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God’s Brave Love-Part 1 (Part C)

Cross Reference Radio / Pastor Rick Gaston
The Truth Network Radio
November 26, 2024 6:00 am

God’s Brave Love-Part 1 (Part C)

Cross Reference Radio / Pastor Rick Gaston

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November 26, 2024 6:00 am

An outline of the suffering of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament 700 years before it happened. All laid out in great detail, God’s plan to save humanity by giving Himself as a substitute to atone for our sins. God’s brave love plan was not reckless, but purposeful to accomplish what He had in store.

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They are not gods which are made with hands. And so there's the Gentiles doing the same thing that the unbelieving Jews were to Stephen. They were doing it to Paul.

This is how it is. There's no beauty that we should desire him. Well, he's full of beauty in the eyes of God, that tender plant. He's full of beauty in the eyes of those who are saved. We hopefully can find a way to be used by God to share that with lost souls. You know, I sometimes make the point that, you know, there are some Christians, if Christ were pastoring a church, they'd leave that church eventually. It's a sad commentary on how sin beats us up if we're not careful.

It gets the upper hand that way. If Christ were to come, would we recognize him? Could we make a contribution to his ministry? The apostles did. They recognized him.

You are the Christ, the Son of God. And they got clumsy with it. You know, Peter, of course, with a size nine mouth.

But man, just not going to find someone that loved Jesus more than Peter loved him. A root, when he says, as a root out of dry ground. And not in the ground. The root is out of the ground, which is pretty much, to men, lying in the pathway, something to be kicked out of the way.

Of no use to them. They trivialized him. And this in contrast to he being the tender plant of the Father, who put him in this hostile environment because love is brave. Love of the Father is brave to let the Son go through these things. Because God is God and he's so superior, it doesn't mean that he doesn't feel these things.

It's just that those feelings don't take control. Those who have attacked Jesus through the ages have seen no beauty, no desire in him. You think Mao Tae Sung saw any beauty in Jesus as he was persecuting anybody associated with Christianity, whether genuine or not? He hated Christianity. So did Stalin and the rest of it. Because communism is a religion and anybody tells you it's a political entity, they don't understand. They're just a religion trying to behave as a political entity to be able to conquer. Anyway, he has no form of comeliness.

The servant has no appeal by the world's standards. Superficial glances at him causes one to miss it and to miss out. I was thinking today, I was trying to say, man, how did I get saved? How did it happen? If I could just bottle it, I could get others saved. But it's very difficult. It's a supernatural event. However, God uses people to bring about these supernatural events.

There's no question about that. He's not entrusted the gospel to the angels yet. It's largely the work of men. But natural men are blind to the beauty of God. Luke chapter 7 verse 44, then he turned to the woman and said, Simon, now let's pause there, Simon a Pharisee. He should have recognized these things. Simon invited Christ over, this celebrity rabbi.

Now, Jesus wasn't trying to be a celebrity rabbi, but because of what he did, he became one in the eyes of people. Then he turned, and of course Simon, here's this woman weeping over Christ, and Simon is judging the woman and judging Christ, and Christ picks up on it, and he says, he turned to the woman and said, then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, so he's looking at the woman, but he's talking to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet.

But she has washed my feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. She saw his beauty. That he wasn't afraid of sinners. That if anyone could be high and lifted up over sinners and trample them, it was him, and he opted not to do that. His humanity was his veiled glory.

She could see it. What was Simon's, I think Simon got saved. I think he was part of giving that account to Luke when Luke did his research.

He says, yeah, he came to my house. I was all uppity about things, because we know some of the Pharisees were saved. It's in their writings. First Chronicles 16, 29.

I'm not going to read it, but I'll reference it to you about the beauty of his holiness. And when we see him, the we there, to Isaiah, was the Jewish people. But to the church, it's all mankind. Now, you've been hearing me say that the Jews have had this mandate to reach the Gentiles, and of course they've left this unharvested crop in the field. Well, who was the greatest Old Testament example of that? Jonah. Jonah had no desire to reach the people for Messiah, I mean for God, for Yahweh, which was what they were supposed to be.

A blessing to all the peoples of the world since the days of Abraham. And yet look how he behaved. But at least he had the conversion necessary to tell us how messed up he was. Jonah says, you know, I was a racist. I was disobedient.

All of the key categories I flunked as a prophet, but God in His grace reached out to me. I was patient. And using that whole fish thing I think was a bit overkill. They could have said that. It wasn't.

It still didn't work. Even after the fish, and he repents, and he sees his self-worth as nothing, and he survives it, and he's sent back. And he's just got this grudge on people going to heaven.

There are some people that live with a bulldozer. Just Christians, you know, it's almost like they don't mind that people are going to hell. In their thinking, in their mentality. I don't know. Anyway, Isaiah, he names those who smoke the man of sorrows, the zealot Jews. We see him. We the Jews.

We did this. Zealot Jews who were incensed, incensed at being told that they slew their own Messiah. Because that's what the apostles told them. According to the scriptures, you killed him, and you got the Bible that says you killed him. Acts chapter 2, verse 23, Peter preaching, him being delivered by the predetermined purpose and foreknowledge of God. That's that brave love right there. He continues, Peter does, you have taken by lawless hands and crucified and put him to death.

I would have been screaming out there, you stupid idiots! But Peter doesn't do that. He ends up bringing a lot of them to Christ. Many of those that came to Christ that day became a problem to Paul. It's real stuff dealing with sin. Will there be people in heaven that you didn't like on earth?

Absolutely! But it won't be that way anymore. I mean, I won't get to heaven if someone comes up to me, hi, hey, I used to come to your church and we won't have that conversation.

Because I'll be telling them, you know, I used to like you till you said that. Then, of course, Stephen, Acts chapter 7, you stiff necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears. I mean, Peter, no one flayed them better than Stephen. You always resist the Holy Spirit.

As your fathers did, so do you. And remember, he's one of them. Well, not a Pharisee, he's, what we would say as a Macianic Jew, watch out for that title. There's nothing any more special about being a Macianic Jew than a Gentile Christian.

It's really the same thing. Anyway, he says, which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the just one. Well, we don't have it on record in scripture, but it's believed King Manasseh had Isaiah killed. But we don't have to because we know that there were others that were killed. Even Jesus mentioned Zechariah killed at the altar. Anyway, he says, of whom you have now become betrayers and murderers.

Straight out, nothing unclear about that. You murdered the Messiah and the Bible told you you'd do this. And do you think they would go, oh, we repent.

They killed him for saying that. Well, Gentile pagans would go on to persecute the Lord's followers, not only as Paul began to preach the gospel in Gentile territories, but even to this day. In Paul's day, they were enraged at being told that their gods were trash, worse than trash. Paul tells us in Corinthians, they worship demons to this day. We say this about all the false religions that are out there. You're worshiping Satan. Well, is it true? All of them, useless concoctions of the God-makers club.

And it doesn't take far. It doesn't take much research to look back and say, where does my religion come from? Well, we can trace ours back to Genesis. We could back it up with the prophecies. We could back it up with science. Incidentally, so I try not to watch Christian anything really. I do read, you know, Christians that are in heaven have left some writings that I like a lot.

Anyway, but this one I took the bait. It was a Christian astronomer telling us about the star of Bethlehem. Now, I'm saying to myself, well, I know the answer to this one, and I hope he gets this right. Well, God in his mercy gave us fast-forward, because there's no way I'm going to sit through 46 minutes, because formal education teaches people to present 40-11 different wrong views than the right view. I prefer showing you the right view, then we can get to some of the others. Well, he does.

He goes through all of those, and I fast-forward, and he gets it right. And so I'm happy about that. It's a miracle. You're not going to chart where the star came from.

You're not going to say, oh, this is the one time that Jupiter, Mars, and Venus all got together. It's a miracle. And it's part of the faith, the virgin birth. It's a miracle. There's no scientific explanation. There's only a spiritual explanation. Why does the sun not gobble up the earth?

Well, according to some, it's going to. Well, because it's a miracle. God is keeping it in place.

He has designed and engineered these things. So, I don't know how I got onto this, but I had to get that astrology thing out of my system. So, Acts chapter 19, verse 26. Moreover, you see and hear, not only at Ephesus, but throughout almost all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away many people saying that they are not gods which are made with hands. And so, there's the Gentiles doing the same thing that the unbelieving Jews were to Stephen. They were doing it to Paul.

This is how it is. There's no beauty that we should desire him. Well, he's full of beauty in the eyes of God, that tender plant. He's full of beauty in the eyes of those who are saved. And we hopefully can find a way to be used by God to share that with lost souls.

If you've ever witnessed someone and led them to Christ, is there a greater feeling? When Jesus said to his disciples, I have meat to eat, you know nothing about. He's talking about leading someone into the kingdom and was that woman at the well.

They were like, who gave you something to eat? Totally missed it, but they got it all later. And so, that's us, right? At first, we miss a lot of things.

And then as we grow and mature in Christ, we start picking up a lot of things. Verse 3, he is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we did not esteem him. That English word, despise, is it not a perfect word? As words go, for hatred?

Because that's what it is. He was despised. Why? And by who? By you?

Are you kidding me? Defective people despising perfect savior? You got the gall, somebody will poke you in the eyes like Moe. But his truths and his holiness disturb the devils in them and it does to this day. Hebrews chapter 12, for consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls.

Yeah, we're not celebrating the loss of any soul. We're working hard to save them, regardless of how far gone they are. I think it's one of the reasons why so many Christians love the song Amazing Grace, because when you look at the life of John Newton, his brother Fig wrote the song. I mean, you look at his life and what a reprobate he was, how depraved he was, and yet he becomes this powerful preacher and writes Amazing Grace. And we look at that and we say, wow, that is a testimony outside of scripture, but because of scripture, that if it's so with him, it could be so with people I love too.

No matter how far out there they are, God can bring them in. A man of sorrows. Well, sorrow is universal. Not all men are great, not all men have fame or money or wealth or happiness, but all of us know sorrow.

And we can identify with this, but his sorrows, of course, run deeper than all the men of history put together. John 1, 3, all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made. I think that the Jehovah Witnesses have a big problem with that one. I thought you said Jesus wasn't God. In the beginning, God created. John says here that nothing was made without him.

He's the maker and is backed up in Hebrews and Colossians also. Well, when God made things, it was all good. God created a perfect environment for beings who had free will to choose right and wrong. In Genesis 1, 3, then God saw everything that he made was indeed very good. That was the sixth day. But sin cursed it all in two bites.

Two bites and it was all gone. Sorrow was born and injected into the human experience. Acquainted with grief, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. You know, when you're suffering, when I'm suffering like everybody else, we want God to do something to stop the suffering. And many times he does not, but we always know that he gets it. And if he decides to leave it on us, it's worth plowing through, as crushing as it may be.

As I know, it's hard to hear when it's your turn. I find I can get little things can make me feel. Anyway, acquainted with grief. So the words from the cross, the life of Joseph, the life of Job, the life of Jeremiah.

Again, the alliteration makes it very easy. Joseph suffered for upholding his doctrine. Job was minding his business and was targeted. Jeremiah was preaching the word and was persecuted. And none of them became apostates.

None of them walked away from God. They continued to do their duty. They didn't like it, but they did it nonetheless.

And they did it gloriously. And so these things teach us that there are higher things in this life than relief from suffering. I don't like that either. But it is a fact, and you can't escape it. John Bunyan, in Pilgrim's Progress, he's in dialogue at this one scene with Satan. In the end, well, he refutes Satan, you know, in the debate, and then Satan attacks him because he can't beat him in the argument. Bunyan suffered in that Bedford prison, you know, he just suffered a lot.

And Pilgrim's Progress is remarkable work. Anyway, he says, in answering Satan, when Satan says, well, if God loves you, then why are all the suffering in your life, his servants and all this and that, he could have just said, yeah, because of you. But Bunyan writes about God, his forbearing at present to deliver them is on purpose to try their love, whether they will cleave to him to the end or not. Well, that's Romans 835. Who shall separate us from the love of God?

Persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, assort, yet in all these things we are more than conquerors, none of them. So acquainted with sorrow and grief, things weighed heavy on the heart of the Son of God in this life. When he's at the grave of Lazarus, it tells us that he groaned.

You know, the grieving of the people affected him. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. Well, they looked the other way, didn't they? And people still do that. You can go in certain circles and say, hey, let's talk about Jesus.

And they'll want to change the subject or get rid of you. They want to look the other way. They want to hide their faces from him. Man can't hide from God. One of the first lessons of sinners, Adam and Eve hid themselves in the garden. Oh, yeah, God was not going to find them. Of course he found them.

And he even puts it in a language that we understand his heart was broken. Adam, where are you? He wanted to hear Adam say it.

He knew where Adam was. Well, once they understood that Jesus was not impressed with their vain religion, they turned on him. John's Gospel Chapter 1, John the Apostle, you know, these men love Christ so much. Long after he had ascended to heaven, it never faded. And it shows up in their writings. And you can hear it in his voice. You can hear it when they say, Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, calls out the whole family.

Simon must have sided with his boy else they would have shielded him from that because they were notorious for shielding names when necessary. If you're familiar with how the Gospels are, you read them enough, it glares at you off the pages. He writes here, he was in the world about Jesus and the world was made through him and the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own did not receive him. Why not? What is your problem? Well, if I remember well, I was once not a follower of Christ.

So I have to tone down the zeal a little bit without losing any of the passion to uphold the truth of Scripture. He was despised and we did not esteem him. The opposite of what he was worth, he did not get.

And someone on earth stood right next to him, close enough to see his eyelashes, and still they went to hell. Yeah, of course Judas, Caiaphas, Ananias, where are those guys now? Well, there were others that did not despise him. This is in Scripture, this section, he was despised and we did not. So it moves from the past tense and it flows as it reads as though it's already happened.

And in Bible hermeneutics, which is really another way for just saying reading the Bible with logic, is the prophetic perfect. I don't know how they get on up with these things. I guess they look on a list and say, hmm, it's like when they named the orange, they saw an orange, it's orange. And then someone brought them a carrot, what's this one called? The good name's already taken. We should have named that one the orange. Alright, it's funny. Coming back to this, how come the lemon's not called the yellow?

You see these kind of inconsistencies, they bother me. Some fruit should be called after its colors, a lot of them. Anyway, well blueberries, they got that one.

They did good on that one. Where are we? Here we go. So, the unbeliever, and I'm almost done, we'll finish here at verse three. Did you really think we'd get to verse six? The unbeliever can praise God as creator in the sense of applauding him. You hear them say, boy, you know, the creator, they cannot praise him as savior, and that's a deal breaker. This is one of the reasons why we ask those who have not given their lives to Christ to abstain from the communion table.

You can acknowledge a creator, but are you embraced by the savior? It means everything. Our salvation does not mean something to us, it means everything to us. When Paul and Moses said that they would die for the Jewish people, first off, they weren't good enough, so that wouldn't work.

And secondly, you look at that and you say, boy, I wonder how serious they were about that, because I can't imagine, can you imagine? Well, maybe for a child, your child, you would offer that to God, it wouldn't work, but you could understand the sentiment there. It's just how the savior is, our salvation is such a high and special thing. It is true that the unconverted can have a lot of fun, they can outfund us. One thing about our teen studies, we try to communicate to them, we're not trying to outfund the world. We're trying to bring you Christ, and we want a little fun to be a part of that, but we can't outdo the world. They'll always be able to minister to your flesh at a faster rate than any good church can minister to your flesh.

And we expect you to understand these things. The world can sing songs of gladness, they have a lot of happy songs, they can get emotional in their songs. Robert Murray McShane was a young pastor a few hundred years ago, died, I think he was 28 when he died.

And if you can get his writings, I think you would enjoy them, he goes pretty deep. He says this, but here lies the difference between the world's fun and the Christian's life. They can be glad and merry only when God is not in all of their thoughts, only when the veil of oblivion is cast over the realities of death and judgment. Sure, the world can have a lot of fun till you bring up their sin and their doom. Now all of a sudden it's not fun, so they look the other way.

They won't have any of that. So I reread verse 3. He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we did not esteem him. So much for self-esteem. I'd rather esteem the Christ and let him do the rest.

Cast your care upon him, free cares upon you, humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and he will exalt you in due time and the right way. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel, mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.

You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick right here on Cross Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-11-26 09:10:27 / 2024-11-26 09:20:11 / 10

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