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The Judgment for Believers #1

The Truth Pulpit / Don Green
The Truth Network Radio
January 14, 2025 7:00 am

The Judgment for Believers #1

The Truth Pulpit / Don Green

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January 14, 2025 7:00 am

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Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in The Truth Pulpit. On Sunday I preached a message that I titled, Seriously, Judgment is Coming, and it dealt primarily with God's judgment on the unsaved. And we saw as we looked at a number of different scriptures that our infallible and trustworthy Lord taught us repeatedly and often and deeply that men who die in their sins face an unspeakably terrifying judgment at the hands of a righteous God. And I'm not going to summarize that message tonight.

I do commend it to you if you were not able to hear it. But Sunday was dealing primarily with God's judgment on the unsaved, on those that are not born again, on those that refuse the gospel of Jesus Christ, on those that never hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. Bible says that even if a man never hears the gospel, he's still accountable and guilty before God because he doesn't even obey the dictates of his own conscience. So God will judge him according to the standard of his own conscience, and by that standard alone he would be condemned and facing eternal wrath.

And so it's a very, very serious topic and one that we're trying to impress upon those that hear us that this needs to be taken seriously. Now tonight we look at a different aspect of the judgment of God. We look at the judgment that awaits true believers in Christ. Christians will face a judgment all of their own, and that's what we're going to open up from God's Word here this evening. If you'll look at chapter 7, verses 1 and 2, remembering that Jesus is teaching primarily his own disciples, not the world, here in this section, he says in verse 1, judge not that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged.

And with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. We've been highlighting that phrase in the middle of verse 2, you will be judged. And it's a statement of certainty, a statement of fact, it's a reality that we all will stand before the judgment seat of God and give a final accountability of our lives to him.

Now it's important to know as we kind of step into the theme here this evening that that is not simply a New Testament concept. Even the Old Testament warned that God would judge his people. It says at the end of Ecclesiastes, the end of the matter, all has been heard.

Solomon had said everything that he had to say in that book, and now he's bringing it to a climax. He says, fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. The Bible says that God will bring every deed to judgment.

I think it was R.C. Sproul that said something like this, that right now counts forever. And if you see that all that we do, that's what it says, God will bring every deed into judgment. Then it means that everything that we do is a matter of accountability before God. And also, and this was what the late teacher was saying, it means that everything we do has eternal consequences.

It has eternal value. It's what vests all that we do in life, whether we are simple, obscure people that few people know about, or elsewhere people have ministries of great prominence. All of that is subsumed under the idea that there will be an accounting given to God, and we're accountable not for what God has not given us to do, we're accountable for what he has given us to do.

And I think that some of that will become clear as we go along here this evening. So I want to start out by talking about the serious judgment of the saved. The serious judgment of the saved, by which I mean that Christians will face a serious accountability before God. And while it's the nature of this judgment, just by way of general introduction, is distinctly different from the judgment that we talked about on Sunday upon the unbelievers, this is still a matter of sober, serious consideration that should lead us to fear God. That is shown by the statement from Solomon there in Ecclesiastes 12, we'll see it come out later in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, that this is a matter of something serious to be taken with sober reverence. And it immediately, you know, it just immediately makes it important for you and me in this room to just be aware of that and to separate ourselves from spiritual frivolity, because I promise you that throughout eternity we'll be glad that we did.

We will be glad that we did. And so in this statement in verses 1 and 2 of chapter 7, Jesus assumes that his disciples will face a judgment from God. There he says it in verse 1, judge not that you be not judged. And we'll explain what he means by that. For with the judgment you pronounce, you will be judged.

And with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. We will stand, Scripture teaches this in many places, that even Christians will stand before God and give an account for the way that we lived after our conversion. And perhaps it's important and helpful at this point to just remind ourselves of the nature of salvation, that the Lord Jesus left his throne in heaven above, came to earth, lived a perfect life on behalf of his people, and offered that perfect life up as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God against his people. And the sins of his people were poured out upon Christ. Christ bore the punishment on our behalf and was buried and was raised again on the third day, the resurrection showing that God accepted that sacrifice, that the sacrifice was well pleasing to God.

The Son, who was well pleasing to God, offered a well pleasing sacrifice to God, and as a result, God is pleased. And now all who come to God through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus have all of their sins washed away by the washing of that precious blood. The righteousness of Christ's life and his obedience to the law of God is credited to our account so that we stand in a legal posture before God of perfectly righteous. It's not simply that we are forgiven of our sins.

It's more than the fact that we were innocent like Adam was innocent before the fall in the Garden of Eden. God views us and treats us and credits us with the perfect righteousness of Christ so that we stand before God with a perfect righteousness that can never be taken away. We stand before God on the same basis of righteousness that Jesus himself does, because we stand before God on the righteousness of Christ. And if that sounds like a remarkable gift to be given upon unworthy sinners, that means that you're starting to understand it, that you grasp something of the significance of it. There is no aspect of our righteousness that gives us standing before God. We have the standing that is based on the righteousness that is outside us. We stand before God on the righteousness of Christ, and God declares us righteous. It is as though he looks on his son, is satisfied with him, then he looks on us and says, I accept you like I accept my son.

One teacher puts it this way. God treated Christ as if he had lived your life, that sinful life, and judged and punished him for it. He did that so that he could treat you like you had lived the perfect life of Christ. And he can receive you into abundant fellowship with no barrier, no guilt, no separation. All of those things of disharmony and judgment have been removed, and we are fully reconciled to a holy God. I think that it's worth turning to 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

This is a bit of a tangent, and that's perfectly all right. 2 Corinthians chapter 5, I just want you to see this in the context that we are discussing it. You could look at Ephesians 2 to see this in a different way, but in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17, we read this. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away.

Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who, through Christ, reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. In other words, and look at that there in verse 19, the essence of salvation is that God does not count your sins against you. When you are a Christian, God does not count your trespasses against you.

He does not remember them. The Scriptures describe this with different wonderful metaphors. Psalms speak about how, as far as the east is from the west, so far as he removed our sins from us. It uses a picture of our sins having been buried in the bottom of the sea, where you could not plunge and find them. And the east is infinitely far away from the west in the picture that Scripture uses. So, my friend, if you are a Christian, it means that you are completely and totally forgiven, that your sins are not held against you by God, and more than that, it means that God accepts you fully, completely, freely, and regards you as righteous for the sake of his Son.

It's a great exchange. Your sins placed on Christ and punished there, the righteousness of Christ placed on you, and you receive the full benefit of that. That is called imputation, accrediting of your sins, your sins imputed to Christ and punished, the righteousness of Christ imputed to you, and you are reconciled to God as a result of that. So that it can say in verse 21 there, 2 Corinthians 5, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Now, having talked with many people over the years about the struggles and the difficulties of their soul, this is the answer to the troubles of conscience that Christians often feel, and they look inside themselves and see the remaining imperfection, the remaining sin in their lives. They think that maybe they haven't repented enough. Maybe their desires aren't yet perfect and all of that. And let me just, I just want to give you a full assurance in what I'm about to say.

How can I put this? It's true, you have not repented well enough. Your faith is not strong enough. You are not righteous enough.

And that's the whole point. There is not a perfect repentance. There is not a perfect faith without defects. We certainly do not have a perfect righteousness of our own, and the challenge for people that are so introspective is to help them realize the things that I'm already saying here this evening. You look outside of yourself. You don't look inside yourself to find a perfect repentance and on the basis of your repentance feel like you've got peace with God.

No, no, no, no, no. You look outside of yourself, you see the perfection of Christ, the righteousness of Christ, and you say, I'm resting in that. I trust in that.

I trust in his shed blood. And it is the perfection of Christ that reconciles you with God, not the perfection of your repentance. And in the occasional times when the Spirit helps someone to understand that, it's greatly, greatly liberating to them. And you know, and so don't look inside yourself for a perfect repentance or a perfect faith.

Look outside of yourself. Look up to the perfection of Christ and realize that there is your righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. Christ is our peace. And we are joined to him by putting our faith in him, not by things that we do.

And that changes everything. Because while your faith and your experience of faith and repentance may rise and fall with the changing of the weather and the rise and fall of the tide, your faith that is a gift from God in itself, it links you with Christ in an irreversible way so that all of the blessing and righteousness of Christ are credited to your account. And therefore you are safe.

You are forgiven. You are at peace with God, not simply feeling, having feelings of peace, but you are objectively at peace with God. Everything that he requires from you has been fulfilled.

It has been satisfied. And that's why we can rest in him. We receive Christ by faith. We rest in him. And we know that he has taken care of everything that is necessary for our salvation. And none of our imperfect works contribute to help improve our status with God. That's important.

That's why we talked about it for an extended period of time. Now, with that firmly established in our minds that the ground of our righteousness is Christ himself, not in anything that we do, we move on to another aspect of the revelation of God and what he says about our lives as Christian and what eternity will be like. Scripture tells us in many places that we will give an account to God for our lives after our conversion. And I want to take you to three or four different passages to help you see this, the serious judgment of the saved. So turn to Romans chapter 14 with me.

We'll start there. We'll go to Romans and then 1 Corinthians and then 2 Corinthians to kind of establish our point here. Romans chapter 14.

Let's start in verse 8. Romans 14 verse 8. Paul says, if we live, we live to the Lord. And if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.

We belong to the Lord. And let me just add something that perhaps I didn't bring out like I should have in everything that I was just saying. You know, you can talk about that, the things that we, these beauties of imputation.

You can talk about them in almost a mathematical sense if you're not careful, if you're not watching what you're doing. What we need to remember is what motivated God to do that for us in the first place. Why Christ did that for his people in the first place. It's because God loves his people. Christ loves his people and gave himself up for us in our complete, guilty, unworthy state. The triune God prepared before the foundation of the world a gift of salvation because God wanted to bestow his love on unworthy creatures and thereby display the wonders of his glory and his mercies to be celebrated throughout all of eternity. And for us to be Christians, for us to have our sins forgiven and to be secure in God is a direct result of the love of God, not of anything that we have done.

If you can grasp something of what I'm saying here, it utterly transforms your whole view of life, of God and your salvation. God does not give salvation to you as a reward for being good. God gives salvation as a gift of love bestowed upon you because it is the overflow of his nature and his attributes to be a giving, loving, merciful, patient God. And for reasons that are known only to him, if you are a Christian here tonight, for reasons known only to God, he chose to give that gift to you when he didn't give it to everybody. You are the recipient of a special, electing, merciful love from God, which means that he knew you by name before the foundation of the world. When Christ was on the cross, he died for you specifically by name, a direct substitute, your sins on him and your punishment paid for by him. And the Holy Spirit came and drew you to Christ by name, picking you out of everyone else and not in a general way, calling everyone to Christ, but in a specific, particular call, calling you with power so that you would come to the Lord Jesus and be saved.

And there was no possibility, God having planned your salvation before the beginning of the world, there was no possibility ever anywhere in the course of human history, there was never a moment of doubt that you would indeed enter into the family of God. Because this is based on the work of Christ, the plan of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, and this is all just a marvelous display of the great depth of the love of God for his people. And if you're a Christian here tonight, you are an individual intended recipient of that great love.

Now that's, you know, pretty breathtaking, really, and we should never take that for granted. As much as we, on Sunday, we focused on the terrifying reality of eternal judgment of the lost and we should never take that for granted, we should take that seriously, so also in some ways, in a greater way, God would have his people take his love seriously, think deeply upon it, become deeply grateful for his love throughout the course of life and recognize that we are on the receiving end of a great gift that we never could have earned. And so there's this great love that is displayed in salvation.

Now, it is right and just that there would be an accountability for what we do with that love, what we, how we respond to that gift, and that's what we're talking about here this evening. And so going back to Romans 14, verse 8, to just start again, if we die, we die to the Lord, so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. He owns us. We belong to him by right of creation and by right of redemption. We belong to him and we are tied to him with a cord that never can be broken. So that in verse 9, Paul says, to this end, Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. Now, watch where he goes from there. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or you?

Why do you despise your brother? Here it is, for we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. This is written to the Christians at Rome. This is a statement to the church, to believers, that we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.

He's writing to Christians. Verse 11, for it is written, as I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall confess to God. So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

That's pretty serious. Paul tells the Christians in Rome, we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. Each one of us will give an account of ourselves to God.

And he's writing to Christians. Now, go to 1 Corinthians chapter 3 and we'll see this theme repeated. 1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 10, we read, according to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation and someone else is building upon it.

Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, notice the contrast there between enduring valuable materials and that which is passing and easily burned up. Verse 13, each one's work will become manifest for the day will disclose it because it will be revealed by fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation, the foundation of his life as a Christian, if any of that work survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

Now, this is not teaching the false doctrine of purgatory. What it's communicating is that God will test the reality of our lives as believers and the things that are valuable will survive to be rewarded. The things and the opportunities that were squandered through sin, through laziness, through indifference, those things will be burned up as it were and there will be nothing left to show for it. There will be nothing to reward there. What Scripture's teaching us here is that as we give an account of our lives before a holy God, some of our life, some of the fruit of our lives, some of the works of our lives will evaporate, you might say.

There will be nothing left to show for it. Other things done to the glory of God, done with the proper spirit and done in earnestness, those things will survive the test of fire and God will reward us for them. Now I'm going to comment on all of this more, but I want to bring one more passage into it. 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 6 through 10. 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 6 through 10. And this is perhaps the clearest testimony, kind of a signature passage on this issue that we're talking about, the serious judgment of the saved.

Paul says, so we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. In other words, when we're here on earth, we're not in the direct immediate presence of the Lord.

We're away from him. Verse 7, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Verse 8, yes, we are of good courage and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So he's talking about the distinction, the contrast, between being in this body on the earth and being with the Lord after he takes us home. But regardless of whether we're on earth or with him in heaven, verse 9 he says, so whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. The goal of the Christian life is to please the God of our salvation, to respond with love to the God who loved us first, brought us into his family. The true Christian has a desire to please him out of, watch this, to please him out of gratitude, please him out of a spirit of love in response to his saving mercies. Not as a legal requirement to get his approval, not as though we're working to get a wage in return, not in that legal spirit that God owes me because I did this.

No, it's I gladly give my love to the Lord, I gladly give my life to the Lord, I give him all of my obedience because I am so grateful for the love and goodness that he showed on me, an unworthy sinner, and I just want to please my heavenly Father. It's like the, you know, it's like the, you know, it's like the loyal child that loves his mother, the loyal daughter that loves her father, and delights in doing things that bring joy to the heart of that loving parent. I want to please my parent, that child says, because I love them, not because, not because I want to be sure I don't lose my share of the inheritance. That would kind of spoil it all, wouldn't it?

You get it? You know, to have a kid that stays in your good graces just to make sure that they get their part of the inheritance, that's not love, that's very distasteful to realize that there would be a material motive for a relational spirit. No, that loving son, that loving daughter does so out of love for the parent. Spontaneous, coming from the depths of the heart, and in that earthly way that we can understand, we multiply it by infinity, we expand it into an eternal sphere, and we see something of what the Christian life is designed to be. I want to please my heavenly Father, you say. I understand, I see from Revelation what Christ did for me. I realize that he was carrying out a plan of love which came from God the Father himself, that he loved me on the cross, that the Spirit loved me when he drew me, and I'm overwhelmed and I'm captivated by the thought of that, captivated by the thought of what wondrous love is this, oh my soul.

A love given to me though I did not deserve it, that I had no claim on, and yet he so lavished it on me, in the words of Ephesians, which he lavished on us in the Beloved. As a result of that, it's our aim to please him, to love him in return, not for legal reasons, not because I fear he's going to strike me if I disobey. I'm not afraid of that. He already struck down his son. He already punished sin in Christ. I'm not fearing that, but I don't want to displease my heavenly Father as much as the loving daughter doesn't want to displease her earthly father.

The thought's unthinkable to a loving daughter. Just before we close, my friends, I just want to let you know that this podcast is made possible for you by the generous support of many friends of our ministry. We're grateful for that, and if you have supported us, I want to say a special word of thanks to you for all that you've done to make this possible. And if you would like to join in the support of our ministry, you can do that so easily by going to thetruthpulpit.com.

That's thetruthpulpit.com. You'll see the link to give, and you can add your support to the others who make this possible for us. Thank you for whatever you do and whether you give or you don't give.

Know that our love and prayers are with you. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time as we continue to study God's Word together here on The Truth Pulpit. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-14 04:07:47 / 2025-01-14 04:18:27 / 11

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