1005. Christ Alone

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything, so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from The University Chapel Platform.

Just over 500 years ago, in October 1517, Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses, which is considered to be the beginning of the Reformation. For the next several days on The Daily Platform, we'll be studying some of these doctrines in a series called Truth Triumphs. Let's listen to today's message, entitled Christ Alone, preached by Nathan Crockett, the Director of Ministry Training at Bob Jones University. Dr. Sam Horn will introduce him. We'll be hearing from Dr. Nathan Crockett. All of you know Dr. Crockett. He teaches all of you who are in the freshman class. He is the Director of Ministerial Training, and it has been an incredible joy to me and really an amazement to see how God has used Dr. Crockett in so many ways, so many of the new changes in the way that we have approached ministry training this year. The new ministry chapel that is going on really are coming out of Dr. Crockett's heart for the Lord and his heart for you as students, so he's going to come and speak to us on our next topic in the Reformation series, Christ Alone. Please turn to Romans 3.21.

Romans 3.21. And as you turn, I want you to imagine that you are out hiking with some of your close family members, and as you're hiking, you're hiking across kind of a rickety bridge, and something terrible happens, and that bridge gives way, and you and your family members fall into a very fast-flowing river. This, of course, is hypothetical. And you're the only one who knows how to swim. Don't you hate ethical dilemmas like this?

You are hiking with your mother, your spouse, and your only child. You only have the time to save one. Who would you save? Now, that's a terrible question to ask, isn't it? Yet recently, I heard Dr. Lonnie Paulson speaking, and he said that question has been asked to people all around the world in various countries, and it's interesting to see the various responses that they give.

For instance, in the United States, and this maybe would not surprise you, it's almost exactly a 50-50 split. Half the people say, I would save my spouse. The other half say, I would save my child. Nobody says, I would save my mother. I think the feeling would be, well, she's been a wonderful mom.

She's had a great life. She certainly would want me to save her grandchild. However, if you ask this in a Middle Eastern country, the response is overwhelmingly that they would save the mother. In fact, I think Dr. Paulson said it's usually 100% of the recipients that say that, and their thinking would probably go, I can get another wife. I can have another child.

But I only have one mom. I talked to some students recently from Asia, and they said it would typically be the same response there. My point would simply be this, that the culture that you grow up in influences significantly your thinking. And so for us, in our day, in our culture, to say what's the big deal that 500 years ago a German monk nailed 95 theses on the door of the castle church, is that really something that we should have all these celebrations about. And we need to understand something about Luther's world.

And again, others have talked about the history behind this, and others will in the future in this series. But I wanted to quickly remind you a little bit about Luther's world. There were famous things, of course, going on around that time. Columbus sailing, the ocean blue, the Copernican Revolution, all these things.

But likely, Luther growing up would have never known about Michelangelo or Raphael or Copernicus or Columbus. He grew up in an area where most people lived a harsh life in northern Europe. There was terrible violence. Peasants would often fight for food with knives or clubs. There were many, many homeless people. I was reading just recently about whole groups of homeless people that would be pushed from one country to another.

If you were born with any kind of handicap, you were almost certainly doomed to a life of homelessness and probably an early death. Many around Luther's lifetime before him and shortly after were killed by various plagues that came through. And not only was the socioeconomic status really bleak and dark, but even more dark was the religious day that Luther grew up in. The Roman Catholic Church dominated everything. And so they would worship saints. There was the veneration of relics.

You had these indulgences that supposedly if you would buy one, it would help your loved ones spend less time in purgatory. Luther grew up in a period of complete religious darkness. And of course, you probably know about the lightning experience and the promise that he would become a monk. And really, Luther, if you study his life, was an overachiever.

I mean, everything he did, he did all out, like 200%. And Luther would later write, if you could get to God by being a monk, I would have done it. But he kept feeling empty until he came to Romans chapter one. And in God's providential timing, he sent someone who's been called a revolutionary thinker. There's a sense in which what Luther was doing wasn't totally revolutionary. He was just going back to what the Bible said.

And really, at the same time, having revolutionary what we could call technology, it seems funny to us to call the movable type printing press technology, but that's precisely what it was. So that Luther in his many, many writings, that these could be widely spread, disseminated throughout that area. And God providentially did that so that a man like Martin Luther and the other reformers, and these men were not perfect.

They had plenty of flaws, and yet God amazingly providentially used them to take on a religious empire with biblical truth to bring us back to what the Bible said. And there's so much more we could say about Martin Luther. You probably realize that for much of his adult life, he was a wanted man, wanted dead or alive.

And yet, within certain pockets, particularly of Germany, he was like a superstar. I mean, he was like people's hero because he took on the Catholic church. Luther, of course, didn't want to take credit for it. He actually wrote this, I simply taught, preached, wrote God's word. Otherwise, I did nothing. And then while I slept, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it.

I did nothing. The word did it all. And of course, Scripture is the first of the solas that we've been talking about, right? We already heard a great message on Scripture alone. This was, you could call this the content of the Reformation. The Reformation also taught faith alone. This, in many ways, was the central issue of the Reformation.

It's not your works. You're saved by faith alone. It was grace alone, the message of the Reformation.

And today, we are talking about this topic. It is through Christ alone. It's not just faith in anything. It's not faith for faith's sake, but Christ is the foundation of the Reformation. And we'll find, Lord willing, next week that all of this is to the glory of God alone, the goal of the Reformation. You could try to summarize the five solas in a sentence like this, that Scripture, and you can add in your mind here alone if you want, trying to keep it as concise as possible, but Scripture alone teaches that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. This is the Reformation.

Those five solas. And today, we have the privilege of talking about the fact that we are saved by Christ alone. Michael Reeves wrote this, the center, the cornerstone, the jewel in the crown of Christianity is not an idea, a system, or a thing. It is Jesus Christ.

Christianity is all about Christ. I had you turn to Romans 3.21. Martin Luther scribbled in the margin of his Bible this about Romans 3.21 through 26, this paragraph that we're going to look at, that it is the chief point and the very central place of the epistle and of the whole Bible. Look now with me at this passage. But now, the righteousness of God without the law is manifested. And if you've been following Paul's argument through the book of Romans, in the first 17 verses after an introduction and then stating the theme of the book of Romans, he transitions into a period where in Romans 1 through 3, he really is proving to you that the entire world, whether you're Jew, whether you're Gentile, that the entire world stands guilty before the God of heaven. He actually says in chapter 3 that when you stand before God, you will shut your mouth.

You'll have nothing to say. But now he's going to argue that people like that, people like you and like me, who are completely, entirely guilty that we can actually be justified, that we can be declared righteous in the courtroom of heaven. And that's a remarkable thing if you've been following his argument because we are filthy, rotten sinners. We're guilty, vile, and helpless. How could we be declared righteous by the just God of heaven?

And he explains that in this paragraph. But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested. There's a way to be saved without perfectly keeping the law because none of us could do that.

How is it made known? He points out it's witnessed to by the law and the prophets. He said, I'm not contradicting the Old Testament.

It pointed forward to this day. Even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ. And you'll notice in this passage, the soul is, right? It's by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe for there is no difference for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And we use verse 23 to show that all people are sinners and it does that in context. It's actually showing that because all people sinned, all people are savable. Verse 24, being justified, that's declared righteous in the courtroom of heaven, freely by his grace through the redemption to be bought back from the slave market of sin through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now he describes more about Christ. Verse 25, whom God has set forth to be the propitiation.

This is the appeasement offering of God's wrath. The sacrifice that appeased the wrath of almighty God to be the propitiation through faith in his blood. To declare his, that's God the father's righteousness for the remission or the forgiveness of sins that are past through the forbearance of God. To declare I say at this time, his, that's God's righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

You say, wow, that's a lot to get my mind around. Do you realize most everyone would agree that the key word in the book of Romans is righteous or it's often translated just. That Greek word occurs dozens of times in Romans.

And one of the things Paul is arguing for in the book of Romans is he's trying to prove this. How can a God who is entirely righteous let guilty people into heaven? You think about in America, if we have a district court judge and they continually let guilty people go free, what do we call them?

Maybe you're thinking liberal, but we usually call them unjust, right? Yeah, if someone, if a judge keeps letting guilty people go free, we say that's not just, that's not fair, that's not righteous. But Paul is saying the all righteous, the incredibly just God devised a righteous means by which he could let guilty people become righteous.

How does he do that? Well, he does it through Christ, right? Verse four, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that's in Christ Jesus. He tells us in verse 25, that's how he can forgive your sin.

He gave you a substitute. The picture in scripture is not of a God who looks at all your sin and turns the other way and pretends like it didn't exist, but a God who calls you out for being guilty, who calls me out for being guilty and chooses to pay the payment for me. It's as if you graduate from college, you get your first job and within the first year you get fired and you go into a rage about this.

In fact, you were so upset about it, you said they fired me, I'm going to fire them and you actually set their building on fire one night in a fit of rage and you watch that burning, you know, that building burn to the ground and it's caught on a security camera. And you stand in court and all the evidence is guilty that you did it. The biblical view of God as your judge is not someone who pretends you didn't do it.

It's a judge who looks at you and says you're guilty and gives the appropriate punishment. Maybe in this case, let's say the building was not insured for fire and so he says that was a five million dollar building, your punishment is you spend the rest of your life in jail unless you can come up with five million dollars and you know that you can't come up with five million dollars. But what if a just judge who righteously called you guilty, who righteously told you the price that you needed to pay that you could never ever pay? What if that judge was also incredibly loving and he took off his judge's robe and he stepped out from behind the judge's bench and he pulled out his checkbook and he said I'm independently wealthy and not because of anything good in you because you're a sinner, you committed the crime. But because I've chosen to set my love on you, here's a check for five million dollars. If you accept it, you can go free.

You can pay your price because I'm paying it for you. Christ alone can do that. I mean where else would you find forgiveness? Where else would you find mercy? Who else would give you heaven when you deserve hell?

We need Christ and we need Christ alone. My wife and I like to try to teach our kids various songs and there's certain ones they really pick up on. There's this remarkable thing, they can see a Disney movie once and it's like the song is locked into their mind. Shepherd just, I came back to the office last night to study and I got home and under my pillow he had drawn me a picture and he likes writing jokes with his pictures and so with quite a few misspellings he wrote, why would you never give Elsa a balloon?

She might let it go. But you know they'll be singing a song in the car like let it go or something like that and I'll be like oh great song and I'll start singing Amazing Grace you know. So we were this past weekend, Abigail was traveling for the university, she was in New England and so I took my three oldest kids to Gatlinburg just for some fun times with them to take them to the aquarium.

So as we're driving up to Gatlinburg we do this thing we sometimes do where I say okay we're gonna go oldest to youngest and everyone will sing a song and we did that a long time because we got caught in traffic. So we sang a bunch of songs, we sang through all the songs that the three of them knew and one of the songs we kept coming back to that we've taught our kids since they were toddlers is what can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Oh precious is that flow that makes me white as snow.

No other fount I know. Nothing but the blood of Jesus. And the only other verse they know is verse four. This is all my hope and peace. This is all my righteousness.

Nothing but the blood of Jesus. And sometimes when I'm singing a song like that I sit there and I think what if my unsaved neighbors heard me singing this? What if a typical person with a secular mindset heard me singing this with my six-year-old and my five-year-old and my three-year-old? They would think I was a horrible parent.

They would think I was the weirdest person in the world. You're singing with little kids about blood? What's that all about? But it's because we believe in Christ alone that He is our one Savior. I believe 1 Timothy 2 5 and 6 there's one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Acts 4 12, neither is there salvation in any other for there's none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. Christ alone. And of course John 14 6, I put the whole passage here on the screen so you can see the context, but where Jesus responds to a doubting disciple by saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No man cometh unto the Father but by me. How would you apply a truth like this? I would say first of all to believe. To believe. Almost undoubtedly there would be several of you sitting here and maybe you sort of let your parent's faith spill over to you a little bit.

Maybe you're at Bob Jones because you can get a great education for a good price. Maybe you're here for any number of reasons and yet maybe you yourself have never believed that there's one way to God the Father and it goes straight through Jesus Christ. Maybe there's someone here and as a child you made a profession and you kind of think that you believe but even in the past month or two you've been dealing with serious doubts. One of the things I like to give out, I have dozens and dozens of these, a reader's guide to the gospels. It's set up almost like a novel with no verse numbers, no chapter numbers, thick paper nicely bound of just the gospels.

I'd be happy to give you one of these. If you say no, I'm struggling with doubts, you can read apologetics books, you can study biblical prophecy, but I encourage people, read what the Bible says about Jesus. Believe.

Secondly, I'd encourage you to think. A couple weeks ago I was speaking at a conference in Ohio, went from that to Christian school convention to a leadership convention in Indianapolis. I took my three-year-old son Christian with me. My friend Jack Rambler came as well and we're sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting on a flight. I'm playing with Christian and the stewardess leads a man over near me.

He was completely, totally blind, couldn't see anything. He was about my age. Sat him down in the open seat right next to me.

I could tell he was a little bit nervous. And so I just leaned over and I said, hey, I'm the guy sitting to your left. My name's Nathan.

I'm 37 years old. My three-year-old son Christian's here with me and I just finished speaking at a Christian school leadership conference and I'm headed to Atlanta, then Greenville. What are you doing? He just started talking. We talked for probably 30 minutes or so before we got on the flight and I thought he was from Charleston. He had a t-shirt on for a Charleston pub and he said he'd had his bachelor party there and he was headed back to Charleston, going to get married on a cruise and I started talking to him about Christ.

And as I did, he sort of lit up and he said, I actually used to live in Seattle and I got saved at a church there and I've kind of gotten away from that a little bit, but he said, I love Jesus. And I asked him how he went blind. When he went blind, he was born with almost no sight.

By the time he was 12 years old, he was completely dark. And I said, that must be hard. And he started smiling and he said, everyone talks to me about how hard it must be being blind. But he just started enumerating all the things that he thanked God for.

All the little things you would never, I would never even think to thank God for, but he did. Are you thankful for Christ and his crosswork on your behalf? Thirdly, are you committed to this? I like that BJ slogan, own it. Do you own it? Do you want to make this place better when someone says, where do you go to school? And I would say the same thing about your Christian faith.

Do you own it? I'm not going to try to guilt you into sharing the gospel, but are you excited about what Christ has done? And this rolls right in over into number four and that is just share. Do you realize there are people around you who are walking in spiritual darkness and you have the truth that could set them free? You don't have to be mean about that.

You don't have to be ugly about that. But can you tell people about Christ alone? Who's their one hope for salvation? I love the Getty song, in Christ alone my hope is found. He is my light, my strength, my song.

The conference I was speaking at Abigail went to hear Keith Getty do a workshop. She's a flute player and he studied under James Galway, the best flute player in the world who grew up in Ireland where Getty grew up. He actually told my wife afterwards it's Galway who taught him how to write a beautiful melody. But one of the things he said at that was he said I wake up every day, he wrote in Christ alone when he was 25 years old, his very first song. He said I wake up every day and I try to write another song like in Christ alone.

Why? It's so core and central to what we believe as Christians. I have a picture of the corner of my bedroom.

I don't know how well you can see that, but on the side of the bed I sleep on right next to me on the wall on nice wood pallet type things is this phrase from one of my favorite songs. In the morning when I rise give me Jesus. I want to close by reading for you a few of the paragraphs that I read at my dad's funeral, the hardest sermon I ever preached a few years ago. A close family friend told me before the funeral dad had counseled with so many people as their pastor while they died and now he had the chance to go through the valley himself. Dad had told dozens of our closest friends and family members how to die well and now God gave him the opportunity to show all of us how to die well.

If you didn't know dad and you found your way into the service you might get the wrong idea. You might think that today we were honoring a great man here after all as a man who preached to thousands and talked to presidents and shared the gospel with the nation on Good Morning America. But if you thought that dad was a great man he'd be the first to insist that you had it all wrong.

Today we're not honoring a great man but his great God. Dad would be the first to tell you he was just a redneck country boy from the hills of North Georgia but a great and all wise God saved that teenage boy from the pit of sin. A great and merciful God put his hand on that redneck country boy and did something remarkable with his life. Dad was not perfect.

He had flaws just like the rest of us. Those of us who knew him well know that he did his best to practice what he preached. That he was quick to ask his friends and family for forgiveness. That he was absolutely passionate about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Dad preached a whole lot of funerals through the years and he always gave the gospel.

The song that's been playing over and over in my mind these past few days is the one that brother Dubois just sang for us. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. And when I come to die. And when I come to die. Give me Jesus.

You can have all this world but give me Jesus. And when dad came to die. When it was time for dad to leave this fleeting world behind. When he breathed his last breath here on earth.

When he left behind his pain ridden tumor filled body and stepped from the temporal into the eternal. Dad had Jesus and that was really all that mattered. Our hope today is not my dad's many accomplishments, is not his artistic ability, his many talents, or his speaking ability. Our hope is in the bedrock reality that dad knew Jesus.

He was in Christ. Could that be said of you at your funeral? That you are in Christ alone. That you believe that. That you're thankful for it. That you're absolutely 100% committed to it.

And that your desire is to share it with others. Let's pray. Father we can face no guilt in life and have no fear in death. And we recognize that as the power of Christ in me. From our life's first cry to our final breath you command our destiny.

No power of hell, no scheme of man can ever pluck us from your hand. Till you return or call us home here in the power of Christ will stand. We pray for your grace to do that. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Nathan Crockett director of ministry training at Bob Jones University. Thanks for listening and join us again next week as we continue this series about the Reformation here on The Daily Platform.