Re:Member Core Doctrines II: Fall and Rebellion
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. My headset mic broke this morning, so I get to hold this. The only benefit I know of holding a mic is that at the end of my sermon, I get to drop it dramatically, if you will, grab a Bible and go to Genesis, chapter one. We are, as a church, working through our membership commitment, and we are walking through. Our membership commitment is one sheet of paper. And it's just bullet points. The first eight or so are theological points that we agree to, and then the second half really is how we're going to practice that here. Our hope for this series is that this is edifying, encouraging, helpful, and that we collectively as church can recommit to these things, if you like. I hadn't committed to this stuff. We're walking through what they mean, where they come from in the scriptures. We wrote these down, but we did not make them up. And so what we're doing is reading them and then showing where this comes from in the Bible, where this idea comes from, where it's anchored in. And so that's what we're doing. Last week we looked at the first two. The first one says that the Bible is inerrant and it is the authority over my life. So we're committing to, we believe the Bible. We're going to study the Bible. That's actually primarily what we do on Sundays is just teach through books of the Bible. And so we're going to study it, we're going to apply it to our lives. The second one is that God has existed forever as a trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And today we are looking at numbers three and four. So I'm going to read them, then we're going to pray and we're going to get started. So number three is this. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship of the Trinity. However, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. And then number four, number three is really theological in nature. And then number four is taking that and helping see where we show up. It says, as a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God because of my sin. I have earned God's wrath towards me and an eternity in hell. That is what we're going to walk through this morning. We're really going to take it sentence by sentence. It'll be basically walk through in four parts. If you are new to Christianity, new to the church, this is a Good morning for you. Because we're going to explain a whole lot of why. Why do we exist? What's God's intent for humanity? Why does God respond to us the way that he does? Why is Jesus coming such good news that we would gather consistently to sing about it. That's what we're going to look at this morning. So I'm going to pray and then we got our work cut out for us. Because whenever I have to face off against stuff like this, the whole Bible's at my disposal. And it says this stuff over and over and over and over again. And so I'm always in the tension of like, how much Bible are we going to read? All of it or just some of it? And we're, we're going to read a lot of it this morning as we kind of go through all of these. So let's pray and let's get started.
Lord, we ask for your help. We ask for the work of your spirit in our hearts so that this wouldn't just be something that we think about, but it would be something that we believe. It wouldn't just be something that we consider this morning, but it would go from our head to our heart so that we might see and reckon with the glorious nature of you, of our creation and of our salvation. Help us to see and feel our sin this morning so that we might respond to you in repentance and love. In Jesus name, Amen.
So the first one, we're going to take that first part. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship of the Trinity. I told you to turn to Genesis. We are going Genesis 1:1-2.
> In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
So the Bible opens up with God preexisting and in the act of creation. Then it's going to say that he begins to speak creation into existence. And this is where John the Apostle is going to pick up. He's going to say in the beginning when he starts his gospel and he's going to highlight something for us. He's going to say this in John chapter one.
> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. The Word is personal.
> All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
> And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
So at the beginning of the Scriptures, we are met with the Trinity working in creation. And then it says this, Genesis 1:26. After he's created everything, he goes and he creates humanity.
> Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
So far we see the Trinity at work, and we see that humanity was created. But in Genesis, if you were to ask, why was humanity created? The best answer you'll get is to have dominion over the earth. And that's true. But God's intent, His purpose for humanity is actually bigger than that and more beautiful than that. But we don't get to see it until we see how he responds to the Fall, until He responds to the rebellion and the sin of humanity. So I want to show you, I'm going to try to help you see that we were intended to be invited into this relationship with God. So once sin enters the world and God begins to respond to humanity's sin, and my page turning is going to be more awkward because I only have one hand. We see in Exodus, chapter 29 as God's bringing the people out of slavery, it says this.
> I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them. I am the LORD their God.
Original intent in the garden was that these people would belong to him and that he would dwell with them. There's this relational nature to God's design. And I want you to know that God did not create humanity because he lacked some sort of relation. He wasn't lonely because he existed forever in a trinitarian nature. We get invited into the love and the joy, the relationship that already existed. He created humanity out of an excess of love and relationship, not out of a need for it. But then he says his intent as he's bringing them out is, I'm going to live with you. You're going to be my people. In Exodus 34, when he displays himself to Moses, he says this.
> The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
When he says what he's like, he speaks of it in these relational terms. He's merciful, he's gracious, he's abounding in steadfast love. He could say mighty, terrifying, awe inspiring. But when he starts talking, he says, no, he talks about his goodness and his relational nature. Deuteronomy 6, before they're sent into the promised land, they're commanded:
> You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
God's intent for humanity is that he would dwell with them, share his love with them, and that they, us, we might love him, that our response to him is love. That's wonderful. It fits in the same category where, I'll look at my boys sometime and I go, no, you're not gonna talk to your mama like that. You're gonna love your mama. That's your mama. You're gonna treat her. She exists in this. The nature of your relationship is one where you're gonna love her, you're gonna care for her, and for me to demand that is good for them. And when God says, I love you and you need to love me, this is how this is meant to work. That's wonderful news, because it could exist in all these other ways, but the nature of God's purpose in creation was that we would belong to him, they would love them. And he keeps going. This is Jeremiah 31, the prophet, speaking. He says,
> At that time, declares the LORD, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.
He brings them back. He says, they're going to belong to me. And he says,
> I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
The prophet Hosea, God specifically tells him to marry a prostitute because she's going to keep leaving him. He says, you're going to keep chasing her. And in that way you're going to picture what it's been like between me and Israel. And he says this:
> And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy, and I will betroth you to me in faithfulness.
What was God's purpose in creation? That he might marry his people, that they might have this type of a love relationship that should blow our minds. That God's desire, the Creator of the universe, his desire for humanity, is that they would belong to him, and that there would be this depth of relationship and love. This is what we were built for. When you think, what's my purpose? Why did God create us? Or why does humans exist? Is this all random? No, God created humanity. He created you that you might love him, that you might know him, and that he might love you. And that that might be wonderful. I feel like you all are less enthused than you should be, but okay. This is why Jesus, when he shows up, he uses bride and groom language. This is why John the Baptist says, I'm not the groom. I'm just the friend of the groom. But the groom's coming. This is why the book of Revelation takes us to the wedding supper of the Lamb. And then in Revelation 21 it says,
> Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
As it's picturing this redeemed relationship and this reconnection, his intent is that we would belong to him, that we would relate to him, that we would be invited into this love, that it would be shared and cherished. And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. That was God's original intent with humanity, was this depth of relationship. Unfortunately, there's a big however that begins the next sentence. We didn't stay in this relationship long. So the next part of this theological statement that we agree to as a church is, however, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. They rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule.
So Genesis 2:15, 17 says,
> The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
He places them in a wonderful place there's no sin, no brokenness, nothing. And he says, one rule. You can have everything. Everything's yours except for this. Do you all know anything about humans? It doesn't go well for us. Pretty quickly, they were like, what's with that one rule? And Satan comes along. If you read the story, the serpent comes and he tempts Eve. He shows up, begins to lie about God. He says, did he really say, you can't have any of the fruit? And she says, no, we just can't have that one. And he says, this is going to be good for you. He starts working in that God's not trustworthy. So Eve eats, her husband eats. He's with her. And immediately sin and death and rebellion enter the world. And there's more going on than just mere disobedience. It's not just that God had a rule and they broke the rule. There's some fundamental things that happen in this moment. I want to read this quote from a friend of mine named Brandon Clements who wrote a book called For Our Good Always. He's a pastor at Midtown Fellowship in Lexington. It says this. It was an intentional choice because not eating from that tree meant that they were accepting that God was wiser than them, that he got to determine what was good and evil, right and wrong. That he was God and they were not. Eating of the tree meant no, I get to determine what is good and evil. This is why it's rebellion. This is why it's a revolt against God's good rule, that it's humanity saying, no, we want to be in charge of that. We don't want to submit to you. We don't want to follow instructions. We don't want to trust you. We don't want to believe that you're good or for our good. We'll take it from here. Thank you.
So sin enters the world. And it's interesting what happens if you look at Genesis 3, starting in verse 8, after they had done this. It says,
> And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Which is just a hint of how God intended it to be. He was just going to show up, walk around the garden. His presence was going to be with them. It was going to be delightful. But the LORD God called to the man and said, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. They were naked. When God created humanity, it says that they were both naked and they were unashamed. Then when sin enters the world, they notice that they're naked and they hide. And I believe that this has entered into the heart of humanity. We still dream about it. You still have that dream where you all of a sudden realize you are completely and utterly exposed. That was ripped away from us. This ability to have this sort of freedom and lack of self consciousness. Do you know how unselfconscious you have to be to be naked and not notice? It's one thing to forget your belt. It's another to forget all of that entirely and to not even notice and not even care. And the amount of freedom and the amount of peace that there is for that to exist in that way, and it's gone. Because sin brings guilt and shame and separation from the man to the woman and from us and God. So that from then on we want to hide from God. That's what enters the world. This is then the curse happens. The curse falls upon the people and God curses existence from this out of their rebellion. And this is known as the fall, which is where we existed in this state with the Lord that we have now fallen from. And then they are removed from the garden and death enters the world. And now they will die. And we've missed the garden ever since.
You know how you can get used to stuff? Stuff can just become normal. You don't even think about it. This is one of the ways I feel like that the world tells me that this story is true. One of my personal. Where it resonates with me, where I can feel this is because we're able to get used to so much. I remember when my wife and I, we had been married a couple years and we went to my family's like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It was something. We were eating a nice meal together. I don't remember exactly what it was. We went in the house and my mom has like a hutch, but it's like a glass case with stuff in it that you can look at, but you're not supposed to open the case, because inside the glass case is more glass. What protects glass better than glass? So we have one of those. We're there and my dad says, hey, come here, I want to show you something. And he opens the hutch, and inside of it he goes, check this out. And there is a dead hummingbird in there. He's like, isn't that cool? It's not like a stuffed dead hummingbird. Just one he found outside, he brought inside, stuck in the hutch. He says, usually they're beating their wings so fast, you don't ever get to see them. Look at how pretty their wings are. Also, look at how cool his tongue is, because its tongue was hanging out of its mouth. And I said, that's cool. We closed the hutch, we ate our meal. We get in the car, we're two minutes away, and my wife goes, what on earth was that? And I said, what? I had no clue what she was talking about. She said, the bird. I said, what bird? Because it had happened before the meal. And then I was like, oh. She said, the dead hummingbird that we ate next to that was in the display case. That bird. That's the bird. And I was like, oh. And then it dawned on me that that might be weird, but in my house, it's not weird. You find anything cool and dead or bonish, and you just bring it in and you go, look at this. You don't usually get to see what's on the inside of a turtle. Well, now you can. And then we just stick it somewhere in our house. Sometimes you stick it in an ant hill first, and then they get the stuff off of it. Then you bring it in your house. We're not psychos. That bird was in that hutch for several years. My older brother at one point said, it's cool. I cut the tongue out of it so it doesn't look as bad anymore. We're capable. There's so much stuff that you get used to as normal. You just get used to it. This is normal. This is how this works. This is normal food. This is normal dress. This is normal talk. This is what you know a house smells like. This is normal. And you only notice it when it's somebody else's stuff. Then you can see it. But you can get used to everything. But there's something in us that has not once ever gotten used to how broken sin is and how death works. You can bury someone who is 97, and something in you rages that, this should never happen. I should never have to say goodbye to people. This should never happen. And we can tell ourselves, yeah, but it was as good as it could be. And it's like, it's not. Because something in me tells me this is wrong. And there's a reality to eternity and the garden are in us because we were made for them. And we can still feel that we've lost them. This is in us, that something has been lost. And so we say, as we look at this, we say, we see it. We see that God made us for something beautiful. We see that we lost it. We feel it. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship trinity. However, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. And we've been living outside of that rule ever since.
So number four, it gets personal. As a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God. I have earned God's wrath towards me an eternity in hell. Let's look at the first part of that sentence. As a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God. That we have participated, we have joined Adam and Eve. This is known as original sin, that we're born with this. Romans 5 says,
> Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.
There's not one of us that has not joined the rebellion. There's not one of us that has not sinned. And you say, well, what is sin? Well, certainly it is disobeying. Certainly it's that God says, this is how the world should work. This is what is good, this is what is right. And we don't do that. So you have things like the Ten Commandments. We're going to set aside the first few because those first few deal with how we relate to God. But let's just look at the ones that tell us how we relate to each other. We'll come back to the first few in a second. Don't steal, don't kill. Jesus shows up and says that anger is the same thing going on in our heart, that when we hate somebody in our heart, we're doing the same thing. Don't commit adultery. Jesus shows up and suggests, lust is the same thing happening in our heart, that it's going on inside of us whether we're acting on it or not. Don't covet, don't want something that someone else has. We can't even walk around without participating in these. And we would all agree the world would be better if those things didn't happen. We're not looking at them going, those are ridiculous. It's like, no, those would be good. It'd be great if I could live in a place like if I told you there's a city you can move to and nobody ever breaks the church Ten commands. You're like, sign me up. That'd be great. You know much money we lose to the fact that people steal constantly. How big of a drain on society that is? How much of your life is spent trying to protect yourself from someone harming you or stealing from you? How much of your thought process goes to that, how much of your energy goes to that, how much anxiety goes to that? We would love for that. But we participate in them. I've stolen things. I don't want people to steal from me, but I've taken stuff from other people. We've done this. We bear false witness. We've whispered about people behind their back. We've said, you know why they do that? You don't even know why they do that. You just got an angry guess. You want to hear my blatant angry guess about this person? You don't say that. You say, I know why they did that. I know why they said that. Would you like for me to share some false witness with you? But it's deeper than that. It's not just that we disobey, but the first ones are that we would love God, that we would have no other gods before him, that it would be him and him alone. And the second one is that we would not make any graven images. And that's exactly what happens. That we would not have any sort of idolatry. That's exactly what happens in the garden, where it's not just that they disobey him, it's that they want something else more than they want Him. And we do that. How often are we going, God, I really don't want you. I just want your stuff. I just want the good parts of life. I don't really care. A whole lot of people who are saying, I'm a Christian is really just, if he's the person who give me the good stuff, then I'll follow him. But I just want the stuff. I'm in it as long as my kids behave. I'm in it as long as my health is here. And if he won't give me those things, then I'll go find something else, because I really just want him to give me the stuff. He's a means to an end. This is what Romans 1 says, that we can see God in creation, but we don't want Him. We swap him out for anything else. We don't give him glory, which is a fundamental fracture of the existence of the world. We're turning it upside down that God is essentially wonderful. And we're going to say I want some other stuff, which is a rebellion against all of creation. It's a rebellion against your very nature. So we do that. The other thing that happens is we exalt self. Boy, you love you some. We do. It's like I can't see past myself sometimes. Even when you're depressed, you still want good things to happen to you. You're like, I'm the worst. Hope I get a raise. We can't. We're self centered. One of the best ways to see this is to take a group photo. Whose face you looking at in that picture? You're not like, oh, look at all my friends. You're going, where am I at? I've taken pictures with my wife and then been like, that's a good picture. And she's been like, my eyes are closed. It's like, I didn't even look at you. Her hair's in her face. It's going through her mouth like this. I'm like, this looks good. Are you on Instagram? Pop that thing on there, just looking at myself. And then we have self righteousness. So not only the self centeredness, the self focus, but then we turn it into, well, I'll be good enough and I'll earn enough, and then God will owe me because how great I am. So even in our righteous acts and our morality, and we'll talk more about that next week, we turn it inward. And then we want sovereignty. We want to be the people who decide what's right and wrong. That's what Adam and Eve were doing. And how much do we do that? How many times have you read the Bible? How many times have you been with your group and even where we're trying and you're going, I don't know, it just doesn't seem right to me. I don't know about that. I just don't feel like God would say that. It's like we just read it and we just react. There's something in me that wants to pick. How many people will go, well, if there's a God like that, then I don't believe in him. And all they're saying is, if I was in the garden, I'd eat that apple because I'm the one who's gonna pick what's good and what's evil, what's right and what's wrong. I'm in charge of that. I can feel it. I can just sense it. You all know how much we do that. I'm just gonna follow my gut on this one. Don't. You're bad at stuff. I'm a grown man, but within the past couple years, I got pink eye. I shouldn't be trusting me with, like, good and evil. We should understand that there's something wrong with us in this rebellion and that we've joined. So that's what we look, we say, okay, we see the rebellion that they committed, and we see that we've joined. Joined. We see that this is deep in us. I want to show you Romans 3, because Romans 3 is not. It's getting after it. Paul says, what then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin.
> As it is written: "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one." "Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive." "The venom of asps is under their lips." "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness." "Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known." "There is no fear of God before their eyes."
If you zoom out, if you're looking down from heaven, if you're in a place where there is no sin and you're looking at the earth, this is a really good description of it. Now we know that whatever the law says, so he's quoting the law, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
So we look at this and we say, okay, I see it. I see myself in this. Ephesians 2 says that we're dead and children of wrath that we're following Satan. Romans 5, 11 and Philippians 3 say that we're enemies of God. Romans 8 and Colossians 1 say that we're hostile to God. Romans 1 says we hate God. This is what we're like on our own. We don't want his rule, we don't want his instruction. We don't want him. We just want stuff to be good for us, whatever that looks like. Nobody had to teach you how to sin. Nobody has to teach little kids how to sin. I got two little kids. Nobody was coaching them up on sin at my house. I mean, we sinned in front of them every once in a while, but we weren't trying to get them to follow our, you know, we weren't sitting them aside and be like, hey, you hadn't discovered lying yet. Let me explain that to you. They're just doing it. It's crazy. You're talking to a three year old covered in powdered sugar and they're like, I don't know about donuts. What are you talking about? Donut. I don't even know if I've ever heard that word. And it's like, you little. What is this? And then we grow up, we learn these things are bad. They've happened to us. We don't like them. We know they decay society. We know that God tells us not to, and we still do it. There are things that you're actively fighting against that you don't want. You know, they're destructive for you. And you're going, there's something wrong with me. Yeah, there is.
So then it says, this second sentence in number four for us is, because of my sin, I have earned God's wrath towards me an eternity in hell. So I'm going to show you places in the Bible that articulate wrath and hell so that we can see it, because it's God's response to sin. He has two responses to sin. One is, he chases people to redeem them. And two, he has wrath and judgment. Romans 2 says, we know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. He just listed off sins, and he says, we know that God's judgment rightly falls on them. And the reality is we actually do believe it's right. You want them to catch the bad guy. You want there to be some sort of justice. You don't want evil people to get away with it. If you've watched a movie where the bad guy wins, you don't like that, that bothers you. You don't want to watch a movie where the guy you hated the whole time walks off and gets free at the end. You want the good guy to catch him. That we want justice. It's just when it turns on us that we start going, well, hold on a second. It says,
> Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.
So he says, God's gracious to us, that we would turn away from these things, that we would repent. He says, but your heart doesn't repent, and you're storing up wrath for the day of wrath. When his judgment is revealed, there's a temptation for us to go, well, I thought God being wrathful was like an Old Testament thing, but in the New Testament, that doesn't happen. The New Testament articulates that there's a way out of it very clearly, that there's hope in the midst of it, but God's wrath is still coming on sin and sinners. Jesus talks more about hell than anybody else. And you know why he talks about hell more than anybody else? Because it's real and he loves you. When I'm with my boys and we're around something dangerous, I talk about it a lot. Back up. Get away from that. Don't touch it. It will electrocute you. Stop. I will tell them even aggressively at times. Back up. Get away from that. Jesus is doing that. This is what he says in Mark 9.
> If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
That hell in Jesus' description is internal and external eternal torment. There's a worm, it's an internal discomfort. There's fire. That's external comfort. And the worm never dies and the fire never stops. And if that's real, and if Jesus knows it's real so much that he would come to die to save us, isn't it beautiful that he tells us over and over again, you don't want to go there. You don't want that to happen. He talks about it a lot. He says it's a place where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. He calls it outer darkness. He calls it destruction. Second Thessalonians chapter 1 Paul says,
> When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
We believe that there are certain things that are wicked and evil to do and that if you don't believe in hell, if you're going, I don't know about that. That seems awful. And we're talking about things we might look at someone and go, if they choose to pursue this type of life, that will lead them towards something awful that'll ruin their life. If they begin to do drugs like that, that'll mess their life up. They should not do that. That will be bad for them where Christians we believe in eternity, so we believe that when we choose a trajectory of rebellion, we just think the stakes are higher than just your life here will be bad. We also believe that sin unrepentance and lack of worship are a complete rejection of God and the fabric of all existence and therefore have eternal consequences. To reject God has massive consequences that go on for eternity. If we don't see our sin, then the fact that Jesus comes to live a perfect life where it says that all have sinned and therefore all have died. Jesus didn't sin, so he didn't deserve death. It was unearned when he died, and therefore he was the only one who had the credit to pay others. If you died on the cross, you'd be paying for your sin. But because Jesus didn't have sin, he's able to pay for ours. We look and say there's this rebellion and there's this people that are running headlong away from God and they're choosing willfully to do it, gleefully, spitefully, continually running from him and that he loves us so much and designed us to exist with him that he pursues to the point of dying. And then he rises so that we might know that his death was effective for sinners. And then there's a proclamation of forgiveness in his name. But the people who line up for forgiveness are the people who know they have debt. If we do not see this rebellion and our place in it, then we will not love Jesus. We will not be overwhelmed by the goodness of the gospel. If we do not see the depravity and the brokenness of our own souls and our inability to save ourselves without somehow exalting ourselves, that that would be the only route we could take would be some sort of moralistic self exaltation to the point that we are still fundamentally rejecting Christ because we just want more of ourselves. If we can't see that we're in a trap of sin that we cannot get ourselves out of because we're already guilty and we deserve death, and that the only way to try to fix it would be to declare our own righteousness which flies in the face of his goodness, and that we need Jesus, then we won't run to Him. But if we understand our sin, oh, the cross is beautiful. And we can feel the love of Jesus when He says he loves us, that he died for us, when John 3:16 says,
> For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
You see that he's not just doing something nice for you, but he's doing what he intended to do all along, which is to have us live with him and know him and love him, that we're invited in. There's going to be tears in our eyes on that day that he's going to wipe away, but he's going to be feeling the same sort of thing as he rejoices in the redemption of his people, because he longs for it too, that that joy will be shared because that's what he's wanted. I have the opportunity today to a young couple in our church is getting married and I get to be the officiant. One of the passages I love to talk about when I do that is Ephesians 5.
> Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
We look at our rebellion and we look at our sin. And then we see Jesus sprinting after the church and giving himself up so that he might have her. It says he washes us and there's no spot or wrinkle or blemish or any such thing. That's the type of love that we're invited into. But in order for us to see it and to love it and to rejoice in it, we have to know the type of sin that we have. Let's pray.
Father, I pray that our experience with sin, with the knowledge of our rebellion, would not be mental, but that you would help us to feel it and to know it, to see the darkness of our own hearts, so that the offer of forgiveness carried out in the cross by Christ would be good news and so that we might trust you. In Jesus name, amen.
The band's going to come back up. I would invite you if you have never really considered your sin. I would invite you to begin to try to understand the nature of your brokenness and the offer to believe in Jesus. To just say, I trust you. I don't trust me to do this. I trust you to reverse in some ways what happened in the garden where we said, I'll be in charge of this. To come and say, I can't be in charge of this. You have to do it. I need you to save me. To go to the cross and say, I don't want my sin. I want you and I need your rescue and I need your redemption. I need your hope. I need you to be the one who does this. And if we believe in our heart and confess with our mouth, we will be saved. And there are none that call on him that would be brought to shame. Nobody trusts in Jesus and is put to shame.