Our Great Redeemer #2

Even as a young man, even as a young teenager, take the opportunity and embrace the fact and say, my life, no matter what anyone else does, my life is going to be marked by faithfulness to Christ. I'm going to set my mind to study the Word of God, to teach it and to obey it. We're glad you're with us for The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright, and today Don presents part two of a message titled, Our Great Redeemer, as we continue our series, Titus, God's Glorious Plan of Grace. Last time Don offered the first of three main points that highlight how Christ delivered us from spiritual slavery. Jesus took our place. We should have hung on that cross because of our sin, but thanks to his grace, he bore it on our behalf.

How humbled and grateful we should be. Today we'll get two final points having to do with the actual price paid by our Lord and the subsequent implication of ownership. Turn in your Bible to Titus chapter two, as we join Pastor Don Green now in The Truth Pulpit. From a human perspective, salvation is completely impossible.

There is no way that you or I can save our own souls. Jesus said in John 8.34 that everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. It's evident in light of what Scripture says about our enslavement to sin, that we could not save ourselves, that if we were going to be delivered, someone else had to come and break the chains and set us free. Point number one here this morning. I'm going to give you three aspects of the way that Christ delivered us from our spiritual slavery. And every one of them we should receive with tender, sensitive, grateful hearts. Point number one. Our Lord Jesus Christ, our great God and Savior from verse 13. What did this great God and Savior do?

Point number one. He took our place. He took our place. He took your place, if you're a Christian. Now secondly, He gave Himself for us. He took our place.

Secondly, we can say this. He paid your price. He paid your price. As we've said in the past, there were many, many slaves in the first century. They could be set free if someone paid a ransom price for them. They could pay the master and the master would release that slave to freedom. The payment of that price was called redemption.

The price that was paid was called the ransom price. It was a technical term in the slave market of the first century. You redeem a slave, you bought him out of slavery. Well, the Bible takes that understanding, that imagery of redemption from slavery and applies it to the nature of New Testament salvation. And the word is used here in verse 14.

Understand this. When Christ died on the cross, He was paying a price. He was paying the price that God required for the release of your soul from its bondage to sin. The price of your salvation was the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Look at verse 14 with me again. Titus chapter 2 verse 14. It says that He gave Himself for us.

And here's the purpose. He gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed. There's the purpose of this giving. He gave Himself to redeem us from every lawless deed. And so Christ redeemed us thoroughly and His death on the cross, we must think about it as a payment that was made for us. There was a price for your redemption.

It wasn't simply a matter of God erasing your sin and forgetting about it. No, there was a price to be paid. There was a debt. And the debt wasn't merely canceled.

It was paid up in full. Your soul had a debt on it that had to be paid. And our Lord Jesus Christ paid that debt with His own life. For you to be free from sin, there had to be a redemption. There had to be a payment to deliver you from that slavery to sin. But when the Bible says that Christ gave Himself to redeem us, it's saying that He gave Himself to pay the price that was necessary to release you from your bondage to sin. And look at verse 14 with me. How thorough was the payment?

How comprehensive was it? Think about whatever you calculate to be the worst sins that you've ever committed and realize that Christ paid even for that. Verse 14, He gave Himself to redeem us from, watch it here, look at the text closely, from every lawless deed. The innumerable sins that you and I have committed against God, the innumerable violations of His law, both in things that we have done and in things that we have not done, every one of them was paid for in that self-sacrificial act of Christ when He went to Calvary. He paid for it. There is no longer any debt that you owe to God because the price has been paid in full. That's why Jesus could say, it is finished. The price, as a substitute, He paid it all for us and there is no sin beyond the value of this redemptive price that He paid for our souls.

He covered it all. He paid for every one of your debts against a holy God. Paul intends us to understand this, not simply in terms of releasing us from the penalty of sin. This is in the context, look at verse 12 with me, the greatness of the work of Christ is not just in the fact that it releases us from the eternal penalty of our sin. Christ has also redeemed us from the present power of sin. He has brought us out of that dominating power of sin and put us under the dominating power of His Holy Spirit to be slaves and instruments of righteousness now, not instruments of sin any longer. And what this means is that there is no sin in your life that is outside the liberating power of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Not one. He has given us the power to overcome sin. It's why He came. Look at verse 12 with me.

Let me remind you of what it says. The grace of God has appeared instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, that's the negative side on the positive side, to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. That's the purpose of grace in your life right now. And understand that in His self-sacrifice, Christ gave Himself in order to buy us out from under that power of sin so that we actually have the power to fulfill what verse 12 calls us to do. That's what it means when it says He gave Himself. Look at verse 14 with me. He gave Himself to redeem us from every lawless deed. He brought us out from the bondage of those sins and had put us in a position where we now have the power to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. That's what it means. To say as a Christian that I can't overcome this sin is a contradiction in terms.

It's an oxymoron. We have the power to overcome sin. Do we struggle with sin? Yes. You know that by experience and so do I. Does that sin own us like it owns unbelievers?

No. There is a resident power within us that enables us to respond to temptation and to overcome it and to live righteously. And so if you're here as a Christian and you've been struggling with sin, let me just state plainly what the truth of Scripture is. The truth of Scripture is that Christ paid the price necessary to release you from that dominating power of sin.

What was the price of your salvation? The life of Christ. The greatest man that ever walked the face of the earth. The Son of God incarnate.

The one whom angels adore. That life incarnate. That life was the ransom, the price paid for your salvation.

I feel really, really small right now, don't you? When you see the greatness of Christ, you can't help but feel small by comparison. The Son of Man, the Son of God, not coming to demand that He be served but to serve you and me. And so the Bible teaches us, as we think about the shed blood of Christ on the cross, to think about it as a payment being made for the benefit of our souls. And that's humbling because we couldn't demand that. We had no claim on that. And yet He did it.

Why? Because He's a gracious Savior. He loved our souls more than He loved His own earthly life.

He preferred obedience to His Father to avoiding the stripes. I love Him, don't you? I'm humbled before Him, aren't you? This is greatness of a kind that the world knows nothing about. This is supernatural grace.

It's supernatural greatness. This is the greatness and the glory and the goodness of God on full display through His Word. And so as you think about that shed blood of Christ, think about it as the price paid to secure your release from an ungodly life. He paid our price. Christ redeemed you. There's consequences to that. It brings us to our third point. It brings us to an obvious conclusion.

Think with me here. Christ paid the price for you. You know what that means?

Point number three. He owns your life. He owns your life. If you pay the price for something at a store, you own it. You own the thing that you paid for.

That's so basic and simple. Well, look, Christ is the Redeemer. Christ is the one who paid the ransom price for us, and therefore He owns us. We are not spiritual free agents. We are not free to pursue a life of sin.

We're not free to ignore Him. He owns us. He paid for us with the purpose of owning us. We are no longer slaves of sin. We now belong as a slave to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what this passage tells us.

Look at verse 14 with me. He owns us. Verse 14, He gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and here's the side-by-side purpose, from every lawless deed He redeemed us, and He gave Himself so that He would purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds. He paid a price to possess you, to own you. There is no question about the role of the Lordship of our Lord Jesus Christ in salvation. He is Lord, and those that He saves He owns by right of purchase, as well as by right of creation. And so we need to think of Christ as the one who bought us, and therefore who owns us, and therefore has the right to direct our lives.

He has the right to command the way that we think, the way that we feel, the way that we speak, the way that we act. That is the prerogative of ownership, is to dispose of us as He sees fit. And for some of us, He has owned us in order to give us a life that seems to be fairly pleasant. For others He has bought us and has assigned to us a portion that comes with sorrows and difficulties and tears.

Either way, either way, it's not ours to question that. It's ours to respond to one who owns us. We are His possession. Our souls belong to Him.

He bought them. And the force of this goes so far beyond what you do day by day. The force of it is an entire understanding of your purpose in life and what the purpose of living is to be. But what I want you to understand is that if your hands don't start going when you talk about Christ, that's okay in one sense. But what you have to understand is that the energy and the enthusiasm that marks the proclamation of the Word is supposed to animate your heart as well. Look at what it says there in verse 14. This is not to be a matter of indifference to you. You are to love Christ with all of your heart, soul, and strength, and you are to do so zealously, enthusiastically, eagerly. That's what it says.

Look at it. Verse 14, to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds. Eager, eager to live for this one who bought you with his own blood, who paid the price for your soul.

Oh, beloved. If you get really energized about things in this world and you're kind of indifferent to the things of Christ and just kind of go along week by week, your soul needs some serious attention. The apostle John could say it's not a burdensome thing. His commandments are not burdensome. The reason that his commandments are not burdensome to the true Christian is because we love the giver of the commandments.

We love obeying him because it's the least that we can do in response to such a great act of self-sacrifice. You see, beloved, when you understand redemption, the biblical doctrine of redemption, it defines your life purpose for you. You don't maximize what you can get out of this life. That's not why we're here.

No, we're here. We're here with one sole purpose, and that is to maximize the glory of our Redeemer, to love him more fully, to obey him more thoroughly, to honor him, to proclaim him. And when I think about these things, I can't help but find myself confronted with the earthly things that don't matter. We have to do that earthly stuff.

I get that. But look, you should have it in such a perspective that you see the glory of Christ surpassing anything that you could do or get in this life. Look over at 1 Corinthians 6. We're almost done here.

Done for today. You could never be done discussing the glory of Christ, could you? You could never speak enough about Christ and give him glory. 1 Corinthians 6, verse 20 states this very plainly.

You have been bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body. This defines why you live. Redemption defines why you live. We live not for ourselves. We live for the glory of the one who saved us.

He owns us. It's only right that we would respond with glad-hearted devotion and obedience. Well, here's a final question.

We won't make a separate point of it. What does the church do with this message of redemption? What are men in the positions of spiritual leadership supposed to do with this? Paul gives an instruction to Titus in verse 15.

Go back to chapter 2 if you're not there already. Titus chapter 2, verse 15. Paul instructs Titus.

He commands him on what he is to do. And he's also speaking beyond Titus to those first century Christians so that they would hear what it is that they are supposed to do. Verse 15, these things, this redemption in Christ, this call to a godly life that goes to older men, older women, younger women, younger men, that goes to all segments of the church. We are to understand this about the message of redemption and the consequences that it has for our Christian life. Paul says in verse 15, these things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority, let no one disregard you.

What are we to do? We teach redemption. We call people to obey the implications of redemption in their lives.

We rebuke them if they don't respond. And we do so with authority because God has spoken. The authority of this resides not in the human messenger.

The authority of this resides in the written Word of God, and it resides in the God who inspired the Word. We are people under authority and therefore we teach these things with authority, and we don't allow for the possibility to be raised up in speculation that there might be another way of salvation. We speak with authority and we say there is not allowed a way of salvation that does not impact your life. This is not meant to be presented as something that's optional for people to take or leave, for people to disregard as if they were the final arbiter of truth. Truth has already been revealed in this Word.

The only question is whether we submit to it or not. The authority of the Word is established, therefore we teach it with authority because God commands it to be taught that way. Biblical preaching is not offering you suggestions to take or leave. The God who has all authority, the Christ who owns us, doesn't speak to us by way of suggestion. He speaks to us with authority. In the context of the book of Titus, what this authority is directed against is lazy people and false teaching.

That's what Titus was dealing with there in the first century. God is calling us out of lazy thinking and lazy living to devote ourselves to the truth of the Gospel, to godly living, and in the context of Titus 2, that's godly living that starts at home in the privacy of our most intimate relationships. Redemption reaches all the way into the privacy of your home because Christ owns you everywhere. He doesn't just own you on Sunday. He doesn't just own you for this hour. He owns you every day of the week.

And praise be to God that it's like that. I'm glad to belong to Him, aren't you? I'm glad that He owns me. I don't want to own myself. I don't want to live for myself. I want to live for the one who bought me with Christ. Christ paid the price for you.

Your life tells the story about what you think about the value of that redemption. With a heart of gratitude in light of our great Redeemer having taken our place, paid the price we owed, and taken ownership of our souls, we serve Him gladly with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. Pastor Don Green will move us further into our series in Titus on our next broadcast. Join us then on The Truth Pulpit.

Right now, though, Don's back here in studio with some closing words. Well, my Christian friend, this passage that we've just studied today has so much to say to us about the nature of Christ and how wonderful He is as a Savior. He took our place. He saved us from sin. He set us free that we might be able to live for Him in a way that glorifies Him. Still ahead are the greater aspects of His work for us when He brings us into glory. We have a brother in heaven who will continue to love us until we are safe with Him. Isn't that wonderful?

Glorify Him as you go into this week now. Thanks, Don. Friend, we invite you to visit thetruthpulpit.com, where you can hear podcasts of our radio programs again at your convenience. And you can also learn more about this ministry. Once again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, inviting you back next time when Don Green presents more from The Truth Pulpit.