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Um, if we haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Mike and I get to serve on staff here with Salt Company Milwaukee. I'm really glad that you're here tonight. Um, because tonight we are starting a brand new sermon series like Mac dropped the ball earlier and let that out. Uh we are starting a series on salvation. Okay, so we'll be in this series for four weeks. Um it's gonna be great. We've got a guest speaker coming uh in the middle of this as well. Um we're gonna outline what salvation means, what it looks like, uh how to how to receive it, um, all of those things. I'm super excited for you guys to um yeah, get into this series with us. Um I want to start with a question. Do you guys remember COVID? Okay, it was a little bit of a groan. Uh most of you, I think I feel like I've asked this before. Some of you guys were you guys like how old were you, roughly? Eighth grade. Who said fourth grade? Okay, all right. Well, it was a long time ago, regardless. But you remember it? You weren't like infants, okay, so you can remember COVID. Um I like to call the time before COVID the before times, because like so much changed during after during and after COVID that it's just kind of like I don't know, a lot of it might not ever be the same. Um, you know, Zoom blew up and then crashed and all those things. Um now, what I want you to do is I want you to think back to March 2020 with me for a few minutes. Okay. Maybe you remember where you where you were when you saw like the world was shutting down. Like I remember I remember when the NBA shut down, when they like walked them off the court in the middle of a game, I'm like, oh no, it's it's a rap for humanity. If they're putting those dudes off the court, they're paying millions of dollars to play a basketball game and they're taking them off the court, that's that's gonna be the end of it. Um imagine you're back in that time frame, okay, however old you were, and I want you to do what I want you to do is I want you to think about if COVID didn't ever slow down. Okay, imagine that instead of COVID being this virus that we like, you know, kind of thought we had like a cure for or uh a virus that multiple companies saying they had like this vaccine and antidote for, imagine with me for a minute that more than just Johnson ⁇ Johnson failed to find the cure. Okay. Imagine that the virus actually continued to spread like through the whole world, undetected, quietly, and then it got worse and more and more and more deadly. To the point where instead of having like a couple of people, or maybe even like a dozen people that you know have more serious symptoms, that it was actually like the whole globe that got infected. Okay, maybe you've seen a movie that's like this. Imagine that that was the case for COVID. And eventually everyone would be facing a miserable, like lifelong terminal diagnosis because of this virus. Okay, but after a while, maybe you and others you know, instead of just being depressed and saying my life is over, you actually hear about someone, a man, who claimed to have a cure. Okay, not a company, but a man who claimed that the government, the researchers, and other humans could not actually cure the virus. A man who started to spread the news about his own miraculous work in curing this virus. A cure that only he had created through giving everything that he had, his own blood, even, and eventually his own life. And he claims that this cure he could actually administer to anybody who wanted to receive it. Like no trips to the COVID vaccine drive-thru site, like none of the nose swabs, none of that. He could actually deliver the cure straight to you. All you needed to do was believe that he had the cure and he'd send it. And as you hear about this man who's claiming to have a cure, you start to hear about people in your sphere of friends and family and neighbors who have mixed feelings about this guy. Some people you know say that he actually isn't who he says he is. He's actually arrogant. They say he's actually a lunatic, that he actually doesn't have a cure, but he just wants people to trust in him over the government or their friends or their family or people who are actually, it's their job to find these things out. These people say that we can find a cure on our own and that collectively mankind will be able to fix themselves and cure the virus. But other people in your life, they've actually received the cure. They're no longer facing a death sentence from the virus. But not only have they been healed of their bad symptoms, but they actually have in some ways gotten even better than before. These people have seemed to just get to a point not just of managing this virus, but they've actually started to lessen the symptoms more and more and more to the point where people are starting to ask questions about if they even have the virus anymore. And people are starting to ask those who have received the cure what they're doing differently or how they could get it. What would your response be to the man who claims to have a cure? Like if you're facing a death sentence, if you're facing a terminal diagnosis and you don't have a cure, would you say that he's a lunatic? Would you say that he's arrogant? Would you rely on the government and human hands to eventually find a cure for this disease? Or would you receive the claimed cure? Would you actually listen to what the man has to say about the cure? How it happens, how he got it? Would you read up on how he developed it? Would you trust that he has what he says that he has? Would you ultimately trust in a man that you actually have never physically met, but he wants to heal you and save you? Now, why did I share that potentially re-traumatizing story with you? Well, it wasn't to bring up your COVID anxiety again, but I share that story with you because this illustration is a direct picture of the state of humanity today. It's not an airborne or contact spread virus. Okay? I pray that we don't have another one of those. But it's an internal virus that we're all actually carrying already, even if we don't know it yet. The virus is called sin. Every single person on the planet is infected from birth. There's no avoiding it. There's no way of achieving a cure. There's varying degrees of infection and awareness of infection, but even a microscopic amount of it is a death sentence. And everybody has a microscopic amount. Unlike COVID, there's no potential way to treat through a vaccine or natural remedies or therapy or through exercise or through breakthroughs and research or even just trying harder. Unlike COVID, there are many people who claim, where many people claim to have a cure, and only sort of do. There's one man, there's one individual, there's one way to cure the curse of sin in our lives. And in our passage tonight, John 3, chapter 3, 16 through 18, that's where we'll be. One of the most famous passages in all the Bible, one that you maybe have heard of, even if you are not a Christian or don't claim to be, the writer, John, is going to lay out the good news of the gospel explicitly for us. And he's going to give us one, the one way to the cure for the sin virus in our lives. So if you have a Bible, or if you don't have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn in them to the New Testament, to John chapter 3. It's in the latter half of your Bible. If you don't have a physical copy of God's word, there's pew Bibles all around you. And we would also love to give you one for free if you don't have a physical copy tonight back at the Connect Table. And if it's your first time, you can kind of get a double whammy Chick-fil-A and a free Bible. It'd be awesome. Use table of contents if you need to. If you got it, say got it. Okay, you guys beat me there. That was fast. Okay, John 3.16, I'll start reading there for us. For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. So tonight, what I want to do is I want to give us three themes from our passage that we see. And my prayer is by the end of tonight that we can all see the reality of our need for a cure for sin. Sound good? Okay, the first is this it's the condition. So we tend to have like a skewed picture of sin. Okay, maybe you don't even know what sin is. Sin is going against against God's design, against God's uh rules and and places that He has put out for us. It is something that we tend to look at and think of others and think like, are there are there varying degrees of how good people can be? Like, we think, oh, this person murdered somebody. I am way more of a good person than them. All right, that's an easy one. Okay, we think that person committed adultery, I would never do that. Right, we look at the things like our justice system here in the States and the varying degrees of punishment for like certain crimes, which are often sins in themselves, and we look at these sentences given out and think, well, don't sins work that way too? Here's what we need to know about the condition of sin. We need to know that any sin, no matter how little in our eyes, is cause for a death sentence. We need to know that it doesn't matter if you lied to your grandma, it doesn't matter if you stole candy from a store, or you beat up a stranger in a parking lot, or even committed manslaughter, whatever it is, your sins are a death sentence. You could be the best behaved person in the entire world, but you still have sin. And even one little speck of sin in your life, it makes you terminal. Verse 18, it says this. Anyone who believes in him is not condemned. But anyone who does not believe is already condemned because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. Okay, John says it like this. He says, We are all, all of us are condemned. And the Bible tells us elsewhere in Romans 3.23 that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Meaning that nobody is exempt from the fatal sin curse. Not even the best person that you know, not your friend who does medical missions, okay, not your grandma who you think has never said a mean word to anybody. She probably has. Okay, not your mentor, not your pastor, not anybody. Because this condition, this virus of sin in our lives that lives within us, it's hereditary. You can't escape it. You can't clean yourself up enough. Ever since the fall of mankind in Genesis 3, we have been dealing with the side effects of the curse of sin in every aspect of our lives. And there's never in the history of the world been a human who has figured out a way to cure this disease except one, and that's Jesus. Jesus is the cure. See, God, in his loving mercy, and compassion for the world, he loved us so much that he saw our condition, he saw our hopeless reality of sin. And what he did was he gave up his one and only son, Jesus, to serve as a sacrifice for us, as a payment for our sins, as a cure for our sin virus in order to save us. Listen to this. This is John 3:16 through 17. Okay, you've probably heard this a million times before, but I want you to look at it with me again. For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. God loved you. He loved you. He loved you. And if I spend ten minutes pointing at everybody in this room, he loves you. And he loves you so much that he gave up his one and only son. I don't know if you guys know this because I don't think any of you are parents in here. Um I think it might just be might just be me and Jared and Connor. But I cannot think of a world where I would give my three-year-old son up in order that other people would be saved. I can't fathom a world where that would happen. It's unimaginable for me. I cannot imagine doing what God did for me, for others, for you. Thank goodness that I am not God, because y'all would not be getting forgiven. Thank the good Lord that he is him, as the kids would say. That is the level of God's love for us. That he was willing to send Jesus to humble himself, to take on the form of mankind in our human form and literally, physically, bodily walk among us as a human being and be offered up to die. Only Jesus wasn't just a man. Sure, he was fully man. Like he was born as a baby. He spit up, he poopy diapers, right? He learned to walk, he grew up, he went through puberty puberty, he learned to trade, like he did all of those things that all of us do. He felt every single emotion, pain, and sensation that you have felt as a human. Okay, I'm gonna give you a bunch of verses here and things that Jesus felt. If you want to write them down, great. They're not gonna be up on the screen. Jesus wept. It's the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11, 35. He was exhausted, Mark 4, 38. He was hungry, Matthew 4, verse 2. He was thirsty, John 19, 28. He was angry, Mark 3, verse 5. He was compassionate, Matthew 9, 36. He was joyful, Luke 10, 21, and he was even tempted to sin. That's Hebrews 4, 15. But the difference between Jesus' humanity and ours was that he wasn't just human. He was also fully God. And because of that, Jesus never sinned. He never gave in to temptation, though he was tempted. He never said, Oh, well, I I can just I can do it just once. Like he never rationalized. He never said, nobody's watching, so I'll get away with it. He never said, it won't hurt anybody else, so I can give in. He never said that. Because unlike us, Jesus actually had the strength and the power to never make a mistake, to live a perfect and sinless life. A life that we as other humans could never hope to live. But not only did he live a sinless life and die for our sins on the cross, he actually didn't stay dead. We're coming up on Easter this weekend, right? The story does not end with Jesus dying as a payment for our sins, but he rose from the grave. Unlike all humans, when we die and pass on from this life, which will happen, it's hard to imagine as a 20-something or a later teen, but Jesus didn't just die and stay dead. Jesus physically, bodily rose from the dead. He rose from the grave, not after just three minutes, but after three days. And he walked right out of the tomb that he was placed in, back into the world. There's hundreds and hundreds of witnesses and accounts that verify this, guys. When Jesus did this, it was not a magic trick. Okay? It wasn't a medical mystery, but it was a miracle of God. And this miracle of God didn't just serve as like a visual representation of God's ability to heal and raise people from the dead, though it did that. But this miracle of God raising Jesus from the grave serves as a visual representation of Jesus defeating sin and death for good. Nobody else could have done this. Nobody else could take on human form and live a sinless life and bear the punishment and weight of all of humanity's sins in their death. Nobody else could do all that and simultaneously be fully God in order to receive the full wrath of God and have a chance of surviving. Because of this, Jesus is the only way. Or in other words, Jesus is the only cure for the terminal sin virus that we all have. There will never be another way to be healed. It's not coming. You can't be good enough. So that leaves us, as terminal people, with a choice. Which is our last theme tonight. The choice itself is actually pretty simple. But the choice is not without consequences. See, the choice you choose to believe when you choose to believe in Jesus and receive the cure for your sin, it's simple. Because you only actually don't have to do anything to earn that. It's simple because it only requires that you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. That's how simple it is. Admitting that Jesus is the only one with the cure. Like it's really that simple. So much so that anybody, anybody, anybody in this room, anybody in the prison system, the worst person you could think of ever in the history of the world, anybody can choose to believe in him and be saved. It's not just for the good people. But here's what you need to know about choosing Jesus. It isn't all sunshine and rainbows. There will still be sin in your life once you choose Jesus. The symptoms, they don't fully go away while you're here on earth. There will still be effects of sin in the world, and the world will still be broken. There will be difficulties that arise because of your belief in Jesus. There will be trials and tribulations that you will experience in Jesus' name. But here's the beautiful thing about choosing Jesus. All of those dark moments that I just mentioned, they're gonna happen anyways. The world will be broken. You will struggle. Life will be hard. Whether you choose Jesus or not, those days will come. You will experience the effects of sin, and you will experience brokenness and you will still sin. But the cure for the sin virus. Like Jesus and the message of the gospel, it gives you hope not just in this life, but in the life to come. See, when you believe in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins, what happens here in this life is that you start to see less and less symptoms of the sin virus. You start to have hope and joy. You start to look more like you were created to be. You start to look more and more like Jesus. But the hope of the gospel is more. Than just in this life. It's for the life to come too. See, when you believe in Jesus, you aren't just given a glimmer of hope for your time here on earth, but also in the next life. Which isn't just decades long like our lives here on earth, but is infinitely long in eternity. Which is something we can't hardly fathom. And when you believe in Jesus, your eternity is set with Him. So you don't have to live like this life is all there is to live for anymore. You don't have to store up treasures and make this life the best that you possibly can. Because you have a life waiting for you when you die that is infinitely better than anything this world can have to offer. Because you'll be in perfect eternity with Jesus. But here's the harsh reality of the condition of sin. It's that if you leave this condition uncured, it's terminal. Your fate isn't just death in this life, but it's death in the next too. It isn't just an end to life here on earth, but it's actually separation from God, your creator, forever. And here's the reality of separation from God. It's not reversible. You don't get a redo. You don't get a respawn. And when we are faced with that harsh reality, like when we look at the terminal condition that we are in and we're given the cure, it's our time to make a choice. See, we need to choose. Am I going to be a skeptic? Like, am I going to go against the life-changing reality of the cure for sin in Jesus? Or am I going to choose to receive the cure and truly live? Tonight we really only have two next steps that we can take in light of this. Okay, the first is maybe some of you need to choose the cure tonight. If you're in the room and you don't claim to be a Christian, praise God that you're here. But here's the reality. I love you enough to tell you that you need to make a choice. You need to choose what pathway you want to take. Because the truth is that we're all actively making a choice each and every day. Like if you aren't choosing the cure, if you aren't choosing Jesus, then you're choosing the opposite. There's no in between. You're choosing separation from God that's not reversible. But the beauty of the gospel and the cure for sin is that if you're in this room, if you have not yet chosen the cure, you can choose the cure tonight. See, God in his mercy and his kindness, he gives us a chance to choose the cure of Jesus if we are still breathing here on this earth. And if you do choose the cure, the antidote starts to work immediately. See, when you choose the cure, you're actually instantaneously given the antidote and forgiveness of all of your sins, all of the mistakes that you've made in your life, all of the wrongs that you have done, you are instantaneously given forgiveness. And also given healing of the symptoms by being given the Holy Spirit. See, the Holy Spirit's this great mystery, but really the Holy Spirit is given to us as a gift, as a helper, as Jesus says, as the Spirit of the living God living within us. And the Holy Spirit, he is the reason that people can look at Christians, at people who have received the cure, and see our symptoms of the cursed sin virus lessening over time. It's not because people try harder. It's not because people have a new system. It's because the Holy Spirit's work in our lives that we're able to make choices to live for God and his kingdom. It's not us, it's him. And when you have the cure, when you have salvation, one of the things the Holy Spirit does in us is he gives us the desire to carry the cure to the next person. Okay, if you're a Christian in the room, if you have received the cure, and if that's you, praise God. But receiving the cure for yourself isn't the only thing that we do with the cure. God Himself desires us to carry the cure of the gospel of Jesus to the next person. The next person who needs it. We all are terminal with sin. And if that's true, then we all need to be doing our job of carrying the gospel message or the cure to the next person. Because the cure does not meant to stay with you, but was meant to be carried on to the next. And if you're not carrying the cure to the next person, and you're a Christian in the room, here's what you need to do. You need to start tonight. There are people all around you. Okay? A lot of you are in college. The other people are in the workforce. There's people who don't have the cure for sin and are terminal all around you every day, all day. Wherever you go. And your job as a Christian is not to save the person by being the cure. But it's to carry the cure so that the healer can do what only he can do. The question is, will you choose to carry it to the next person? And tonight, I want us to imagine what would happen if all of us in this room stopped treating the gospel like our own personal saving cure for the sin virus and actually started treating it like it is the cure for all people. Imagine. Imagine what would happen if on our campuses and in our city, if we decided to carry the cure, the message of the good news of the gospel to the next person, to all of those around us. It's not your job to save people. But it is your job to carry the cure. Imagine a city that would be full of people that aren't just given the cure for the sin virus, but a city that would be full of people that would be living their lives more like the one who laid down his life to give the cure for all who believe. Let's pray that this would be true of our city tonight. God, I thank you for this room. Lord, I thank you for all the people who are here tonight. Lord, I thank you that you don't just leave us in our condition. Lord, that you actually give us a cure in Jesus. God, I pray that if anybody has not received the cure yet tonight, that tonight would be the night. That tonight would be the night that they receive the gospel. That they receive the cure for sin in their life and place their faith in Jesus, that tonight would be that night that they wouldn't wait. God, I pray that those who already know you, that they would accept the challenge of carrying the cure, the good news of the gospel to the next person around them. Whatever that looks like, whether their family or their work or their friends, God, I pray that they would take that upon themselves to carry the cure to the next person. And I pray that we would be in a city and in campuses that reflect this reality of the cure being available to all who believe. I pray all this in your name. Amen.