Our Great Redeemer #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Today, Don continues teaching God's people God's Word in our current series titled, Living as God's People.

Let's join Don with part one of a message called, Our Great Redeemer on the Truth Pulpit. We're going to be looking at verses 14 and 15, but I want to just use the context, the broader context of the book to just remind us of where we were. As you're turning there, I know that many of you have had near misses and serious car collisions or other kinds of danger, health dangers that you didn't know whether you would live or die as a result of. But that experience of having a near miss of a very serious car accident is something that is instructive and illustrative to help us today. You have that sense of, I could have been killed there.

That could have been catastrophic for my life and for my loved ones, and you just missed the collision by just the hair on your head, so to speak. Well, in a far greater way, beloved, that's the sense that we should have and the gratitude and the relief and the marvel that we have at being in Christ and being delivered from our very sinful selves. Titus chapter three, verse three, reminds us of our former condition when it says, We also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts. There's that slavery word again, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. Those of you especially that were saved in the course of your adult life can look back and you can see that.

Can't you? The hatefulness of your heart and the anger and the lusts and the foolishness and the deception, both being deceived and deceiving others with hypocrisy. That's a picture of what we were like, and yet here we are and we are gathered together in the name of Christ, predominantly those together that have been truly born again. We have fellowship with the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have fellowship with one another that is particularly sweet as we think about Christ and how he's worked the fear of God into our hearts in a loving way. And here we are now.

What can we say about these things? Today's passage shows us the wonder of what Christ did for us. We'll read from verse 11 in chapter 2.

Chapter 2 verse 11, when you and I were like that, when sin owned us as death hovered over us, eternal judgment was breathing down our neck and we were kissing the chains of our bondage. We liked our sin, didn't we? You loved your sin. You did not even know that there was a different way of life. There was not a different kind of life to be had.

And you loved yourself and you loved what you did. What happened to us? How is it that we are no longer in that realm as Christians and now we are gathered together in this blessed realm that we find ourselves?

What happened? Chapter 2 verse 11. The grace of God appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age. Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds. These things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority.

Let no one disregard you. There you were in bondage to your sin and the grace of God appeared, as it were. The grace of God came to you. Somehow, somewhere, someone brought the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to you and told you that there was a Savior who had gone to the cross and had borne the wrath of God on behalf of sinners, had risen from the dead, showing that God had accepted the sacrifice, and now you were bidden to come to Christ. You were invited to come to receive free mercy, free grace, a promise of eternal life, a promise that all of your sins would be forgiven and that you would be reconciled to a holy God, delivered from the threat of hell and damnation and promised eternal life with God in heaven in the gracious presence of Jesus Christ the Lord. That is grace.

That is undeserved favor. That is a kindness and a love that the world knows nothing about, and it's revealed to us in the Scriptures. And we were all in that position of being in bondage to sin, and here in Titus chapter 2 verse 14 in particular, we see how Christ graciously came to earth, graciously accomplished a work that would thousands of years later be applied to your soul and to deliver you from that awful position of bondage.

How did he do that? How did Jesus Christ deliver us from our spiritual slavery? I want to show you three simple matters today.

In one sense, they're simple in that they can be grasped even by the youngest child, and yet the profound depths of them could never be fully plunged in this life for sure. What does this text tell us? Well, first of all, Jesus Christ took your place. Jesus Christ took your place, meaning that where you deserved judgment and condemnation from God, Jesus Christ, according to the eternal plan of God, stepped into the world and stepped into your place, as it were. He took your sin upon him.

He stepped into your shoes. He took the posture as if he had lived your sinful life, that he had fought all of your sinful thoughts, as though he had done that. And then he went to the cross where God struck him with judgment so that the judgment would not fall on you.

In mercy, my friends, Jesus Christ intervened on your behalf, and he did what you could not do for yourself. Look at verse 14, where it says, at the end of verse 13, let's say, just to pick up the relative clause context, our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us. He gave himself for us.

The simplicity of those words show us how Christ intervened for us. He left heaven in order to become a man. He gave of himself by surrendering the prerogatives of deity, not the essence of deity, but the prerogatives of deity.

He left his glorious throne, his glorious home in heaven in order to come and live among men. He took on a human nature, added a human nature to his deity, and he did this for a specific purpose. Beloved, it was infinitely more than coming to just show us an example of how a godly man would live. Christ was infinitely more than just a teacher or a prophet. He was God in human flesh, and he came to do something that only God in human flesh could do. He came to pay the price for our release from sin.

He took the punishment for everyone who would ever believe in him. Throughout all of the course of time, before the coming of the cross, men were looking forward, looking to the future, looking ahead to the promised coming deliverer that God had promised. And they rested their faith in a promise that had not yet been completed, you might say. We, on our part, we look back in time. We look back and see that in Jesus Christ, the promise was fulfilled.

And what did he do at the cross? Look at Isaiah 53. At Isaiah 53, some of us have turned to these familiar passages today dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and decades.

For some of you, maybe you're hearing them for the first time. You're fresh out of false religion. You've just, God has called you out, and these things are almost brand new to you. Well, regardless of which end of the spectrum you're on, the wonder and the beauty of the substitutionary work of Christ is fresh and precious for each one of us.

Look at Isaiah 53, verses 4 through 6, where we read this. Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. God imputed to Christ our sin. He treated Christ as though Christ was guilty of all of our sin and guilt, and he punished him for it. Christ gave himself over to that divine punishment, and why did he do that? He did it out of grace. He did it out of love.

He did it out of kindness. Jesus Christ is so full of love for unworthy sinners, so full of grace for those who are rebels against his will, that he went to the cross and he gladly, voluntarily, without any compulsion from an external source, he undertook to take our punishment on the cross, and that all of the wrath of God that you and I deserved, he took, he absorbed, he felt, he endured, he suffered, and this is an indication of how he gave himself for us. He gave himself over to the punishment of God on our behalf.

He did it for us, so two things, you could say, many, many more, but just two things to highlight here. Number one, he did this in a negative sense so that you and I would not have to bear that wrath ourselves. We could not bear it. We would have spent eternity in hell bearing the wrath that our sins deserved. Christ intervened so that that would not fall upon us. Then in a second way, in a positive aspect of it, he did this so that we would be reconciled to God. Not only having the narrow escape of the fatal collision of us with God's wrath, but the positive dimension of coming into the family of God, entering into the realm of God, accepted by God, adopted by God into his family, showing forth that we were chosen before the foundation of the world, redeemed, brought out from under our bondage to sin and now being alive to Christ and being in the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's what he did. That's what he gave himself up for at great personal cost, at great eternal torment, suffered and felt in his soul, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In his infinite person, he took an infinite weight of sin and guilt and judgment and wrath during those lonely hours on the cross. And through it all, the love that he had for sinners, his obedience to his father's will, his glad giving of himself. He stayed there when he could have called down 10,000 legions of angels who were waiting, as it were, waiting for him to say, come and stop this.

He restrained himself. He gave himself in order to do this. There was a price that required you to be delivered from your sin. There was a ransom price that had to be paid, and he was paying that price with great suffering, in great love, in order to accomplish the result that now we are here to celebrate here today. Beloved, Christ was not suffering for his own sins on the cross.

Everybody, everybody that in the judicial process acknowledged that he had found, Pilate said, I find no guilt in this man. Jesus Christ was substituting his life for yours. He was substituting his life for the life of every sinner who would ever believe in him.

He took the penalty that was rightfully ours. We were the lawbreakers. The lawbreaker is the one who in any economy of justice suffers the punishment for the sins and the laws that he has broken. Christ steps outside of that legal realm, so to speak. And what I mean by that is that he went beyond the legal realm in order to fulfill the punishment that was required in his own body. He took the penalty that was rightly ours to suffer, and beloved, you and I that are in Christ, we can look at the cross and we can rightly say, he did that for me. He did that for me. He did it for lots of others, but he also did that for me by name. As J. Gresham Machen so famously said, you know, when he was on the cross, he thought even of me, because he bore my sins. He was a direct substitute for me, for you who believe in Christ.

He was a direct substitute. And as a result in that, in his infinite mind and in a way that I can't begin to try to delineate for you, somehow you by name were in the mind of Christ as he suffered on the cross. Somehow your sins and all of the fullness of them were somehow absorbed by him. He was aware of them. He took them upon himself so that the punishment of God that you fully, completely deserve, was fully and completely poured out on Christ so that there was nothing left to punish you over, because Christ had paid it all.

As we sing, Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it. What? White as snow.

White as snow. And beloved, you understand, right, that you and I, we didn't deserve that. We were not entitled to that.

We had no reason to expect that, because we had forfeited all of our claims on God when we fell in Adam, and when we affirmed Adam's sin in the way that we subsequently lived. Oh, oh, oh, the love of Christ for sinners like you and me, to give himself like that for us, to do a work of substitution to free us from sin. There we were with the stroke ready to fall upon us, and Christ, as it were, is speaking in metaphors now, Christ stays the hand of God, says, no, don't punish them, punish me instead. Everything about your punishment, oh God, is just. It is right.

It must be done. Your justice must be fulfilled. But Christ takes it as his own. The sinless one takes on the sin of rebels, and endures in unimaginable sufferings on our behalf. And now you and I in Christ, we look back with gratitude that he did that for us, our words of praise, our songs of praise, they're necessary, they're sincere, but they could never adequately give a return to Christ for what he's done for us. What a wonderful savior is Jesus our Lord. He took your place. Secondly, we see in this text that Jesus Christ paid your price.

He paid your price. Go back to Titus with me, Titus chapter 2, verse 14. This text just pulsates with the work of Christ, what he did on our behalf, every clause, every word is important here. Verse 14, he gave himself for us.

And what did he do? What was the end? What was the purpose of his giving of himself? To redeem us from every lawless deed.

To redeem us from every lawless deed. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, he was paying the price that God required for sinners to be released from their slavery to sin. And the word redemption is tied to the language of slavery in the first century. There were many slaves in the first century, and someone could pay a ransom price, what was called a ransom price, to set them free.

You give a price to the owner, and he allows them to go free. The price becomes the cost of their freedom. Well, scripture teaches us to think about the work of Christ in our salvation as being the payment of a ransom price. It is redemption.

The payment of the ransom price was called redemption. And what Jesus Christ did as he was dying on the cross was he paid the price to redeem you from your slavery to sin. It was a price that he paid to God, not to Satan. He paid this price to God in order that you might be set free. And notice, beloved, especially if you've had a hard spiritual week and you've manifested the sinfulness of the evil that remains within you, notice how thorough and comprehensive what Christ did on your behalf is. It says he gave himself for us to redeem us, to deliver us from every lawless deed, from every lawless deed. Every sin that you committed before your conversion was covered and paid for. Every sin that you've committed as a Christian and which you came in feeling, you know, from the past week and your struggles with sin and temptation, those two, every sin that you will ever commit before you go to glory.

Jesus Christ on the cross redeemed you from every lawless deed, every one of them without exception. Christ who knows our hearts completely. Christ who knows your private deeds as well as those which men are aware of. Christ who knows what you speak in secret, what you cherish in your heart.

Christ who knows the worst about you. Beloved, he went to the cross knowing all of that thoroughly and perfectly, went to the cross to redeem you from all of it, from every lawless deed, from every illicit relationship, from every act that you've committed against others. Whenever it comes to this, I often think and often want to say and just to assure because lots of people hear these messages and just speaking to that young woman or maybe a woman older in life who underwent an abortion for her own convenience and now just feels the weight of having sacrificed the life of her child for her own convenience and now the weight of that sometimes makes it hard to fall asleep at night. What a joy to look into Scripture and to say that Christ looks in mercy on that and forgives and took the payment, paid the price for even that that you might be set free, that your conscience could be cleansed before God and to know that God accepts you. God has forgiven you. God has released you from all of that guilt and paid the price for your deliverance from sin.

He paid your price. You see why the gospel is good news? That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, with part one of a message titled Our Great Redeemer here on The Truth Pulpit. Now, just before we go, here again is Don with a closing thought. Well, thanks, Bill, and I just want to take this brief moment at the end of the broadcast, my friend, to encourage you with a word from Jesus Christ himself as you walk through adversity in this world. Christ knew that it would be difficult, and in John 16, verse 33, he said this.

He said, These things I have spoken to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage. I have overcome the world. My friend, Scripture tells us that we will face obstacles in this life, and they will be difficult, but in them all and through it all, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has overcome the world, is with us to help us overcome the world as well. May God help you and bless you and encourage you as you walk through life today. May you look to the Lord Jesus Christ as he is revealed in the pages of Scripture. Thanks, Don. And now for Don Green, I'm Bill Wright, inviting you back next time as Don continues to teach God's people God's Word from the truth pulpit.