Bought At High Cost Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Rare paintings, priceless jewels, many things command a high price, even things that will one day perish. But we need to know that God paid a very high price to redeem those who trust in His Son. That high price is today's focus.

From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, as we continue a journey in the book of Ephesians, we've come to chapter 1, verse 7. Tell us about what it means that we were bought at high cost. Dave, when you mention the words bought at high cost, what comes to mind is 1 Peter, chapter 1, where it says that we were not purchased with corruptible things such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ. There is no comparison to the price that God paid to redeem us. And throughout all of eternity, we are going to grasp more and more of the wonder of our redemption. I've written a book entitled The Inheritance of the Redeemed, claiming the spiritual treasures that are yours in Christ. We have these treasures, but we have to claim them. This is one of the last days we are making this resource available to you.

Go to rtwoffer.com, or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the book The Inheritance of the Redeemed. And yes, thankfully, to the glory of God, we were purchased at high cost. I want you to come with me to a hospital room, and a man is dying, or at least he's going to die in two weeks or so, and I'm trying to explain the gospel to him, and he tells me that he has sinned too greatly, and there's no way for him to be saved because of the enormity of his sin. He maybe doesn't put it in those words, but that's the essence of it. He says, this is not for me because of my past. The question is, what would we say to a man like that? Can you imagine going to him and saying, well, you know, all that you need to do is to do the best you can, and then you'll enter into heaven? No, it's too late to do the best you can.

Furthermore, there isn't much opportunity to do much good. I discovered later that the reason probably that he was feeling such a sense of guilt is that he had committed murder many years ago and was in prison for two years and then was paroled, and maybe it was that that was upon his conscience, and I'm not sure to this day how he died, whether or not it was through saving faith in Jesus Christ or not, despite my best efforts to point the way out to him. But isn't it wonderful to know that no matter what your past is, no matter how shrouded in mystery it might be, no matter what crimes even you have committed, there is such a thing as forgiveness and cleansing and restoration before God. And that's a message of hope to a city that needs to know that there is hope, even for some very big sinners. Now, if you're here today and you're not a big sinner, you're just one of those small sinners, you're just a Baptist kind of sinner, for example, I want you to know that you have a problem that may be even worse than the other folks, because you think your problem isn't so bad. Well, the reason that I'm preaching this message is for two reasons. First of all, I want to show biblically that there is more grace in God's heart than there is sin in your past, and some of you need to hear that. And, of course, the opposite, namely, or not the direct opposite, but the corollary for those of you who think that you haven't sinned so greatly, you need to hear this message as well.

But there's another reason. And that is because I want to show that when Jesus died for us and redeemed us, which is where we will pick up on the text in a moment, it was with the intention of actually also delivering us, actually freeing us. You see, there are many people who know something of the meaning of the word forgiveness, but they don't know the meaning of the word deliverance. So for them, the whole Christian life is a case of sinning and repenting, sinning, committing the same sin, repenting, doing it again, then coming to church on Sunday or during the week and confession, and then the same sin is committed again and again and again and again.

And that is the existence that they might experience. If we could sit down with the Apostle Paul and dialogue with him one on one, he'd tell us that there is much more to the Christian life than that, and you are not fully entering into the provision that Jesus made when he redeemed you. Bibles open please to Ephesians chapter one, Ephesians chapter one. If you were with us last time, you know that I stressed in verses three and four the fact that God chose us and he did it from before the foundation of the world. God made the choice and it was made before you showed up on this planet. Indeed, it was made before the planet was created.

Very important. And if you missed that message, I'd encourage you to get a copy of it so that you can see this in sequence. Now, what we find in Ephesians one is that when it comes to salvation, the entire Trinity was involved. When God came on this rescue program to clutch us and to pick us up from the effects of sin, I mean, the Trinity was involved. Verses three and six, God the Father chose us. Verses seven to twelve, God the Son redeemed us. And then verses 13 to 14, God the Spirit seals us. The Trinity is involved. And I might say that when the Apostle Paul begins writing in about verse three, he does not stop in Greek. There are no commas and no period until you get to about verse 14. I was just meditating on this passage last night and it dawned on me again that that Paul just spills forth truth. Every single phrase is filled with incredible implications and meaning. And I can't even comment on every single phrase.

We just don't have the time. But I want you to see in this an ocean, an ocean of truth that you can drink from and never think that you will exhaust it. And now for those of us who are sinners, and that includes a good percentage. I remember a retreat in which the young person, here's an idea for you, Jeff. He put a sign over the door that said, for sinners only.

And the young people got off the bus and they looked at the sign and they said, well, then where do we go in? This message is for sinners. If you're not a sinner, you don't need to listen to it.

But if you are, I suggest you listen carefully. Our focus is going to be verses six and seven. Actually, I should say more specifically, it is going to include primarily seven and eight.

Let's change that and say seven and eight. I won't be able to get beyond that today. Just two verses. First of all, what is the meaning of the word redemption? Redemption. You'll notice it says in him, we have redemption through his blood. What does that word mean? Well, there are three different Greek words for redemption in the New Testament, and the one that is used here means to buy, to buy out of the marketplace with the intention of setting a slave free.

That's the, that's the meaning here. There's a preposition that is used with the word redemption. That means, that means you purchase with the intention of freeing. You see, the imagery is that of slaves.

Come with me to the Roman Empire. Millions of slaves, and sometimes they would have slave auctions. You could buy a body, you could buy a person. And of course, every slave who is auctioned to the highest bidder hope that he would be purchased by a loving owner who would take good care of him and not beat him and keep him in such awful slavery. And that's the imagery.

Here's what happens. Jesus Christ goes to the slave market, and he sees someone there who is, someone who is consumed by jealousy and lusts and addictions and most of all self-will. He sees us, and then he purchases us, and he buys us from the slave market, and he says, you are now going to belong to me.

I am purchasing you with the intention, with the intention of setting you free so that you can belong to me forever. That's what Jesus does. And I want you to know today that what he does is much more remarkable than someone going in and purchasing a slave because these slaves used to know that they were slaves. If you get beat every day, you know that you're a slave and you know that things aren't going well.

Listen carefully. When Jesus purchased us, he first of all had to convince us that we were indeed in slavery because most of us thought that we were as free as we wanted to be before we were redeemed. You see, we just said, well, we're living our own lives.

I'm keeping my own schedule. I can be up as late as I like doing whatever I like, involved with anyone that I like, and I'm doing my own thing, and this is freedom. The Bible would say, no, it's not freedom at all. This is a deep form of bondage.

There is no bondage. There is no slavery that is as bad as slavery to sin, and God had to show us that. Yesterday, we had a retreat. My prayer partners and I, we were on a prayer retreat, so we should be prayed up today.

I'm not sure that we are, but we should be after spending hours in prayer yesterday, but one of our members gave a testimony that I want you to hear sometime, but here he is. He's watching TV, and he comes across a Christian channel and keeps watching and watching even just to ridicule these silly, silly people. He did it for a laugh, yet he was hooked on it, couldn't stop until one day God showed him his sin, and he believed on Christ, and he said after that, accepting the rest of the Bible was no problem. A God who could save me most assuredly could create within Mary a child without a father. God could raise the dead.

He can do anything if he can save me. See, that's the essence of the Gospel is that when we begin to realize in God's presence that we are not only bound, but we are deceived because we don't know we're bound until God shows us. God comes along then, shows us our sin and our deception, and redeems us. Christ bought us.

That's what the word redemption means. Bought us with the intention of setting us free. Parenthetically, to whom did he pay the price? You know, we talk about Jesus bought us. Well, he paid the price, not to the devil. That's where the analogy of the slave owner breaks down, because Jesus didn't go into the marketplace of sin, and Satan was our task master, and Jesus paid him. No, we never really ever belong to the devil. He was allowed to do a number on us, but we always belonged ultimately, in an ultimate sense, to God.

So the payment was not made to the devil. It was God the Father. And when I say that, please don't think that God the Father is the vengeful one. Sometimes it's easy for us to think that God the Father is the vengeful one. Jesus is the gracious, loving one, and he appeases the anger of this very distraught father.

No, listen to John 3 16. For God so loved the world that he gave his son. So it isn't as if God is vengeful, but a payment needed to be made. And God the Son made the payment, and God the Father accepted it. And the payment was made 2,000 years ago so that when you and I believe on Jesus now, we are simply getting the rewards of what Christ did for us back then. Having purged our sins, he sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.

He bought us for himself on the cross. That's the meaning of the word redemption. What is the means, the means of redemption? Notice the text says there in verse seven, the means is through his blood, through his blood.

Why, why blood? Well, it is God who set the price of redemption. It is God who said the soul that sins, it shall die. And it is God who says that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins because a life has to be substituted for a life.

And that substitution of death is signified by blood. So Jesus Christ had to come. He had to become a man because you cannot take spirit and nail it to the cross and get blood.

So he had to become a human being. So blood could be shed the blood of God, the son received by God, the father. And the Bible says in verse seven, we're still there as we will be in him. We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. That was the result of the shed blood.

You know, that idea of forgiveness carries with it the notion of being sent away, sent away. Remember in the Old Testament, they had a ceremony in which they would have two goats and one goat was killed and the blood was taken and it was put upon the altar. It was taken into the holy place. And then the other, the other goat, the, the priest would confess the sins of the nation upon the living goat. And I often wondered how long it took for the priest to do that. Certainly if he named the sins in detail, it would have taken a little bit. But the goat is sent away into the wilderness, symbolic of the fact that God puts our sins away.

He puts them away. There's a friend who's known to my wife and to me who committed adultery and you can imagine all that he went through. His marriage, by the way, has been saved thanks to some good counsel and some a lot of accountability to put that thing back together after that mess. But you see, going through all of his sense of guilt and the alienation that he felt and the sense of helplessness of having devastated this relationship so badly, he made a study which he gave me a copy of entitled Things that the Bible Says God Does with Forgiven Sins. And he had a whole page. I wish I could have found it yesterday.

I need a filing system that works a little better than the one that I have, I guess. I couldn't find it, but I did remember certainly things like this that would come to your mind as well. He casts them into the depths of the sea. The Bible says, he says, your iniquities, God says, I will acknowledge them no more. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us, the scripture says. It says that our sins are hidden from his eyes.

And you could go on. He must have found 15 or 20 different things that God does with forgiven sins. He sends them away. He sends them away. You say, yeah, but the consequences still are there.

Yes, they are. And at the end of this message, we'll talk about that. But there is still, there is still a sense of cleansing and forgiveness that can happen even though the consequences are there.

Now look at how far we've come. The meaning of redemption is that Jesus bought us for himself. He bought us that we might be free in him. The means of redemption is through his blood. And I want you to know today that when you come to God, it must be always through Christ, through that new and freshly slaughtered way, as it says in the book of Hebrews. We come through that way into God's presence. Let me mention now the measure, the measure of redemption.

Here it is. It's in our text. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, underline it now, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.

What is the measure? It is according to God's grace. Now notice it does not say that he saves us simply out of the riches of his grace, but according to the riches of his grace. There's a proportion there. You know, it is said that Rockefeller used to love to fill a pocket with dimes and then go into some of the poor areas of New York and just throw the dimes on the street and watch the children scramble for them.

Well, that was nice, I guess, but I'll tell you this. If you know anything about Rockefeller, he was giving out of his riches, but he was not giving according to his riches. If he had been giving according to his riches instead of dimes, it would have been dollars that he would have been giving.

He'd have been giving a proportion. And when God saves us, he doesn't save us simply out of the riches, but according to the riches, which the text says he lavished upon us in Christ Jesus. There's hope for those of you who think that you have gone too far.

There's hope for those of you who think that because of your past life ruined with all kinds of silly and foolish and devastating sins, there's hope for you because he lavished grace upon us. There's an old story I heard when I was a boy about a captain who was, an old captain who was discussing with a young captain of a ship what to do when things got difficult. The old captain said, now suppose you're out in the middle of the ocean and a storm comes up, what would you do? And the young captain said, well, I'd put out the anchor. And the old man said, well, what if the wind was even sharper and blew more sharply? And he said, I'd just let out more rope. And he said, well, what if the wind increased in philosophy? He said, I'd let out more rope.

Well, what if it even got windier? I'd let out more rope, the guy kept saying. And finally the old man was exasperated and said, where in the world are you getting all this rope from? And he said, well, the same place that you're getting all of that wind from. Now I want you to know that for every, for every wind that blows, there is grace. There is grace. Where does God get all that grace from?

He gets it from himself and, and God's grace is according, according to his riches, which he lavished upon us in Jesus Christ. Let me ask you something, my friend, how do people view you? Are you misinterpreted? Are you misunderstood? Are you looked down upon?

Are there those who have spoken words against you? Did you know that the perception that other people have of you is not nearly as important as God's perception of you? He has made a tremendous investment in your life. And when he redeemed you not with corruptible things, but with the precious blood of Christ, he was saying to all of us, you are very special.

You're special to me. And that's why Jesus could say that the very hair of our head is numbered. I've written a book entitled The Inheritance of the Redeemed, claiming the spiritual treasures that are yours in Christ. And I wrote the book to help you to understand that God's redemption is much greater than we are often led to believe. Now for a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. And I want to emphasize that this is one of the last days that we are making this resource available. The title of the book again, The Inheritance of the Redeemed, claiming the spiritual treasures that are yours in Christ.

Don't put too much stock on what others think of you, rather receive hope and encouragement and strength if you remember and better understand what God thinks of you. That's why I've written this book, The Inheritance of the Redeemed. Here's what you can do. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now as I already emphasized, this is one of the last days we are making this resource available to you, The Inheritance of the Redeemed.

Let me give you that contact info again, RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Running to Win exists to give you resources, not only messages, but other resources to help you run the race of life successfully. Remember, God has done more for us than we can ever imagine. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Pastor Erwin Lutzer with Part 1 of Bought at High Cost, the third message in a series on Between Heaven and Earth, taken from the book of Ephesians. Next time, more details on how far God went to bring us to Himself. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.