SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holmes.
SPEAKER_01: We get harassed by demonic powers all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Where you're just walking along and you get this crazy thought, this lustful thought, this desire to cheat, this desire to lie.
SPEAKER_01: Where does that come from?
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, all of us are up to no good in our flesh.
SPEAKER_01: But there's also demonic powers that are out there, and he says here, he dishonored the rulers and authorities.
SPEAKER_01: And he uses another metaphor.
SPEAKER_01: He has made a public disgrace of them.
SPEAKER_01: Triumphing over them, and we'll cover that in a moment.
SPEAKER_01: By the cross.
SPEAKER_00: At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_01: The cross is the centerpiece of human history.
SPEAKER_01: It's the symbol of our faith.
SPEAKER_01: I wore a cross today, the foundation of everything we believe in.
SPEAKER_01: Literally, the world would be completely different.
SPEAKER_01: I don't even know if the world would still exist if it were not for the cross.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have an empty tomb without a cross.
SPEAKER_01: It's been called the Crown Jewel of Hope.
SPEAKER_01: And many years ago I had the privilege of going to the London Museum and seeing the Hope Diamond, this massive diamond.
SPEAKER_01: And walking around the Hope Diamond and seeing the colors and the reflections of the Hope Diamond.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm convinced, because of the size of the diamond, that you could go and look at the Hope Diamond every day for the rest of your life and see a different color and have a different viewpoint of the cuts and the reflections of light that flow through the Hope Diamond.
SPEAKER_01: Well, the cross of Christ is like that.
SPEAKER_01: There's so many angles.
SPEAKER_01: You can meditate on the cross for the rest of your days and see it differently every time.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I've chosen for this year to focus in on a phrase, Christus Victor, the victory of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I'm going to focus on here today is the victory that came through the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord, for being Christus Victor, our Christ, our victory through the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Jesus, for winning the greatest victory the world has ever known through a rugged Roman cross on a hill called Calvary.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Jesus, that we can live in victory because you are the victor.
SPEAKER_01: In your name we pray.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Christ lived a life you could never live.
SPEAKER_01: And he died a death, you could never die, that you might have a life that you've always longed for.
SPEAKER_01: Look at Colossians 2, if you have a Bible with you, and if you don't, you might have some in front of you.
SPEAKER_01: Colossians 2, 13.
SPEAKER_01: Might seem like a strange passage to read on Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: But I believe it describes the Christus Victor so well.
SPEAKER_01: And even though you were dead in your sins, and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, and all of you before you knew Christ, you were dead in your sins.
SPEAKER_01: There was no life in you.
SPEAKER_01: There was no spiritual life in you.
SPEAKER_01: There was physical life in you, but there was no spiritual life in any of us.
SPEAKER_01: But nevertheless, Christ made you alive with him, having forgiven all your sins.
SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
SPEAKER_01: Greatest story ever told.
SPEAKER_01: Greatest event ever known in the history of humankind.
SPEAKER_01: He has destroyed what was against us.
SPEAKER_01: So now he explains why you're alive.
SPEAKER_01: First he says you're alive.
SPEAKER_01: Now he's going to tell us why you're alive.
SPEAKER_01: That's really good news.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's like you gotta take that one to the bank.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you are still letting the enemy just rip into you and accuse you and tell you you're a loser and tell you that you can't make it and tell you you can't conquer that particular sin.
SPEAKER_01: Memorize Colossians 2.
SPEAKER_01: This passage.
SPEAKER_01: He has destroyed what was against you.
SPEAKER_01: You can't destroy what's against you.
SPEAKER_01: He already destroyed what's against you.
SPEAKER_01: Past tense.
SPEAKER_01: Past tense event, present tense experience.
SPEAKER_01: It was a certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to you.
SPEAKER_01: He has taken it away.
SPEAKER_01: Then he tells us even further, this is how he did it, by nailing it to the cross.
SPEAKER_01: So he took a metaphor of the way debts were paid, wherein the debtor had been signed off as having paid the debt, and then he would destroy it.
SPEAKER_01: He uses that illustration to say it's been nailed to the old rugged cross.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 15.
SPEAKER_01: Disarming, disarming the rulers and authorities, those are demonic powers.
SPEAKER_01: He has disarmed demonic powers.
SPEAKER_01: We get harassed by demonic powers all the time.
SPEAKER_01: We've talked about this at the road so many times.
SPEAKER_01: We've been covering Revelation 12 and these the dark powers.
SPEAKER_01: Where you're just walking along and you get this crazy thought, this lustful thought, this desire to cheat, this desire to lie.
SPEAKER_01: Where does that come from?
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, all of us are up to no good in our flesh, but there's also demonic powers that are out there.
SPEAKER_01: And he says here, he disarmed the rulers and authorities.
SPEAKER_01: And he uses another metaphor.
SPEAKER_01: He has made a public disgrace of them, triumphing over them, and we'll cover that in a moment, by the cross.
SPEAKER_01: So twice he expresses here, the Apostle Paul expresses here what the cross did to enable us who were dead in our sins to be alive in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That's Christus victor.
SPEAKER_01: And the tomb means nothing without the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And as you know, the cross means nothing without the empty tomb.
SPEAKER_01: Christ is our warrior who fought the greatest battle ever fought to take captivity captive, that you and I can walk in victory and freedom and joy and peace.
SPEAKER_01: That's good news.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why this is called Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: It's not sort of Good Friday, it's Good Friday because of what Jesus did.
SPEAKER_01: Men and women, we have been made alive in Christ because of the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And in this war where principalities and powers come to render us ineffective, powerless, where we start listening to those accusations of the enemy, to wear us down with afflictions, addictions, and contradictions at the cross, that was rendered ineffective because Satan and those powers were crushed because of what Jesus did, taking on the wrath of God, taking on all the sins of the world, yours and mine and future generations, came upon him and he took it to the grave.
SPEAKER_01: And I believe he went to hell.
SPEAKER_01: Not because of any sin in him, but because of sin in us, that he took on upon himself.
SPEAKER_01: And he marched into hell.
SPEAKER_01: And he went up to Satan.
SPEAKER_01: He says, I'll take those keys, please.
SPEAKER_01: And he opened the gates of hell.
SPEAKER_01: And we know in Scripture that the saints of old, many of them, rose from the grave that day when he said, It is finished.
SPEAKER_01: They were free from the obvious.
SPEAKER_01: Because what Christ did that immediately when he died, he went into what we called at that time paradise, divided into two parts.
SPEAKER_01: He took the keys, he opened the gates, and you'll never go to that paradise because it is done now.
SPEAKER_01: It's over, it's a new dispensation.
SPEAKER_01: You will be with Christ immediately when you physically die, because you know him.
SPEAKER_01: That's good news.
SPEAKER_01: That's Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: That's Christus Victor.
SPEAKER_01: We are alive in Christ because of the cross, because Jesus, in the song we just sang, one of the great hymns of the faith, says he crushed our pride.
SPEAKER_01: You see, Satan has a high self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: It was his high self-esteem and his own pride that got him booted out of heaven.
SPEAKER_01: And he's a great marketer.
SPEAKER_01: And so Satan's always wanting you to have a high self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: From psychologists to educators to even many Christian preachers, it's about having a high self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: But I believe the worst sin, and I'm not equating them exactly the same.
SPEAKER_01: But let's talk about pride.
SPEAKER_01: Pride is always looking down on others.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a pretty good definition of pride, actually.
SPEAKER_01: Pride is always looking down on people or looking down on events from your vantage point, being above them.
SPEAKER_01: The problem with pride is when you're looking down, what are you not doing?
SPEAKER_01: You're not looking up.
SPEAKER_01: C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis said, pride is a spiritual cancer.
SPEAKER_01: It eats up the very possibilities of love, contentment, or even common sense.
SPEAKER_01: In our world today, humility is often seen as a vice and pride is a virtue.
SPEAKER_01: On Good Friday, the message of the cross is that pride is a vice and humility is a virtue.
SPEAKER_01: So we say, well, Steve, are you saying I shouldn't have high self-esteem?
SPEAKER_01: Are you saying I should have low self-esteem?
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm saying you shouldn't have any self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: You have to have God esteem.
SPEAKER_01: There's this problem in the phrase, it's self.
SPEAKER_01: Does anybody here struggle with self?
SPEAKER_01: It's the greatest enemy of the joy and the power and the personal, growing, dynamic, intimate relationship we can have with Jesus and with others.
SPEAKER_01: And so Christ crushed pride and self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: And he's now given us the joy of humility, which is Christ's esteem.
SPEAKER_01: God made you with talents and gifts and dignity.
SPEAKER_01: And we discover our talents and our gifts and our dignity creased us victor by God being esteemed more and more in your life.
SPEAKER_01: I just got finished with jury duty.
SPEAKER_01: Four days of jury duty.
SPEAKER_01: And I will say this at least in El Paso County, we have a good justice system.
SPEAKER_01: We have a good justice system.
SPEAKER_01: That judge, man, he told us what to do.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he told us everything to do.
SPEAKER_01: He read the law to us and he gave us the instructions and we did it and we did it and we did it.
SPEAKER_01: And when we went into that jury room, every person in there, I don't know their religious background, I don't know where they're from, I still don't.
SPEAKER_01: We didn't talk too much about that, but everybody wanted what was right for that man who was on trial.
SPEAKER_01: It was cool.
SPEAKER_01: It's like, wow.
SPEAKER_01: And we were ethnically different, I'm sure we were spiritually different, but we wanted justice.
SPEAKER_01: There's something in the human psych that knows right and wrong.
SPEAKER_01: That part of us, it's the God image that was created in each of us, has been lost, but now it's found at Calvary.
SPEAKER_01: It's alive now.
SPEAKER_01: It was dead.
SPEAKER_01: He said we were dead.
SPEAKER_01: We were dead in our pride.
SPEAKER_01: We can be alive in Christ's humility because the most humble work that man has ever known was on Good Friday.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus humbled himself and he gave it all at Calvary.
SPEAKER_01: And what was against us has been destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus came and it says that he took this certificate of debt.
SPEAKER_01: This certificate, we owed something because of our pride.
SPEAKER_01: We owed something for our sin.
SPEAKER_01: He took that.
SPEAKER_01: You can never be good enough, church.
SPEAKER_01: We can never be good enough to earn it.
SPEAKER_01: But we can be bad enough.
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
SPEAKER_01: You are.
SPEAKER_01: You're bad enough.
SPEAKER_01: But he's good enough.
SPEAKER_01: And we have to constantly esteem Christ in our life because we can't earn it.
SPEAKER_01: We can't do it.
SPEAKER_01: And he did it all, and he took the certificate of debt of what you and I owe.
SPEAKER_01: And he nailed it to the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther said of this verse that we've read, because of the humility of Jesus, the cross appeared to be Christ's greatest defeat and Satan's greatest victory, but the opposite was true.
SPEAKER_01: Charles Spurgeon said, To the eye of reason, the cross is the center of sorrow and the depth of shame.
SPEAKER_01: To the world, the cross must ever be an emblem of shame.
SPEAKER_01: And so Jesus died in between two criminals that you might not be a criminal ever again.
SPEAKER_01: He was stripped of all dignity, that you might be clothed with all dignity.
SPEAKER_01: He was bloodied and torn apart with the bones and the metal that were within that scourging Roman whip that you and I might have health and healing.
SPEAKER_01: What an irony.
SPEAKER_01: We were dead.
SPEAKER_01: We were dead, but now, men and women, we are alive.
SPEAKER_01: And to the extent that you and I believe that, is the extent to which we walk in the joy of the Lord, which becomes our strength.
SPEAKER_01: Christus Victor did it all.
SPEAKER_01: It is finished.
SPEAKER_01: That term, it is finished, was a Roman term.
SPEAKER_01: And that was a piece of paper that was handed to that person who had paid all their debts to say it's all paid for.
SPEAKER_01: It'd be like kind of a stamp at the bank now, saying, you now own the car.
SPEAKER_01: This is your certificate.
SPEAKER_01: And they said, and the wording was, it is finished.
SPEAKER_01: Disarming the rulers and authorities, he has made a public disgrace of them.
SPEAKER_01: So Spurgeon says it's the greatest shame and disgrace the world has ever known.
SPEAKER_01: And the scriptures say he disarmed rulers and authorities and he made them a public shame.
SPEAKER_01: He made them a public disgrace through his triumph at the cross.
SPEAKER_01: And the picture is how the Romans would come into a village and they would have that the general would be on a chariot.
SPEAKER_01: And he had all behind him, all chained together and roped together those captives from that country or that province where he had won the great battle.
SPEAKER_01: John Calvin said of this passage, for as he had previously compared the cross to a signal trophy, or show the triumph in which Christ led about his enemies, so he now also compares it to a triumphal chariot in which he showed himself in great magnificence.
SPEAKER_01: For there is no tribunal so magnificent, no throne so stately, no show of triumph so distinguished, no chariot so elevated as in the cross on which Christ has subdued death and the devil, the prince of death.
SPEAKER_01: He has trodden them under his feet.
SPEAKER_01: Christus Victor.
SPEAKER_01: John, in writing of this victory, said it this way.
SPEAKER_01: This is the victory that has overcome the world.
SPEAKER_01: Our faith.
SPEAKER_01: Who is he who overcomes the world?
SPEAKER_01: But he who believes that Jesus is a son of God.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to take communion in a moment because you believe that Jesus is a son of God.
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't believe that, don't take communion.
SPEAKER_01: Refrain.
SPEAKER_01: Because communion is for believers, it's for disciples.
SPEAKER_01: But do you realize by proclaiming that Jesus is a son of God, that's the victory.
SPEAKER_01: It's not how much faith you have, it's who your faith is in.
SPEAKER_01: And so communion is the great hospitality of God for each of us.
SPEAKER_01: It's a foretaste of the prophetic word we have in Revelation 19.
SPEAKER_01: Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to feast with the Lamb, just as Jesus did on what the religious calendars, the Christian calendars, call Monday Thursday.
SPEAKER_01: Monday Thursday was last night when Jesus had the last supper with his disciples.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to take communion now.
SPEAKER_01: If you're a Jesus follower, or you choose today to become a Jesus follower, we welcome you to the victory that is your faith.
SPEAKER_01: Your faith that Jesus died at Calvary for the sins of the world, that he was buried dead, that on the third day he rose again.
SPEAKER_01: He was seen by Peter.
SPEAKER_01: Circumstantial evidence.
SPEAKER_01: Eyewitness evidence?
SPEAKER_01: In the courtroom of even a modern trial?
SPEAKER_01: Eyewitnesses.
SPEAKER_01: And then it he has a little comma in 1 Corinthians 15 to more than 500.
SPEAKER_01: Who are most of which, most of whom are still alive.
SPEAKER_01: So even by modern standards of a modern trial of how evidence is processed, over five hundred eyewitnesses saw him alive.
SPEAKER_01: Now you could do that and say, well, they're all dead.
SPEAKER_01: But he said, most of whom are still alive.
SPEAKER_01: And then we know, if we count Paul in the mix, that 12 of the 13, or 12 apostles, capital A apostles, Paul's considered one of the apostles, 12 of the 13 apostles died, martyrs' deaths, proclaiming Jesus had risen from the grave.
SPEAKER_01: Actually, 12, 11 of the 12, not counting Judas and not counting John.
SPEAKER_01: That's good news, folks.
SPEAKER_01: That's Christus victory.
SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you have been blessed by today's message.
SPEAKER_00: To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: If you are walking through a difficult time, we want to pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: Go to theRode.org, click on the Ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.