Salvation

The Work of God in Redemption

Series: Behold our God

Speaker: Pastor Justin Wheeler

Scripture: Galatians 4:4-7

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Gal 4:1 I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, 2 but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. 3 In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

I became a believer in Christ on New Year’s Eve in 1998. On that night and in the months leading up to that night I had no interest in religion and zero interest in Christianity; but God had another plan. Two weeks prior to New Year’s Eve, one of my best friends who just happened to be my drug dealer had been born again. My friend’s name was Joel and he had gone away for a couple of weeks to stay with a friend and to his surprise one of the people living in his friend’s home was a faithful Christian who took every opportunity he could to share the gospel with my friend.

Joel came back home a new man and he came straight to my apartment where I and my other friends were just beginning to celebrate the New Year. On that night, Joel came with his Bible and he sat down beside me and he made it clear that I needed to stop doing drugs, turn from my sin, call out to God for forgiveness and trust in Jesus to save me. To this day I don’t know what passage Joel used to share the gospel with me but I know that on that night, right there in my living room, God did something in my heart and mind that changed me forever.

God changed me from a slave to a son. For the first time in my life I felt like I was going to be crushed under the weight of my sin. I didn’t know how Jesus could do it but I cried out to him to forgive me and save me. I repented and began to try and live my life for Him. I went to church and was baptized. I was given a new Bible and I began to read it. I was learning, I was growing, I was like a fish out of water but I was learning how to breath in a whole new way.

Everything in my day to day life was new but I was also learning that as a Christian I had become part of something that had been going on for thousands of years. As I read and studied the Bible I came to realize that I had been plunged into a story that had been unfolding since the beginning of time. I didn’t know how all of it fit together but I knew that my faith had a deep past filled with men and women and events that stretched back thousands of years. I wanted to know how it all fit together.

Then I read Ephesians 1:4 and it blew my mind.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will

When I read that for the first time I could hardly believe that before the world was, God knew me and chose me. He predestined me for adoption according to His will, and my adoption hinged on Jesus Christ. Jesus was not just another name in an endless story of religious faith, but rather He was the climax of that story. The promises God made to His people from the very beginning of time, found their culmination in the work of Jesus. He was/is the point of the whole book.

All the Scriptures, the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Writings, they all concern Christ. The whole of the Old Testament is drawing our attention to the main stage where God is showcasing the main event which is God’s plan to redeem His people from their slavery to sin through Jesus’ death on the cross and His resurrection 3 days later.

Transition…

There are two great works of God: creation and redemption. Redemption means deliverance (rescue) from evil by the payment of a price and this concept of redemption can be seen in hundreds of passages throughout the Bible. Redemption has a backstory that goes like this: when mankind rebelled against God two things resulted; our separation from God and our guilt before God. We were expelled from the Garden, cut off from the tree of life and the presence of God; but we also became guilty of treason and deserve death because of our crime.

Mankind is the problem, not the solution. In Genesis 3 we learn that because of sin God has put a boundary in place between us and Him. Since God is the one who put this boundary in place it only makes sense that He is the only One qualified to cross that boundary and make things right. Only God can restore the relationship corrupted by sin.  We cannot redeem ourselves.

And from that day in the Garden, God set out to accomplish a work of redemption that would remove the guilt of our sin and bring us back into fellowship with Him. This morning we are going to spend our time studying God’s Work as our Redeemer and we are going to look at this work in five stages: The Word of Redemption, the Pattern of Redemption, the Securing of Redemption, the Application of redemption, and the Enjoyment of redemption.

Sermon Focus…

I. The Word of Redemption (V. 4a)

4:4 But when the fullness of time had come…

In Galatians 4:1-3, Paul is trying to help us understand our own backstory by explaining two contrasting ways of identifying ourselves. He is showing the contrast between life as a slave and life as an heir. Slavery and sonship are the two categories of human identity that he wants us to understand. But these two categories are also a memory of Israel’s past.

There was a time when the people of God were slaves in Egypt and they longed to be set free. They longed for God to rescue them and so they cried out to God for help.

Exo 2:23…The people groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. 24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham…

Let the weight of this sink in for you. In Exodus 3:7f God says to His chosen covenant people “I have seen your affliction…I have heard your cries…I know what you are walking through and I am coming to rescue you.” The OT writers refer to this covenantal loving care from God as Hesed, His steadfast love.

Friends God sees, He hears, He knows and in the day of our trouble, in the day of our need, in the day of our affliction he remembers his covenant love and pours out strength to rescue us. Do you know what this means, God is for you. When He looks upon you today, Christian, He does not see your sin and your guilt, He sees the righteousness of His Son and He loves you.

(Illus. Imagine Israel in the midst of their slavery. They must have felt as though God did not care. They must have felt as though God did not remember them and that he did not hear their cries. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

During their time of bondage in Egypt God loved His people and in His love He raised up a man, a son, named Moses, who would deliver a message both to the children of Israel and the King of Egypt. Here is the message God gave to Moses.

Exo 6:6 Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. 7 I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord

This is the word that God sent to His people while in slavery. It is a word of promise that says the day is near at hand when I will step out of Heaven to come and free you from your bondage. God says, “I will deliver you. I will redeem you. I will make you to be my people. I will be your God.”

Now here in Galatians 4, Paul wants us to understand that we too have been in slavery.

3 In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come,

Our identity apart from Christ is that we are slaves to sin. When he says here that we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world he is talking about the role of the law in our lives. The law is not what saves us, it only points out that we need to be saved. The law doesn’t make us holy, it simply reveals that we are not holy. The law is like an x-ray machine that shows us that our bones are broken, but the x-ray machine can’t put us back together it can only show us the problem.

We need someone to come and save us, to rescue us, to put our bones back into the right place and that is what God promised to do. He promised that a time would come when He would arrive to redeem us from our slavery.

In the Sovereign and eternal plan of God there was a time, a date set by the Father, when He would act. There would come a time when His plan of redemption would shift into high-gear and when the fullness of that time had come He sent His Son.

II. The Pattern of Redemption (V. 4b)

V. 4b…God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law

For Israel, God sent Moses as a prophet who would speak for God and lead His people once they were freed from slavery. This would become a pattern for how God would redeem His people. In time He would send them prophets, He would give them priests and He would finally give them a king. But notice who it is that does the moving…God sent.

There are two sending’s in this passage: V. 4 God sent forth His Son, V. 6 God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son. The pattern of God’s work as redeemer is not that we must reach out to Him and convince Him to love us but that God is reaching out to us convincing us that He loves us. God is the One on the move bringing an end to the winter that has reigned in our hearts.

I didn’t understand this when I first believed but over the years I have come to understand that I can take no credit in my salvation. I was not pursuing God, I did not find God, I did not come to my senses; the truth is that from the very beginning God had planned to come for me. He sent His Son into the world to show us His love and He sent His Spirit into our hearts so that we could be made alive by His love.

This is the pattern of God’s Work in Redemption. He comes to us. Only the gospel teaches us to think this way. Every religion in the world, except for Biblical Christianity, teaches that in order to be right with God you must do something. Every religious notion in our hearts tells us that in order for God to love us we must make ourselves loveable by becoming moral people, by attending services, by doing good things. But the gospel says, God’s plan to redeem His chosen people from their slavery to sin is going to happen by God coming down to earth not by our climbing our way up to Heaven.

Jesus came because the Father sent Him and when He came he was like one of us. He was born of a woman and born under the law. This means that the way God is going to accomplish His purpose of redemption is not by starting at the top but by going all the way down to the bottom. Jesus became a helpless human child. He came in the world the same way you and I came into the world, as a baby born into this sinful world.

There is no one so low in their sin that Christ can’t save them. He humbled Himself all the way down to become a baby in a manger. He was born under the law so that He could identify with and redeem those who were under the law.

III. The Securing of Redemption (V. 5a)

V. 5a… to redeem those who were under the law

The key word here is redeem and it means that when Jesus came He secured deliverance for us by making the payment necessary to set us free. The law could not free us, it could not reign us in and make us fit for God, so what did God do? He came down and reigned us in all on His own. But in order for us to be set free a price had to be paid. Christ paid that price. He paid our ransom.

The cost of our ransom wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t a few pennies’ scraped up from the couch that paid our debt, it wasn’t silver or even gold; it was the precious blood of Christ that paid our ransom. In order for us to be redeemed Christ willingly died. That is the picture that Paul wants us to see. For the blood of Jesus to cover our sins it had to first be poured out in sacrifice. It cost Him.

Redemption, refers to the process of being delivered through payment, that payment is called a ransom. The ransom price was His blood poured out on the cross. He died in our place. He died to set us free from the guilt and power of sin. “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 6:23).”

He died to cover our debt, to pay the price required to buy us out of slavery. On the cross, Jesus secured redemption for all of His people, for every human being who would believe in Him and trust in Him for salvation.

In the OT, there was a system of sacrifices that were required for the people to come into the presence of God in worship. But as soon as they walked away they were in need of cleansing once more. Year after year the sacrificial lambs were offered up so that the sins of Israel would once again be washed away. But Christ offered up a better sacrifice.

Hebrews 9:11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come… 12 he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

The sacrifice of bulls and goats was enough to let them get close once a year, but the sacrifice of Christ brings us into the presence of God forever. The blood of Christ has eternal value. The worth of Christ is greater than anything you and I can imagine. Thousands and thousands of lambs could shed their blood and it not be equal to one drop issued from Jesus side. His blood saves. His blood redeems and its value is infinite.

The blood of Christ is enough to change our identity from slaves of sin to Sons of God.

IV. The Application of Redemption (V. 5b)

V. 5b…so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The keyword here is adoption and it means to transfer rights as a member of the family. Christ secured our redemption through the payment of His own blood and now He has applied our redemption by adopting us into the family. This is Amazing Grace.

We were once enemies of God. We were once slaves to sin. We deserved death and judgment but God’s gracious plan was to save us at the immeasurable cost of His own Son and the result is that we now have a seat at God’s table.

God’s family is a rowdy bunch and we fit right in. All the saints that have gone before us were complete failures and sinners. Oh sure, they did some good things but they were all wretched sinners just like you and me. But God loves us despite us. God loves us and wants us in the family, so His work of redemption is not complete until we receive full adoption as sons and daughters.

He could have simply paid all our debts and let us go free, but He took it a step further and said, “I want you to come home with me.” Forgiveness would be like God paying our fine in court so that we could leave as free men, but adoption is when God comes alongside us, slips his arm around our shoulder and squeezes us in as His child. And the benefits of our adoption are incredible.

V. The Enjoyment of Redemption (V. 6-7)

6 And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

If you are a Christian, then you have a new identity in the eyes of God. This passage tells us who we were apart from Christ, who we are now as born again believers in Christ; and this passage lets us know that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each responsible for the change that has taken place in us.

If you have put your trust in Jesus, it’s because God has done a work in you to redeem you from life as a slave and He has adopted you as His beloved child. Child of God is your new identity and the world can’t understand this, but you must. You are a child of God now and you can stand with confidence, with dignity, and with courage knowing that God, your Father, is for you. If God is for you then who can be against you?

As Christians, we know that God loved us. That He sent His Son for us. That Christ redeemed us by His blood and God adopted us into His family. We get to call Him, “Abba! Father!” And God has underwritten our inheritance in eternity. Our future is as secure as is the existence of God.

Conclusion…Access to the tree of life (Rev 22:1-5)

This story of redemption has been unfolding ever since the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve were sent out from God’s presence because of their sin. Even back then God told them that one day He would send a man, a son of Eve, who would come to crush the serpent’s head and bring back the peace that was lost because of sin. One day we would be able to come into the presence of God again and have access to him and to the tree of life.

Rev 22:1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

The story of God’s work in redemption began long ago but it is still unfolding today. If you are a Christian, then this is your story. You may not have fully understood it but you were a slave to your sin and because of His great love for you God determined that He would not allow you to remain in slavery. He sent His Son Jesus to live for you and to die for you. Jesus chose to die in your place to secure your redemption you and to make bring you into His family.

And He is still at work in your heart through the Holy Spirit who will not abandon us nor let us utterly fail. He will guide us all the way home and there is coming a day when we will be home forever. If you are His, He loves you like a son, like a daughter and His love never fails.

This is the Work of God in Redemption.

Does this story seem too good to be true? Are the circumstances of your life so difficult that you have assumed that God doesn’t care about you or know what you are going through.

Do you feel as though God has forgotten about your circumstances? Do you think God doesn’t care about you? Do you want God to send the Spirit of His Son into your heart so that you can know Him as your Father?

Luke 11:13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

 

 

 
 

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ (1 of 2)

Series: Colossians

Speaker: Pastor Justin Wheeler

Scripture: Colossians 3:12-17

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What is the greatest truth in all of the Bible? Many of us would scratch our heads thinking that this is not an easy question to answer but perhaps it’s easier than we think.

On April 23, 1962, Karl Barth (the renown 20th Century Swiss-German, neo-orthodox theologian) spoke at Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago. Many have reported that, during the Q & A time, a student asked Barth, if he could summarize his theology in a single sentence. As the story goes, Barth responded by saying, "In the words of a song I learned at my mother's knee: 'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'"[1]

The love of Christ for sinners is an amazing truth but the fact that Jesus loves me, not as a possibility but as a reality…now that has to be the greatest Biblical truth I will ever discover. 

The fact that God knows us intimately and still loves us unconditionally is the greatest news that you will ever hear in your lifetime and when we tease out the details of His love for us it gets even better. He loved us before He made the world (Eph 1:4). He loves us with an everlasting love. His love for us moved Him to send us the greatest gift the world has ever seen (John 3:16). He loved us while we were still sinners (Rom 5:8) and there is nothing in the universe that can cause Him to withdraw His love from us (Rom 8:31-39).

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, then you can be absolutely sure that Jesus loves you and this love should produce two things in our hearts: gratitude for His amazing grace and repentance from the sin that once grieved our Savior’s heart. The kindness and love of God should lead us to repentance, to turn away from sin and to seek to bring glory to Him for who He is and for all that He has done.

Transition…

God loves us and when we come to see His love for us in the gospel and we embrace it by faith it brings about a change in our heart that also results in a change in our life. Now, if we get this out of order then we will miss the point of the gospel entirely but if we can keep this in place then we can live our lives with enduring confidence and Christ-like obedience.

With this in mind let’s read together, our passage for this morning from Colossians 3:12.

Col 3:12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Sermon Focus…The Rule of Christ in the Lives of His People

This morning and next week we are going to learn 5 ways the love of Christ impacts our lives as believers. Today we will look at the first 2…

I. The Power of Christ’s Love (V. 12)

Col 3:12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,

You may not see it at first glance but there is an immeasurable power at work in this verse. Paul’s shift from doctrine to practice is still underway. He has spent 2 chapters helping us to get our minds right when it comes to who Jesus is and what He accomplished for us on the cross. But now Paul is working to apply all of that doctrine to our lives. He wants us to know that right-teaching (orthodoxy) necessary leads to right-living (orthopraxy).

And the thing that he wants us to understand is how one motivates the other. What is the mechanism of action between right doctrine and right living…it’s the saving love of God. In one sense this passage is very basic and immensely practical. We are being instructed here to put on the character of the Christian life and these characteristics are intended to contrast with the sins that we once walked in (Col 3:5-8). But the simplicity of how are we to live as Christians is rooted in the deep magic of Gods love for us.

Notice that the calling for us to put on the character of Christ is rooted in the fact that we already belong to God. We are God’s chosen ones, the eternally elect children of God. How do we know this? Because we believe the gospel. We know because we, “heard the gospel and we understood the grace of God in truth (Col 1:4-6).”

1 Peter 1:3 According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

The gospel assures us that our membership within the family of God depends not on our goodness but gods grace, not on our loveableness but on His love.[2]

By faith we are the chosen ones of God, holy in His sight, and dearly loved by our creator. THIS is what motivates us to put on godly character. We are well loved children who long to be more like our loving Father.

(Illus…In the early generations of the Christian church the ceremony of baptism sought to illustrate this in a tangible way. Baptismal candidates would symbolize the radical change of Christian conversion by arriving at the place of their baptism in old and shabby clothes that symbolized their old way of life. Then just before going into the water they would take off those old garments, laying them aside. They would undergo baptism as a symbol of their new life in Christ and as they came up out of the water the church body would gather around them and wrap up in fresh, new and often bright white garments to symbolize the new life in Christ that lay ahead for them.[3]

The love of Christ is so powerful that it completely changes the course of our life. The gospel is so amazing that it can pry our hands away from a lifetime of sin and rebellion. The good news of God’s love is so thorough that it can change not only our eternal destination but also our earthly journey. Our identity as the chosen, holy and dearly loved people of God gives rise to a new way of life.

And that new way of life includes “putting on” a deep sensitivity to the needs and cares of others. Our lives are to be filled with compassion for others and this flows out of the compassion that Christ has shown us. We didn’t deserve His pity, or love; and yet He came to live and die in order to meet our deepest need. By faith we have received compassion and now we become conduits of compassion to others.

Being compassionate toward others leads us to show kindness to them. Kindness is compassion in action. In other words, the love that we have been shown is to affect us deeply and then flow out of us freely. The gifts of God are not intended to terminate on us. They are meant to fill our hearts to the point of overflowing and then burst out of us so that others will experience the kindness and compassion of God for themselves.

Kindness is a Christ like attitude toward others and humility is a Christ like attitude toward oneself. Christian humility is to have an accurate view of your importance in light of the cross. Our sin is so great that Jesus had to die to save us, but Christ’s love is so great that He was willing to die to save us. This doesn't cause us to boast it cause us to worship. The gospel brings us all to our knees.

 The supreme act of humility in the history of the world was put on display by Jesus and His act of humility is to fuel our own.

Phil 2:5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Meekness does not mean weak in fact it means the opposite. This word refers to a person that is so strong in their character that they master themselves and willingly assume the role of a servant to others. Isn’t this exactly how Jesus treated us. He was and is the eternal Son of God but He willingly laid down His life for us and He calls us to follow Him.

The last trait in this list is patience. God calls us to be patient, slow to anger, understanding, and willing to wait on the Lord. But there is another application to this and it has to do with how we treat those within the church. The main verb in this verse is a 2nd person plural verb which means that these character traits are to be employed within the context of the church. God wants us to live in this way all the time but especially in our relationship with other believers.

The power of Christ’s love is so strong that it transforms our individual lives and begins to spread out to transform the community that we belong to. But the next question is how do we put these into action?

II. The Function of Christ’s Love (V. 13-14)

13 bearing with one another…

The newfound compassion in our hearts functions to impact our relationships with one another. Jesus calls us to bear with one another, to be patient with each other, even to put up with one another. This is the same word that Jesus used when he said to the disciples, “O faithless generation, how long am I to bear with you?” IOW, how long do I have to put up with your spiritual ignorance and immaturity.

But it’s more than mere tolerance, it’s love that binds us to others no matter what. Our love for one another is to be so strong that it causes us to overcome that frustration.

(Illus…Mark Dever tells a story in his book The 9 marks of a Healthy Church and in the story he is talking with a friend. The friend has gotten into the habit of coming to church only for a portion of the worship service (the sermon) and then he quickly ducks out to go on about his business. He wouldn’t stay around to meet people, to build relationships with people, to share with people or to help people. He simply came in to get what he wanted and then he would leave. Mark asked him about this and the friends responded by saying that he could get everything he needed from the sermon and then by leaving he was making sure that other people weren’t holding him back from his growth in the Lord.

In his mind, hanging around and investing in the lives of other people would be a frustrating waste of his time. He might have to hear their stories, they might request his counsel, and that would require him to bear with them to help them grow in Christ, but he really didn’t want anything to do with that.

Now let’s contrast this with how Jesus treats us. Jesus never hears us praying and thinks, “I really don’t have time for you today.” He never sees us coming and says, “Oh no, not this guy again.” He never loses focus when I ramble on about my problems, He never rolls His eyes when I confess the same old sins, He never looks at His watch as a signal that I need to move on.

Jesus bears with me, He bears with you and He calls us to bear with one another. To be patiently present to listen, to encourage, to offer counsel, to rebuke when necessary, to share scripture often…this is what it means to bear with one another.

V. 13…and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

If you spend even a short amount of time in the church you are going to learn a very important lesson and it is that we are not perfect people. Your brothers and sister in this church are not perfect people. We will let one another down, we will let slip something that was shared in confidence, we will offend one another and when these things happen we need to remember the gospel. The ultimate offense is not what someone has down to us but what we have done to God.

The deepest and most egregious offense in our lives is not that someone let us down but that we sinned against our God. And yet the Lord has forgiven us. He forgave and He forgives and He calls us to follow Him by forgiving one another. There is not a time when we are more like our Heavenly Father than when we forgive those who have betrayed, hurt or offended us.

As Christians we know the joy and comfort of being forgiven and Jesus is calling us to extend that joy and comfort to others. When we forgive one another in the church we are echoing the forgiveness that each of us has already received from the Lord.

14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

Paul goes back to the clothing metaphor here and he paints the picture of us taking a large cloak that covers over everything and he tells us to fasten it tightly around our shoulders. The one garment that pulls everything together is love. If we try to pursue the other virtues and we forget that they flow from a heart of love then either we will fail or those virtues will become distorted. Rather than bearing with one another we will become manipulative and controlling. Rather than forgiving one another we will hold grudges that will eventually burst out and ruin our friendship, or cause us to pull away altogether.

But when love is the motivation for our care for one another it covers a multitude of sins. We can look at one another and think the best rather than the worst. Love makes the commands of God a delight rather than a duty, it makes us want to listen to one another rather than have to listen to another.

1 Cor 13:4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This is the function of Christ’s love.

Conclusion…

(Illus…Many of the battles that we see in the church don’t come down to doctrine at all they come down to one person’s preference over another. One person wants this while another person wants that. One person likes this style while another person likes that style. One person agrees with this presidential candidate while another person agrees with that presidential candidate.

Personal opinions and preferences are a natural part of life and we aren’t always going to agree on some things. But there must be something or someone holding us together that is greater than our personal preferences. That person is Christ and our unity in Him is far more important than our differences.

The default mode of the human heart is pride and pride rails against the idea of someone having authority over you or getting preference over you. Pride looks upon another person and desires to dominate them. Pride causes us to compare ourselves to others and to think that we are better or more important than them. Pride seeks power. It seeks to be superior to everyone else.

But the gospel comes in and it not only chips away at our pride, it destroys it. The gospel obliterates the idea that we are better than the next guy by telling us that we are just like the next guy. Sure, we may have more education or experience but those are only external things. You see the gospel gets at the heart of who we are and lets us know that we are not as awesome as we think.

The gospel attacks the default mode of the human heart and in the place of pride it inserts humility.  And the fruits that flow out of this gospel humility are gentleness, patience, bearing with one another and an eagerness, a zeal, to maintain unity and peace in the church.

In the world pride fuels competition but in the church humility fuels community and that is what God is building. Through the gospel of Jesus Christ God is creating a new counter-cultural community. He is building a city on a hill and the only way that we can be brought together as a city that displays the love and grace of God is if the pride in our hearts that would cause us to compete with one another gives way to humility before God that would have us embrace one another.

 

 
 

Resurrection Hope

Topic: The Resurrection

Speaker: Pastor Justin Wheeler

Scripture: 1 Peter 1:3

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This morning we are celebrating something that is absolutely essential to the Christian faith, to the degree that if it is not true then Christianity is pointless.

1 Cor 15:17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins…19 If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.

What we are celebrating is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We call it Easter, which is an old English term identifying the Christian festival of the resurrection. I prefer to call it Resurrection Day because that cuts through all the cultural and religious confusion to get to the heart of what this day is all about.

·       We are celebrating the historical reality that a first century Jewish rabbi named Jesus, who also happens to be the one and only Son of God, was crucified in Jerusalem during Passover week and then three days later he was raised from the dead.

·       We are celebrating the theological reality that by His death, burial and resurrection we who believe have been saved from our sins and have been granted eternal life.

·       We are celebrating the present reality that because of Christ’s resurrection from the dead we of all people have reason to live our lives with indestructible hope no matter how good nor how horrible the circumstances of our life happen to be.

·       We are celebrating the supernatural reality that the founder of our faith went through death and came out the other side.

And because of these things we worship Jesus Christ as our risen Savior and our God.

The worship of God is the ultimate purpose of our lives and the ultimate purpose of the church and it is also the goal of today’s sermon. In 1 Peter 1:3 we read this, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” The word bless means to worship or praise. It means to express gratitude toward God and to express joy in what He has done. Which begs the question, “What has God done?”

I Peter 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead

Transition…

Now, if we miss the first few words of this verse, then we will miss the point of all that we are going to learn in this passage. It is not Peter’s goal to simply expound on Christian theology so that we will marvel at theology itself, but that we would praise and worship the God who has revealed Himself in that theology. The result of these truths is that we must worship God. So working backward from the response of worship we need to understand the truths that motivate us to worship. IOW, why do we bless God?

My purpose in preaching this morning is to help us understand how the resurrection of Jesus Christ leads us to love, worship and serve God.

Sermon Focus…

I. We worship God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has shown us mercy.

I Peter 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy

Mercy happens when someone shows kindness to another even though it is within their power and right to punish them. When our kids get in trouble they want us to show them mercy. When we do something wrong we want to be shown mercy. When we are pulled over for speeding we deserve the be held accountable, but we would much rather our crime go unpunished.

Now, there is something that we need to understand about the God of the Bible and it is that He shows us mercy every day. God shows us mercy when He withholds from us the punishment we rightly deserve because of our sin against Him. God owes us nothing but judgment, and yet He shows us mercy every day by holding back that judgment from us.

God’s mercy is the divine restraint that keeps Him from unleashing the righteous wrath our sinful rebellion demands.

Notice in the text that God’s mercy toward us is great. We are the recipients of His abundant mercy. Our God is merciful and this means that His desire and ability to withhold what we deserve is like a storehouse so full that it is constantly overflowing (Lam 3:23). The mercy that God has for His people will never run out and we praise Him for this.

(Illus…Most of us would like to think of ourselves as merciful, showing kindness instead of judgment to others. But this tends to fall apart when we actually try it. Try to be merciful toward your children, your rude co-workers, that person who cuts you off on the road…And you come to see just how difficult (or impossible) it is to be merciful. But our God is so filled with mercy that He never stops showing us kindness.

But there is another side to God’s mercy. Divine justice demands that our sin be punished, which means that for God to withhold punishment (show us mercy) is to short-circuit His justice, unless the punishment we deserve is poured out on another. That is where Jesus steps in. Friends, this is what makes the gospel so beautiful.

Jesus stepped in to receive the justice of God that we deserved. He bore the wrath for you and me, so that we could be free. That is what He was doing on the cross. He wasn’t dying because He deserved to die, He was dying because we deserved to die. He took our place so that God’s justice would be upheld and so that God’s mercy would overflow toward us, and for this we Praise our God.

I. We worship God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has shown us mercy.

II. We worship God because He has caused us to be born again (v. 3)

It was Jesus, in John 3, who told us that in order to enter the Kingdom of God we must be born again. In our first birth we were stamped with the image of Adam, but the new birth emblazons us with the image of Christ. This new birth is given to us as a gift from God. He is the cause of our new birth.

But why do we need to be born again? Because our nature is totally corrupted by sin and we are powerless to overcome that nature on our own. The Bible teaches that by nature we are dead in our sins and children of wrath. This is what our first birth in Adam has afforded us. We need to be brought from death to life and Paul tells us how this happens in Titus 3.

Titus 3:4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,

We weren’t born again because of our good works; it was God’s mercy that fueled our new birth. The new birth is not the result of your prayer, or your baptism, or your trip down the aisle to talk to the pastor. The new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit in you. The Spirit brings life where there was death. He opens our eyes to see the truth of the gospel that we hadn’t seen before. He gives us a new heart of flesh replacing the heart of stone, and the result is that those who possess new life will respond with faith and repentance.

(Illus…Let’s imagine that a man is pulled from the water having just drowned and someone present begins to administer CPR. The man’s heart has stopped, there is no air in his lungs, and his brain function has ceased as well. But when the first responder begins to work he is able to bring all of those dead functions back to life. He compresses the heart to make it beat again, he fills the lungs with air in order to make them breathe again, he does all this in order to call the dead man back to life.

When that life finally rushes back it is only natural for the man to begin breathing new fresh air into his lungs, his heart begins to beat again on its own and his brain function jumps into high gear. The first responder has done his job and now the revived man has to do his job, which is to live.

The Holy Spirit is like a first responder who works within us causing us to be born again and the signs of our new life are faith in Jesus and repentance from sin. Faith and repentance are not the cause of our new birth; they are the evidence of it, meaning that we praise God and not ourselves for our new birth.

II. We worship God because He has caused us to be born again (v. 3)

III. We worship God because He has given us a living hope (V. 3)

What does Peter mean when he tells us that we have a living hope? What He means is that the source of our hope is not an idea it is a person. Let’s think back to the events of this past week some 2000 years ago.

On the night when Jesus was arrested, Peter was by His side and at first it seemed that Peter was willing to go to war in order to remain by Jesus’ side, but that is not how the night ended. Before the night ended, Peter denied that he even knew Jesus. And to make matters worse, Jesus told Peter that it was going to happen.

Earlier in the night Jesus told His disciples that the Jews would seek to put Him to death and that His followers would run in fear. When Peter heard this he jumped out of his seat to confess his commitment to die at Jesus’ side. But the Lord knew Peter better than Peter knew himself.

By mid-morning the next day Peter had denied His Lord and Jesus was hanging on a Roman cross atop Golgotha’s hill. Jesus was dead and Peter was devastated. Jesus’ death on the cross dashed Peter’s hopes. His death made Peter’s denials all the more bitter. It meant that there was no possibility of making amends or being restored to the one Peter had come to love. The crucifixion robbed Peter of hope.

But when the girls came in from the tomb on Sunday morning and told Peter that it was empty, can you imagine what this did to his heart? His hopes had been dashed to pieces, but this news was enough to cause hope to flicker in his heart again. Peter heard this news and then flew out of the door to go and see for himself and when He saw Jesus His hope was restored. But it was a new kind of hope. It wasn’t a false hope, a misplaced hope, a blind hope, a fond hope; it was a living hope.

Peter’s hope was not based on an idea it was based on a person, a person that is alive and for whom death has no hold. So when Peter writes to us about our living hope he writes from personal experience. His hope is alive because his hope is in Christ and Christ is alive. The resurrection of Jesus was not a mythical tale for Peter, it was a life-changing reality.

III. We worship God because He has given us a living hope (V. 3)

IV. We Praise God because He raised Jesus Christ from the dead (v. 3)

The Roman crucifix meant one thing death. It signaled the end of rebellion. It was the great silencer of those who dared to stand against the power of Rome.

The men who cried out to Pilate for Jesus to be crucified trusted that if they were successful Jesus would be no more. They were voting NO to Jesus and His Kingdom, but the resurrection shows that God voted YES.

N.T. Wright says,

Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the re-description of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.

An earthly court sentenced Jesus to death but a higher court reversed his sentence. Death couldn’t hold Jesus because death had no claim on Him. He did not die because of His own sin He died for the sins of His people. Therefore, death could not hold Him.

Now, it’s one thing to claim that Jesus was a great rabbi worthy of our attention. It is quite another to claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that is exactly what Peter is doing here. He is claiming that Jesus, the man crucified on a Roman cross was raised from death to new life by the power of God.

The resurrection of Jesus is proof that He was the Christ and the God appointed Savior of the world. Friends, there is no reason nor is there any hope that you will find peace in this life and the next unless you receive Jesus Christ as Lord. And the most powerful evidence that Jesus is worthy of your worship and devotion is the resurrection. 

All of the things that we praise God for (His mercy, our new birth, our living hope) are only made possible through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection was absolutely necessary; otherwise none of these gifts could be ours. If Christ had somehow failed, then His sacrifice would not have been accepted by God as a sufficient ransom for our sin. If Christ had somehow failed then there would be no reason for Him to be raised from the dead, because His work was not complete and acceptable to God. If there was no resurrection then we would receive death and not new life, wrath and not mercy, despair rather than hope.

The Apostle Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 15 when he writes,

V. 14 If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

V. 17 If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

V. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

If it weren’t for the resurrected life of Jesus we would have nothing to celebrate, nothing to rejoice in, nothing to hope for and no reason to want to praise God.

V. 20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead,” which means that all of these things, all of these gifts are ours and they should result in praise to our God. Because of the resurrection we have received the Father’s mercy. Because of the resurrection we have been born again. Because of the resurrection we have a living hope.

Conclusion…

I. We worship God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has shown us mercy.

II. We worship God because He has caused us to be born again (v. 3)

III. We worship God because He has given us a living hope (V. 3)

IV. We Praise God because He raised Jesus Christ from the dead (v. 3)

Here in this text, Peter is leading us to praise God because our salvation is His work and not our own. We couldn’t begin to accomplish it and we do not in any way deserve it. For Peter, praise is not a religious duty that earns us God’s love, rather it is the overflow of our joy in what God has done for us through Christ.

One of the things that today should force us to do is to look upon the empty tomb and ask ourselves what must I do with Jesus? It is easy to come to church on Easter Sunday and celebrate a cultural holiday. It is easy to get together with family to hunt Easter eggs, wear new spring clothes, and go to church. But we’ve gotten really good at ignoring the earth shattering truth that this day is all about.

Jesus Christ a man attested by God with signs and wonders died in the place of sinners and was raised to new life on the third day. The power of God in his life, death, and resurrection is the un-ignorable truth that we must all reckon with today.

So my plea for you is that you run to Jesus, that you would see the weight of your sin before God and that you would see Jesus as the only one who can wash that sin away.