Doug McMasters: Good evening, beloved.
Doug McMasters: Good evening.
Doug McMasters: I want to invite you to take a Bible if you would turn over with me to 2 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
Doug McMasters: For those of you that do not have a Bible, you can find one in front of you there.
Doug McMasters: And you can find 2 Corinthians, as soon as I can get to the page, I'll tell you exactly what page number, if that's helpful.
Doug McMasters: Be 1,025.
Doug McMasters: 1,025 in our Pew Bible.
Doug McMasters: Well, this evening we're here to remember our Lord Jesus Christ, especially the day of his death on the cross.
Doug McMasters: And in all of our prayers, our songs and hymns, our scripture readings, this proclamation, and soon in our communion, we're celebrating the cross of Christ.
Doug McMasters: And so if anyone came in, maybe their first time tonight, a casual observer of us, they would see just how important that is to us.
Doug McMasters: And if they were to come and visit us on Sundays, they would see exactly the same thing.
Doug McMasters: They would discover that our focus is on Christ and that our focus and attraction to him is primarily about his death on the cross.
Doug McMasters: It's not primarily about his example, even though he was a great man, and we desire to follow his steps of faith and love and submission.
Doug McMasters: It's not primarily about his teaching, even though he was a great teacher, and we desire to obey him in everything that he commands.
Doug McMasters: And it's not primarily about his moral fortitude, even though he was a brave defender of justice and mercy.
Doug McMasters: And we too desire to bring justice where wrongs are committed and mercy where wrongs are confessed.
Doug McMasters: No, all those things are important.
Doug McMasters: But there's something greater that we see in Jesus Christ, and that's why we're here this evening.
Doug McMasters: Because what we are celebrating is wrapped up in what this weekend is about the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ.
Doug McMasters: In a couple days on Sunday, we're going to join with the apostles in proclaiming and celebrating the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: Tonight, however, we're going to focus and narrow our focus on the death of Christ and join with the apostles in glorying in his death.
Doug McMasters: Paul boasted about the cross of Christ.
Doug McMasters: If you were to read his writings in many different places, you could read how central it was to his person, how central it was to his ministry, how central it was to his proclamation.
Doug McMasters: He said in 1 Corinthians, we preach Christ crucified.
Doug McMasters: He said also in that same book, in another chapter, I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
Doug McMasters: He spoke about the message of the cross, the offense of the cross, the triumph of the cross, and the wonder of the cross.
Doug McMasters: And in a culminating statement in his arguments to the Galatians, he said, May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.
Doug McMasters: You know, in Paul's day, that would have been a rather strange thing to take a boast in.
Doug McMasters: A boast in the cross of Christ.
Doug McMasters: Today we think of crosses as something beautiful, maybe something noble, perhaps even wear them as jewelry.
Doug McMasters: But that would have been completely unimaginable in Paul's day.
Doug McMasters: The cross was the ultimate humiliation.
Doug McMasters: The word crux in Latin was even unmentionable in polite Roman society.
Doug McMasters: So for the Romans, the cross was something degrading, disgusting, despicable, detestable, disgraceful, unable to be even mentioned.
Doug McMasters: In fact, when people were condemned to a death of crucifixion, the sentence that was put against them was done in an archaic sort of euphemistic way.
Doug McMasters: Let them hang on the unlucky tree.
Doug McMasters: They wouldn't even say crucify them.
Doug McMasters: It's hard for us to think of a contemporary equivalent of all of that.
Doug McMasters: Perhaps it might be if we if Paul was to say it in our vernacular, I boast in nothing but Christ and his electric chair.
Doug McMasters: Or I glory in nothing but Christ and his being guillotined.
Doug McMasters: It would be that abrasive.
Doug McMasters: See, the cross was an awfully strange thing to boast about.
Doug McMasters: According to the standards of the day, the cross should have been an embarrassment to the early church.
Doug McMasters: I mean, what would people think about this one that they're proclaiming as their Lord and finding out he had been executed like a low-life criminal?
Doug McMasters: But instead of denying it or covering it up, the Christians proclaimed it in that generation.
Doug McMasters: The very thing that seemed to people of that generation too obscene to whisper in polite company became the broadcast of the Christians in the streets.
Doug McMasters: Why?
Doug McMasters: Why were they so willing to make the death of Christ on the cross something so special and something so significant that they were willing to go past the shame of it all that their generation had put upon them to be able to proclaim it so loudly and so fully and freely to all who might hear it.
Doug McMasters: Well, that's why we're here tonight.
Doug McMasters: Because we too glory in the cross of Christ.
Doug McMasters: And yes, it may sound and be abrasive to our generation, but there's something to know here about what Christ did when he died on the cross that deserves our attention, that deserves our attachment, that deserves our love and our proclamation.
Doug McMasters: And so we're going to look at a passage tonight that traces out for us the reason for that devotion of Christ in him crucified and the substance of our proclamation to the world in our generation.
Doug McMasters: Let's take a look at this passage in 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
Doug McMasters: The Apostle Paul begins in verse 17.
Doug McMasters: He said, If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creature or new creation.
Doug McMasters: The old is passed away, and see the new is come.
Doug McMasters: Everything is from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
Doug McMasters: That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.
Doug McMasters: And he's committed to us the message of reconciliation to us.
Doug McMasters: Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.
Doug McMasters: We plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.
Doug McMasters: He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Doug McMasters: This passage of scripture lays out for us the storyline of why the cross is so glorious to us.
Doug McMasters: And the first thing that we'll notice in this passage of scripture is our dilemma.
Doug McMasters: It doesn't speak of it directly, it's underneath the surface, but not very far at all, actually.
Doug McMasters: When you read this passage of scripture, you hear the word reconciliation, be reconciled.
Doug McMasters: There's a lot of terms there that talk about this, of God bringing about this reconciliation through Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: And what this tells us is that our dilemma is this that humanity is not in a harmonious relationship with God.
Doug McMasters: We are unreconciled.
Doug McMasters: The one striking commonality of us all, no matter how big or short or what size we are, where we grew up, with the color or shade of our skin, it doesn't matter a whit.
Doug McMasters: There's one striking commonality to us all, and all of us are estranged from God.
Doug McMasters: Since the time of Adam, every one of us had been aligned with that first man in disobedience.
Doug McMasters: And because Adam's fall plunged the human race under the consequences of sin, all of us are born sinners.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures tell us that just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all have sinned.
Doug McMasters: Even David, King David, lamented in Psalm 51, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Doug McMasters: In Psalm 58, it said that people are estranged from God from the womb, and that we speak lies from birth.
Doug McMasters: And if any one of us might think that, well, maybe we could just get past that, maybe sort of pick up ourselves after our birth and do better than maybe anybody else could do.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures tell us, as Paul said in Romans, there is none righteous.
Doug McMasters: Not one of us.
Doug McMasters: Later in that chapter, he said, All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.
Doug McMasters: The Old Testament speaks of that way too.
Doug McMasters: There's no man who does not sin.
Doug McMasters: And Proverbs 20 says, No one can say, I have cleansed my heart.
Doug McMasters: I am pure from my sin.
Doug McMasters: This is our dilemma.
Doug McMasters: Because of who we are by birth and by action, we're estranged from God, and that problem continues from generation to generation.
Doug McMasters: We all as humans are in an unreconcilable position with God.
Doug McMasters: We're incapable of being the people that God created us to be, though he made us with the full intent of his goodness and greatness.
Doug McMasters: We have all turned aside, Roman says.
Doug McMasters: We have all together become worthless.
Doug McMasters: There's no one who does good.
Doug McMasters: The problem isn't with God.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures lay that blame not on him as though he were some cruel taskmaster, but upon us as humans who have rebelled.
Doug McMasters: Paul teaches us here that God is the aggrieved party, and that we're the one who caused the alienation.
Doug McMasters: And left to our devices, we would only continue to be at enmity with God.
Doug McMasters: And so it's in the context of this that we see that our dilemma is that we are estranged from He who made us.
Doug McMasters: Isaiah told the people, he said, Your iniquities have made a separation between you and God.
Doug McMasters: Your sins have hid his face from you, so that he does not hear.
Doug McMasters: It even puts it into terms that are emotional, that resonate with our emotional life.
Doug McMasters: God saw how great mankind's wickedness on earth had become, and his heart was filled with pain.
Doug McMasters: Why that personal emotional expression?
Doug McMasters: Because God created us.
Doug McMasters: We were made by God, for God, in the image of God, so that we might dwell and have communion with God.
Doug McMasters: But instead we chose rebellion.
Doug McMasters: God told Adam that if he were to go down that pathway, that there would not only be the dilemma of estrangement, but that there would be consequences.
Doug McMasters: Our doom.
Doug McMasters: He said, The day that you eat of that tree, you will surely die.
Doug McMasters: And he did.
Doug McMasters: And so do we.
Doug McMasters: Every single one of us.
Doug McMasters: Not one of us gets out of this world alive.
Doug McMasters: The consequences of sin reverberate all the way down to our generation and in our home.
Doug McMasters: Ezekiel 18 said, the soul that sins will surely die.
Doug McMasters: And in Genesis chapter 5, the genealogy of the human race talks about God making Adam in his own image.
Doug McMasters: But then it shifts to Adam having a child, and that child being in Adam's image after the fall.
Doug McMasters: And then it talks about Adam living for a certain number of years and then dying.
Doug McMasters: And his son having children in that son's image and living and dying.
Doug McMasters: And as you go through Genesis chapter 5, the thing that speaks so much is not the length of years that these people lived, but the reality that no matter how long they lived, they died.
Doug McMasters: And they died and they died and they died, and we still do.
Doug McMasters: The prognosis is not any better if we think about it in the spiritual realm.
Doug McMasters: Alienation from God in this life and alienation from God in the life to come.
Doug McMasters: Death does not end this estrangement that we have.
Doug McMasters: God, true to his nature and his holiness, exacts his standards of righteousness by bringing his wrath against ungodliness and the unrighteousness of men.
Doug McMasters: And we leave this world as hard and horrible as it might be into a worse death, an eternity apart from God in all of his love, and all of his mercy, and all of his grace, and all of his goodness, and all of his power toward people that he would give, and we would have none of it, and we will bear none of it.
Doug McMasters: Isaiah 59, your iniquities have made the separation between you and your God.
Doug McMasters: This passage begins here, but it doesn't end here wonderfully.
Doug McMasters: It doesn't just stop and leave us in our dilemma and our doom.
Doug McMasters: Take a look at this passage again because it reveals something about God.
Doug McMasters: It shows that He is a deliverer, which is a remarkable thing in light of what we've just examined Scripture to say about ourselves.
Doug McMasters: If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation.
Doug McMasters: The old has passed away and the new is come.
Doug McMasters: Why?
Doug McMasters: Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ.
Doug McMasters: God, in verse 19, was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.
Doug McMasters: And he's committed the message of reconciliation to us.
Doug McMasters: Amid our dilemma, amid our doom, there's good news in this passage.
Doug McMasters: There's good news that God is also a God of mercy and love and has provided a remedy for sin.
Doug McMasters: And he has come as a deliverer.
Doug McMasters: And he makes it clear that all the glory should go to him for that reconciliation.
Doug McMasters: Paul describes this: that we in our sin-severed relationship between us and a holy God can be restored, as we'll see in a moment, in and through Christ.
Doug McMasters: But by the will of God it has happened.
Doug McMasters: It flows out of his love.
Doug McMasters: Why is God the source of this?
Doug McMasters: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.
Doug McMasters: God demonstrated his love toward us, Paul said in Romans 5.8, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Doug McMasters: Though we were enemies, we've been reconciled to God through the death of his son, Romans 5.10.
Doug McMasters: Ephesians 2, God, who is rich in mercy, and because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, he's made us alive in Christ.
Doug McMasters: Hear this, because this is the good news.
Doug McMasters: The remedy of our broken life and our broken relationship that we have with God is not within ourselves.
Doug McMasters: It's only found in God.
Doug McMasters: Only God knows how to make sinners who deserve hell acceptable in his sight and welcome to be with him in eternity in his presence.
Doug McMasters: Only God could design a way for our sin to be dealt with and for that judgment to satisfy his demands of justice and turn away his wrath in such a way that is consistent with his love and his grace and his mercy.
Doug McMasters: Only God would know what it would take to take us who are under the dominion of darkness and to move us and to translate us into the kingdom of his son, where there's nothing but light.
Doug McMasters: Only God could be the author and the executor of this plan of redemption.
Doug McMasters: And his plan is to do it in Christ.
Doug McMasters: So we have a dilemma and a consequence of doom that God, the deliverer, brings through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: So let's take a look now at this passage and see its deliverance that it offers to us.
Doug McMasters: The answer to many questions is found in this passage.
Doug McMasters: The answer to the question, how can an absolutely and infinitely holy God be reconciled to sinners like us?
Doug McMasters: How can God's just and holy law, which demands condemnation and punishment to those who violate it, be satisfied?
Doug McMasters: How can those who deserve no mercy receive mercy?
Doug McMasters: How can God uphold true righteousness and give us grace?
Doug McMasters: How can the demands of justice and mercy be met?
Doug McMasters: This passage tells us that God is both the just and the justifier of sinners.
Doug McMasters: How?
Doug McMasters: Through the satisfying, substitutionary sacrifice of the Son.
Doug McMasters: That's what this passage talks about.
Doug McMasters: And in fifteen Greek words, we find the answer to that in verse 21 of this chapter.
Doug McMasters: He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Doug McMasters: It is through the satisfying substitutionary sacrifice of the Son that we find our deliverance.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures speak about Christ's death with overtones and direct connections to the sacrificial system of the Jewish people in the Old Testament.
Doug McMasters: Those mapping out of their sacrificial system as finding its culmination and its conclusion in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: Even the prophecies of Christ's coming speak in these terms.
Doug McMasters: Isaiah 53 talks about us going astray like sheep, turning every one to our own way, but it says the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Doug McMasters: And a little deeper in that chapter, it said, the Lord was pleased to crush him when he made him a guilt offering.
Doug McMasters: There's that sacrificial terminology.
Doug McMasters: And Peter pointing back for Jewish people to look back there and to see that and to tell them this you were redeemed from your empty way of life, inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like gold and silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb.
Doug McMasters: He draws the language of the sacrificial system and points it to Jesus Christ and says, This one who died on the cross died as a sacrifice there.
Doug McMasters: Hebrews 10.
Doug McMasters: Brothers and sisters, since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus.
Doug McMasters: He's inaugurated for us a new and living way through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.
Doug McMasters: Hebrews 9.
Doug McMasters: Christ appeared as a high priest to the good things that have come, and in a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, he entered the most holy place once for all, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood.
Doug McMasters: How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works?
Doug McMasters: Hebrews 7.
Doug McMasters: He doesn't need to offer sacrifices every day as high priests do, first for their own sins and those of the people.
Doug McMasters: He did this once for all time when he offered himself.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures speak of the sacrificial nature of this death.
Doug McMasters: But it also speaks of him as a sinless one in sacrifice.
Doug McMasters: That unblemished lamb, that lamb without a spot, that one that had to be pure in every way possible, laid on the altar in the Old Testament, was a figure of Christ who is to come, the sinless one, made himself a sacrifice.
Doug McMasters: The one who did not know sin, our passage says.
Doug McMasters: Attested to by many other places, Peter, he committed no sin, neither was there found deceit in his mouth.
Doug McMasters: Hebrews 4, 15, he was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet without sin.
Doug McMasters: Hebrews 7, this high priest that we need, who is holy, innocent, undefiled, separate from sinners.
Doug McMasters: 1 John 3, you know he was revealed so that he might take away sins, and there's no sin in him.
Doug McMasters: Romans 8:3, taking the sinlessness of Christ and this offering of sacrifice, and puts it together.
Doug McMasters: What the law could not do, since it was weakened by the flesh, God did.
Doug McMasters: He condemns sin in the flesh by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh as a sin offering.
Doug McMasters: This is the significance of Christ being human.
Doug McMasters: But he's not just like us in the sense that he did not rebel against the Father like we had.
Doug McMasters: However, he did identify with us, and that brings us to our next point that not only was his death a death of sacrifice, but it was a death of substitution.
Doug McMasters: And this is where it gets glorious.
Doug McMasters: He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, on our behalf.
Doug McMasters: Listen to some other places where Paul talks about it in the book of Galatians, chapter one.
Doug McMasters: He gave himself for our sins.
Doug McMasters: The Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me in chapter two.
Doug McMasters: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.
Doug McMasters: There's all that terminology of doing it on our behalf, doing it in our place as a substitute.
Doug McMasters: Christ's death was taking what we deserved.
Doug McMasters: He didn't come merely to share the lot of humanity with us, to be a great example of how humans ought to live their lives.
Doug McMasters: He came for the purpose of giving up his life in place of ours.
Doug McMasters: He died that we might live.
Doug McMasters: And thus the scriptures tell us that Christ's death was substitutionary.
Doug McMasters: In this salvation, it is this one point that the death of Christ is a death that we deserved.
Doug McMasters: Our punishment is borne by Him.
Doug McMasters: He voluntarily took upon Himself a doom he did not deserve.
Doug McMasters: He was sinless in order to die on the behalf who deserved everything that the wrath of God could pour out.
Doug McMasters: This is why there's no room for boasting.
Doug McMasters: We can only boast in the cross of Christ.
Doug McMasters: This is what Paul meant by that.
Doug McMasters: There was nothing we could add to this.
Doug McMasters: And while we stand and gaze at Christ, we stand and gaze at him, not simply a man dying as an example of how committed we need to be to God.
Doug McMasters: No.
Doug McMasters: He's a man doing a service by being a substitute for sinners, taking our place, dying our death, giving himself for us, becoming a curse from us, so that that curse might be lifted off of us.
Doug McMasters: And then this passage of scripture tells us something else.
Doug McMasters: Not only is his death a sacrifice, his death is a substitution, but his death is satisfactory to God.
Doug McMasters: It tells us here that everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself in verse 18, through Christ.
Doug McMasters: Verse 19, in Christ God was reconciling in the world to himself.
Doug McMasters: How is that reconciliation made?
Doug McMasters: Not counting their trespasses against them.
Doug McMasters: Well, where did those trespasses go?
Doug McMasters: Verse 21 says, They went on him who knew no sin, so that we might know the righteousness of God in Christ.
Doug McMasters: You see, there is the darkness of our sin, that dilemma that we're in, but there is also this righteousness of Christ, which is given to us.
Doug McMasters: All of our sins credited to Christ, and all of Christ's righteousness credited to us.
Doug McMasters: What a remarkable thing this is.
Doug McMasters: That God the Father would count our sins against his own Son, so that we might become his children.
Doug McMasters: What a remarkable thing.
Doug McMasters: That all of God's anger against sin and all of that separation from God and all the consequences that we deserve sits on Christ.
Doug McMasters: And God accepted his death on our behalf.
Doug McMasters: And you might ask, how do we know?
Doug McMasters: Come Sunday, you'll find out.
Doug McMasters: Up from the grave he arose with a mighty triumph over his foes.
Doug McMasters: How do we know that the death of Christ was satisfactory?
Doug McMasters: Because death could not hold him in the grave.
Doug McMasters: That's why.
Doug McMasters: Was there a price to be paid for our sin?
Doug McMasters: He paid it.
Doug McMasters: Is there a penalty to be born for our sin?
Doug McMasters: He bore it.
Doug McMasters: Is there a judgment to be faced for our sin?
Doug McMasters: He faced it.
Doug McMasters: Is there a victory that needs to be won?
Doug McMasters: He won it.
Doug McMasters: This is our Savior.
Doug McMasters: And this is why picking up Isaiah, Peter says this: He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, because by his wounds we are healed.
Doug McMasters: We're delivered.
Doug McMasters: He is the remover of wrath.
Doug McMasters: And that leads us to another part of this passage.
Doug McMasters: Not only is there a dilemma and doom underneath the surface here, there is the statement full and free of God as a deliverer and the deliverance coming through the sacrificial, substitutionary, satisfactory death of the Son.
Doug McMasters: What does this bring us?
Doug McMasters: A delight.
Doug McMasters: You can feel the reverberations of joy in this passage of Scripture.
Doug McMasters: If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation.
Doug McMasters: The old is gone, the new is come.
Doug McMasters: You can almost feel Paul yelling these words.
Doug McMasters: The triumphant glory of a new creation.
Doug McMasters: This old one that was full of death and destruction and disobedience and all of that is gone.
Doug McMasters: There's a new one here.
Doug McMasters: And if you're in Christ, you're part of that new creation.
Doug McMasters: You can feel him singing these words.
Doug McMasters: And you can see him not speaking about himself, but speaking about the glory of God's grace.
Doug McMasters: All of this is from God who has reconciled us to himself in Christ.
Doug McMasters: That's our delight.
Doug McMasters: How rich is it?
Doug McMasters: Take a look at verse 21 again.
Doug McMasters: In him we might become the righteousness of God.
Doug McMasters: We started out this talk talking about our dilemma and our doom.
Doug McMasters: But we're not going to end it there.
Doug McMasters: We're going to end it with these words.
Doug McMasters: That the righteousness of God might be seen in us.
Doug McMasters: That when God looks on us, he sees the sinlessness of Christ.
Doug McMasters: That he no longer deems us guilty, but he actually sees us as righteous in his eyes.
Doug McMasters: Wow.
Doug McMasters: Now that is good news.
Doug McMasters: There's no way we could earn this favor.
Doug McMasters: There's no way that we could gain it.
Doug McMasters: It's granted to us on the basis of Christ Himself.
Doug McMasters: This is why Paul in Colossians said this for God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him to reconcile everything to himself by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.
Doug McMasters: And he turns it back to his hearers and back to us.
Doug McMasters: And he says, Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds, as expressed by your evil deeds, but now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through his death to do what?
Doug McMasters: To present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him.
Doug McMasters: That is amazing.
Doug McMasters: To present, yes, disobedient, Doug.
Doug McMasters: Yes, in a dilemma, Doug.
Doug McMasters: Yes, a doom to an eternal separation from God, Doug.
Doug McMasters: And to turn anyone who believes on Christ, to be presented before a holy God as holy, to be presented before a holy God is unblamable, to be presented before a holy God is unreprovable in Christ.
Doug McMasters: We have no perfections of our own to offer him.
Doug McMasters: The only thing we can offer him is to be behind Christ.
Doug McMasters: And when he sees Christ, he sees those who are in Christ.
Doug McMasters: And he sees us as Christ, righteous in our union with him, because he took our place.
Doug McMasters: In the imagery of Colossians is some large Colosseum being brought before a king or an emperor, and that those are brought into the presence of this king or emperor are presented and guaranteed an acceptance only by right of their life without blemish, free from accusation.
Doug McMasters: And not a one of us could say we deserve to be there.
Doug McMasters: But if we're in Christ, we are.
Doug McMasters: We are.
Doug McMasters: We are there because of Jesus.
Doug McMasters: He made him to be sinned for us who knew no sin.
Doug McMasters: So that what we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
Doug McMasters: The good news is that sin which separated us from God has been removed, and he accepts us as we had never sinned at all.
Doug McMasters: He declares us innocent, he acquits us, he drops all charges against us, and he grants to us the gift of righteousness.
Doug McMasters: One sixteenth-century German theologian said this God grants and credits to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never sinned or had ever been a sinner.
Doug McMasters: As if I had been perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me.
Doug McMasters: What a wonderful thing.
Doug McMasters: That's something to sing about, isn't it?
Doug McMasters: And that leads us to a last point that we're going to make here.
Doug McMasters: We've started with a dilemma in our doom to hear the shocking, surprising, glorious word that God is also a deliverer, who's given us deliverance in his Son, Jesus Christ, and that we might receive with delight the good news that we are received without blemish in his presence.
Doug McMasters: And that leads us, last of all, to our declaration.
Doug McMasters: Why was the early church willing to step in front of people who were unwilling to even say the word cross in polite society and speak from the street corners and speak in the homes and to speak in the synagogues and to speak wherever they might get a hearing?
Doug McMasters: To speak about, have you heard of the death of Christ?
Doug McMasters: Have you heard about him being crucified on the cross?
Doug McMasters: And to do so with joy, and to do so with gladness, and to say, like Paul said, to glory even in that.
Doug McMasters: Why is this our declaration?
Doug McMasters: Because this is how sinful people can be reconciled with a holy God.
Doug McMasters: There's no other way.
Doug McMasters: But it's wonderfully a way God has made that his holy displeasure against alienated sinners is appeased, that his hostility can be removed, that a harmonious relationship might be established, to be reconciled with God, that God designed a way for everything that estranged us from him is done away with.
Doug McMasters: That our sins might be removed from us as far as the east is from the west, cast into the depths of the sea, thrown behind his back into the ocean of forgetfulness.
Doug McMasters: What is our declaration?
Doug McMasters: It's exactly what Paul says here in verse 20.
Doug McMasters: We're ambassadors for Christ.
Doug McMasters: Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf.
Doug McMasters: Be reconciled to God.
Doug McMasters: How do you do that?
Doug McMasters: In Christ.
Doug McMasters: That's the only way.
Doug McMasters: Be reconciled to God.
Doug McMasters: Yes, God could reverberate this message from the heavens, but He's desired to take people who've experienced the reconciliation and made them messengers of the reconciliation.
Doug McMasters: So that people might be able to understand the transformation that's happened in a life that once was doomed, but now is welcomed.
Doug McMasters: Be reconciled to God.
Doug McMasters: Nothing else will get us there but the deliverer, God, in his means of reconciliation, the deliverance that's found in the sacrifice of Christ, that is a substitute for us and satisfactory for us.
Doug McMasters: And the scriptures tell us that all who call upon the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.
Doug McMasters: That if we acknowledge our rebellion, if we acknowledge our need of forgiveness, and we don't try to play games with God by trying to turn over a new leaf or trying to be better than what we were, or trying to look around and see if perhaps maybe there's somebody we could, you know, one up against, you know, those guys in jail or whatever.
Doug McMasters: But we honestly come before God and say, I have nothing to bring.
Doug McMasters: The only thing I can do is throw myself on Christ.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures say, There you will be reconciled.
Doug McMasters: To acknowledge your rebellion and your need of forgiveness is to repent and to believe on Christ.
Doug McMasters: You see, this reconciliation is not something you do, it's something you receive.
Doug McMasters: This is reconciliation, it's not something you accomplish, it's something you can embrace.
Doug McMasters: This reconciliation is not something you decide to have happen, it's something God has decided to do and to awaken people to their need so that they might flee to the Son.
Doug McMasters: The scriptures tell us be reconciled, be reconciled to God in Christ.
Doug McMasters: We're going to close with these words that Paul wrote to the Ephesians.
Doug McMasters: He said, In Christ, you who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
Doug McMasters: For he himself is our peace.
Doug McMasters: So that in himself he might make the two into one new man, and thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both, Jew and Gentile, in one body to God through his cross, so that by it he's put to death the enity.
Doug McMasters: The judgment and the wrath and the separation are gone in Christ.
Doug McMasters: And the question is: are you in Christ?
Doug McMasters: And if you're not, I can only plead with you the very words that Paul says here, be reconciled to God.
Doug McMasters: It's your only hope, it's your only means of life.
Doug McMasters: Let's pray.
Doug McMasters: Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for this wonderful message, a message that's worth singing and shouting, this message that's worth savoring, a message that's worth turning to you with song of delight, because it is our only hope.
Doug McMasters: And it is wonderfully by your design the means by which we are brought back into relationship with you.
Doug McMasters: And so, Father, if any inquisitive observer might walk into our midst and wonder what it is about Jesus that we love, certainly we'll talk about his example, his faith, his love, his submission to the Father and all things.
Doug McMasters: Certainly we'll talk about his teaching, how wondrous it is, and our desire to obey it.
Doug McMasters: Certainly we'll talk about his moral stance and fortitude, a defender of justice and mercy, yes, but there's something much, much broader and grander and greater that we would speak about first.
Doug McMasters: And that is all wrapped up in this that Christ has died for sinners.
Doug McMasters: While we were ungodly, Christ died for us, and that through him we are reconciled to you.
Doug McMasters: And so tonight, as your people, we say, May we never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.
Doug McMasters: Amen.