Foundations Class – Session 3: Jesus Christ — Who He Is and What He Has Done

We're not just friends of God — we're friends of God because of Jesus. But what exactly did He accomplish, and why does it matter for your everyday life?

In this session, Pastor Mark Medley takes a deep look at the work of Jesus on the cross and unpacks the richness of what it means for us. This isn't just about getting to heaven someday — it reaches into every part of how we live right now. Through Scripture, Pastor Mark walks through the major things Jesus has done on our behalf: He regenerated us, bringing us from death to life. He justified us, declaring us not guilty before the righteous Judge of heaven. He exchanged His righteousness for our sin. He redeemed us, buying us back from slavery. He reconciled us, turning enemies into friends. He satisfied the wrath of God in our place. He adopted us into His family. He is sanctifying us day by day. And one day, He will glorify us completely.

Along the way, Pastor Mark shares a memorable story from a village in Ghana that puts the gospel in sharp focus — God doesn't want your goat. He's already provided a Lamb.

If you've ever felt like your faith was just a doorway you walked through, this session will show you that the gospel isn't just the entry point — it's the entire way.

This is part of the Foundations class at Trinity Community Church, taught by Pastor Kelly Kinder and Pastor Mark Medley.

We are Trinity Community Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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Transcript

Setting The Foundation: Who Jesus Is

Mark Medley 0:00

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the third session in your foundations course. My name is Mark Medley. I'm one of the pastors at Trinity Community Church. And Pastor Kelly is already taking you on a little journey, laying a foundation in the foundations class for who God is and what God thinks about us. And we're talking today about Jesus Christ, who he is and what he has done, and the work on the cross and why that's so important to us. And uh in the last session, we found out that uh that God has reconciled us to himself because of his great love. He sent his son, and now we're called friends of God. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us so that we could become friends of God. It's really important that we understand that we're not just friends of God. We're friends of God because of the work of Jesus. So there's some scriptures here in your book, and you can look at those. I'm going to read through them quickly, and then uh I'm gonna let you read most of that on your own, what's in the book, because I want to go a little bit deeper and talk about what it means, the work of Jesus on the cross, what that means to us. In your book, we see Romans 5, verse 12 says, Therefore, just as one through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and death spread to all men. And we understand this uh we inherit a sin nature. Through Adam, everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. No one is right in themselves before God, and so we can't repay the debt that we owe to God. And then you see in Colossians chapter 2, verse 14, that Jesus, it says, He wiped out the handwriting of the requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us, and he is taking it out of the way, he has nailed it to his cross. So we see that that God, even though those uh that sin had separated us from him, that God is here, we are here, and there's a there's a separation between us, and the separation is our sin. And this is not the Bible, it is not sin, you understand that, but I'm just using it as an example. Um, but God loves us so much that He took, He sent His Son Jesus to take upon Him the weight and the penalty and the punishment of our sin, so that Jesus took that. He came, He lived a life that I could not live, a life of perfect submission and obedience to God. And then He died the death that I should have died because I was not obedient to God. And through, and then God raised him from the dead, validating his work, and through faith in what he has done, I can be back together with God. The sin had separated me, but now I'm brought back together. Jesus nailed all of those things. If you can think of it, everything you've ever done, recorded and written on a piece of paper, or reams of paper, maybe everything that you've done that has been a sin against God. But he took that and he nailed it to his cross. And when Jesus died, those things were destroyed. We're back together with him. So Romans chapter 6, verse 23 says, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. So uh we can see that this is the this is where we were and where we are. What we were before Jesus, what we are now because of Jesus. John chapter 14, verse 6, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Jesus is the only way to salvation, and Jesus is sufficient for your salvation. It's not Jesus plus something else, plus your Bible reading or your witnessing or your church attendance, all those things we do because we love him because he first loved us. It's Jesus alone. It's not my works, it's Jesus alone that saves me. And then from that place of love, I am set free and I'm enabled to live a life that's pleasing to him. So I live this life of obedience and getting to know him more, uh, church attendance, prayer, worship, Bible study, all of these things are fruits of this love. It's not I'm trying to do that to put God in my debt, but I'm doing this because he first loved me. And this is how I get to know him further. It's out of the purest motive. You see, Christianity has the purest motive. We're not trying to do things so we can try to get to God, but we are already with God because of Christ. And because of that, we are um we are doing the things that we do. We're living upright and obedient lives because of that. So you can read further about that in your book. Um, also uh you can read where again Colossians chapter one that talks about the fullness of what Jesus has done there. And in John chapter 1, verse 1, in Hebrews 2, 17 and 18. So there's a place there for you to write some script, some notes, and I just want to give you a few of the things that that Jesus has done for us. I want to kind of scan the scriptures in the short time that we have here, and let's talk about what Jesus has done. So, in the very first thing we can think of, Jesus has done in his work on the cross is that he has God has regenerated us. Regeneration is a scriptural term. Uh, in in Ephesians chapter 2, we see the idea of it, verse 4 and 5, and it says that God being rich in mercy, when we were dead in our sins, has made us alive because of his great love, wherewith he loved us. Even we were dead in our transgressions, he made us alive together with Christ. We were dead in our sins. It's not like we were sick and we needed a little bit of medicine. We were dead in our sins. And God has raised us with Christ. Jesus died with us, died for us in the sense we died with him. We were dead, but he raised him. He raised him from the dead, and he raised us up with him. So this is the idea of regeneration. It means that we were dead, but now we're alive again. In the Old Testament, it's put this way: the promise about the new covenant was that I will take away your heart of stone, and I'll give you a heart of flesh, and I'll put my spirit in you, and I'll cause you to follow after me. You know, if you have a heart of stone, a heart of stone can't beat, and a heart of stone can't pump blood, a heart of stone can't bring life to anything because it's dead. A heart of stone can't feel God because it's dead. But God in his mercy regenerated us so that we're able to live again, to feel him, to be sensitive to him, to have his life. So God generates me, and the scripture says that he gives me a new heart. It says that we have a new nature, that in Christ we're new creations, that we are a new man or woman. We live in a new realm, and we've we're being renewed day by day. This is a life of Jesus. We were dead and now we're alive. And if you've come to Christ, you understand that. You realize how you were before, and that there's something inside of you that's been made alive, alive to God, able to hear him, able to seek for him, able to sense him, able to understand him now. Like we were blind before, but these scales fell off of our eyes, and now we're able to see him. So this matters a lot. This matters a great deal how you see yourself as a believer. We're new creatures. At the very center of his being, he has been created in righteousness and holiness. When he is saying no to evil, he is saying yes to his true self. This is true of us, us as a new creature. So I'm not trapped in my old, helpless, and hopeless way of life. This is the power of God. No, the Bible says that the gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation. This is the power of God to raise the dead and bring them to life again. That's regeneration. Christ is our life. Second thing is a word called justification. Justification means Christ is the one who justifies us before the righteous judge of heaven. Okay, if you think of justification, if you're justified in a courtroom, when the when uh the evidence is presented and the jury finds you not guilty, and the gavel comes down and the the judge says, not guilty, you're acquitted of all of your charges. You did not do it. You're free. There is no punishment. You're free to go and live your life. There's nothing. Nothing you have to pay for. You're free. This is what justification is. But it's not just an earthly judge that is saying this. It is the judge of heaven and earth. It is the judge, righteous judge of all men. God Almighty, because of the work of Jesus, is saying, I am not guilty. God calls you not guilty. Now, when God calls me not guilty, that's good news, you know, because I have an accuser. The scripture says there's an accuser, uh, the devil, uh, accuses us and lies to us. I also have another accuser on this side, that's me, my own thoughts about myself. I don't, sometimes I don't think that I'm worthy. So I've got the enemy, the devil, and I've got my own mind, and they're speaking to me about my unworthiness. And yet the scripture says that I am worthy because I am justified. I am not guilty. God Almighty calls me not guilty. This is good news. This is good news. So now a righteousness apart from the law has been made known to you, which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There's no d difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but being justified freely by his grace. This is Romans chapter 3, verse 21 to 23. So God has regenerated us, made us alive from the dead, and he is justified us. So God is our justifier. So we're free from the penalty of sin. Shame and abandonment have no grip on us. We can live as loved sons and daughters, beloved ones, as God intended. And we can rest. We can live in rest, knowing that we're right with God. This is good news. We were enemies, now we're friends. We were guilty, now we're innocent, we were dead, now we're alive, we were separated, now we're brought near. We were once works driven, but now we're driven by love. Driven by love. We can rest in God's grace. This is good news because sometimes we can think, I know God loves me, but I'm not sure that he likes me. You know, sometimes we have these ideas, these thoughts, and we have this truncated view of the gospel. And we kind of see it as a door that we just walk through to become a Christian, but it's not the doorway only, it is the entire way. It's the entire path, it's the entire room, the whole world for us is the gospel, and it's good news for us. The gospel is the power of God over my sin, over my guilt, over my shame. I'm no longer bearing a weight of guilt and shame and not enoughness. That's not me anymore. God has justified me in Christ Jesus. That's really good news. So the third thing is um Christ gave us his righteousness. There was this exchange that happened in 2 Corinthians 5 21. It says that God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that we might be able, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Christ. So he who knew no sin became sin, so that we who knew no righteousness could become righteous. There are these there's this exchange. His innocence for our guilt, our guilt for his innocence, and he has made us righteous. Christ is our righteousness, Christ is our life giver, he is our justifier, and he is our righteousness. It's really great. God does not want your goat. I'll tell you a story. I was in Africa in uh the country of Ghana one time. I was traveling with my friend Pastor Prince. He was talking about preaching up in the in the uh rural areas in the mountains. And then, you know, in many of these villages, they still are uh practicing um the uh animism and animal sacrifices. They appease, they want to appease the spirits. And so this means uh oftentimes this means blood. This means you actually kill something, you kill a chicken, or you kill a goat. Sometimes it's even they cut themselves and they they bleed themselves on an altar to appease the spirits, so the spirits will leave them alone and not do them harm. So sometimes they're they're offering their goats, and a goat is something really important in Africa. It is something you can get milk from, it's something you can get food from. It's um it's a it's a real prized possession. So when you're giving that up, you're giving something really big up. Well, Pastor Prince was in this village and he said, as he was preaching, God has sent his son, the lamb of God, to be slain for your sin. And he said, God doesn't want your goat. The one true God doesn't want your goat. He's already provided a lamb. After the preaching session, an old man from the village came up to Pastor Prince and said, You tell me that God doesn't want my goat. And Pastor Prince said, Yes, God has already provided a lamb as a sacrifice for your sins, Jesus. And the man said, Why has no one told me this? Because I've lost a lot of goats. He just made a lot of sacrifice. You know, we don't, we don't, I don't think any of us listening here are have uh sacrificed animals for our sins, but we have done things to try to atone for our sins in our own, our own works. We have our own little goats that we give, our own efforts that we give, and we think, oh, I'm right with God, or God is happy with me now because I've done this, or I went to church, or I did something nice instead of something something wrong, you know, or I refused to do something wrong, or I made an extra effort and God is happy with me today. You know, God doesn't want your goat. He's already provided a lamb. And he is he is the justifier and he's given us his righteousness, and he's taken our sin upon us. The next important word in scripture is Redeemer. Christ redeemed us. Christ, when it says Redeemer, the idea is He He bought us back. Scripture is Matthew 20, 28, for the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many. So uh a ransom is something that is given when a price is paid to buy a slave back, especially in those days you could be in slavery. And when you're in slavery, uh there is possibility for someone to buy you out of that. And that's called redeeming a slave. And the price that is paid is the ransom. You pay a ransom to redeem. Christ came to give his life as a ransom for many and for you and for me. He is the ransom. So redemption is the act of uh that secures your release from your sins, and ransom is the price that is paid. So the idea is I'm bought with a price. He bought me. I'm not my own, I belong to God. And if I belong to God, Satan has no hold on me. This is good news. The gospel is the power of God to redeem me from the curse of the law. Next word we want to talk about is reconciled. Reconciliation means when we were enemies, we are now made friends. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son. This is Romans chapter 5, verse 10. He brought an end to the hostility that was between us. A reconciliation has this connotation of we have had a riff. There's something wrong, there's hostility between us. We're in enmity with each other. And reconciliation is when those people come back together. And they're once again in fellowship together. This is what this is the picture of what Jesus has done. Romans 5, 1 says that we have been justified through faith and we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Justification brings peace. As he made us alive in regeneration, as he justified us by declaring us not guilty because of the work of Jesus, as he made an exchange our sin for his righteousness, as he brought us back and he redeemed us, he was reconciling us, he was making us back one again. The power of the gospel is the power of God to bring us back into relationship again. Peace with God. I'm no longer an enemy of God. I'm not only a servant, I'm his friend. And I can have peace with him and peace with myself and peace with others because of the reconciliation. So another idea about uh that you need to know that's in the scripture uh concerning the thing that things that Jesus has done for us is uh a fancy word called propitiation. Propitiation means you take away the anger of something. To propitiate means to um to remove the anger, the wrath from something. And you know, there's wrath from God because of our sin, because he's a holy God. It's a holy wrath. It's not an anger that's arbitrary, like maybe we have experienced from people on earth, or maybe even our own fathers, where there's uh you never know how a person is going to be. You never know if he's gonna be happy or sad, and sometimes because of his mood or his hormones or whatever it is, he's like angry at you and he's flying off the handle. He's a man. This is what men do sometimes. God's anger is not like that. God's anger is a steady, justified wrath against sin because he's a holy God, and sin um sin taints the world, and sin um sin is the thing that separates his creation from him, and he has his anger against sin. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is just hours away from the cross, and uh just before his crucifixion, he prayed this prayer. My father, if it's possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. And this idea of a cup, this metaphorical expression, is also in many different uh parts of the Bible. We see it in uh in Psalm 75, we see it in Jeremiah, we see it in the book of Revelation, so the psalmist, the prophets, and then even John on the Isle of Patmos, he's talking about the cup of God in the context of the wrath of God. He will pour out his cup of wrath upon the wickedness that he sees. And what Jesus is saying in the garden is. When he's saying, Father, can this cup pass from me? He's saying that because he's getting ready to drink this cup of wrath, the wrath that is upon you and me, the wrath that is upon all people because of the sin that we have. We deserve the wrath of God, but he, as difficult as it was, took that cup and he drank every drop of the wrath of God so that we could be free from it. So the power of the gospel is the power to make me free from God's righteous anger against sin. This is beautiful. It delivers us from the fear of God's anger. God is not up there just waiting to bang us when we do something wrong, to hit us with a hammer or something. He takes away the fear of judgment, the fear of punishment, even the fear of death, because Christ has drunk the cup of wrath that should have been ours. Well, that's not all. There's another word that we see in Scripture. It's the word adoption, that He has adopted us. In 1 John 3:1, it says that what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God, the children of God, sons and daughters. So we're adopted into this family. It was God's purpose and God's desire to bring us to Himself through the death of Christ so that we could become sons and daughters. And it even says that God has put his spirit inside of us, the spirit of adoption that cries out, Abba, Father. We can not only call God our Savior, our master, our friend, we can call God our Father. This was his heart all along. We don't have to live like orphans anymore, with a with a uh, with trying to hold on to everything ourselves, trying to make our own way, not sure about tomorrow because we have nobody to help us, not sure about our identity because we don't feel loved. We're not sure or secure in being accepted. That's all that is uh the mindset of an orphan. But instead, we can live with open arms, coming to our Father, who has open arms, beckoning us to come and have fellowship with him. And we don't have to feel like an outsider. We have a close, intimate relationship where he, as a good father does, provides acceptance. Ephesians chapter 1, provision, Philippians 4 19, protection, Matthew 10, 29 through 31, encouragement, Psalm 10, 17, comfort, 2 Corinthians 1, 3 and 4, and discipline. Hebrews 12, 10. We don't have to feel to feel like an outsider because we're not outsiders. We have a place at the table. And we don't have to bring anything to the table to have a place at the table. God has given us that through Christ. This is the power of the gospel to become sons and daughters of God. That's good news. Another word we need to think about is the word called sanctify, the sanctification. What that means is that we become more and more like Jesus every day. The power of the gospel over sin is the power to help us be changed, to be more like God day by day. Romans 6.14 says, sin will not have dominion over you. You're not under the law, but you're under grace. So we were dead to our sin. The power of sin has been broken that we don't have to be a slave to it anymore. Romans 6 says that we died with Christ, buried with baptism, buried with him in baptism, so that we could be raised again to newness of life. And now, as sin, as death has no power over Jesus, even so sin has no power over us. Therefore, do not let sin have power over you. The sin, the power of sin has been broken. We're delivered not only from the penalty of sin through Jesus, that means our debt has been paid by Christ. We're delivered from the power of sin because we died with him and he raised us up. But we're also delivered ultimately from the very presence of sin because he's going to take us into his presence in heaven where there is no sin. So we don't have to live enslaved by the power of sin. By believing the gospel, we have the power of the Holy Spirit inside of us, and the power of that Spirit releases us from the power that sin has held over us. The gospel is the power of God to be changed forever. And one more word I'll just give you, and it's called glorify or glorification. Christ is our glorifier. And that passage in 1 John chapter 3, if you read another verse, it says the next verse, chapter 3, verse 2, it says, Dear friends, now we are the children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is. Which means the scripture teaches that we will be like him in body. We will receive a new spiritual, immortal, glorified, resurrected body that's no longer in the realm of pain and sorrow and limitations, and we will live forever with him. The power of God in the gospel is that he can transform us from these bodies to supernatural or eternal bodies. This is just like a small, small sample of the unsearchable riches that we have in Christ. Christ is my high priest and my healer and my provider and my baptiser, baptizer in the Holy Spirit. He's my resurrection, He's my Sabbath rest. He's my wisdom. All of those things we could continue to talk about. But I just want you to understand the richness that we have in Jesus Christ. It's not only that we're going to heaven, that's good enough. It's not just that we have been forgiven, that's good enough. But it goes deep. It goes deep into our lives, into our everyday lives. This is really important because you can be mature in your in your theoretical understanding of salvation through Christ, but still live a life of fear because you're in because you've attached your security to your works instead of Jesus' work. You can live your life bound by the approval of others because you don't understand that you've been accepted by God through the gospel. You can believe in Jesus and be born again and yet have this fear of what people think about you. But that can also be released and you can be free from that. You can live with the fear of being abandoned because we don't understand we're adopted into the family of God and we're sealed by his spirit. See, this is what's important, why it's so important to understand the gospel, to understand the fullness of what Jesus has done. This is just a little bit of it, but I hope it's been helpful. Father, thank you for your grace to us in Jesus Christ. We have so much. You have given us everything that we need in Christ. We give you praise for it. Teach us, Lord, to walk in these things day by day, more and more, from glory to glory, from faith to faith, from one level to another level of maturity. Pray for that in Jesus' name. Amen. God bless.