Captivity feels like addiction. It feels like relationship dysfunctions that you can't break. Captivity feels like the inability to be happy or to find satisfaction or that something's not right. Jesus purchased your redemption with his blood and that blood can set you free. Welcome to the Summit Life podcast.
I've got an exciting update for you today. Up until now, this podcast has been a rebroadcast of our daily radio program five days a week. But starting today, things are changing just for you, our podcast listeners. From now on, you'll hear full sermons instead of new episodes every weekday. And you can look forward to hearing your two brand new, full-length sermons each week, releasing every Monday and Wednesday.
We hope this makes it easier for you to follow along and really go deeper into God's Word. And what better time to make the switch than today? We're kicking off a brand new teaching series that walks us through what it truly means to be a disciple of Jesus. Dallas Willard once said, the most important question a church can answer is, what is your plan for making disciples? At our church, the Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, we call our plan the whole disciple.
No matter who you are, no matter how long you've been following Jesus, you can take your next step in becoming a fully devoted follower of Jesus. because Jesus isn't after a 50% disciple. What he's always wanted is the whole disciple. The first message is titled The Most Important Sentence in the Bible. Let's get started.
It was July of 1961, and the 38 members of the Green Bay Packer football team had assembled for their first day. of training camp. Their previous season had been Fantastic. They'd been somewhat of a Cinderella team, but they had made it all the way to the national. Football championship, what we today call the Super Bowl.
And they had lost that championship game in a heartbreaker just by a fraction of a few minutes. The returning team, the Green Bay team returning for this season in 1961, was even stronger, and it was almost certain that they would make it to the championship again. They were, they were the top team in the nation. In other words, this was a group of elite athletes at the very top of their sport, which is what made what coach Vince Lombardi did when he walked into that locker room for that first practice session that season. It's what made it so bizarre.
David Marinus describes the moment in his best-selling biography of Vince Lombardi called When Pride Still Matters. Gentlemen, gentlemen, he said, holding out one of these, this. is a football. Vince Lombardi, Marinus said, he said, had taken nothing for granted and would take nothing for granted. He began a tradition.
each season of starting from scratch. assuming that the players were blank slates who carried over no knowledge from the year before. That began a tradition that he did every season that would lead to several Green Bay championships, national championships, and has since become legendary in that most of the greatest coaches in the world will say they never take the basics for granted. And so that's what we are going to return to today. This weekend, we are beginning a short series called The Whole Disciple, in which we are going to discuss what it means to be a disciple and how to live as one.
And today, we're going to start with the basics. I would encourage you, if you're listening to this right now, not to say, well, you know, I mean, JD, I've been in church most of my life. I know all of this stuff. I feel like I probably don't need to pay attention because I got all this down. I would encourage you not to say that for a couple of reasons.
First, it's possible that a lot of us here don't know the basics as well as we think we do. I share that because last year I spoke at a Christian high school chapel in our area, one of the best Christian high schools in our region. And before I spoke, I passed out little three by five cards. And I asked all these high school students to write down their answer to the question of what is the gospel. And then I took up their responses.
Now, again, these are Christian families who send their kids to Christian school and take their kids to church and are trying to train them. About a third of these high school students in their answer, after I sifted through them later, about a third of them demonstrated a grasp on at least the basics of the gospel. They may not have said it perfectly, but at least the basics were there. Another third or so of the group gave an answer that was not wrong per se, but suffice it to say that what they wrote down fell pretty far short of a clear gospel explanation. I mean, things like, you know, believe in God and try to obey Jesus.
Not wrong, but I'm not quite sure that means you understand what the gospel is. That was a second third. A third third gave answers that were just flat out wrong. Like, nothing ambiguous about it. This was well-articulated heresy.
And that was at one of the best Christian high schools in our area.
So I figure if some of them are unclear. that maybe some of us in here are too. And so today, today I wanna help you get clear. The second reason I would tell you not to write this off and to say this is not really for me is that even if you do know the basics. The greatest Christians in Christian history have found that going back to the gospel, going back to the gospel is the way to really grow in the Christian life.
Martin Luther, the great reformer, always said it this way. He said, to progress in the Christian life is always just to begin again. The gospel, he said, is like a well. You don't get the best water from the well by widening the circumference of the well. You get the best water, the sweetest water, by going deeper into the well.
And so that's what we're going to do.
So here's the question that I present as we begin today: Do you know that you know, that you know that you know? that you belong to Jesus. That you are at peace with him and that you will go to heaven when you die. And could you explain that to somebody in a short time? Clear, compelling.
way. Paul wrote Romans chapter 3, verses 23 through 26 to answer that question.
So if you have your Bibles, I would invite you to turn there. Romans chapter 3, verses 23 through 26. The theologian Leon Morris says that Romans 3, verses 23 through 26 is the most important sentence in the Bible. Those four verses, by the way, are all one sentence in Greek. We chop it up into a bunch of sentences in English, but in Greek, it's just one long run-on sentence.
Leon Morris says that is the most important sentence in the Bible, indeed, maybe the most important sentence in human history. Again, the great reformer Martin Luther said that this one sentence, these four verses, mark the center point of the whole Bible. And that the entire Christian life rises and falls on your understanding of this sentence. Let's take a look at the most important sentence in the Bible. Verse 23, Paul says, for all.
Have Yeah. And all have fallen short of the glory of God. I covered this verse at Christmas. But let me do it again very, very quickly, okay? Sinned.
What is Sin. Gentlemen. This is A football. A lot of us like to think of sin primarily as heinous acts, things like adultery or murder or racism.
Something like that. Or maybe you think sin is an outdated word indicating a failure to conform to some repressive, outdated Victorian-era standard of morality. But sin in its essence, Sin just simply means rebellion against God. I always told my kids that the way that they could define sin and understand it is by the middle letter, S-I-N. Sin is when I think that I know better than God.
It's when I think that my way is better than his way. It's when I choose to do what I want to do rather than what he wants me to do, because what I want to do is more important than what he wants. It's when I make myself the focus of my life instead of making him the center. This is a rebellion Paul says that all of us have participated in. All have sinned.
Just ask yourself. Has God always come first in your thoughts and your affections and your actions? Have you always trusted that God knew best in all things and always submitted joyfully to Him? Has His will and His glory always come before your desires? I think the answer that any honest person would give to those questions is no, emphatically, no.
All of us have sinned, Paul says. And that means we all fall short of the glory of God. Think of God's law, the Ten Commandments, as the silhouette of a perfect heart. A perfect heart would desire naturally to obey all those things. And a perfect life would conform naturally to those laws.
How easily and how naturally Has your heart conformed to God's laws? Several years ago, as part of a leadership exercise, I got to Fly one of those simulators at the Southwest Airlines Pilot Training Facility in Dallas.
Now, if you don't know, these simulators are amazing. It is crazy realistic. Think of it like it's the ultimate video game. It's a hanging cockpit suspended by all these hydraulics on every side so that when you're flying in it, you can feel everything just like you were up in the air.
Now, if you didn't know better, you would actually think you were in the air. It was me and a couple other guys in this leadership exercise. The instructor let us take off and he let us fly around for a while, but when it came down to land, The instructor would have the autopilot take over and land that 737.
Well, when you're flying, there's this little box that you're supposed to fly through, and then around that in the simulator, a little silhouette of a plane that you're supposed to keep your plane in. And then later they would evaluate you by how well you stayed in that silhouette as they threw different little challenges at you. When it was my turn, I was having a lot of trouble staying in that little box. I was over here, I was there, I was up, down. It would not have been a pleasant experience for anyone in the back.
But the best part was that somehow I convinced the instructor, since I was going last, I convinced him to let me take the simulator off of autopilot and just try to land it outright. Honestly, I'm still not sure why he did it. At first he said, no, no, no, you can't do that, blah, blah, blah. Policy, policy. But eventually I convinced him.
I think I just wore him down, which seems to be a superpower of mine. And so I wore him down. And y'all, I brought that big 737 in. And I'm not trying to brag because it's not bragging if it's true. I totally stuck the landing.
I mean, it was amazing. And it's just so realistic. The way it bounces and moves. And the instructor was like, that actually was pretty good. They even have you land at a specific airport, and the graphics around you look exactly like that airport.
And so I landed at Detroit Airport and when I brought it down and we kind of bounced a little bit, I pressed gently forward on top of the pedals to apply the brakes because in an airplane that's where the brakes are is on top of the pedals. But y'all, that plane would not slow down. And the runway was whizzing around me, and the graphics around us were going by planes. And I can see that we're getting toward the end of the runway, and just beyond the end of the runway is Terminal E.
So I press harder, and eventually I am pressing. I mean, I'm telling you, my back is bowed up against that back seat, pressing with all my might on that top of that pedal, but it won't slow down. And y'all, we hit Terminal E going several hundred miles an hour. And that simulator flashed a red screen and then just went dark and still. And I thought, oh, this is what death feels like.
And the instructor said, well, we're all dead. And so we all started unbuckling the seatbelts, and I'm like, I don't understand. I was pressing the brakes. Why wouldn't the plane slow down? And the instructor, almost as an afterthought, as he was getting up, just pointed to the throttle and he said, You got to pull that back, son.
I still had the throttle halfway open when we landed and hit the terminal, going essentially, you know, half power in this airplane.
So, bottom line is, I will not be your pilot anytime soon. This will not be a second career of mine. Too many things to think about at one time. When it comes to the glory of God, Not only did we stray crazy far out of that silhouette that we should be flying in. We all crashed and burnt.
Maybe you're better than me. Maybe you're not. But compared to the glory of God, Paul says, which is our real standard, we all fall short, way short. But good news, okay? Paul is just getting this sentence started.
And so verse 24, he says, We are, though. We are justified by His grace as a gift. Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by Faith.
Now There's a bunch of really, really big words in there. words you don't typically use in normal day-to-day conversations, words like propitiation and justification and redemption. And you're like, Pastor, I like small, simple words, so make it simple. And I am going to try to, but I also need you to understand. That these words contain within them the secrets of eternal life, so you need to learn them.
And I figure if you can memorize the names for your $14.16 ingredient drinks at Starbucks, that you can learn these words, okay? The first word is easy. Verse 24, it is the word. Grace. We are justified by his grace as a gift.
Grace simply means gift. Grace means receiving something that you neither earned nor deserved. Many people today, in fact, this is common wisdom in our culture. They say that all religions are basically the same because all religions essentially teach you to love the divine. They teach you to emphasize honesty and kindness and integrity.
You know, they may have different nouns for different things, but their basic messages are all the same. That is common cultural wisdom in America, but y'all, that is not. True. You see, every other religious message in the world works off of this underlying premise. And that premise is I obey.
I obey, therefore I will be accepted. I obey, and if I obey well enough and often enough, then God will accept me because of my obedience. But see, the gospel that Paul is articulating, the gospel that Jesus taught. Reverses that premise. The gospel says, no, no, no, you are accepted.
By a gift of grace. Therefore, in response to that, you obey. Every other religion says, if you obey, you'll be accepted. The gospel says, no, you are accepted. And in response to that, you obey.
You don't work towards salvation, you work from it. Or here's another way you can say it. Most religions in our world, every other religion except for the gospel, is spelled D-O. It's what you do that earns your acceptance with God. The gospel is spelled D-O-N-E.
The gospel is a gift that you receive because of what Jesus has done on your behalf, and that is what makes you right with God, and in response to that, you obey. My Sunday school teacher, when I was a kid, always said that I could remember grace as simply God's riches at Christ's expense. It was free for me. It wasn't free for him. He paid a great price for it.
But it was a gift that he offered to me at his expense. And that, you see, sets Christianity apart from every other religion in the world. Philip Yancey, in his marvelous little book, What is So Amazing About Grace, tells this delightful little story. During a British conference on comparative religions, he says, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They begin eliminating possibilities.
How about the incarnation where God becomes man? Was that unique to Christianity? No, they concluded. Many other religions had different versions of God's appearing in human form. How about the resurrection?
Was that unique to Christianity? Again, other religions had accounts of a return from death. The debate went on for some time until C.S. Lewis wandered into the room. What's all this rumpus about?
He asked. And he heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity's unique contribution among world religions, if there is one. Lewis responded, oh, that is easy. It's grace. And he walked out of the room.
Grace. Grace. The second word denotes in that sentence, and this is a big one, verse 25. Propitiation. whom God put forward as a propitiation by Jesus's blood.
Propitiation is a Greek word, hilasterion. And it means simply that wrath has been satisfied. That the cause for anger has been taken away. Paul says that because of God's grace through the blood of Christ Jesus, that God's wrath against your sin and my sin. has been satisfied, it's been taken away.
Many today in our culture find the concept of a wrathful God, they find that very difficult for a couple of reasons. They say, hey, isn't God supposed to be a God of love? And a God of wrath would be the opposite of the God of love. But see, when people say that to me, I always say, well, that is a very shallow view of love. Because when you really love something, you naturally hate.
Or you are angry at whatever threatens or destroys the thing that you love. Right? I mean, think about it. If you love the cancer patient. You hate the cancer destroying their body.
I love my children, so I hate. seeing the things in them that I know will harm them in life. I hate dishonesty. I hate cruelty. I hate bigotry.
I hate laziness. In fact, I get angry when I see those things, not despite the fact that I love them, but because I love them. Wrath, you see, is a necessary component of love. Where there is no wrath, there is no love. You may have heard it this way.
Anger is not the opposite of love. Apathy is the opposite of love. Which is why God hates sin. He could not do it any other way. You see all the destruction in this world.
All the sickness? All the pain, all the divorce, all the broken relationships, all that ultimately goes back to the curse of sin. And if God loved us and he loved his creation, he would have to hate sin, which he does.
Some of you, by the way, you've been the victim of sin. You've been wronged or used or abused, and because God loves you, He hates the sin that was done to you, and He is angry at the person who did it to you. I mean, imagine if you were forced to watch some violent assault on a child. Imagine if you were forced to watch some racial assault on an elderly person. That feeling that you would get in the pit of your stomach.
Of revulsion at having to watch that. That's what God feels. about your sin and my sin, but multiplied times a billion.
So, yes, God is angry at sin because of his love for his glory and his creation. The second problem people have with the concept of propitiation is they say, well, what's the whole deal with needing the blood sacrifice to offer us forgiveness? That seems archaic. Why wouldn't God just give us a stern talking to? and say, okay, I think we all learned our lesson here.
Let's try this again. Everybody back in the pool. All skate going the same direction. Don't take the apple this time. The snake offers it.
All right, let's just do it over again. The answer is because at the core of who God is, He is justice. Psalm 89:14 says that justice is the very foundation of God's throne. And so for God to simply overlook sin would be unjust. To use a very simple example, imagine that I've got a brand new Mercedes-Benz.
And you know where I keep my keys, so you steal it. You wreck it. But you don't have the money to pay for it.
So you and I go into court, and the judge looks at you and says, You are guilty of stealing. The car. But then that judge looks at you and says, but I forgive you. You are free to go. No consequences at all.
Now that might be awesome and moving. for you. But who is it not awesome and moving for? Who was left wronged in that situation? Me.
I'm glad you were forgiven, but I'm still out of a Mercedes-Benz.
Well, see, the same thing is true with us and God when it comes to his righteousness and his glory. We owe a debt to God's justice that has to be paid.
Now, in that courtroom, imagine that after the judge brought down the gavel against you and said, You owe. the price of this Mercedes. I say in response to you. I forgive you. You don't owe me any money.
By the way, don't do this to me because I will not do that, okay, in that moment, all right? But if I did that, Would that be? unjust. No, it would be just. Why?
Because what's happened to the debt that you incurred with the car if I do that? I've agreed to pay it myself. Propitiation is God absorbing the penalty of his own wrath into himself.
so that he could give us forgiveness. That's why Paul says in verse 26 that at the cross God demonstrated his righteousness.
So that he could be both just. And the justifier, the one who makes people just or righteous. He could be the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. At the cross, God accomplished two things that up until that point seemed like they were hopelessly at odds. He satisfied the full demands of his justice and he saved us.
Charles Spurgeon tells a story of an ancient Saxon king. who had the reputation among his small little kingdom. As being the fairest and most loving king that had ever lived. The people loved him, and he loved them.
Well, one day, according to the story, it was discovered that money was being stolen from his treasury, and so. He gathered all the people of his small little country into the town square and he announced to them: He says, You know that I care about you. You know that I've always been committed to caring for even the poorest among you. If you have needs, Let me know. I'll try to meet them if I can, but you can't steal money from my treasury.
That's... Sabotage. Every day, money continued to be stolen, and so the king made a second decree. He said, though it breaks my heart. Because you continue to do this, whoever gets caught stealing from this treasury.
is going to be whipped with 10 lashes. Several weeks passed by. Money continued to be stolen day by day, and so the king came out a third time, and he upped the penalty to 20%. 20 lashes. This was serious.
Still, money continued to be stolen. The king once again doubled the penalty to 40 lashes, which was, in essence, the death penalty because very few people were strong enough to survive 40 lashes with that kind of whip.
Well, according to this story, two days after this decree was made, the thief was caught. red-handed in the very act. It was the king's mother. The king's mother was the one who had been stealing the entire time. And so.
The people began to wonder what the king is going to do. I mean, some people thought he would punish her because, I mean, the law is the law. But others said, how could such a loving king, such a tender king, how could he oversee the execution of his own mother? Others thought he would let her go because it was his mother, but people objected: well, that wouldn't be fair. Because he said it, it was a decree, the law was the law.
And so, according to the story, the king asked for a couple of days to think it over. When he emerged from his private chambers, He decreed that the law was indeed the law. And the punishment had to be given.
So they took the king's mother out to the whipping post. They tied her up, the guard ripped off the back of her shirt, and the guard raised his whip. to bring down that first lash. On the body of the king's mother, but just before he did, the king said, Stop. And the king walked over and he looked very lovingly at his mother and then he took off his own royal robe and he laid it aside and he wrapped his body around hers.
Then he looked back at the guard and he said now Now you may hit her. And the guard said, but I can't. If I try to bring down this lash, it's going to hit you because you're between me and her. And the king said, I have given you an order. Do it.
And so the guard very tenuously Brought that first lash down, and then every lash thereafter, and every single one of those 40 lashes went into the king's body and not.
so much as one touched the body of his mother. And so you see, the story says the king fully lived up to his reputation. of being the fairest king ever to live. And also The most loving.
Now you say, is that story true? Honestly, I'm not sure. I heard it as true, but I don't know. But either way, it is a picture of what God did for you on the cross. God was just God was righteous.
He upheld his righteousness, and he also was the one who justifies those who come to him for salvation. By the way, This is why the Messiah had to be God himself. God could not send an angel. He could not send some kind of lesser God to die for us like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses teach. I mean, if Jesus were anything other than God Himself, God would not have been forgiving us Himself.
He'd have been punishing somebody else randomly for our sin. That would not be gracious and loving. That would be unjust and cruel. I mean, if you and I are in business and you wrong me. Your company wrongs buying and I say, hey, don't worry about it.
I forgive you because I took out my anger on one of my employees. I dot my employees' pay instead of your pay. That's not loving. It's only grace when you absorb the consequences into yourself. Which is what God did at the cross.
He took into his own body his anger against our sin so that he could be both just and the justifier. of the one who has faith in Jesus. Which is the next word, by the way, verse 44. Justified, where? Justified.
Justified means declared righteous. It refers to a legal status. You are declared to be something. In God's eyes, You are seen as righteous, perfect, blameless, innocent, even though in your behavior, you aren't any of those things. On the cross when Jesus died, Some of his last words were, it is finished.
In Greek, what he said was to tell a sty. What's interesting about that phrase is that archaeologists have found that phrase scrawled across the top of receipts from the first century. After you had paid somebody your debt to them, the debt collector would write the word telestai across the top and sign his or her name, which meant this account has been settled, nothing more is owed. From that point on, to demand payment on this account would be unjust because it had been fully paid. That's what the word justified means: declared righteous.
By the way, note this, justification does not mean And this is where a lot of people get confused, that you gradually become, in your behavior, a righteous enough person to go to heaven. Becoming a righteous person is important, of course. But in theological terms, that is called sanctification. You becoming righteous in your attitudes and your behavior. That's sanctification.
Justification is a legal term indicating that God declares you righteous even while you are still struggling with sin. My last 24 hours, like every 24 hours before that, has been filled with struggles with sin. But even so, God has declared me righteous because Christ's righteousness has become mine. Martin Luther had a great way of describing this in Latin, Semul justus et peccator. Simultaneously.
righteous And a sinner. The Christian is simultaneously justified, even while he or she still struggles with sin. This was pictured in the Old Testament process of sacrifice. Once a year in the Levitical system. Each believing family in Israel would bring a lamb.
A perfect, unblemished lamb. That was important. It had to be a lamb without flaw, it had to be healthy. And they would lay that innocent, perfect lamb on the altar. And then the father of the family would place his hand on the head of that lamb and begin to confess his sin and the sin of the family.
And as he did so, the priest would take the knife and he would cut the lamb's throat. And in that moment, Leviticus says, that family is justified. Because the lamb was taking their sin and was dying there in the altar.
so that they could walk home free. This was a foreshadowing. Of what Jesus would do for us and how we would receive him. On the cross, Paul said, Jesus became my sin. He became the liar.
He became the thief. He became the adulterer. He became the murderer. He became the husband who has neglected his family. He became the husband who has cheated on his wife.
He became the immoral woman who wrecked somebody else's marriage. He became the drug addict. He became the teenage girl lying to her parents. He became the hypocrite living a double life. He became the abuser.
He became the proud. He became the selfish. He became the apathetic. He became those things and died for them so that when I lay my hand of faith on him, And when I claim him as my own, my sin becomes his and his righteousness becomes mine. On the cross, Jesus said the phrase, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Because he was forsaken for my sin so that I would never be forsaken of it again. My sin cannot be held against me. And so when my enemy or my conscience says to me, hey, what about your lack of generosity, JD? You don't have a great record of this. You're not really a generous person.
Surely somebody like you couldn't really belong to God. What about your bad record of relationships? What about that impure mind? God could never claim you as his own. I say, oh no, Jesus paid it all.
It would be unjust of God to ever hold this sin against me because Jesus paid the full price for it already. He became my sin. There's therefore no condemnation for me who is in Christ Jesus. I'm free. I'm innocent.
I am forgiven. I am justified. The fourth word. Verse 24. Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Redemption means bought back. And it points to two things in the Jewish mind: purpose. and price. Purpose. When you redeem something You are restoring a purpose to it.
Whenever a first century Jew would use the word redemption, top of their mind, would always be the Exodus story. where God redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt. And the first thing God said to them in Exodus after bringing them out of slavery was, I redeemed you for this purpose. To make you my people, so that you could be the light of my glory to the nations and you could become my channel of blessing to others. With that imagery in mind, Paul says to us.
God redeemed you for a purpose too. You weren't just saved from sin. You were also saved. for God's glory. A lot of times Christians talk about salvation only in terms of what we're saved from.
and rarely in terms of what we're saved for. Right? The question I grew up on, every youth camp ever, you know, I went everywhere to this question was always asked: friend, if you died tonight. Do you know for sure where that you'd spend eternity with God? Just as important as that question is this question.
If you get up tomorrow. How are you going to live differently? Because God saved you for a purpose. God saved you to reflect His glory. He saved you to reflect his character.
He saved you to be his light to the nations. He saved this church so that it could be a light to the city of Riley, Durham. and it's for us to be his instrument of blessing.
So, redemption points to a purpose that God had in saving us. It also points to a purpose. price because when you redeem something you pay a price to get it back There's a famous story, and I know this one's true. about how King Richard the Lionhearted of England in 1190 AD was was sailing back from the Crusades in the Middle East. when bad weather forced him to land in the very unfriendly territory of Austria.
King Richard and his men disguised themselves as the Knights Templar.
So that they could sneak their way back into England as religious pilgrims. But while passing through Vienna, King Richard was identified and taken captive. Amazingly, what gave King Richard away was his insistence. on eating only roasted chicken for dinner and his fancy rings that he refused to take off. Things that he just could not give up, even in disguise.
Like, we're not barbarians here. To the king of England was discovered and put in chains and forced to live as a slave. as somebody else's property. The Duke of Austria offered England back their king. but at a ransom price of 150,000 marks, or $3.3 billion in today's money.
which was two to three times the annual revenue of England at the time. Eventually, England paid it. It was and is the most expensive ransom of a person ever given in history.
Now, I read that story and my thought is Would I ever be worth that to somebody? I'm quite sure the United States would not pay that for me. My family might wish that they could pay it, but of course they never could. And yet, Paul says, God paid infinitely more than that amount for you. You were redeemed, Peter said, not with silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, something far more valuable than silver or gold, a lamb without blemish and without spot, though I was far less valuable to Jesus in a strategic sense than King Richard was to England.
God paid the fullness of my price without so much as a second. thought so that I could give Him glory and live as his son. I need you to hear two things in that, okay, if you will. I need you to hear that you have value to God. The value of something is determined by what you'll give up for it, right?
That's how you determine value. What does the cross say about your value to God? He's not for you. Is it for you? Justification and propitiation concern the guilt of our sin.
Redemption addresses the shame. I have value. See, shame makes me say, I have no value, I'm not worth anything. What the redemption says is, yes, you do. You mattered so much to God that you were bought at a great price.
Greater than any price that's ever been paid by any other human in history. I want you to think about the power available to you in your salvation because of that price. You might feel like a captive to sin. Captivity feels like addiction. It feels like relationship dysfunctions that you can't break.
Captivity feels like the inability to be happy or to find satisfaction or that something's not right. Jesus purchased your redemption with his blood, and that blood can set you free. It's like God said to Israel when he brought him out, I brought you out on eagle's wings. That means I can take care of you in the promised land. What Jesus says to us in Romans, what Paul says to us in Romans is, if God purchased you with his blood, of course he's going to give you everything necessary for you to become what he wants you to become in life.
God would not purchase you at so great a price to leave you in your sin. He redeemed you for a purpose at a great price, and with that great price comes the promise of great power. If you choose to avail yourself of it.
Alright, those are four big words. grace, propitiation, justification, and redemption. Here's our last word, verse 25. to be received by Faith. Faith is how you receive this gift.
You know, in our culture, again. Saying that somebody has faith can mean a lot of different things. It can mean that you generally have a positive outlook on life. It could just mean you're a generally religious person. He or she is a man of faith, he's a man of faith.
She's a woman of faith. When the Bible uses that word, it's not talking about those things, it's talking about something very specific. Faith is the hand on the head. of the sacrifice that says This is mine. This one is dying for my sin, and I'm receiving his righteousness.
The Greek word. For faith is the word pistis. It means literally in Greek to lean your weight on something. Think about it like sitting down in a chair. Got the chair up here.
I may be fully convinced. This chair will hold me up. I mean, it looks strong, looks like it'll hold my 160-pound body up just fine, okay? If I don't sit down in the chair. Test us.
But that's not faith. You can only be in one of two positions related to that chair. That you're probably sitting in right now. You can be standing beside it. With your weight supported by your legs.
Or you can be sitting having trusted your weight. To the chair. Standing up here beside the chair is not pissis. Even if I'm fully convinced that it will hold me. In the same way, see, you can only be in one of two positions with Jesus Christ, standing.
Trusting in your own goodness to get you to heaven. We're seated. Trusting in his grace and his grace alone given to you as a gift. as your entry into heaven. The moment of salvation.
is when you lean the whole hope of your salvation. It's when you lean the weight. of your hope of heaven on him. Right? I mean, it's not the moment you pray.
If I stood up here and was like, oh, chair, thou art a lovely chair, I want you to be my personal chair. With me forever. That's not pistas. It's when I sit down. And I say my hope of heaven.
This is what he did. Sitting down includes two elements. They're both included in the word faith. But we would say in English, faith and repentance. Faith means accepting his offer to save you and trusting in his grace, not your good works, to get you into heaven.
Repentance. It means acknowledging him as the Lord of your life. By the way, true faith always includes... Repentance. And I feel like I need to say this here in the southeast.
Part of the United States where there's still in the Bible Belt.
Sometimes people in church tend to think that you can have Jesus. without being serious about his lordship. As in, you can believe in him as savior without submitting to him as Lord. You can't, what word am I looking for? You can't bifurcate Jesus.
You either take them all or you don't get any of them. And surrender, for it to mean anything, has to be total. Right, I mean there are certain relationships that are either all or nothing. Marriage, for example, is one of them. When I married Veronica, I did not say, I promise.
To be at least 98% faithful to you. 98% after all, suma-kun lost. That's amazing. What would that mean if I said that to my wife? What does that mean?
Like, out of 100 girls I know, I consider 98 of them off limits, but two of them are still an option?
Well see, lordship is also one of those relationships where it's all or nothing. That's why we say Jesus is either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all. And if you're like, well, I'll give you everything in my life, Jesus, except for this one relationship, that's mine.
Well, see, then you're still fully in control. By the way, when I say that, I'm not asking. If you struggle with obeying sometimes, of course you do. I struggle all the time. I'm talking about a decision that Jesus is Lord over everything in your life, that there's no area, not even one, in which you consciously and willfully say, I'm not going to do what God wants in this area.
I'm going to do what I want. If you have one of those areas, you are not a disciple of Jesus. The call to follow him means total surrender. It's like Tertullian, the North African church father, said in the third century. If you attempt to have Jesus without repentance, You're going to end up with church without heaven.
Grace. Propitiation. Justification. Redemption Faith. These five words.
or the gate. to paradise.
So let me ask you some questions. Number one, do you understand these words? Do you understand them? Maybe for the first time today. You do.
But more importantly, number two. Have you received them for yourself? You see, the truth is, Jesus has done everything necessary to save you. But it's a gift that you have to receive for yourself. I've told you before, I think about one of the most bizarre Supreme Court cases of all time.
You can go back and look this up. This is legit. United States versus George Wilson. 1833. George Wilson had committed a series of crimes and was sentenced to die.
Bye hanging. President Andrew Jackson, however, for reasons unknown to us. issued George Wilson a full pardon. But then George Wilson also, for reasons unknown to us, refuse the pardon. and demanded to pay for his crimes.
The warden told George Wilson that he couldn't execute him because he'd been pardoned by the President of the United States. But George Wilson refused the pardon and contested the issue in court. The odd case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and this was their verdict. I quote. A pardon is a contract.
and is therefore not complete without acceptance. A pardon is an act of grace. that may then be rejected. And if it be rejected, we have discovered no power in this court. to force it on him.
George Wilson was executed in 1833. With a presidential pardon sitting on the warden's desks signed by Andrew Jackson.
Now, I am not sure if Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote that opinion, Was thinking about the gospel when he issued that ruling. But see, the Bible teaches the exact same thing about God's pardon of us. A pardon is only valid if it is received. Have you received it? for yourself.
What a tragedy to die and spend eternity apart from God with your sins already paid for. I hope you enjoyed the beginning of this brand new teaching series called The Whole Disciple. Remember, everything we do is only possible because of your generosity. It's not an exaggeration to say that our gospel partners are the financial fuel behind everything we do, including providing this new podcast format. And it's always a privilege to say thank you with our specially curated featured resource each month.
to give a one-time gift or to join with us as a monthly gospel partner. Visit us online at jdgreer.com. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries. Yeah.
