The Purpose of the Cross, Part 2

A lot of folks want healing who don't want to deal with the sin, okay? But that's not going to make you changed. Dr. Tony Evans says that's why so many people turn to feel-good solutions that soothe their guilty conscience but don't last. So the question is, do you want healing, or do you just want to feel better for the moment? This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans.

It's a popular expression, and it's true. God accepts us the way we are, but loves us too much to leave us that way. Today, Dr. Evans explains how that process of change is part of the purpose of the cross.

Let's join him. The cross has a three-fold relationship to us. It has a past relationship called justification, where God declares the sinner righteous. It has a future relationship called glorification, where we will be eternally transformed to live in the presence of God forever. But my concern as I walk through this series is the present purpose of the cross in the life of the believer, and that's called sanctification.

That is where God transforms the life of the sinner who has become a saint and is now part of the family of God. What I am discovering is that many Christians, and I may not be going too far out to say most Christians, have lost sight of the cross. They've not lost sight of it in terms of justification. They know that they got saved when they placed faith in Jesus Christ, and Christ came into their lives, they were forgiven, and they were imparted eternal life.

They haven't lost sight of it for the future because they anticipate the glories of heaven and heaven being their home. But what we have lost is the power in the present of the cross. We remember it on Easter, Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday. We perhaps think of it a bit of Brown Communion, but we have lost sight of its current contemporary potency, 1 Peter chapter 2, and I want to focus on verses 24 and 25. And he himself bore our sins in his own body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, for by his wounds you were healed. For you were continually straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls. He says that on the cross, he uses the word cross, Jesus Christ bore our sins. When it says he died for our sins, with an S, he has now entered specificity in the discussion about sin.

No longer is it a general umbrella category, singular sin, it is now specific to the individual thoughts, deeds, and actions that are in fact sinful. Jesus bore our sins that we might die to sin, live to righteousness, and the reason I'm telling you all this, Peter says, is that by his wounds you are healed. Now, many of us in this building today need healing. Some of us need physical healing because we're physically sick. Others of us need emotional healing because we've been wounded in our emotions. There are couples here who need relational healing because the relationship is in trouble. There are various kinds of pain in this building right now. The Bible says, at the end of verse 24, by his stripes or by his wounds, you are healed.

So I'm going to talk to you today about your healing. But his healing is tied to his wounds. His wounds is tied to the cross because his wounds came because of his suffering at Calvary on the cross. But why did he suffer at Calvary? For our sins.

Follow me now. He went to the cross because of sin, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness so that by the wounds we get healed. Let's try this another way. A lot of folk want healing who don't want to deal with the sin. Jesus's wounds were tied to him bearing our sins. What a lot of folk want is they want healing but don't want to address the sin problem. Lord, heal me. Heal my marriage. Heal my mind. Heal my depression. Heal my circumstances.

Heal me. The cross can only help your healing if the sin that brought about the problem is addressed. You cannot appeal to the cross if there's a sin involved in the pain that has gone unaddressed. People want to come to church for Jesus to change their situation when they're not willing to let the cross address the sin. If Jesus is not free to adjust the sin, he's not free to address the wound or the consequence of the sin that brings the pain that sin causes.

If you and I could understand that much of the pain, not all, not all, sometimes you can just get sick because there's bad bacteria in the air. I mean, you know, I'm talking about where there has been an action or an attitude that is an affront to the holy standards of God that brings a repercussion or consequence in physical, emotional, relational, circumstantial pain that needs healing. He says that Jesus bore the sin and by his wounds he'll bring the healing but only if the sin has been addressed. A lot of people want counselors to make them feel better as long as they don't deal with the sin.

But once you start dealing with my sin, I want to talk to somebody else. But you have to understand the cross cannot come to bear on the pain that you need to be healed if the sin is skipped and goes unaddressed because Jesus didn't die for your circumstances. He didn't die for your issues.

He didn't die because you made a mistake. He died because of sin and unless you treat the sin as a sin then the Savior can't heal the wound that the sin caused. So everybody wants healing but what they don't want is the mechanism of healing. And that is the identification and addressing of sins. See, the first question a Christian counselor should ask you, a secular counselor won't do it and some Christians won't even do it, is, is there an action and an attitude that undergirds the problem that brought you here that is in antithesis to the will and Word of God? Because until that question gets answered and responded to, Jesus Christ won't be involved in the healing. And what we're missing is we're going to human help that Jesus is not involved with because we're not willing for somebody, if we're not able to do it ourselves, to identify the sin. You talk about the problem of divorce today.

The answers are amazing, you know. Well, we're just different. Well, I don't believe God brought us together in the first place. I mean, let people just go all over the map talking ridiculous nonsense because they weren't saying none of that on the day they got married. No, what has happened is the husband has left his biblical role and or the wife has left her biblical role. They're functioning in sin and therefore he has abdicated his responsibility. She has abdicated hers.

They've reduced it now to a personality difference. Nobody's willing to call it that this husband is acting sinfully out of the will of God in relationship to his family. She's acting sinfully out of the will of God in relationship to her family and they didn't want to know why God isn't healing their marriage because you have not identified you doing your role as sin because he only bore sin on the cross and only sin will he address. See, what you want if you need healing is somebody to help you identify the sin if there is a sin involved. But see, that's not popular.

People want to go and they want to feel good. Make me feel good, make me shout, you know, make me happy, okay? But that's not going to make you changed. That's not going to bring healing.

You're just going to show up next week for another feel-good session. We're talking about transformation now that you might die to sin, live the righteousness, and that thing's changed. You might be healed. So the question is, do you want healing or do you just want to feel better for the moment?

By his wounds, you were healed. He's talking about the wounds that came as the consequence of the sin that's gone unaddressed, which he died for. So many people don't want healing. They want healing, but they want it without the cross. And the cross only exists to deal with sin. That's all the cross deals with. It only deals with sin. So when you come and you're talking about, you know, I'm not all that bad, you know, everybody has problems and all that. No, that ain't cross talk.

That's human talk. Where have you rebelled against the standard of God? And until you confront that, confess that, repent from that, the cross will be of no avail to you.

And you'll stay sick of whatever the sickness is, mentally, emotionally, relationally, circumstantially, whatever it is. By his wounds, you are healed. I'm talking about the cross. The cross is here, and it's available today to bring mental healing, emotional healing, relational healing, and even physical healing if it's related to sin. It is available because by his wounds, he's still healing today. You ever notice when Jesus was on earth, when Jesus was on earth, you ever notice he'd say, take up your bed and walk, and then he'd throw out, and your sins are forgiven you.

Wait a minute, now I thought the man was sick. No, whenever he throws that line in, the reason that they were sick was because of a sin. That's why he tells them your sins are forgiven you, but because now forgiveness of sin occurred, now they can pick up their bed and walk. There was a change in their circumstance because the spiritual got addressed. Unless you deal with the spiritual, the circumstantial won't change from God's standpoint. You'll try to manage the best you can, but you won't get healing. That's when you'll know your salvation is real.

See, we know it's real, but that's when you will feel it. You'll feel it when you see God change something that you couldn't change because you addressed the spiritual underpinning of the problem. There is a rare problem that can't be fixed if the spiritual is addressed. For example, unforgiveness is a sin. Unforgiveness is a sin. Wrath is a sin. All anger is not sin, but wrath is a sin.

You carry that wrath? That's a sin. Now what people will do is blame the people who caused it, and the people who caused it are to blame. They are to blame because if they were wrong, they were wrong, but that's their sin. You can't skip your sin, pass your sin off to their sin because they caused it, skip your sin, but still want healing. God is going to deal with them, and He should deal with them, and He will deal with them based on how they deal with them, but you still got to face your sin. A lot of people are going around with emotional pain because the sin that they've committed, they're not willing to deal with.

They pass it off because somebody else did something. And there's another important component of the spiritual healing process. Dr. Evans will return in a moment to tell us what it is and how it changes the part of you that makes you who you are. First though, Easter is just a few weeks away now, and as we approach it, a lot of people will begin thinking about springtime, bunnies, and decorated eggs. And while those Easter traditions may be fun, they certainly don't represent the true meaning and impact of Easter. That's why Dr. Evans wrote the book The Power of the Cross. It'll show you why truly understanding and appreciating the purpose, preeminence, and power of the cross is the only thing that can turn empty, meaningless religion into something vibrant and alive.

Learn how to access all the benefits, blessings, and power the Lord died to give you. Get in touch with us and get a copy of The Power of the Cross. Right now, for a limited time, we're offering it as our gift to anyone who comes alongside our ministry and makes a contribution. And as an added bonus, we're including all 14 full-length messages from Tony's current teaching series, Returning to the Cross.

You can get them on CDs or downloadable MP3s when you make a donation at tonyevans.org. All the details are right there on the homepage. Or if it's easier, call us at 1-800-800-3222. Again, 1-800-800-3222.

I'll repeat that contact information for you after part two of today's message. Here's Dr. Evans. Watch his name. He's not finished yet.

He's got one more thing to say. Verse 25. For you will continually strain like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your soul.

When you come back to the cross, you've come home to the shepherd and guardian of your soul. Can I tell you something about sheep? Dumb. Sheep are ignorant. I think I told y'all one time, I was talking to a sheep farmer one time, and he had all these sheep, and he was telling me how dumb they are. He was saying, the Bible is so accurate, one sheep will start going in a circle. Sheep's just going in a circle. The other sheep think it's going somewhere.

So they'll line up behind it and just go in a circle, go in a circle. He said, and the sheep will just go in a circle, in a circle, in a circle, one dummy following another dummy. All right? Sheep are dumb, which is why the Bible says, all we like sheep have gone astray. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Okay? Where are we dumb? Here's where we're dumb. In our souls. The soul is the you. Your personhood or personality is your soul. You are not your body. Your body is merely the house for your soul to live in. Your soul needs a place to stay. So it stays in your body. When your body dies, it will then relocate, because it can't live in this dilapidated, deteriorating house, so it relocates.

All right? The soul is you. Every person is made up of three parts. Spirit, soul, and body. Your spirit, you communicate with God. Your soul, you communicate with yourself. That's how you know you exist.

Your body, that's how you communicate with the world around you through the five senses. Now here's what you need to know about your soul. Everybody's soul is distorted. Everybody's soul has become contaminated. Everybody, everybody who's born, that cute baby that's born, jacked up soul.

Soul is messed up. That's why you don't have to teach your baby how to sin. You don't have to teach it how to lie, be selfish. You don't have to teach it how to do that. You got to teach it to tell the truth. You know, you got to teach it why.

Because it was born all squiggly. Okay? Everybody's soul, so you have to understand, you don't know you like you think you know you. You don't know you like you think you know you. I know you think you know you. But you got parts of you.

In fact, some of us have realized that. You said, I can't believe that was me. It was you. You just didn't know it yet.

Okay? You don't know you. You don't know you. The way God ordained life to work is, He would communicate with the spirit. The spirit would communicate with the soul. The soul would communicate with the body, and the body would act based on that information. So God would communicate with the spirit. Spirit would communicate with the soul. Soul would communicate with the body.

The body would act based on that data. Now the problem is, the soul, before conversion, does not have a filter. So some souls are more messed up than others in how they express themselves through the body, but every soul is disconnected. When you get saved, a seed is birthed in you, the spirit, and as you grow, the spirit takes over more space in the soul and begins to guide the soul and bring about order to the distortion. But He says, like sheep, we stray from the shepherd.

Let me tell you something. The shepherd will allow the sheep to stray. Why won't God help me? Because the shepherd will allow the sheep to stray. Why will the shepherd allow the sheep to stray? Because the shepherd cannot compromise his character just because he likes the sheep. The shepherd can't dumb down and reduce his standard. But what the shepherd will do is be available upon the sheep's return. Prodigal son. What the shepherd does is he is available.

He will let the sheep go until the sheep comes to the realization he cannot make it without the shepherd. Some folks are here today who don't like doctors, can't stand the thought of a doctor, can't stand the thought of a hospital. You tell them, come on, come on, you've got to go to the doctor. No, I'm not going to the doctor. You've got to go to the hospital. No, I'm not going to the hospital.

You know what they just told you? I ain't sick enough yet. Let it keep getting worse. Let it keep hurting worse. And one day they're going to wake up, ah, I need a doctor.

Why? Because they weren't hurting enough to know that they can't get rid of it themselves. So God will allow the sheep to stray until they discover, I can't fix this. And I need somebody who's an expert in healing to make me better because my soul is messed up. So you have to understand, most of the problems, except for some physical problems that come with simply because we're in a decaying body, but most of the problems in our lives are problems that emerge from our souls, not from our bodies. So a lot of us are treating the wrong thing. See, we're trying to treat sinful things with physical pills. You can't fix a spiritual problem with a physical pill.

All you can do with a physical pill is distract you from the cause. See, we're in the soul management, not soul transformation. We just want to make sure, if I can at least manage my soul, I can get by. Jesus is not in the management. He's in the transformation. But to do that, he's got to bring healing. And to do that, he's got to deal with the sin that he died for. He says, but you have returned.

That means come back home. You've come back home to the shepherd, the one who guides and bishop, guardian, bishop, the overseer of your soul. Guess what God wants to be?

He wants to be your overseer. He wants to govern and guide your soul. Why do you want your soul guided?

Because everything else comes from that. See, in your soul are three things—your mind, your emotions, and your will, your thoughts, your feelings, your choices. Those are the three things resonant in your soul. Your soul governs what you think. The soul governs how you feel. The soul governs what you do. All the body does is carry it out. It carries out the mind through the brain. It carries out the choices we make through our bodies. All the body does is act on what the soul gives it. So if you've got a messed up soul, you will do messed up things with your body. See, the person who's struggling with drug addiction or sexual addiction or gambling addiction, they may do those things with their body, but the reason they're doing those things with their body is because there is confusion in the soul. But the soul gets confused because sin has gone unaddressed.

Hello, I'm Bob, and I'm an alcoholic. We know that. That's why you're here.

That's not deep enough. What does God say about drunkenness? Now, that's the question, because now we're dealing with it as a sin, not as just something I just inherited from my daddy and, you know, I need to stay away from liquor and stay away from the bar. That's not dealing with what Jesus died for. Jesus died for the sin of drunkenness. Now, that wound He will heal because that He died for on the cross. Until you're willing to deal with it as a sin, then the cross can't help you. I'm talking about the cross and its contemporary value to the Christian, to me and to you, to us. Dr. Tony Evans, talking about the importance of dealing with our sin God's way, as he wraps up this lesson from his message series, Returning to the Cross.

This two-volume collection focuses on the most important concept of the Christian faith. You can receive all 14 full-length messages in this series when you make a donation and request them at tonyevans.org. And as a reminder, we'll also include a copy of Tony's companion book for this series called The Power of the Cross. Don't forget we're offering this resource bundle as our thank you when you support the alternative with a financial contribution. Visit tonyevans.org today or call our 24-hour resource request line at 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our friendly team members help you.

That's 1-800-800-3222. Knowing about the sacrifice Jesus made for us is important, but responding to it is crucial. Tomorrow Dr. Evans talks about our commitment to the cross. I hope you'll be with us.