The Hidden Life of the Christian

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Please enjoy the following sermon. We are in Galatians chapter two and verse 20 today, but I seem to be on a roll doing this.

I want to speak to you about another passage. You can remain in Galatians two, unless you want to turn there with me.

I see a couple of you smirking. I can't do this too, too often, but in the book of Acts, if we look there in chapters 21, sorry, yes, 21 and 22, we find a scene there that I would say is very interesting and yet is very unsurprising.

They were told that in that ancient city of Jerusalem, the apostle Paul was worshiping

God in the temple when a group of Jews from the Roman province of Asia recognized him.

And upon seeing him there, the crowd became incensed. They laid their hands upon Paul, the word says.

They called upon their fellow Jews crying out for help, not for their rescue, but for his murder.

And they dragged him out of the temple. And if it wasn't enough, upon dragging him out of the temple as the guards closed the gates, not coming to his aid, but simply keeping him outside, they began to beat

Paul with such an intensity that it became plain to everyone, including

Luke, the inspired author of this book, that their intention was to murder him right then and there.

The crowd was in such an uproar that Luke tells us that it quickly came to the attention of the

Roman tribune, who without delay had his soldiers and centurions go and intervene so as to save Paul's life.

And when they arrived in the chaos of it all, the Romans came, they bound Paul in chains and were told that they had to lift him up.

I'm not sure where, maybe hoisting him on their shoulders to keep him from that rabid crowd that if they were allowed to would tear him to pieces.

And so hoisting him up, they went to take him to the barracks. Now in a situation like this, if you were the apostle

Paul, what would you want to do? Where would you want to be?

I think if you're like most sane people, you would want those Roman soldiers to carry you directly to the barracks and out of harm's way.

But we're told the apostle Paul had something else in mind. Instead, appealing to the tribune, he sought to address this crowd that was in the process of trying to kill him.

And so having the opportunity, he stood before that barbarous crowd and he sought to explain what it was that Christ had done in his life.

We saw our sisters be baptized a few moments ago and they were surrounded by a crowd rooting for them, praising

God for what he had done in their lives. Well, here's Paul standing before a crowd who's not praising

God, but seething and grinding their teeth at him. And this is what he said.

He explained his background, that he was a well -educated Jew brought up in Jerusalem under the famous rabbi

Gamaliel. He went on and explained that he was formerly a zealous persecutor of Christians, a man with a heart full of disdain for Christ's followers that drove him to hunt them, not in Jerusalem alone, but beyond the walls of Jerusalem, that he might take them down like animals, beat and torment and even kill them.

But when he went on, as he went on, he went on to describe how it was that Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus in a blinding light, and how it was that Christ confronted him with the truth, how he was baptized, how he was changed, and how he was forgiven of all of his sins.

And nevertheless, as he went on, when he finally got to his mission to the Gentiles, the crowd had had enough, and they drowned him out again with the calls, with cries for his death.

And in the years that follow, we can trace the life of the apostle Paul in the pages of Scripture and in the annals of history, and we find something remarkable, that whether before magistrates or Jews or the

Roman emperor himself, he was always having to repeatedly explain what it meant that he was a

Christian. And as I was thinking about it this week, it's hard to speak without addressing what has happened in the past week, to think that a brother in Christ was murdered in public in Utah.

I thought to myself, still more, that perhaps there are no creatures in all of this world that are more misunderstood than Christians, than the

Christian. You would think that after 2 ,000 years have passed, with something like,

I searched it up, something like five billion copies of the Bible in print, that the world would know what a

Christian is. But alas, they do not. In fact, they claim to know exactly what we are about, but many of them do not know more than the

Jews knew in Paul's day. At the same time, we are surrounded by so many who are false teachers, who teach in false churches, who produce false converts, who claim to be

Christians, and yet they do not know the first thing about what it means to belong to Christ.

And if that isn't enough still, sadly, there are many genuine, though immature believers, who are weak and vulnerable and ineffectual for this reason, because they have a truncated understanding of what it means to be a

Christian. And as we come today to hear the

Lord speak from his word, and to rejoice in the baptism of two of our sisters, the question becomes, and it's a question that I put to you.

Do you know what it means to be a Christian? Do you have the biblical and the theological categories, the literacy needed to understand and to live according to your basic identity in Christ?

If someone were to ask you, what makes a Christian a Christian? Would you be able to offer a satisfactory answer to that question?

Or would you grasp around for words like a lost man, hoping at things in the dark?

This afternoon, I'm preaching on one verse, Galatians 2 .20. And my aim today is very, very simple.

Today we're going to look at what it means to be a Christian. We saw some of what it is in the waters of baptism, and now we're going to see what

God says it is. In this one verse, Paul tells us, if you are a believer, he tells you who you are.

And if you're not a believer, then in this one solitary verse, he tells you who you must be.

In this verse, we find, as one Puritan has put it, the secret of the hidden life of the

Christian. Find me a Christian, and we will peel back the layers of the onion, and we will look together at what it means to be a

Christian. That is what we're going to look at together today. So I had us turn to Galatians 2 .20.

I'm going to read the whole of the verse, and then we're going to pull it apart. We're going to extract truths from it, three truths from it, looking at three different sections of this one verse.

So let's read the verse together. Paul writes, We're going to look at three dimensions.

I'm calling it at the hidden life of the Christian, and the first dimension, the first aspect of what it means to be a

Christian is this, that the Christian has a new union. The Christian's new union.

I wrestled with this. We could title it the Christian's new life in Christ. And we find it in the first two sentences in verse 20.

I'm going to read it again. We can never read it too often. Now, whenever we preach a sermon on one verse, it is very, very, very important that we not violate the text, that we not do violence to the text by tearing it out of its context.

So it's important, I think, that we frame this passage in its right grammatical and historical context.

Here is Paul writes to these Christians in Galatia. He is writing to churches in the

Roman province of Galatia. And here he's addressing people who are wrestling with the very question that I've just posed to you a moment ago, what is a

Christian? And this is what had happened. During Paul's first missionary journey, we read about it in Acts chapter 13 and 14.

We read that Paul passed through this province of Galatia, preaching the gospel and establishing local churches there in that region, especially in the prominent cities.

But shortly after Paul established those churches and went back to Antioch, we find in Scripture that there was a group of people, we would call them now the

Judaizers, who came in after Paul, and they sought to undermine the message of the gospel by teaching that one is not saved solely by faith in Christ Jesus, but that one is saved by a combination of faith in Christ and of law -keeping, of obedience to the

Jewish law. They would come in and say something along these lines, that it is good that you believe in Jesus, but it is not enough that you believe in Jesus.

You need to be circumcised. You need to follow these Jewish dietary laws. You need to adhere to all these

Mosaic covenants. And then, and only then, may you be saved. Now, this is a damnable heresy, if ever there was one.

And so in response, Paul wrote a strongly worded letter and urgently sent it to the

Galatians. It's interesting, this is likely the very first letter that Paul wrote in his epistles.

It had to go to the Galatians. They were amongst the first that he reached, and now they're amongst the first that he needs to address problems with.

And he writes to them to convince these confused Christians that they were not justified by works of the law, but by faith alone in Jesus Christ.

And part of Paul's argument in this chapter is that the Christian is no longer bound to the law as a system of works, because he has died to the law.

He told the very same thing to the Christians in Rome, in Romans chapter seven in verse six.

We read it there where he says, but now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

Now what Paul is trying to convey here is that at one time, if you are a

Christian in this room, at one time you were captive to sin, captive to condemnation under the law.

You were a prisoner being led to death, and the only help that the law of God brought you at that time was to pronounce

God's judgment upon you. It did not matter how hard you tried to do or say the right things.

All that the law could do for you was to stop your mouth and remind you of how sinful you really were.

Under the law, Christian brother, sister, we were powerless to change.

Paul tells us in Romans six that we were slaves to sin and unrighteousness, and everything in us was ultimately corrupt.

Our sister Karis said the words earlier, we were totally depraved and hopelessly infected by the plague of sin.

That is the past experience of the Christian, and I would be remiss to say that if I didn't say this, that it is the present experience of every person who is not a

Christian. Thomas Watson has said of this condition, he said, sin has the devil for its father, shame for his companion, and death for its wages.

And such were all of us, and such still are some of you. And you see before we can appreciate what a

Christian is, we must first realize what he once was. That is where Paul is taking us, dead in trespasses and sins, condemned under the law like the rest of the world.

But Paul does not leave us there, nor does he mince words when he speaks about the new life of the

Christian. At the beginning of verse 20, he uses the strongest possible language when he says,

I have been crucified with Christ. Could he be more explicit in his teaching than this, that we are not what we once were?

And this is where the study, you know I'm a grammar, I'm a grammar guy, the study of grammar can be really, really helpful.

Because here Paul uses a passive indicative verb, which means that it's not something that we need to be doing in the future.

It's not something that we need to be crucifying ourselves in Christ now, but in union with Christ, passively, we have been crucified.

It is an assertion of fact. And what this means then, if you are a

Christian, the man or the woman that you once were is dead and gone, along with its godless disposition and enslavements to sin.

And he frames this, again to lean on that grammar for a moment, in the perfect tense, meaning that it is a past action, but with ongoing effects, meaning that we have been crucified and yet the experience of that crucifixion, the benefits of that crucifixion persist.

Christian, what this means is that you who have truly died to sin, that you have died to sin, that you might remember very vividly your former self before Christ.

You might remember your former self so well, I know what it is. You can recall a moment in time as if it were but a second ago.

You might be able to vividly remember that man or that woman, but that old man, that old woman has been crucified with Christ.

And the expectation then is that we would no longer live according to our former manner of life, that that person is gone.

Therefore we might say that the hidden Christian life is a crucified life.

The true Christian is one who has died to all that held him captive to sin.

He has died to the condemnation that once characterized his godless life.

He has died to the foolish and self -destructive compulsions that once dominated him in this world.

He has died as well to all of its accompanying shame. Think about this with me for a moment as we watched our sisters go into that water.

I'm not sure we didn't, I didn't hold you too long I hope sisters, but you went down and for a moment you were gone.

When we baptize people and we see them go down into that water, it is a picture of this reality.

And how many of us I ask you still live as if that old man is still alive.

That old man, that old woman is dead as we have seen. But Paul doesn't leave us dead thankfully.

But just as Christ was raised in union with him, we have been raised with Christ to newness of life.

And he adds this in verse 20, he says, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Now Christians love to quote this passage. They put it on on t -shirts and hats and quilts and cups and candles.

But how many of us know what it means? That it is no longer us who live, but Christ who lives in us.

This means that not only is our old sinful self dead and gone, but that we have been made all together new in Christ.

And in the most wondrous way we have been made alive with the spirit of Christ in us now, so that we no longer live for sin and self, but we live for Christ and for Christ alone.

At one time it was in all of us. Our controlling impulses were magnetized towards sin and towards those things that displease

God. It didn't matter how hard we tried. We heard that in the testimonies today. We were unable to do that which pleased the

Lord. But now that we have been made new in Christ, the controlling impulse of the

Christian is to do the will of God. And I ask you, does this describe your life?

That the controlling impulse, the desires in your heart, that everything within you, though you execute it imperfectly, is to love your

God and to please Him? You thought

I was joking when I said that there are many Christians today who have a truncated idea, a truncated view of what it means to be a

Christian. To be a Christian is to be a new man and a new woman with new desires to love and to please

Christ. Is that in you? It must be, for this is the description of a

Christian. Just a moment ago we saw as our sisters were enveloped in water, that they were covered.

For a moment they were gone, and then a moment later they came out of the water with great intensity, and something about them had changed.

This is a picture of the hidden life of the Christian. It was a physical demonstration of a spiritual reality.

And this is where much of the world, and where even many in the church, totally misunderstand what it means to be a

Christian. When the Lord saves a man or woman to Himself, He does not merely forgive them, and then call them to a life of moral reform.

If you think that the Christian life consists of this, doing the things that I don't want to do, and abstaining from the things that I do want to do, that is not the

Christian life, that is dead religion. But what the Lord does is this, that when a man or a woman becomes a

Christian, the Lord joins that man or woman to Christ, and they are born again.

Maybe you've read the story of Nicodemus coming to Christ and asking, how can a man be born again?

This is the picture of being born again, radically transformed, so that we are never the same again by the power of God alone.

It is a miracle greater if I were to call a blind person to the front of this room, and give them sight.

We would all gaze in wonder, and get how it is that we have somehow lost sight of this, that when

God raises a man or a woman from the spiritually dead, and makes them new in Christ, it is remarkable.

It is grander than raising up a lame man to walk. It is infinitely more glorious than bringing a dead man back to life.

It is taking a spiritually dead, darkened, and lost person, bound in devilish slavery, and raising them to radiant life as a new creation in Christ Jesus, and nothing in all of creation compares.

And we don't know, many of us, what it means to be a Christian, because we have stopped marveling at that.

But if you are in Christ, you are new, and you must walk in that newness of life.

Paul says in Romans 6, that we have died to sin, therefore consider yourself dead to sin.

It is an invitation to the greatest adventure that one can live, to live as a

Christian. You know, we see, and I'm all for civil liberties.

I am all for freedom. You see people with signs chanting freedom, freedom, freedom.

I want to tell you there is a freedom that is greater than anything that they know what they are speaking about.

It is a freedom in Christ to be released from slavery to sin, from bondage to death, to live that you might please

God. Oh, that God would grant all of us this, that we would, from our heart of hearts, from a regenerate and renewed heart, seek to love and desire, and to please and to glorify

God. There is no greater adventure, no greater blessing, no greater privilege in this world than this, and in Christ He has enabled this.

I could stop my sermon now, and we could go now for the rest of the week, and praise God. And I want to bless you more.

Paul goes on to speak to a second dimension of the Christian life, the hidden Christian life, and it's this, the

Christian's new trust. In the second part of verse 20, we read this, and the life

I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the

Son of God. When Christ rescues a man from sin and death,

He doesn't merely give that man or that woman a new life, but He gives him or her a new trust, a new object of trust.

And here again, we find that many in the world and many in the church have completely misunderstood what it means to be a

Christian. I'm not overstating this, I'm serious. If you were to survey the average person on the street today to go out, let's go to the bus stop like we do evangelism, this time instead of gospel tracts, we'll take a clipboard, and we'll ask them just one question.

What does the Christian life consist of? How many times would we hear, would we put the check mark next to this box that the

Christian life consists of trying to be a good person, or that the

Christian life consists of obeying a certain set of rules, or that the Christian life seeks to try to avoid sin?

We see this fatal flaw. It is a fatal flaw in the world's thinking when we tell an unbeliever, we've had this conversation, you have ever shared your faith, you have had this conversation with someone to tell them, you need

Jesus Christ. And what do they say? They say, you know,

I can be a good person without being a Christian. It's like they didn't hear what we were saying.

I didn't say you need to be a good person. I said you need Jesus Christ. They say, yeah, but I can be a good person without being a

Christian. As if the substance of Christianity and the Christian life consisted in maintaining a certain moral standard.

The vast majority of people today still believe, still think in their heart of hearts, in the depth of all that they are, that if there is an afterlife, they will be granted access to that afterlife based on a certain balance of probabilities.

That there is a scale, and as long as I put more good works in this scale, in this side of the scale,

I will go to heaven. They survey inmates on death row, and they say,

I'm going to heaven. You're a murderer. But I do more good than bad.

Now, of course, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.

But sadly, and this is a sad thing, that the same way of thinking has subtly infected many professing

Christians today. If I have learned anything from ministering to youth and to university students, my brother can agree with me,

I trust as I go on, and many others in this city over the past 19 years.

If you were to go today to a big box church in our city and ask the average person with earnest, in earnest, how can

I get to heaven? I don't want to know anything else. How can

I get to heaven? You would be met with a response that sounds more like the response you would get taking a survey on the street than you would in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And why would we expect anything different when this is the kind of thing that is taught?

I went to one of the most prominent televangelists in the world. You can probably picture him.

His face is on the cover of every one of his books. He promises you your best life now. And he explains, he says, you may have made mistakes.

He refuses to call sin, sin, he said. He doesn't want to push people away. And so he says, you may have made mistakes.

We all have. But God says you're forgiven. If he forgives you, why don't you forgive yourself?

Now, if that is the gospel you have heard and believed, I want to assure you, you have believed no gospel at all.

There is no substance in that. That is a gospel that will damn and not that will save.

And while we may laugh or scoff or recoil at such an indistinct explanation of the gospel, yet how many of us have been subtly swayed by this very way of thinking?

That we would look at anything, we would have any trust rather than the right trust.

But as Paul writes about the Christian's trust, he avoids all of these foolish errors.

And he explains that the Christian life is one that is lived by what? By faith in the son of God, he says.

And again, it's helpful to see this sentence in its larger context. I know it's rare that I preach on one passage, so we get used to that Bible being open in front of us.

Let's look at it again. In verse 16, here we find what has been called the thesis statement of the book of Galatians.

And this is what it says. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, okay, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law.

But because by works of the law, no one will be justified.

The whole context of this and what we get in Galatians 220 is really the icing on the cake as it were.

Do you want to know what separates a Christian, one who is right with God and will go to be with him forever, and one who is not a

Christian, one who at this very moment is abiding under the just wrath of God? The difference is this.

The one who is a Christian, they have one trust. They have a faith in Jesus Christ.

They have cast aside all other ways of trying to please him, all other ways of trying to buy his love, of making him indebted to us so that he has to give us salvation.

No, they come before God, before Christ with empty hands and say, I believe in Jesus and I have nothing else to offer.

It is by faith and faith alone in Christ. It is recognizing that we have been made by a good and holy

God, that we have sinned against that God grievously. I cannot,

I cannot stress that enough that we have truly grieved God in the way that we have rejected him.

And he's so good to us that he's given us life and breath and all things that he has only ever been gracious and kind to us, that we should wake up each day with breath in our lungs and an opportunity to live for him.

And we have grieved that God. And the

Christian believes that there is no amount of works, no amount of law keeping, no amount of seeking to tip the scales that is sufficient to save us from this just God.

But what we could never do, God did by sending his son, Jesus Christ, to live a righteous life in our place, to die an atoning death on that cross that we might come to him freely.

It was not free for us, or sorry, it was free for us, but it was not free to God, I assure you, that he gave his only son on that cross, that whoever believes in Jesus Christ would be saved.

We must come to him on his terms. Verse 16, you will see if you look at that with me one more time, it does an interesting repetition,

Galatians 2 .16. The word justified is repeated three times, to be just before God, to be declared righteous.

That's what justified means, that God would look at you as if you have the very righteousness of his son.

What a marvel. How? How can we have this? Justified is used three times.

Belief or faith is used three times. And the works of the law are excluded three times.

This is why Paul can say in verse 20 then, that the life he now lives, he lives in the flesh by faith in Jesus.

Paul was an impressive man, a man of great spiritual pedigree. And in Philippians 3, he talks about it, how he is a

Hebrew of the Hebrews. He is a well -educated Jew. He was a Pharisee of the

Pharisees. He said, do you know what that means? Many of the Pharisees, most of the Pharisees memorized the entire

Old Testament. Talk about devotion. The average

Christian today might memorize, I don't know, have you memorized as many verses as you've been a

Christian? If you've been a Christian 20 years, have you memorized 20 verses? Paul memorized this much of the

Bible, tradition tells us. And what did he do with it? In Philippians 3, irrespective of how religious he was, he said this,

I count it at all as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. He said, for his sake,

I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain

Christ and be found in him, and this is key, found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

What is a Christian? A Christian is one who has believed on Jesus and does not have their own righteousness, does not rely on their own righteousness, but they have the very righteousness of God, of the living

Son of God imputed to them, counted to them by faith alone.

And yet still some of you here do not believe me. I ask you to search your heart, that some of you still think that there is just but a little that depends on you.

I ask this question, would you come to God on his terms?

Not with your trinkets, not with your filthy rags, not with the little that you can offer, but would you come to God on his terms by faith in Jesus Christ alone?

This is what makes a Christian. This is what the Bible calls a

Christian. And then the last dimension of the hidden life of the

Christian that I want us to look at is this, the Christian's new portion.

All of these titles could have been changed on a whim. We might say the

Christian's new treasure, and we see it in the final section of verse 20. If you look back at Galatians 2 .20

with me, where he says, the Son of God, it is by faith in the

Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

So the Christian is one who has a new life by union in Christ. The Christian is one who has been saved by God through faith alone in Christ with no additions.

And the Christian is one who says with Moses in Lamentations 3 .24, the

Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.

It is not enough to have faith in God. Sometimes you will ask a Christian, you'll say, tell me about your saving faith, your conversion.

Explain the experience to me. And they will go on. As we heard our sisters speak a few moments ago and speak about what their life was and what their experience of the world was.

And they will tell you, and I went to church, and I loved the music, and I loved the preaching, and I loved the reading, and the fellowship was great, and they were friendly, and they were all of these things.

And I thought, I am going to believe in God. And then on that day, I believed in God. I'm not in the business of judging people's testimonies, but that is an incomplete testimony.

When someone tells me that testimony, I say, and? I explain this to my children all the time, that even the demons believe in God, and they shudder.

It is one thing to believe in God, to say, I love God, I believe in God, that I have a creator.

There are a million religions under the sun that believe that they have a creator. We must believe.

We must have a portion. We must have an object of our faith. And Paul tells us the object of that faith.

The son of God who loved us and gave himself up for us.

Or from Paul's experience, who loved me and gave himself for me.

A Christian by definition is one who finds in Jesus Christ their summum bonum, their highest good.

The Christian is one who in Christ they find the lodestar, the fixed point around which one's life is directed.

The Christian is one whose hope is only ever and always in Christ and Christ alone.

And I want you to see with me the character of this Christ.

To see with me. You think, you think you know, but you don't.

Says who loved me in the son of God who loved me.

One commentator says this is not an impersonal, impersonal mechanical transaction.

I am convinced that one of the hardest things to do in all the world, and it shouldn't be this way, but it is, is to convince a

Christian, a Christian who rightly understands, who has a sound understanding of the doctrine of God, who knows that God is holy and good and that he transcends all things.

It is one of the hardest things in all the world to convince a Christian that God loves them.

Look at the emphatic language that he loves me.

When we look at God and we see that he is holy, holy, holy.

That he is so, so good. And we see ourselves, and if you are like me, you can, you can look at yourself and you say,

I don't know that I could get more unlovely. All that God does is good.

And meanwhile, everything I touch is stained with my sin.

Even the very best things. I will come into my study and open my Bible and seek to read and to write sermons and to spend time with the

Lord. And even what should be the most sanctified part of my day is still tarnished by my own sin.

And it could be so easy to say, how could God love a wretch like me?

God can and God does if you are a Christian.

And how, where do we see this? Our brother read it in Romans 5 in verse 6.

You want a steadfast proof that God loves you? You say, give me one proof that God loves me.

As a Christian, I can give you many, but I'll give you the best.

In Romans 5, 6, while we were still weak at the right time,

Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die.

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,

Christ died for us. We almost sang it this week.

We didn't, but that hymn, How Firm a Foundation. Ye Saints of the

Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word. What more can he say than to you he hath said?

That God loves us and we see that love for sinners in this, that Christ died for us.

And so in him we have our portion. In him he is the treasure. He is the great, he is the pearl of great price that we sell all things that we might buy the land and have him.

He is the treasure that we cover up and we come and we bring everything.

We take our, here, this is my righteous work. This is my wretch. This is my sin. This is my everything.

You can have it all. Just give me Christ. That is the heart of a

Christian. And if you do not have that heart, you must ask yourself, am I a Christian?

But so often we will say, I love you. We will make that statement.

But there is an incongruity between our statement of love and our actions.

At least as a husband, I know what this is like. Husbands, you can, you can understand this.

But you can tell your wife, I love you. And yet in your actions, do something that is altogether different from that statement.

Men who aren't married, sisters, I trust you've had that experience. Let me tell you something.

Christ has never had that experience. That when the

Lord tells us he loves us, all of his actions are aligned with that love.

And we see it in this, that he loved me and gave himself for me.

This week, I had the unfortunate experience of seeing a video of what took place.

And as gruesome as it was, I was not surprised by that level of sin.

But in the days that followed, probably because I shouldn't, just shouldn't have been doing this,

I went on social media to see what people were saying about it. And I saw a comment that celebrated the murder of a

Christian brother engaging in friendly debate.

And in that comment, there were over 500 ,000 likes.

I did not think it was possible, but I was surprised by the sinfulness of man.

That the sinfulness of man is greater still than I understood.

The sinfulness of man is greater than you understand. And you and I can mine, we can study a martiology, the doctrine of sin for the rest of our lives.

We can get our PhDs in it. We can do postgraduate studies of it. We can look at just one theme, the doctrine of sin.

And I will tell you something, there will come a time when you will be surprised again by the extreme nature of sin and of human depravity.

And that sin is not just in them. It is in us. What did

Christ do for sinners? As I saw those comments,

I'll be honest. There was, I think, a sinful unrighteousness in me that I wanted to show those people how wicked and evil they were.

And one day they will know. Do you want to know what Christ did for some of those people?

He came and He gave His life for them. He went to the cross, the most brutal death that man has invented.

And that wasn't it. But as He hung on that cross, the very wrath of God was poured out on Him in our stead.

He was forsaken by the Father. He satisfied the just wrath of God in our place, not because we were worthy, but because we were like those people that I was reading their comments this week, because we were sinners and because He loved us.

And now you know when I say that Christ must be our summum bonum, that He must be our highest good.

Because a Christian, when you come to understand the gospel, you realize this, that I'm a new creature in Christ, that I never deserved this, that this is not mine to have.

But the Lord, while I was still dead in my trespasses and sins, He crucified me with Christ.

He raised me to newness of life. I am a new person in Him. He has given me a faith, a saving faith, so that I can look to Christ, not offer any of my pocket change, but I can leave it all behind and I can look to Christ by faith alone.

This is scriptural. And in Christ, I find my greatest portion, my highest treasure, that Christ gave

Himself for me particularly and for you, if you believe on His Son.

And C .T. Studd, who was a missionary who left a very promising career.

He was like the Connor McDavid of cricket, I tell my son. Just the very best.

There was no one better than him. Imagine one day. It's unfathomable for someone of that caliber in a sport, of being famous for what they do on the field, to leave it all behind, that you might preach

Christ, to give away a promising career, to give away everything.

C .T. Studd said, if Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.

That is the Christian life. Can't you see?

We've been operating with far too shallow a definition of what it means to be a Christian, to see

Christ, to believe in Christ, to be filled with Christ, to give our all for Christ.

I'll finish this quote. One man writes, the whole Christian life is a response to the love exhibited in the death of the

Son of God for men. I want to ask you, are you a

Christian? Before God, are you a

Christian? If you are, then praise God with me that He has made you so.

And if you are not a Christian, then God commands you to repent, that is to turn to God and to believe in Jesus, that you might know the reality of what our sisters have experienced, that you might know the reality of what

I have just spoken about, that you might know Christ more than just a man on a statue, a man in a painting, a man in the

Bible, but that you might know Christ as your Lord, your Savior, your God, your

Master, your Friend. Please join me in praying.