Great Promise, Great Consequences #2

There is nothing that you can do that would merit the great gift of salvation that He has given to you.

You see, it doesn't depend upon your performance. Our salvation is based upon, it is rooted in, it is secure in this. Thanks for joining us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. We're continuing our series, Titus, God's Glorious Plan of Grace. Don has the conclusion of a message titled, Great Promises, Great Consequences.

The promise, of course, is salvation unto eternal life, and the consequences include being set apart for Christ. Today, Don will discuss our security in the Lord. Then, he'll look ahead to the day we see Jesus face to face, in all His glory.

And what a day that will be. Grab your Bible, open it again to Titus chapter 1, and let's join Don Green now in the Truth Pulpit. You know, Paul uses marriage as an illustration of the purpose of salvation and talks about and compares Christ to the bridegroom and the church to the bride. Well, look, the bride gives her affection to her husband uniquely, exclusively, in the design of God.

I realize that sin has marred that almost to imperceptibility, but in the design of God and in the purity of marriage, the design is for the wife to give her pure affections, undistracted devotion to her husband. Well, that's just a little picture of what it's supposed to be like with Christians loving Christ and devoting themselves to Him. That's why we exist. It's because we belong to Him.

We're set apart for Him. All of our aspirations and affections for this world go away. They die. Jesus said, no one can be my disciple unless he gives up all of his possessions. No one can be my disciple unless he denies himself, takes up his cross, and comes after him. There is a total crucifixion of our affections and our love for ourselves, and that dies. We crucify it for the sake of gaining Christ, so that we belong to Him exclusively, and that we give to Him the undivided affection and worship and devotion of our heart.

That's why we exist. We're set apart for Christ. Turn back to the Gospel of John chapter 17. Look at verse 13 as Jesus is praying to his Father.

He's on the verge of crucifixion now. He's praying to his Father. He's circling back, as it were, to the purposes of God and sending him this promise that the Father made to him, of giving him a people. Christ is about to lay down his life for his people. In verse 13, he's praying to the Father, and he says, Now I come to you, and these things I speak in the world, so that they may have my joy made full in themselves.

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Christ did not belong to this earth. He bought a people.

He's buying a people here in John. Now we stand in the aftermath of the fact that he's accomplished our redemption, and he's taken us out of the world. We no longer belong to the world. He says, verse 15, I do not ask you to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. And so we're in the world, but we're not of the world. He says, verse 16, they're not of the world, even as I am not of the world. We're like Christ in that way. Christ, in a sense, didn't belong on this earth, because the world rejected him.

The world had no part in him. And Christ says, now they're just like me. And so what does he ask the Father on our behalf? Verse 17, he says, sanctify them in the truth. Sanctify means to set them apart. Set them apart in the truth. Your word is truth. As you've sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.

And on it goes. See, we're set apart for Christ. You have to realize, if you're a Christian, the title deed of your life belongs to Christ, not to you.

Your life is a blank check in the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ for him to fill out the terms and conditions as he sees fit. It's all about what Christ is doing. It's all about his purpose. We belong to him. We're set apart for him. That is one of the glorious consequences of the fact that God promised a people to his son. Well, we belong to him, not to ourselves.

Secondly, what does this mean? We're set apart for Christ. Secondly, we are secure in Christ.

We are secure in Christ. And go back to Titus for just a moment. Because you see this implied in Titus, and then I want to take you to a passage in John that brings us out to. Titus, chapter 1, verse 2.

We go back to it again. Paul says that he's an apostle in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago. What was the promise? He promised a people to Christ. He can't lie about that. It's impossible for God to lie. There's no uncertainty.

Follow me here. This goes to the very assurance of your salvation. This is important to you. This goes to the very reason that you can have absolute security and assurance in your salvation. It's because your salvation is not rooted in what you do. It is not rooted in the level of behavior that you bring after you make a profession of faith in Christ. There is nothing that you can do that can earn favor with God. There is nothing that you can do that would merit the great gift of salvation that he has given to you.

You see, it doesn't depend upon your performance. Our salvation is based upon, it is rooted in, it is secure in this. It is secure in the fact that God promised us as a people to Christ before time began. He says, I will give them to you.

They will belong to you. Jesus said, everyone who comes to me will not fall away. We belong to him and the security of our salvation is rooted in the fact that we are the subjects of a promise from God the Father to God the Son that could never be violated. You can't lose your salvation if you're truly saved. That's impossible because if you belong to Christ at once, you belong to him forever. And if you were to somehow fall away and fall out of that redeemed people, that would mean that God's promise before time began had failed. And that can't happen.

That's impossible. And so once we come to Christ and start to understand, I've really been saved, then we trace that all the way back and realize that that's simply the outworking of the promise of the Father to the Son and therefore the ground of our salvation, the security, the certainty of the good final outcome is the fact that God promised this to his Son. And God is never going to break any promise to anyone. But if you can put it this way, at the limits of human language, he most certainly would never break a promise to his Son. And if we have received salvation, then that is an indication that we're part of the promise that God made to Christ.

And the security of that is unbreakable. Nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord. Look back at John chapter 10 and you'll see this in the same context of the giving of the Father to the Son. John chapter 10. Drink these words in if you struggle with the assurance of your salvation as a Christian.

Jesus says in chapter 10 verse 27, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give eternal life to them and they will never perish. And no one will snatch them out of my hand. Here it is, verse 29. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one. Jesus says the Father has given them to me. This is the will of the Father that a redeemed people would belong to me forever. I will purchase here as he's talking in verse 10. I'm giving eternal life to them. He'll give the bread of his body as it were on the cross in order to secure their salvation.

But the Father has given them to Christ and Christ is purchasing them with his blood. And there is nowhere in that equation for anyone to fall through the net of those who are truly saved. And it's rooted in the fact, not in what you do.

Get that thought out of your mind. It's not about what you do. It's about the fact that the Father has given a people to Christ. Christ has secured us with his blood and therefore one of the glorious consequences of this pre-eternal promise of God is that we now who know Christ are secure in him. Praise God.

Praise God that the certainty of the ultimate outcome of your salvation does not rest in your ability to obey Christ perfectly until the end. Because none of you do that, and I don't either. You see, listen.

There's a reason I get animated about this stuff. It's because this is about the well-being of your soul and the assurance that you can walk through a very difficult life knowing that the outcome is good for you in the end. And if it's not urgent to the preacher, it's hard to see how it's ever urgent for the people to understand and embrace this and love it.

You see, it's not about you obeying. This is about the fact that God has an intention on your life that he intends to fulfill and it's secondarily about you, but it's primarily about the fact that he loves his Son and he wants his Son to have this people and he's not going to let anyone or anything interfere with that. Satan is not going to take you out of the hand of Christ.

Your sins, if you're a Christian, are not going to take you out of the hands of Christ. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. There's a sense in which when we understand the security that we have as a result of the promise of God to Christ, Satan himself must flee in the face of that. He holds no fear for us as Christians because we know that God loves Christ and he will fulfill his promise and that Satan, weak created being as he is, cannot interfere and disrupt what God has intended from all of eternity to accomplish for his Son in Christ.

We're secure in him. My Father is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.

My Father has given them to me. Christian, look at those words. Look at those words and realize that he's talking about the redeemed and if you're one of the deemed, Jesus is saying, My Father has given you to me and no one is able to snatch you out of the Father's hand.

We are utterly secure in Christ. God will keep us in Christ so that we belong to Christ in the end, so that his promise to Christ before time began will be fulfilled. Final point. Final glorious consequence. The ultimate consequence. This is what we live for. This is what we stand on tiptoes looking for, straining, looking into the future, waiting for, sorting through the mist, waiting for this great final glorious consequence.

Point number three. We will see Christ. We will see Christ.

What are the glorious consequences? For now, we're set apart for Christ. We're secure in Christ.

There's something even better to come. We will see Christ and we will praise him for his glory. We will see his glory with our own eyes, unhindered by sin, with the redeemed through all of the ages, and we will look and we will see him and we will be astonished, we'll be amazed, we'll be flabbergasted at the glory of Christ, and we will reflexively say, you are glorious, you are great, worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive glory and honor and praise throughout all of eternity. Look at John chapter 17 again. John chapter 17. Remember, Christians are a gift from the Father to Christ.

Salvation is a gift to us, yeah, but it's preeminently about the Father's gift to Christ. And Jesus is still praying here to his Father before his crucifixion. Look at verse 22, chapter 17, verse 22. Jesus says, The glory which you have given Me, I have given to them, that they may be one, just as we are one. I in them, and you in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you sent Me and loved them, even as you have loved Me.

Now watch this in verse 24. Can I set just a little bit of context in your mind before we look at these great words? Jesus Christ, who is God the Son, is praying to God the Father. He is impeccable in his righteousness. He knows the will of God perfectly.

He obeys it perfectly. He is in perfect unity and harmony with the Father. God the Father loves his Son.

The Son loves his Father. Now, with all of that in mind, Jesus, fully omniscient, knowing the will of God, having been there before time began when God made the promise to him, he's about to make a request of his Father. He says, Father, I want you to do something. Now, before we see what it is that he requests, ask yourself this question. Do you think that God the Father answers the prayers of God the Son? Is there any possibility that God the Father, who loved Christ before time began and made promises to him, is there any possibility that the Father would fail to do exactly what his Son asks him to do?

That's impossible. What we are reading comes in the form of a request that Jesus makes to his Father, but what we're about to see is certain to occur because the Father would certainly grant everything that Jesus ever asked him. And what does he say?

Who is he thinking about? What is his goal as he expresses the heart of Christ to his Father moments before, as it were, his crucifixion? Look at verse 24.

If I was more demonstrative, I'd say, let's all take our shoes off before we step onto this holy ground, but that's just not where it's at. Verse 24, here's his prayer. Here's his request that he knows in advance his Father will grant. Father, I desire that they also, these who have believed in me, is who he's referring to. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, there it is again, huh? I desire that they be with me where I am so that they may see my glory which you have given me, for you loved me, there it is again, before the foundation of the world. Christ says, Father, I want this people that you have given to me to be with me one day in glory. I want them to see the full unhindered view of the glory which I shared with you before the world began. That's our destiny.

That's what's going to happen. We will see Christ and praise him for his glory. Look, do you want to know if you're a Christian or not?

Ask yourself whether that sounds good to you. Unredeemed people are not interested in seeing Christ. They don't love him in this life. They don't serve him. They don't pray to him. They don't read his word. They don't care about Christ in this life. And so, obviously, the idea of seeing him in greater glory in the future would not hold any appeal to them.

But, beloved, if you are a Christian, something in your heart wells up and draws to and says, I can't wait for that day to come. I want to see the face of the one who was crucified for my sins. I want to see the one who executed to perfection this divine plan to redeem a people for all of eternity.

I want to see him. I want to thank him. I want to bow down and grab his feet and kiss his feet and thank him for his love and mercy and grace, which I did not deserve. I want to bow down.

I want to kiss his feet and just say, Jesus, thank you. I want to see the face of incarnate God, the one that I pray to, you say to yourself. I want to see the face of the one that I've prayed to unseen. I want my faith to become sight. I want to see Christ receiving the glory of which he's so preeminently worthy and which men in this life utterly deny him. I want to see the reversal of the order so that Christ is preeminent, sinners are banished, and there's nothing distracting from the glory of Christ, and I want to see it with my own eyes.

You know what? That's what Christ wants too. That's what Christ was asking for in John 17, 24.

Father, I want him with me in heaven so that they can see this. You are going to have the privilege of an inexpressible clarity of view with physical vision and spiritual understanding of Christ that will utterly dwarf by comparison your experience of Christ in this life. That's what's ahead for us. We're going to see him. What does that do to us when we think about it? We're going to see the culmination of an eternal plan of God that he promised to his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We're going to see that. We're going to be direct participants in the outworking of that promise. We're going to be direct participants in the outworking of the eternal plan for the ages, which has nothing to do about anything that's going on in this life, so to speak. All of the politics and all of the different things that dominate the news today are going to be utterly irrelevant at that day when we see Christ in his glory and we look around and we say, I don't know, I don't know. I kind of picture us looking and saying, wow, can you believe we're here? Can you believe how great this is?

Why are you looking at me? Look at Christ! That should do something to your heart.

What it should do to your heart is this. You should be thinking, who am I to be on the receiving end of something that glorious and magnificent and inexpressible? You should be utterly humbled if you're a Christian. You say, at my best, I could never have deserved this. And yet it's going to be greater than I can ask or think.

It's greater than I can imagine here. God, sometimes people will say, why me? Why are you granting this to me? Well, do you see the answer to that question is it couldn't possibly be about you? It couldn't possibly be about you deserving that kind of eternal glory?

It can't be about that. It has to be about something else, something more transcendent, something independent of you and me, and it is. It's about the fact that the Father loves the Son and has given him a people as an expression of his love.

And 1 Corinthians tells us that when it's all said and done, Christ will just turn around and give it back to the Father as an expression of his love to the Father. We are lost here in the wonder, glory, and awe of the magnificent purposes of God, revealed in Scripture. We are lost in wonder, awe, and praise of the fact that we get to participate in it. We're lost in wonder, awe, and praise of how this puts this brief, fleeting life into perspective and gives us the ability to transcend whatever life throws at us with a joyful, glad heart. I'm going to heaven. I'm going to see Christ in his glory. God has made me part of an eternal promise to his Son.

What were we talking about? Glorify Christ, beloved. Love him, and look forward to this great day which is certainly coming.

And let that sweetener walk in this life. And so Pastor Don Green has concluded a message titled Great Promises, Great Consequences, and they're all available for believers in Jesus Christ. Don, why would anyone scoff at such wonderful truths? Why the resistance from skeptics? Well, my friend, if you have tried to share Christ with someone only to be met with a sense of resistance or even a bland sense of indifference, let me encourage you with what Jesus said about the skeptics that refused to hear the gospel. He said that light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works are evil. Therefore, they do not come to the truth lest their evil deeds be exposed. You just keep on sharing. You keep on praying for those people that you care about.

God must do a work to open their hearts, and he will as we commit those people to him in prayer. And friend, remember to visit TheTruthPulpit.com for more about this ministry. There you'll also find out how to get free CDs of Don's messages. Once more, that's TheTruthPulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, inviting you back next time when Don Green presents more from The Truth Pulpit. .