? They

They might think, well, I don't eat my relatives, you know, like, what do you mean? Of course, I was born in America, I went to church all my life, right? These are very common statements down in Mississippi. It's so common. People will say, I grew up in the church, right? And

And here, Paul, the end of chapter 11, you know, some people will quote a verse at the beginning in Romans chapter nine that says, verse 15 says, He will have mercy on whomever he will have mercy, and he will have compassion on whomever he will have compassion, right? And they say, woah, woah, wait a minute, listen to this, verse 18, Therefore he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens. Oh, so actually, yes, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the people that he has mercy on, and the people he hardens that he doesn't have mercy on, and they don't stand a chance. Right? And

And that's the conclusion of many people today. Many Christians take that view. But if you ask me to wait till we get to verse 18, I would ask you to wait till we get to the end of the section, because when we come to the end of the section in chapter 11, this is what we read. In verse 30, you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, that is the Jewish nation. Even so, these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you, they also may obtain mercy.

For God has committed them all to disobedience that he might have mercy on all, on all, Right? So, the whole idea in this story is, people have real choices, and if you choose to reject the mercy of God, God will still use you. No one's absolutely useless. You can always be a bad example. And so, if you won't have the mercy of God, in other words, he gives you the opportunity of being a vessel of mercy. The

The man who wrote this murdered Christians for a living, and God offered him mercy, and he took it and became the apostle Paul. And he writes about a man who had huge potential, had a huge opportunity to become a vessel of mercy. And instead of that, Pharaoh hardened himself against God, and he rejected the offer of mercy. Not once, not twice, not three times. You know the story. Over

Over and over and over again, every time Pharaoh prayed, God answered his prayer. Get rid of the frogs. God said, we'll do it. Right? The amazing thing about that is that Moses said, you lord it over me. You

You be in charge. Tell me when do you wanna get rid of the frogs? And Pharaoh, to our amazement, said, tomorrow. One more night with the frogs. And of course, what happens is people get used to anything, including frogs.

And by the the time twenty four hours passed, he was no longer willing to let them go. Every time Pharaoh made a promise, he broke it. Every time Pharaoh prayed, God answered his prayer. And the second last plague was time out. For the whole nation, they didn't have electricity, so when God turned the power off, it was off.

And they all just sat there in darkness to think. God wanted them to think, didn't he? But in spite of it all, Pharaoh rejected the offer. The the question then was, did God fail to use Pharaoh to make known his power and his name throughout all the earth. Right? That's

That's that's the offer he made to pharaoh. Just like he did with Nebuchadnezzar. And what happened to Nebuchadnezzar? He bowed to the will of God, ended up writing a gospel tract that was distributed across the world, a 126 nations from India to North Africa. Imagine if, say, Donald Trump, or the head of Iran, or some world leader, sent out a message to the world, God has humbled me and has revealed to me that he is the true God, and he is to be worshipped, and I invite the world to bow at the feet of Jesus Christ. Imagine.

Imagine. Pharaoh was given that opportunity, and instead of doing it, he hardened himself against God, and so God said, alright then, I will take over the process of hardening, and I will then use you as a vessel of wrath. Not an object of wrath. A vessel is a picture of service. You're going to be my servant one way or another, Pharaoh.

You get to choose how you're used. Do you want to receive my mercy? Oh, no. Okay then, you can have my wrath. And how did God pour out his wrath on Pharaoh?

We call it the Passover. The most biblically accurate revelation of the cross of Christ in the Old Testament. People around the world today in little jungle clearings and teeming cities are still listening to preachers preach the gospel from the Passover. And Pharaoh, reluctant though he was, ended up doing what he never intended to do, was to become a billboard, A billboard sized message to the world, take God seriously, because bad things happen if you don't. And the message spread.

Right? We're we're gonna think a little bit about this story later, but when the children of Israel got to the edge of the promised land, the first person to engage with them, who was a wicked woman who ran a house of prostitution in the city of Jericho, she says, I want your god to be my god because I heard what he did in Egypt. Right? It worked. And it's still working.

You can't stop God from doing what God is going to do. You can stop being the object of a mercy of God. You can reject his mercy, but you can't stop him from using you, right? And so, evangelists use the dying words of Voltaire to preach the gospel. That's not what Voltaire had in mind, that's what God had in mind.

He can either positively or negatively reveal the truth, and so those who are lost have the opportunity of responding to his mercy. But if they say no to his mercy, God will still use them, Right? And he will triumph. The whole point of this passage, by the way, is not to talk about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is being used as an illustration of Israel.

God selected Israel to spread the message of the true God around the world. But they refused. And in their darkness, they took their Messiah and murdered him. Whatever could God do with that? Well, he could save the world with that.

Right? God always wins. It doesn't matter. People rise up against God and they blaspheme his name and God ends up being glorified. And so this is really at the heart of the message, that in the end, God wants to show mercy to all, and he sets about to do that, and if I fail, God doesn't fail.

You know what the scripture says? Let no man take your crown. You know what that means? That means that all the crowns will be handed out someday. You may not get one, but the work will all get done.

Right? And if you don't do it, God will find someone to do it. And God, God will accomplish what he set out to do. And no one's going to stop him. But the way he does it is not by bullying people.

He does have some vicious sheepdogs to nip at our heels to bring us to the good shepherd. And we'll think about that in another session when we look at Psalm 107. But God loves the human race, and he has endless tactics to bring people to himself. And God never tires of seeking for the lost. Right?

Now when the Pharisees, they they strongly objected to Jesus hanging around with sinners, as if they weren't sinners. Right? Like, what's he doing eating with sinners? Yuck. Makes me lose my appetite.

And so Jesus appeals to them, and he tells them the story of the prodigal son. And when he gets to the end of the story, they think this is good preaching because he's been preaching about the naughty little sheep that went away, that's not us, that's these publicans and sinners, right? And the naughty little coins that got lost, and the naughty boy that went away, And they're thinking, this is good preaching, give it to them. They need it. They really need it.

And just before they leave, Jesus says, oh, one last thing, would you be interested in the other brother? Yeah, That's who you are. You're the other brother. No. You don't go down to the far country and waste your life in a riotous living. You

You stay on the farm, and you try to work your way into the father's house, but you can't do it. He already loves you. But you're going have to come through the same door that your prodigal brother came through. Yeah. There's there's mercy for you. You're

You're the most welcome man in the countryside. The father came out and appealed to him saying, come on in son. You see the point that he's making? Gentlemen, it makes sense if you lose something to go looking for it. Right?

The shepherd has 99 sheep, that's not enough for him because he knows there's one out on the hills and he goes looking for the lost sheep. And a woman has 9 out of 10 coins from her dowry money, but that's not good enough. What about that one? And she stops everything to find it. Does that make sense to you gentlemen?

Okay. God thinks he lost something when you went away from him. I mean this is like Elon Musk pulling a hand kerchief out of his pocket and a dime rolls out and goes down the manhole or the personhole cover. And so he goes and finds a big long stick and a piece of chewing gum and he starts trying to get that coin back. They say, come on man.

You're going be the world's first trillionaire and you're worried about 10¢ down the down the sewer? Here's the God of the universe. And when I look at the solar system, and I see this little speck, the sun is a million and a quarter times bigger than little planet Earth. But then I pull back and I see our galaxy, the Milky Way, and they have to put a little arrow to a little speck, a speck of dust, smaller than a period in the Milky Way, and say, that's your solar system. And then they pull back again and say, oh, well, you're you're Milky Way. It's

It's just one of billions of galaxies full of billions of stars. And you're a little speck on a little speck surrounded by some little specks off in the corner of God's universe, and he thinks he lost something when you went away from him? He does. And Jesus said, He sent me to find you and bring you home. That's it, isn't it? That's

41:04 We cannot save ourselves

I think he spends most of his energy in religious sin. I think that's where his focus is, as an angel of light, trying to make people feel good enough for God, to do enough themselves. That's his main mission. We cannot save ourselves. And Paul has such an excellent argument for this, doesn't he?

Somebody thinks that they're they're working their way to heaven, and I say, well, okay, explain this to me now. When you do a good work, who gives you the energy to do it? Who gives you the resources to do it? Who gives you the clarity of mind? Any idea who that would be?

Oh, God. Oh, every good deed you do puts you deeper into debt to God. Right? David said, we give thee but thine own. There wasn't a lamb that was offered in Jerusalem that God didn't make.

They couldn't make a sheaf of wheat. They couldn't give them anything that he had not already given them. So the math doesn't work, does it? I think I've told this story many times, I was in the Chicago Airport, and everything was shut down for the night because of high wind, and I helped a lady with a problem. She had lost her bag, and I, back in those days, I actually went with a security guy down into the bowels of the Chicago Airport and found this woman's bag, which had medication that her son needed.

And when we finished off, there was a priest sitting the edge of the concourse and he saw me and sort of thanked me for my good deed, you see. So I thought this was a good opportunity, so I came over and sat down beside him and I said, Well, it looks like we've got some time to talk. And I've always wondered about this, could you tell me sir, how many good deeds do I have to do in a day to break even? And he said, Sounds like you've got something on your mind. I said, Well, I just couldn't figure out the math on this. Like,

Like, the God we worship is perfect, is that right? Yeah. Okay, so his standard is perfection. Right? So, if on a particular day, I actually pulled it off, I didn't get frustrated by somebody cutting me off in traffic, my wife didn't burn my toes, I didn't stub my toe, everything went perfect, and the whole day I could say when I came to the end of the day, you know what, I think I made it all the way through this day without sinning.

On that particular day, I just break even, because that's God's minimum daily requirement, right? How am I going to get this credit to apply to all the days where I fall far short of God's standard? He said, you know, I teach ethics at the Vatican, but I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you. I said, You know, I spent a lot of time in Ireland and knocking on the doors and talking to people, they're such lovely people, they'll take me in and give me a cup of tea, and we'll talk, and you know, somebody has misled them. And and they've got the cart before the horse, and they think the way to please God is to live in a way that pleases him. That's

That's the whole idea. If you live a good life. You know the problem with that? They don't have any life. According to the Bible, we're all dead in sins and trespasses.

We have no life to give him. The message of the gospel is not give your life to Christ. You have no life to give him. The message of the gospel is he wants to give his life to you. And you see, the problem is you can't live it till he gives it.

So here they are trying to live it's so frustrating, trying to live the Christian life. It's like decorating a corpse. It doesn't work. It's like it's like dressing up a mannequin. First you need the life, and then by his grace, you can live pleasing to him.

But that comes first. Right? And so the scripture says, when the kindness and love of God our savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saved us. Paul says, if you're trying the other approach, then it's reckoned of debt and not of grace. I said to the... To

To this dear man, imagine how full of yourself you would need to be to stand before God someday and say, God, you owe me. After all that you've done for me, giving me my every mouthful of food I've ever eaten, every ounce of strength, every conscious thought, every breath, All through these years I've lived on your planet Earth. You sent your sun and your rain and everything that I enjoyed. It was all yours. I didn't own any of it.

None of it belonged to me, And I lived off your largesse for all those years, my whole life. But during that time, I took a little bit of what you gave me, and I gave it back to you, supposedly. And on that basis, seeing I gave a little bit back of what you already gave me in the first place, I would think it only fair for you, number one, to wipe out all my debt of sin, and that you would be now put into my debt, and you owe me a place in heaven forever. How's that for math? It's absolutely madness.

And yet the world is full of people who think this way. But the gospel is so clear that we cannot save ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. And then number three, salvation is found in receiving a person. And again, the devil has done his work here, and he's given the impression that the way that you get to heaven is by schemes, by joining holy clubs, and by jumping through hoops, and there are all these things you need to do, and everybody has different ideas. Some

Some places you feed idols, and some places you turn prayer wheels, and some places you crawl on your hands and knees up a mountain. There are all kinds of things you can do, but in the end, you're showing God how serious you are and how good you are, and that he should be impressed with that. And and I said to the dear man, I said, no, you you understand how bad this looks. This looks really bad. Okay. On

On the one side, god says, I gave you my son, and my son died on the cross in agony for you. And you're just brushing that away and saying, no, no, no, no, I gave some frozen strawberries to my neighbor, and I think I'd prefer counting on that to get me to heaven rather than the death of Christ. Do you not see? It's like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa, you do not improve things. Anything you seek to add to Christ takes away from Christ.

Because you're giving the impression, he's not quite enough. God says he is enough, and I can prove it to you. I raised him from the dead. I... He was made sin so that in his resurrection, we have the receipt.

We have the guarantee that all our sins were paid in full because if not, he'd still be in the grave. Our sins are gone when we put our trust in Christ. Salvation is found in a person. We preach Christ crucified. I know who might have believed. This

50:30 Whom you believe

Did I did I come the bonafide way? Right? And here's what Paul says to his friend Timothy, I know whom I have believed. Not how much, it doesn't matter how much. It can be like a mustard seed, how much?

Right? You can have a mountain of faith in some false religion, it doesn't get you an inch closer to heaven. You can have a mustard seed of faith in Christ and his finished work. It's not your faith that saves you. It's God who saves you through the finished work of Christ. And

And when you put your trust in Christ, you discover that it's not what you believe that saves you, it's whom you believe. Salvation is in a person. So that's the question. Is your faith... I say to young people sometimes, I don't know if I'm saved. I

I say, well, forget what happened when you were five years old, today, now, here, do you know that your sin deserves an eternity separated from God? And do you believe that Christ paid the price for that? And do you want him to be your savior? Then what does the Bible say? That if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you've got a pretty good shot.

No. It's not a crapshoot. It's a sure thing. He that has the son has life and shall not come into judgment, but has already passed from death into life. Number four, there's only one savior.

And and may I say that when we say there's only one savior, we mean the savior as described in the word of god, Not the savior that men make of Jesus sometimes, who's as much a false image, as much an idol, as the idols of other lands. Right? No. It is Christ as revealed in the scripture. The perfect God man.

Right? But to reject his deity is to miss the whole point. It's to have a bridge going halfway across the chasm. There is one mediator between God and men. There's only one God man in the universe, and therefore only one person who can span the distance between God and man.

Someone who, as man, understands the desperate need of humanity and can identify with it, more than that, who can represent it, who becomes the representative of all sinful men, though he never sinned. But he must also be God. Right? Only an infinite person could satisfy the infinite heart of God. I had the privilege of speaking in our mosque to a group of a 100 Muslim men from 50 Muslim countries, and I'm not sure why, but they told me that they wanted me to explain why I believed what I believed, and they gave me two hours until the evening prayers to do it.

And as spoke together, I said, you know, this is the fatal flaw. If you give Jesus a place but not the place, he cannot satisfy all of the essential requirements of a savior. And you may think of him as a prophet, as he is more than a prophet, but you can think of him as a prophet, but you don't need a prophet, you need a savior. You don't need someone who can diagnose in 50 different languages what your problem is, you need someone who can save you. And in order to be a savior, he must be an infinite person.

Right? What is a necessary exchange for a sinful person? It would be a perfect person. But what is a sufficient exchange for billions of sinful people? It would have to be an infinite person.

55:21 God puts himself into our hands

There are a lot of people who don't. Salvation is made possible by the death of the Lord Jesus. Now think about that for a minute. The devil moved into Judas, and Judas betrayed the Lord Jesus to the Jews. And the Jews handed him over to the Romans, and the will of God was done.

Did the Lord manipulate these effective agents to do these things? Well, no, he plead with Judas not to do it. Are you really going to betray the son of man with a kiss? As they sat at supper, he offered him the morsel of his eternal friendship. But when he determined to do it, the Lord said, go ahead then.

Did Jesus goad the Jews into rejecting him? He wept over them. He warned them. He said, When you've lifted up the Son of Man, you'll know that I am. And did he prod Pilate to condemn him?

Well, no, he said, the one who delivered me to you has committed the greater sin. But when they all did what they chose to do, the will of God was done. This isn't the exception to the rule, you see, this is the rule. This is how God gets his work done, and we'll see this when we look at a scene in Acts 17 where there's a group of Jewish people who hear the claims of Christ and who reject him. And there's a group of Gentiles who hear the claims of Christ and they receive him.

And they both fulfilled the scriptures. Have you noticed that? Yeah. The ones who rejected him, Paul warned them beforehand and said, be careful now, if you reject him, you will be fulfilling the scripture that says you're going to do this. Now, nobody made them do it.

They chose to do it, but in the end, the will of God was done. When Moses was on Mount Sinai, and the people were committing gross sin in the valley below, and God said to Moses, Get out of my way, I'm going go down and destroy them. I'll start over with you. Get out of your way. Six feet of clay standing in the way of Almighty God, get out of my way.

And Moses said, well, if you're giving me a choice, no, I'm not going to move. I'm going to plead for the people. I'm not going to say, well they're really nice people, you got to know them, you should give them a second chance. No, what I'm going say is they're your people, and you brought them out, and what would the Philistines say when they hear that you've abandoned your people in the desert? And he pleads the sermon of his life, and we come to the end of it, and then it says, the King James says, and God repented, they've changed it to relented, but it's the same word.

The question is whose will was done that day? Well, God's will was done. God was looking for an intercessor. He was looking for someone who cared about those rascals like he did, who would plead their case. You have the story of Abraham and Sodom.

People have this funny idea that God was trying to get down there to destroy them, and Abraham was holding on to his coattails, wait, hold it, hold it. You know what the story says? God says, Abraham's my friend, I've to tell him about this. He'll think about them the way I think about them. He had already interceded, he had risked his life to save the people of Sodom.

And he goes down, down, down, and then he stops. You know why? Because he trusts God. He knows there probably aren't even 10 people there, and and he wants at least Lot to get out, and so he leaves it with God, and that's exactly what God does. God doesn't stop at 10.

God drags one man out. That's all he could find was one man and his and his girls, Because that's what God is like. Whose will was done that day? God's will was done. This is the message of the Bible, isn't it?

God puts himself into our hands. He's not a bully. He puts himself into our hands. Isn't this the story of the incarnation? Look at him, the God of the universe in the arms of a virgin.

He put himself into our hands. John says, we handled the word of life. He might have said man handled. He got so close to us we could spit in his face, we could buffet him, pull the hair from his cheek, and he went on loving us anyway. And when men had done their worst, God did his best.

Can't you love a God like that? This happens all the time. This is the story of history. You know God has put himself into your hands. Take a look at your hands for a second there.

Those aren't your hands, they're his hands. Isn't that what the bible says? When a couple get married, he gives his body to his wife. His body doesn't belong to him anymore, it belongs to her, and her body belongs to him. That's what the Bible says.

And when I receive Christ as my savior, something similar happens. He says, I'll look after your business, you look after mine. You are the body of Christ. And he puts it into your hands, the ladies and gentlemen who are providing these meals for us, that's Jesus' idea, you know. But he doesn't have a kitchen, so he asked them if they would do it, and he would work with them.

This is the idea, isn't it? What is prayer? Prayer is God putting himself into our hands. Ask my Father, and he will do it for you. Is God a servant?

He serves us every day, all day long, and when we go to sleep at night he keeps at it, doesn't he? He's the ultimate servant God. When Jesus came and put on the garb of a servant, he didn't become a servant, God is a servant. The servant God, that's what's so amazing about God. He feeds the atheist his breakfast every morning.

63:31 Repent, believe, and eternal security

I don't want you to weep and howl and fall on your face, that's not what I'm asking you to do. The word metanoia means a change of mind, and the problem is that people are born with stinking thinking, and they have all the wrong ideas about everything, about themselves and about God and about the way of salvation, and they have to have their minds recalibrated by the word of God. God's word gives us the truth and we have to submit to it. That's what faith is. Faith is taking God at his word.

So when God says something, I say, yeah, and God says, no, listen to what I'm saying. I want you to believe me. And that's what it takes. And so people say, well, I didn't repent when I got saved. Well, it's probably because you repented as a child when you were listening to the gospel preacher, and he said all have sinned, and you didn't want to believe that, but you came to believe it.

And you came to believe that there was only one way of salvation. You see, in our society we grow up with a surfeit of truth. There are other places, and they have to go through the painful process of discovering that, yes, I am a sinner, yes, I am a hell deserving sinner, Yes, I can't fix myself. Yes, only one person can save me, and that's Jesus, and I put my trust in him. That process is what the Bible calls repentance.

Not feeling sorry for your sin, not stopping sinning, there are words for that. What the Bible is talking about is agreeing with God about the problem, and agreeing with him about the answer. Because there are people who do agree about the problem, they repent every week, they go to their church and say they're sorry, but they never put their faith in the finished work of Christ. So there needs to be repentance and belief, agreeing with God about the problem and with God about the answer. So Jesus preached repentance, John preached repentance, but the Apostle Paul did. In

In Acts chapter 20, he says, This was my message, repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. We must repent and believe in order to be saved. And once we are saved, we are saved forever. I spent some time out with some ex Hutterites out in Great Falls, Montana. Wonderful people. God's

God's done a mighty work there. They have a real problem with the idea of eternal security. They've been taught all their lives that the unpardonable sin is saying, I know I'm saved. And that if you do that, you're damned just by saying it. Well, of course, the Bible disagrees.

These things are written that you may know that you have eternal life. And I spent a whole week going through all the passages, Hebrews six and Hebrews 10, all the passages that caused them distress, and on the last night I looked at them all and I thought to myself, you know what you're telling me right now, I still don't believe in Nicholson. So it's not me, it's what does God say in his word. And so I turned to this passage that I have quoted here, in Colossians three:three-four. I said, you know, if salvation meant that God gave me eternal life, you're right, I probably could have messed it up. I

I mess up pretty much everything he gives me. And God knew how stupid I'd be, and so he had a different scheme. He didn't give me eternal life. What he did was he gave me his son, and this life is in his son. The gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ

Christ is our life. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. So when I receive Christ as my savior, that's really what I'm doing. He's not just handing me a chunk of life and saying, here, let's see what you can do with this. What he's doing is, he is coming in as my life.

I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me. And so my security is not in my hands. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews tells us we can be so sure of heaven because our life has already arrived there. As they say in the South, I am so sure of heaven I can swing over hell on a rotten pea vine singing blessed assurance. My life is already there, right?

We have an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, has already entered inside the veil. And so this is what Paul writes to the Colossians, your life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, we shall appear with him in glory. I do not have any life independent of the life of Christ. It's his life that I share with him. It's

It's the same life. And this is why God made Eve not out of the dust, but out Adam. Right? They were one creative act. He took life out of Adam to make Eve.

Eve's life was Adam's life. She is the bride of the wounded side, and that's what God did with us. So much so that Paul borrows Adam's love song to his wife. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called Isha, for she was taken out of Isha. Feminists hate it that the word woman and female have these nasty men in the midst of it all, but it means, Isha, out of man, out of the male. That's

That's what happened. And the idea was now, they were one life. So this strange little play on words, the word cleave, which means to make two out of one, like in cleaving the offering, and then making one out of two. Right? So in creative act he separated them, but then he unified them, and they only had one life to share.

And that's what Adam meant. Some people say he was passing the buck, but that's what he meant when he said, The woman which thou gave me, she gave me to eat, and I ate. He wasn't right in doing it, but what he was saying was, We only get one vote between us. When he says, The woman which thou gavest me, not the woman which thou gavest me, but the woman which thou gavest me. Well, how did he give her? He

He gave her in marriage. We're one. We're in this thing together. And that's the picture of the Christian life. It's not like, okay, I'm wandering away from Jesus, like, you know, Jesus, sometimes I get close to Jesus, and sometimes I get far from Jesus.

I will never leave you nor forsake you. The moment you're saved, he is in you and you are in him, and nothing can ever change that. That's why I'm so secure, because it's not in my hands to lose it. The only way that I could lose my eternal life is if God lost Christ. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. Remember

Remember what Jesus said? My hand, my father's hand, we got this. It's wonderful, isn't it? It's okay to say hallelujah now and again. This this is the glorious truth.

That's why we shall never perish. Now, I can't even see the clock back there. I used to, when I was a young guy, could see it. Alright, looks like we have two minutes. Notice this list here, some of the rich truths connected with the work of Christ. Salvation

73:03 Pictures of the cross

He gave us everything he's got. God can't think of a thing to give us that he hasn't given us in Christ, and that's what makes dissatisfaction in the hearts of God's people so obnoxious. I gave you everything I got. That's not enough, is it? Yeah.

What a gift. All other gifts in one. Salvation as a ransom, the redemption paid in full. And we'll think about this a little later when we look at the story of Ruth, which is the Old Testament illustration of redemption, and how there's no such a thing as a limited atonement. He paid the full price. Why?

Why? Jesus was not paying so many pains for so many stains. The Lord Jesus gave himself, right? He gave himself without spot to God. He gave everything he was and everything he had.

So no, it's like some people say, well you know if Jesus died for sinners that don't trust him, then that's kind of wasteful, isn't it? No, it's a demonstration of the infinite grace of God, and if you don't want him, he still wants you, right? They denied the Lord that bought them. What does that mean? They denied the Lord that bought them. He

He paid the price. Whether they come or not, the price has been paid. Salvation as new birth or regeneration. And by the way, folks, if you have questions, write them down while you get them, okay? You won't remember them.

When we have come to question and answer time, and everybody's like, I had a good one. I don't remember what it was. So I can't answer the ones you can't remember. So if you think of a question, like for example on this, maybe some young person writes down, If Jesus died for everybody, then why isn't everybody going to be in heaven? How can God justly send people to hell if their sins are all paid for?

That's a good question, isn't it? And that's a good answer, but you have to write it down. Okay? Yeah. Reconciliation.

Now this is only on our part, not on God's part, okay, reconciliation. The story of the lady and her husband and her son were at odds with each other, and she's dying, and she gets them to come to her bedside, and the son's on one side and the father's on the other, and in her dying strength she takes their hands and brings them together over her breast. Lovely story, but it's got nothing to do with what happened between us and God. God didn't need to be reconciled to us. We were at enmity with God, but he was our best friend.

God wasn't our enemy, he didn't need to be reconciled, we needed to be reconciled by the death of his son. That's a one way thing, but just to see that. As substitution, Christ died for our sin, taking our place, several verses there. Salvation as a victory, having disarmed principalities and powers, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it. Ta da, right?

He won the Medan crown. He totally defeated the foe there at Calvary. Salvation as forgiveness. Now this is so important, you know, forgiveness today, people don't realize what chains they release when they forgive people. The chains they release are from themselves.

If I won't forgive someone, I chain myself to that thing, to that event, to that person. When I forgive them, I free myself. And the scripture says that if you won't forgive, then when you show up at God's door saying, I need forgiveness, he says, that's an interesting word. Isn't there somebody you need to forgive? Why don't you go do that first and then come and see me?

Forgiveness is a real thing, and when we forgive people, it doesn't mean we're saying it doesn't matter. We're not saying it doesn't hurt, but we are saying there's enough on the cross to cover this, and I claim Calvary. Calvary covers it all, and if God can forgive me for what I did, then I should be able to forgive others too. That's a whole subject on its own. Salvation as a new covenant, right? Every

Every time we take the cup at the Lord's Supper, we hear him say, this is the new covenant. Now technically, the new covenant is to be made with the house of Israel in the day to come. But Jesus, by his death at the cross, laid the foundation for it, paid the price for the new covenant, and when I accept Israel's Messiah as my savior, he extends the benefits of the new covenant to include Gentiles like me, and we celebrate this in the death of Christ, the new covenant. A new covenant in which he writes his law in our hearts and minds, and our sins and iniquities remembers no more forever. Salvation as justification, right?

Justification does not mean just as if I'd never sinned. Justification means that God, as judge, can righteously declare me right because of the sacrifice of Christ. Based on his paying full payment for my sin, God can declare me right. Now sanctification, of course, is the process by which he actually makes me right, and that's a long painful process. Salvation as propitiation, again, is something primarily that has to do with God.

It's satisfaction, of course I'm satisfied, but God needed to be satisfied, right? There are people who will tell you this in their religion, Well, I'm happy with my religion. Oh, okay, is that all that needs to be happy? If you ran up your credit card debt at Christmas time, oh, I did get carried away, didn't I? And you call up the credit card company and say, oh, I'm afraid I got a little over the top with my credit card, but I have a scheme here that makes me perfectly happy, I'll send you $10 a month and they say, excuse me, but it's not the debtor that has to be happy, it's the creditor that has to be happy, right? And

And so whether I'm happy with my belief system or not matters very little, the question is, is God happy with it? Right? And that's why we have to take God at his word. Salvation is something that makes God happy, right? Propitiation, first of all, was required because God had been extending credit to the nation of Israel for fifteen hundred years.

If a banker extended credit to a farmer who couldn't pay his debt for a year, They might let him away with that, but two years? No. Three? Definitely not. Right?

Here was God every year saying, I'm agreeing to live one more year in the midst of a sinful people, on the basis of that drop of blood on the mercy seat. And in that drop of blood, I see everything that my son will accomplish at the cross and paying what Paul calls the sins that were past, because the offerings didn't do it. They may cover it over for a time, atonement, but they couldn't take away the sin. And so God kept extending credit and forgiving those people on the basis of what Christ accomplished at the cross. And so I needed redemption, but God needed to be propitiated for all the sins of the past, which he had graciously dealt with by allowing the people to carry on as if they were paid for, but weren't, until Jesus paid it all.

So these are just a few of the beautiful ideas that we have regarding the cross. There are many more, you could fill pages with this, but I just leave it with you, and when we think about God's salvation, to understand the freeness of it and the fullness of it, to be able to share it with people, you know, there's nothing like it. To speak a word, a simple little word to someone in the gospel, and to see their eyes light up. You may not have that experience, but sometimes it's because they don't understand what we're offering them. Right?

82:17 Telling the story clearly

What is it you're not interested in? Well, they don't think I'm asking them. They think I want them to join my religion, so we need to make it clear what it is we're offering them, right? I've used this before, dear brother Tony Sushariba, and he would meet people, and he would tell them, You know, I've got a new home, it's heaven, I'm going to heaven one of these days. Heaven is my home. Is

Is heaven your home? Right? Such a great little story, we share this with the men in prison, because one of the issues people ask is, look, there's this person, a really good person in our town, maybe it was my granny, she never heard of flea, she was always helping people, she raised people, kids that were from other families, she'd give us food before she'd eat it herself, but she never prayed the sinner's prayer, know, so where did she go when she died? Yeah, it's common question, right? And there's a great story about a brother who lived in Salisbury Plain in England and he traveled by commuter train to London every day, and as he would do it, he would sit and read his Bible, and there were other people from the town who traveled on the same train, and once in a while they engaged with him, but they pretty much left him alone. But

But in their town, I've got the name at home, it's something like Baswell, I forget the name exactly, but there was a well known wealthy man in their town, and he was an outspoken atheist, but he was always doing good things for people. Well the day he died, the folks who got on the commuter train were all interested in knowing what this Christian would say about the death of this man. And so they came to him and said, you heard that Mr. So and So died, yes, Well, you know, he he was always living for other people. He didn't believe in your god. He

He he he was an atheist. Where did he go? And he said, well, that's a simple question to answer. If he died the way he lived, he went to his own place. He went to his own place, yeah.

So when you die, are you going to go to your own place? No, no, I should, I deserve that. But Jesus said, I'm going to go and prepare a place for you, and if you want, you can come to my place. And I accepted his offer, and so I'm going to go to his, you know, you can go to his place too. Isn't that beautiful?

It's theologically accurate, it's simple, it's clear, and it's winsome. That's what we need. Right? I was saying brother Tony, he would say to people, did you know I am sure of going to heaven when I die? And you know how I know?

Based on my good looks. Your good looks? Yeah. I had a good look at myself, and I realized I was a poor lost sinner. And I had a good look at Jesus, and I realized he was the savior of sinners just like me.

And I put my trust in Jesus and his finished work, and so, yeah, I'm going to be in heaven based on my good looks. Isn't that lovely? You get a smile every time you say it to them, and before they know it, whoops, the raspberry jam helped the medicine go down, and they got it. If you're going to win some, you've got to be win some. And this is the great thing about the Gospel. There

There are a thousand ways to explain it, but they're all beautiful. If we just know how to tell the story, suffer a sinner whose heart overflows, loving his savior to tell what he knows, once more to tell it, would I embrace? I'm only a sinner saved by grace. Well, let's pray. Father, we just commit ourselves to you now, and we just, we don't know what to say. So

So we stand at the cross agape and say, is it really true? The best of heaven dying for the worst of earth. The one who deserved the crown of glory taking the crown of thorns. The one who deserved the highest throne in the universe taking the cross and dying for me. Oh, each one of us in our hearts, Lord Jesus, confesses with joy, the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me. We'll

We'll never get over it. You'll never hear the end of this. We'll be praising you forever. What a good savior you are. And we want to be more effective in sharing this news, sharing our savior with those around us. Help

Help us, we pray. Give us that joy that overflows. When people look at us, they know we have a hope different than this world, and they might ask us for the hope within us to be ready to speak a word for the savior. We ask this in Jesus name, amen. Thank you.

Salvation Through the Ages - Part 2 — James 3

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Salvation Through the Ages - Part 2 — James 3

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