Colossians - Christ Rescued Us

God Centered Theology

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You know, after Thanksgiving last week, I need to ask the question, does

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Christmas really even matter anyway? I ask that question because the world will tell you it doesn't.

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Does it matter? I mean, after all, we've commercialized it, we've, to death.

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Thankfully, some stores are changing their posture, but for a while there, you couldn't say Merry Christmas, it was

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Happy Holidays, I don't know what it was like at Goody's there, Dan, but I know at Food Lion, we were told, you can't say

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Merry Christmas unless somebody says it to you, and then you can say it back to them. So we basically just ignored that rule and said it anyway.

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At time in the retail, you're like, well, you know, if we get fired, we'll be home for the holidays. But you're not supposed to say

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Merry Christmas, and you know, it's always interesting to me when you hear people caught up in progressivism talk about it, they say, well, you know, it's all about, you know, inclusion, and blah, blah, etc.,

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and like, yes, it's about inclusion to the exclusion of Christianity. So as long as you've excluded Christianity, well, you can include anything you want to.

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So the bottom line is, we all know why they don't want

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Christmas to matter, and it has nothing to do with Santa, it has nothing to do with Elf on the Shelf, it has nothing to do with presents, it has everything to do with Jesus Christ, which you see, and I think, good, it showed up good.

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After my debacle from a couple weeks ago with the big bright yellow picture, I learned to use more darker colors in my pictures, because they won't show up well, but the whole manger scene there with Mary and Joseph and the baby

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Jesus and all the good stuff like that, that is why it matters.

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And over to this, let's see, today, next week, and then the 24th, so, and then we got two special events in between,

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I'm going to try to have three messages to try to pull out and explain why Christmas actually and truly, really matters.

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And we're still in Colossians for this, and if you want to turn your Bibles to Colossians chapter 1, we're looking today at verses 13 and 14.

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Now we're going to pick up, and I'm going to start the context here by just simply repeating verse 12, is where we left off last week, where it said, "...giving

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thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints and light, for He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved

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Son, in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins." So, for He rescued,

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He has delivered us, who hath delivered us, you can translate it different ways there, and some translations will put a period after verse 12 as actually more of a continual sentence here, because it's establishing the fact that we give thanks to the

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Father, God the Father, who is the one that qualified us to share in the inheritance of the light, for He, this is referring to God the

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Father, He is the one that rescued us from the domain of darkness. You typically think of Jesus Christ being the one that rescued us, it's actually

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God the Father that qualifies us, God the Father that rescues us through the agency, through the giving of His Son.

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It is the Son that makes the payment on the cross of Calvary, it is God the Father who draws all men to Himself, and it is based on the payment of the

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Son that we are able to stand justified before God the Father. So you've got a beautiful picture there of the eternal love between all the persons of the members of the

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Trinity. And this section of Scripture here really brings that out in beautiful form here.

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New American Standard, this first word here, rescued, in verse 13 in New American Standard, it says, for He rescued.

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The English Standard uses, He has delivered. The King James uses, who hath delivered us.

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I think either way you're good. The Greek word is rouamahi, rouamahi.

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It means I rescue, deliver from danger or destruction. It's the same word, many of you are probably very familiar with the

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Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6, right? You know that line in there where it says, deliver us from evil, or deliver us from the evil one?

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That same word that's translated deliver in the Lord's Prayer is the same word translated either delivered or rescued here in Colossians.

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Same word. It is also the same word, and it's in a different form, but in Romans 11, 26 when it refers to Christ as the great deliverer of Israel, of His people, same function there.

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It is God who delivers or rescues and transfers us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved

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Son, or His Son of His love. God is able to justify the sinner based on the payment for sin that His Son made by shedding

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His blood as a perfect, sinless Lamb of God. The kingdom of elect people that the

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Father gives to the Son is an expression of His eternal love for the Son.

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The beautiful picture within the Trinity in salvation is something that I'm amazed by on a daily basis, and this is one aspect of that.

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It says, I rescue, I deliver. Turn with me if you will to John chapter 6 in your

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Bibles. John chapter 6, I'm going to read for you verses 37 through 40.

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It says, All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out.

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For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me.

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This is the will of Him who sent me, that of all He has given me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.

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Notice in verse 39 when He says, now this is Jesus speaking of God the Father. He says, This is the will of Him, the will of God, who has sent me, that of all that He has given me

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I lose nothing. What does this mean? Well it means that the great rescue mission, the great rescue mission that God performed in sending

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His Son, Jesus Christ, and that is what we celebrate at Christmas, right? We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

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Jesus Christ's birthday, you'll hear sometimes children will sing the Happy Birthday Jesus and even have a cake and celebrate it and the whole shebang and that's perfectly fine, that's a great thing.

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But understand what you're really celebrating. We're celebrating, aside from the resurrection of Christ, the single greatest proof that we have that the

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Bible is true, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The moment in real time when the

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Creator of the Universe, the Sovereign God, entered into the creation that He created, took on persecution,

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He was sinless, He was betrayed, and still went to a cross and died for us.

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And it is the big Christmas we celebrate the moment in time which He was born, which the Holy Spirit married, became as a virgin, through the virgin birth.

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She was pregnant, she was with child, had never known a man, she was a perfect virgin.

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There's no doubt that's one of the areas that liberalism wants to attack, because if they can deny the virgin birth, they can deny a sinless

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Savior. If they can deny a sinless Savior, they can deny a perfect sacrifice. If they can deny a perfect sacrifice, they can deny a perfect Savior, and if they can deny a perfect Savior, then they can deny a

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God who is our Judge and who we owe our very lives to. See, so it's all connected.

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And in verse 40, it says, For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I myself will raise him up on the last day.

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This great Meschke mission performed by God in sending His Son to make atonement for sin, what these verses mean here is that it has a 100 % success rate, 100 % success rate.

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You will not find one instance in Scripture where Jesus tries to save someone and fails.

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Every single person that exercises true, authentic, believing faith in Jesus Christ will be saved.

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They will have eternal life. It is only those that have denied Christ, that have denied what

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God has revealed about Himself and about who we are, it is only those that die choosing their sin and die in their lost state that will find themselves in hell.

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No one will be in hell because they are somehow a victim of circumstances. They will only be in hell because they have chosen to be there, they have rejected the payment that Christ has made for them.

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So it can be said that all the Father gives to the Son will come to the Son, and everyone that believes and has faith in the

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Son will in fact have eternal life. Because this cross that is over here in the corner, that we leave out as a reminder, has a 100 % success rate.

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Christ's atonement wasn't just good enough for half of your sins, or 75 % of your sins.

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It was good enough to wipe the slate completely clean. It takes the darkness in our hearts and washes it white as snow.

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See, when you think about a rescue mission, and those of you that have ever been in the military might have either been involved with one, or maybe you were aware of one that your unit performed at some point.

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But when you think of rescue missions, we typically think of the military, or something we saw in a movie,

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Arnold Schwarzenegger probably did at some point. But it's necessary.

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Why? Because the one being rescued can't save themselves. Think about that.

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There's no need for a rescue mission if the person you're going to rescue could save themselves.

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The reason you need someone to rescue you is because you're in such a state that you can't save yourself.

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And that's true of us. We can't save ourselves. The very second we were born and began to sin,

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God would be perfectly just and righteous to wipe us out.

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Adam and Eve, the second they ate from that fruit, He would have been perfectly just wiping them out right then and there.

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But God is so gracious and so merciful. You'll hear a lot of times, they'll talk about the forbearance of God, the forbearance of God in relation to sin.

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What this is saying is that God doesn't excuse the sin. He's not overlooking it. He's simply forbearing or putting off the payment, the justice, the wrath, what the sin deserves.

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And He does this, thankfully, in large part with us on a daily basis.

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The soul that sinneth it shall die. The wages of sin is death. Thankfully, by the mercy and grace of God, we don't have to save ourselves because we can't.

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We can't change our spiritual condition. We can't raise ourselves to spiritual life. We need a rescuer.

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We need a Savior. The reason this person being rescued needs a rescuer is because they don't have the capacity to change their imprisoned state.

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If you think about a slave or someone that is imprisoned in a jail cell, now

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I know sometimes people break out of jail, mostly on the movies. Lex Luthor seems to escape jail more often than not and Superman has to go and put him back in jail.

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But in jail, in slavery, especially in these times, you did not get out of it.

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You were there permanently. There was no change. You could do nothing to change your imprisoned state.

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Therefore, they and us who are in the bondage of sin, slaves to sin, spiritually dead, are in need of the one with the power to rescue, the power to save.

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We are rescued or delivered from the domain of darkness, it says. Now, going back now to Colossians chapter 1 and verse 13, it says, for He rescued us from the domain of darkness, the domain of darkness.

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We are born sinners. We are under the condemnation of our own sin and deserving of the wrath of God for our own sin.

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You know, Romans 8 .1, one of the more well -known verses of the Bible, it says, you know, therefore there is now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus.

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That verse is reflecting something that has changed, not what the original state was.

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Therefore, there is now no condemnation. Why? Because you are in Christ Jesus.

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The natural state of man is a state of spiritual death, a state of slavery to sin, bondage to sin.

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You say, why any free will? Well, yes, man has free will to make choices, but man has free will to make choices that are consistent with his nature.

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So we have free will to make choices that are consistent with the sinful nature that we have.

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So that is why we see man in his natural state naturally choosing sin.

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This is why we say that man left in this natural state without accepting Christ will die choosing their sin because it is our nature.

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That is why when we talk about salvation, it says we become a new creature. We have a new nature.

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We are a new creature in Christ. We have new desires, a new will, a new range of options.

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We have a Holy Spirit that gives us the power to overcome temptation and to choose righteousness because we have been rescued and delivered from this domain of darkness.

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We need to be rescued. We need to be liberated from this kingdom, this domain of darkness.

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Now this word in verse 13, domain, it could also be translated dominion, power, authority, and it is

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Satan's authority. Now don't misunderstand and don't miss the fact that Satan only has authority that God gives him.

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Remember the story of Job and all that he did to Job? Satan only did those things to Job, why?

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Because God allowed him to do those things. Satan can do nothing. God is sovereign,

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Satan is not. But in this life he is referred to as the God of this world, little

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G. The king, the one that has authority over this world. First John goes into great detail about lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and speaks of the fact that there is the darkness of this world.

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I think it is in Ephesians in chapter 6 it talks about the prince of the power of the air, so on and so forth.

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Satan is the ruler currently of this world. Satan's kingdom is one of spiritual darkness that we find ourselves imprisoned, and it is one that is full of deception and wickedness.

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It is from this domain that we need saving and delivering.

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If you doubt that this kingdom, that this domain, that this dominion exists,

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I have only one instruction for you, and it is something that will be very easy for you to do. Turn on the

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TV. Turn on the

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TV. Watch the news. What was it, in Egypt hundreds were just killed?

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Was it yesterday? Or the day before? What was the largest killing in Egypt? You had the

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Texas shootings that our brother Ray is still taking up dollars, one dollar a piece.

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We are going to send some money down there to help them. It is a dark world.

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You say, why doesn't God do anything? Oh, He will. That is the thing.

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He will. One day He is going to come back, and He is going to set it right, and sin will be done away with.

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Satan and his false prophet will be thrown alive into the lake of fire.

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They will be the first, Satan will be the first person to populate the eternal hell, the lake of fire.

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Now, when you die now, you are still in a place, hell, but the lake of fire is a space that is reserved for the time after the great white throne judgment, when all judgment on sin is made, and then

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Satan is cast alive into the lake of fire. And that time will come. He will meet his judgment.

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He will meet everything that is coming to him. But for now, God sovereignly allows him to do that which he does.

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And when it talks about the fact that Satan operates the way he does because he knows his time is short, that is because Satan is no dummy.

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He knows the scriptures. And the judgment on Satan and his false angels that fell with him have already been pronounced.

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There is no possibility for change for them. They know it is only a matter of time before the lake of fire is where they are thrown into.

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So that is why they operate to the degree that they do, because they say, well, we might as well cause as much havoc, as much deception, as much wickedness, and as much sin as we can, because we know that Jesus Christ is real, and one day

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He is going to deal with us. So we have to do what we can while we can. But this word domain, referring to the domain of Satan, turn with me if you will to Acts chapter 26.

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Acts chapter 26, we are going to look at verse 18. This section in here, beginning in verse 12,

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Paul is giving a description of his conversion about how he was on the Damascus road. He had the letters in hand to go kill these

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Christians. And Jesus Christ comes out of nowhere, the shining light, and says,

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Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He is like, who are you, Lord? He is like, it is me,

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Jesus, the one you are persecuting. And he is converted right there on the road to Damascus.

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And at the end of this particular account in verse 18, he is telling Paul now what he is going to do for him.

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You are going to go out, you are going to preach to the Jews and the Gentiles, and you are going to see many rescuing, verse 17, rescuing you from the

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Jewish people and from the Gentiles to whom I am sending you. And verse 18, to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, from darkness to light, and from the dominion of Satan to God, from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, which is a result of salvation, a result of our justification before God.

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And see if this looks familiar from last week, an inheritance, an inheritance among those, the inheritance of eternal life, the inheritance that we look forward to in the blessings of the eternal state, in eternity, when we will live forever with Jesus Christ.

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But notice this at the end of this verse, who have been sanctified or set apart to God by faith in me.

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Now keep in mind the context here. This is Jesus Christ speaking to who then was

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Saul, changed to Paul, on the road to Damascus to kill Christians.

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And in this moment in time, he tells them you are now going to become, go from the great persecutor, you're going to become the great persecuted.

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You're going to go from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan to the dominion of God.

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And it is this gospel message of Jesus Christ that Paul took to everyone.

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It is this same gospel message that we read about in the completed revelation of God in his word that we call the

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Bible. And we are sanctified, we are justified, we are saved, and we are rescued by God on the basis of our faith.

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Beautiful picture there of this. So what's the change? What is changing here?

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What's the difference? Well, notice going back to Colossians, our main text here, verse 13, he says, for he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, or the kingdom of the son of his love.

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So what has changed in salvation? You go from being slaves of sin to slaves of Christ.

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Slaves of sin, slaves of righteousness. But I would make the argument to you this morning that the only true freedom in this life, the only true freedom you'll ever have is to be a slave of Christ and a slave of righteousness.

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We as created beings are always going to be under someone's dominion, someone's authority.

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While the term submit and submission has gotten a bad rap, and largely people don't understand what it truly means, the fact of the matter is all of us as human beings, either willfully or based on the bondage and slavery that we find ourselves in, are going to submit to something and or someone.

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And the state of sin that we find ourselves is lost. We are slaves of sin. We submit to sin.

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That's the only thing we can do. We are under the authority of sin, the bondage of sin, the dominion of sin.

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When we are saved, we are liberated, but we are liberated to become slaves of Christ.

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Romans 6 details this out very well for us. We are free from the bondage of sin.

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We are free to pursue righteousness. We can submit willfully to the Father. We can submit, bow the knee, and serve

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Christ. We can produce righteousness in our lives. So the only true freedom in this life is to be in fact a slave of Christ.

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We are transferred from darkness unto light, from Satan's authority to Christ. Now it's an interesting sort of thing here because God is fully sovereign, but it can be said about us in our natural state that we actually be under the authority of Satan, but then

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His authority is always under God's, everyone's is. It is the

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Kingdom of Christ. So when He says He's transferred us to the Kingdom of His Beloved Son, He's transferred us to the

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Kingdom of Christ. Now the Kingdom of Christ, there's many multiple facets to it.

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And we're not going to get into all of them today, but there's a present reality. Christ is ruling and reigning in the spirit and the soul, the life of believers.

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There's a future aspect to it with the Millennial Kingdom. And then there's the eternal state when paradise lost becomes paradise restored.

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The current earth and heavens are remade and everything is put back the way it should.

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And sin is no longer, and we rule on for eternity with Christ. But this

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Kingdom that we're transferred into is the Kingdom of Christ. And in whom?

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So notice here, verse 13, He says, For He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the

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Kingdom of His Beloved Son. In whom? So this in whom, now remember at the beginning of verse 13 when it said,

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For He rescued us, this was referring to God the Father. But there's a change here at verse 14 when it says,

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The Kingdom of His Beloved Son, in whom? This is referring to Jesus Christ, the second person of the

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Trinity. Well, what is it that we have in Jesus? We have redemption and the forgiveness of sins.

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So number one, we notice that we have redemption. I'm going to take a crack at this word.

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Apolutrosis. I'm pretty sure I got that wrong. Apolutrosis.

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I'm probably going to look it up on the internet later and realize I got it completely wrong. But that is the

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Greek word that is translated here, redemption. And it means a release. It means to deliver by payment of ransom.

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Now, you could also say it's more literally the idea of sort of buying back from.

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Buying back from, use it by way of the payment of ransom. This particular word was used commonly in that day of freeing slaves from bondage.

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So someone would go and they would want to free a slave from bondage.

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They would find out what the payment would be to free them. They'd make the payment and then they'd be freed. Our will, our nature, our desires, our very soul, when we are born, before we are saved, are all in a very real spiritual slavery and bondage.

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You say, well, Andy, does this mean everyone is equally as bad or equally as sinful? No, depravity doesn't mean that man is as bad as he could be or that every single individual will sin to the max capacity that they could.

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God actively through the power of the Holy Spirit restrains sin to a very large degree and to a degree that I don't even think we can even comprehend.

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Which will be interesting to me in the Tribulational Period when God really pulls back and says, all right man, you think you can do it better?

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Have at it. And we read about what happens during that time period, don't we? So I believe that the restraining power of God is the only thing that keeps man from being as sinful as he possibly could be.

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But this redemption that we need is because of our bondage to sin. Christ made this payment to secure the ransom for our sin.

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For the sin of the believing ones. Those who will place their faith in Christ for salvation.

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That's what the cross is. It's a ransom payment. They refer to it, and I think this is 1

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John 2, 2. You may recognize this word. It refers to Christ's payment as being the propitiation for our sins.

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What that word means is that it is the satisfaction, the satisfactory payment for our sins.

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God's justice, God's holiness demands a payment for sin.

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Either we will pay it in eternity in hell for our own sins, or we will by faith accept the payment that Christ made on the cross, and we will stand perfectly righteous and justified before God.

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And this gift is free. It is on the basis of our faith. But it is a redemptive payment. It is based on the redemption found in Jesus Christ.

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So number one, we have redemption. And then lastly, number two, we have forgiveness of sins. This Greek word translated here, forgiveness, means a dismissal or a release of penalty.

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A sending away of sins forever. You know the verse in Psalms, as far as the east is from the west, that is how far our sins are removed from us.

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And as I've said when I've preached on this before, I can't humanly wrap my mind around how

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God forgets my sin, but the Bible says that He did so, so I believe it. But I am a finite creature.

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I can't, I'll be honest with you, I cannot humanly wrap my head, because I can't forget, well, the older I get,

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I forget more stuff. I'm not going to ask for anybody to raise their hands if you fit that bill.

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I don't forget more. But the idea that you could forget sin, in the eyes of God, I've never committed a single sin.

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It's because of what His Son did on the cross on my behalf. All right, take that one and run with it.

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I don't know how to humanly explain that to you, because it's a divine act, and we're just simply not divine creatures.

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But I believe it's true, and I believe it's true on the basis of what Christ did for me. It means complete forgiveness without any possibility of reversal.

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God's never going to come back to us one day and say, you know what, that whole cross thing, I changed my mind.

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Reverse that, you've got to work for it, not on the basis of faith. You know why He can't do that?

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God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God in His perfect character cannot deny

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Himself, and He's already said in His revealed Word that salvation is on the basis of His grace and is by faith.

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For Him to do that would deny Himself, and God is incapable of doing that. This word could also mean pardon.

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Many of our hymns will utilize this terminology, a pardon for sin. This is an interesting one,

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I like this. A pardon being the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty.

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The excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty.

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God will never come to us one day wanting a payment for our sin. How thankful we should be because of that one fact.

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God is never going to come to you, my friends, and say, you know what, I know I told you that my son's payment on the cross was enough, but there was a little bit left over, and I need you to cover the difference.

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He will never do that to you. Our salvation is secure. It is full.

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It is eternally secure. Nothing can change it. Nothing can reverse it.

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It is finished in the mind of God. It was fully dealt with on the cross, and is fully forgiven on the basis of faith.

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So my friends, to wrap this up, does Christmas really matter? Oh yeah, you betcha.

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Why? Because of Christmas, because of the incarnation of Christ, because of that baby

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Jesus in that manger, because of what He grew up to do, we have the following.

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We have release from bondage to sin, and we have it in Christ. We have all of our sins forgiven, we have them forgiven in Christ.

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We are justified and declared righteous before God, and we have that justification in Christ Jesus.

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Yes, Christmas does matter. The incarnation of Jesus Christ does matter.