The Lamb Over Me

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Transcript

Welcome And Today’s Scripture

0:05

Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in the Word. I'm Ronnie Cooksie. Today I get to share with you yet another amazing scripture from God's Word. Today I'm reading to you from 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 21.

The Great Exchange In 2 Corinthians

0:21

And it says, He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. He that is God made him, that is Jesus, who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. Now God and Jesus are the same person, three simultaneous expressions of one God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit.

What Jesus Carried On The Cross

0:48

So God chose to send Himself in the form of Christ, the Son, and for a split second, for a brief moment, Jesus took all the sin of all the world on himself and became sin for us. There was a transaction where God was able to kill Himself as the payment for our sin. Now the pain of the cross was unimaginable. Death on a Roman cross was one of the worst ways to die in all of history. Nails were hammered into the feet and wrists. The weight of the body would pull against the nails, causing the victim to not be able to support themselves enough to keep their body upright and to breathe properly. And there was much more. But the worst pain, I believe, was that he took the weight, the burden, the agony of all the world's sin on himself for that moment. Now we know what it feels like to sin. It doesn't feel good, it feels horrible. And you take all the sin of one person's lifetime and put it all together, and all of that misery and all of that feeling that comes with our sin combined, and then you combine that with the hundred billion or so people who have lived on this earth throughout its history, and Jesus took all of that combined sin and he took it on himself on the cross, and he had never tasted sin before. What a horrible thing that he endured for me and for you.

A Father’s Story Of Substitution

2:36

In 2005, one of my sons and I went in to see an overseas doctor to have a couple of warts burnt off. We each had one. Well, I let my son go first so that he wouldn't be scared after watching me, but I knew that it wasn't that bad to have a wart burnt off. To my shock and to my son's horror, the doctor took a pair of scissors and with no painkiller, he cut my son's wart off just as smooth as could be. And we were both utterly mortified. I was watching and wishing there was something I could do to take my son's place. And I did get an opportunity to go second, but I wanted to stop it for him, and that's what God did for us. He saw that we were and are impossibly incapable of paying for our own sin. And we would therefore suffer forever in hell unless he took our place. The pain of the cross, horrible, but the worst pain was the burden of my sin and your sin on his back. And it says he became sin in that moment.

Paid In Full And Covered By The Lamb

3:55

But he rose again from the grave, defeating the penalty and the power of sin. And it says that we, through that, if we place our faith in him, we can become, as it were, the righteousness of God in him. That means that if you turn to Jesus for the forgiveness of your sin, then when God sees you, he doesn't see your sin, he sees what Jesus did for you. They used to use a Greek word during first century Rome called Tatalesti, and it was like stamping paid in full on some debt. And so when God sees you, he sees paid in full, which is what Jesus cried out there in his last breath on the cross. He sees paid in full when he sees you, if you've placed your faith in Christ for your sin and for your salvation. You do have a past, but God doesn't have to hang it around your neck. That past may mean that you need to be more careful and in fact vigilant in some areas, but the penalty, the payment, is gone. He paid for it on the cross. Hallelujah. He knew no sin and became sin, so that we who knew no righteousness could become righteous. In the Japanese language, there's a word for righteousness, and it's beautiful. The Japanese and Chinese are those picture-like characters in their language, and the word is beautiful. It's made from two Japanese characters. On the bottom is one of the characters that means me. But the upper character is the character that means lamb. Lamb over me. And that's what the scripture says. I am right with God and forgiven when the Lamb of God who died in my place as the sacrificial lamb is over me. Are you in Christ? Then rejoice today that you are forgiven and that he became sin so that you might be counted and seen by God as righteous. If you haven't, oh, do it today. God bless you, and I'll see you right back here next time.