A Greater Sickness IX: Evidences of the Cure

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie, along with Dr.

John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author of the Behold Your God study series. Over the last couple of months we've had the backdrop of the coronavirus, and today in the latest news,

John, it seems like things are beginning to open up. Some restaurants are, in Mississippi at least, some restaurants are allowed, you know, 50 % capacity.

Some churches are beginning to meet again, or at least making plans to. And so it seems like there's a sense of the light at the end of the tunnel and life getting back to some sense of normalcy.

We can see that there will be an end to this virus, but we still want to continue, we want to complete the series on man's greatest, greatest virus, and that being sin.

In this series we've drawn, we've tried our best to draw some parallels between the physical virus of the

COVID -19 coronavirus and sin. They both spread aggressively.

They both replicate. They both destroy as they move further. They're both difficult to see, but they still have clear symptoms.

They mask themselves. And let me encourage you, if you've missed any of these episodes, go back, listen to them, because as we discussed in the last two weeks with the cure for this disease, for the virus of sin, we talked about just how

Christ is lovely, how His work is applied to us. But John, where are we going now that we've talked about the cure, where do you go now?

Yeah, our last question is really, I think, a very encouraging one, but also pretty critical in the religious culture that we live in, and that is, are there evidences that are available to demonstrate that you really have been cured?

You know, what evidences can you produce to say, I am cured, or God has saved me?

And, you know, what does the Bible say that those are? What does the Bible say that they aren't?

And, you know, so we want to look at that big picture today. Yeah, because when you think about it, so again, just drawing that parallel between the physical and spiritual virus, let's say, you know, when things are opening back up even more wide, or, you know, now with some restaurants opening up, and let's say your waiter comes to your table at a restaurant, and you find out he was in the hospital last week, or two weeks ago as it may be, with the coronavirus.

You're gonna want to know that he is fully cured, and it may be, hey, have you got a little doctor's note that says, you know, not just cured, but, you know, contagion -free while you're serving us?

And, you know, we may look for some type of evidence of a person who's been cured.

We need to have that same evidence in the spiritual cure as well. Yeah, I think that it really is a significant question.

Does the Bible give us evidences that we can look for, or that we can present, to demonstrate that what we say about the work of God in us and for us is valid?

The law of God provides for this in the physical realm as well as the spiritual. So I want us to consider just one example from Leviticus chapter 14.

In dealing with the situation of leprosy, so obviously a pretty dangerous disease, and if a person was a leper, then they had to.

There are all these very specific laws about where you can live, you know, how not to spread the contagion, announcing yourself as a leper if people got near.

But what did you do if you ever got cured of leprosy?

And so the Bible gives some very specific steps. Now I want to read the entire passage just to show the specificity of it.

So in Leviticus 14 we read this, "...shall

also give orders to slay the one bird in an earthenware vessel over running water.

As for the live bird, he shall take it together with the cedar wood, and the scarlet string, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the live bird in the blood of the bird that was slain over the running water.

He shall then sprinkle seven times the one who is to be cleansed from the leprosy, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the live bird go free over the open field.

The one to be cleansed shall then wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and bathe in water, and be clean.

Now afterward he may enter the camp, but he shall stay outside his tent for seven days.

It will be on the seventh day that he shall shave off all his hair, he shall shave his head, and his beard, and his eyebrows, even all his hair.

He shall then wash his clothes, and bathe his body in water, and be clean.

So all these very specific rules for if you are ever to enter back into society after having leprosy, this is the appropriate way to show the priest that you're clean, and then the priest to turn and show the nation that you are in fact clean.

Yeah, and there's a New Testament parallel with that in Matthew 8, 1 through 4. It says this, when

Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed him. And a leper came to him and bowed down before him, and said,

Lord if you are willing, you can make me clean. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying,

I am willing, be cleansed. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, see that you tell no one, but go, show yourself to the priest, and present the offering that Moses commanded as a testimony to them.

Yeah, so two parts there, and it's easy to forget the second part. The reality that Christ can cleanse anyone, so I am willing, be clean.

But the second is the command, go and show yourself in an appropriate way to the appropriate authority, so that they can go ahead and they can declare that you really are clean.

You know, so give evidence to those who knew the old you, to demonstrate that there's a new you, spiritually.

You know, we live in a culture, TJ and I do, where it's just pretty common to hear people, you know, say my little

Johnny or Susie got saved at church, and you want to rejoice with them.

You know, the parents are happy. But, you know, having grown up in this culture, this religious culture, where sometimes that's not handled in a very careful way, you just cannot help but have these doubts in the back of your mind, or these questions.

You know, there's a question mark there, and you don't want it to be there. But, is it real? We've met so many people that have been deceived unknowingly, you know.

Or even emotionally manipulated into. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the preacher doesn't mean to be deceptive, but he has been, or their parent doesn't mean to be, but they have been.

And so, the child repeats a prayer, thinks they're a Christian, and then later, you know, demonstrates that nothing really changed.

So, you know, in your mind there's this question, when you look at that kind of a situation, what evidence is there that there's been a real cure?

When you look in the mirror, can you say, I know I'm a believer? When you're talking to friends, or family, or people you work with, what can you point to to say, this is how

I know, and this is how you can know that I am a believer, or one other? When you count the cost for living for yourself, and then you see the cost of living for God, that cost is great when you come to Him for the cure.

But, you're willing to pay that cost, and it is a light cost. I mean, when you look at how

God discusses His law, His law is a joy. It's not a burden. His burden is light.

So, can you really expect to see that kind of change? Yeah, I mean, in sanctification, so I've been a

Christian for 31 years, and I face this in some ways more now than the first 10 years of being a

Christian. You know, when I first became a Christian, and I still saw struggle with sin in my heart, and you read the

Bible, and you understand why it's still there. You know, you look in the mirror, and you tell yourself, well, you've only been a

Christian a little while. You know, be patient. God is growing you up, and all of this will be placed under the feet of Christ, which is true.

But, 31 years later, if some of the same old lies can still trip me up, if some of the same old temptations can still distract me, if I can still find myself to be cold and sluggish, or what

Spurgeon called a poor dying rate of Christianity. When I see that in myself after being a

Christian for 31 years, it's not so easy to say to myself, come on, you've only been a for 31 years.

The Lord's going to do it, you know, or you know, He will give you grace to mortify these things day by day.

Well, that's true, but sometimes I have to go back to the Bible and ask God, okay, what can

I really legitimately expect in the work of Christ in this life? And so, you know, what are the evidences that should be there, you know, or how high can

I set my expectations? Yeah, because there are some people who say you have to expect perfection, which you'll deal with in a little bit.

Yeah, so what kind of changes can we really expect? Let me say that before we even look at that, some people would doubt that this is a valid question.

So, they might say this, well, look, the new birth is an invisible work of God. That's true. We don't see a person being changed within by the

Holy Spirit. We see the changes that occur after that, but we don't see the new birth itself. What about justification?

That certainly is an invisible event to us. It is the declaration of the triune

God that we are right with Him through the finished work of His Son, and we've received that through faith. What about union with Christ?

I can't see that occur. I can see effects of that. What about adoption? I don't have a paper, you know.

So, all these mighty works of God in this great, you know, the panoramic view of salvation, so much of it is invisible in itself.

Is it right to even say we should look for evidences? Another objection is that it's judgmental to look for evidences.

If someone says, comes to your church and says, I love Jesus, you should just accept that kind of statement.

Some of the earlier Baptistic churches, Presbyterian, Congregational, you know, so not state churches.

In England, and, of course, in the colonies in America, some of them had in their church constitution that for church membership, a person had to have or present a credible testimony, a credible evidence of conversion.

You had to be able to give the evidence to some degree. These are things we see God doing in this life.

So, I think that the Bible helps us particularly in two ways. First of all, it shows us that expecting to be able to give biblical evidence of conversion is right.

And second, it shows us what is to be expected and what is not to be expected, which you just mentioned one of the things, and that is like sinless perfectionism.

You know, this unflawed faith and an undiminished fervor, undivided heart, those are not evidences of the

Christian life, but so what is? There's a couple of New Testament passages that are very helpful.

Now, we'll only be able to give a couple, so T .J., why don't you read those? Yeah, we'll start with James 2, 4 through 18, where he explains that works justify our profession to have faith.

What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him?

If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, be warm, and be filled, and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?

Even so, faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. But someone may well say, you have faith, and I have works.

Show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works. Yeah, so I think we could sum it up by saying this.

If we, if a man can still come to Christ, a man, woman, child, and say to him, if you are willing, you could make me clean from the deepest stains of sins, you know, viral infection, then if that's still a valid request, then it's still valid to expect that Christ would say to us,

I am willing, be clean, and go back home, go back to work, go back to school, and show people the evidences, you know, that that you're a new person in me.

Yeah, and it does come to his honor as well. I mean, when we're talking about evidences, and should we seek evidences, it does come back to that.

But to go further, Ephesians 2, 8 through 10, says this, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not as a result of work, so that no one may boast.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, so that we would walk in them.

There's so many that we're going to have to limit ourselves, and it's going to take two podcasts, but even then, when we look at the evidences of the cure, we're just going to have to kind of group them together, and maybe kind of hit the tops of these mountain peaks, all right?

So let's just jump right in, and I think easiest way to do it would be kind of give some simple scenes, you know, for our listeners, things that are easy to carry with you through the week.

So the first scene is this. Imagine a man standing beside an empty grave.

He's facing away from the grave, walking away from it. That's our first picture. It's a good picture for the description of what are the evidences of God's work in your heart.

One evidence is that you, having died with Christ to sin, have been raised with Christ to a new life.

I mean, listen to Romans chapter 6. Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the

Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. So there's Paul's wonderful description.

We once were in a grave. We were dead to God. That is unresponsive, like a corpse, unresponsive to every voice, to every plea, unresponsive to their environment.

That's the way we were with spiritual things. When the Bible says in Ephesians 2 that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, it doesn't mean that we are inactive.

Sadly, we were very active. We lived aggressively for me, for ourselves, but when it came to God, the realities of God, the claims of God, the beauties of God, the sweet voice of God, you know, all of that, to that we were unresponsive.

We were dead, calloused. Now what Paul describes in Romans 6 is this.

When a man embraces Christ by faith, he is placed into Christ. He's baptized into Christ by the

Spirit, and of course we demonstrate that outwardly by a water baptism. And it's like in the baptism, you know, a man as Baptist, you know, with immersion, it's very clear.

A man is placed in Christ. It's like he goes into the grave with Christ, and he rises out of the grave with Christ.

You know, it's just a symbol of what spiritually really does happen. So Paul says, if you belong to Christ, then belonging to Christ, being united to Christ, means what

Christ did affects you. So when Christ died, then actually, then you spiritually, then you've died.

The old you, when you embrace Christ, the old John Snyder has been laid aside, and a new

John Snyder walks out of the grave with Christ. So not only have we died to the old life, and the old sinful nature,

Paul says in Romans 6, has received a mortal wound, so it doesn't tyrannize us anymore.

Our identity now is that I'm a new man. I have a new identity. There's a new

John Snyder raised with Christ, and so that's one of the first evidences. Yeah, so what good would it be if we had this new life, and everything in our new life was exactly the same, right?

So talk to us about some of those differences in the new life. Yeah, I mean, what good would it be, as you said, to come up out of a grave and be the same you, you know, just to have a second chance in life, but to have no power to live differently?

So the Bible does give us some really wonderful metaphors for this, and these are metaphors we're all used to, if we're, you know, familiar with Scripture, but I don't want us to lose the weight of them, the shock, that, you know, the astonishing value of these, because we're familiar with them.

So one would be the new birth. A Christian is born again, and that shocked

Nicodemus, the Bible teacher, in John chapter 3. I can't start over. I've lived my whole life this way, religiously, and you're telling me,

Jesus, that this is not enough, that I don't even understand anything about the kingdom of God? Well, I devoted an entire life to this religion.

I can't start over, can I? Can I become a babe again? Well, actually, yes, spiritually, you can be born all over again, and you must be.

Another metaphor is a new creation, Paul says in 2nd Corinthians. Another is a new creature, or another, a spiritual resurrection.

So all these are pictures of something that's completely new, fundamentally new.

So not just, let's try that again, let's have a second chance, but a completely new you in this new life.

C .S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, which I remember, when I first got married,

I read books to my wife each night as we would go to sleep. The problem was, my wife falls asleep easier than I do.

So, you know, we're halfway through a chapter, I look over, and she's asleep, and I think, I don't want to stop yet, I want to find out what happens.

So it didn't work very well, because, you know, the next night she would say, okay, where were we? And I'd say, well, you fell asleep in chapter 1, but I'm in chapter 4, and she would say, well, like, well, go back to chapter 1, and I think,

I don't want to read chapter 1 again, I want to read chapter 5, you know? But anyway,

I can't remember if I behaved well there, or if I was selfish. The Chronicles of Narnia, there are two pictures

I want to mention. One is the picture in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the other is a picture in the story of the

Silver Chair, all right? So, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is one of my kids' favorites, you know, probably one of my favorites of all of his books.

So they're going on this venture, but in the middle of the venture, they're taking this really rotten kid named

Eustace, their cousin, who's just made everybody miserable because he's so selfish and arrogant. Well, Eustace is turned into a dragon magically, and at first he thinks it's a pretty cool idea, but then he realizes that he's alienated from everybody.

He can't have a normal life, so he gets tired of being a dragon, and he decides he wants to take care of this.

So he meets the figure in the books for Christ, Aslan, the lion, and so the lion tells him to scrape off the dragon scales so he can be a boy again.

So he scrapes and scrapes with his dragon claws, and it hurts, but after he scrapes off scales, he looks and there's just other scales, and so, you know, it's just layer after layer, and he can't really get back to a boy.

And then Aslan says to him, I'll have to do it, and then the lion, with his sharp claws, tears deep, and, you know,

Eustace isn't sure he's gonna make it through the process, but he rips off the dragon skin, really, and all that's left is the boy.

So, interesting picture of Lewis's, you know, metaphorical way of describing how God, what

He must do to us. Another is the silver chair. The prince is deceived by a witch.

The way he stays under the power of the witch is he's belted into, he's locked into this silver throne each night, and the throne is bewitched, and so it bewitches him, but when he's in the throne at night, he comes to his senses, and he tells the truth, and he realizes he's a captive, but after a night in the throne, the next day, then he's under her spell again, and the kids have to go and rescue him.

I just mentioned those to say this. Good pictures of what Christ has to do to make us new so that we can walk away from the grave.

He changes us so deeply, much deeper than we could just by scraping off the ugly spots of life, and He has to break the grip that sin has on us so that we can really be in our right minds.

Okay, so Christ makes a new me, a new me walking away from the grave, a new life, a new me.

Now, that sounds good, but let's think specifically about that. Do you remember when we were talking about the impact of sin on us?

We said that sin isn't just against God, it's against us, and sin employs every aspect of us in a rebellion against God, but the work of Christ reverses every one of sin's, you know, terrible influences, so think about us.

That means every part of me is being impacted by Christ's rule, whereas it once was impacted by sin.

So sin caused my body to be devoted to the emptiness of living for self. The senses were open doorways to the lies of temptation.

The faculties of the soul, you know, the mind, the desires, the choices were under the tyranny of sin, and now

Christ comes, and He makes a new me. So the body, Romans 6, we present our body, these instruments, as instruments of righteousness to serve

Christ, and not as instruments of sin's service any longer. What about our senses, our sight?

We see the beauty of Christ now. Our taste, we used to think that God was probably good for you, like really bitter -tasting medicine, but it's not somebody you would want to have anything to do with, but Christ works in us in such a way that suddenly we know that what

David said is true. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good, not just morally good, but thrillingly good, you know, attractive, desirable.

Hearing, think about the hearing. Christ opens our ears. We once had to listen to a thousand masters when sin ruled us.

Now, only one voice, God's. The one voice we didn't want to listen to now is the, the one voice we did not want to listen to in the old life is the only voice that we want to listen to now, and we hear that voice, follow me, and it means something to us now.

Think about the faculties of our soul. The mind is freed to really understand what

Christ has been saying all along, and oftentimes people describe coming to Christ in this way,

I get it now, I get it, I've heard this all my life, I get it, you know, and then the will,

Christ gets me, you know, I happily, I jump up and run to him.

The heart, I find him infinitely desirable, irresistible, captivating, where at once I had no appetite for him.

So, you think about the memories before Christ, memory devoted to pulling up old sins and wrong thoughts, pulling up hurts and bitter memories where we hold grudges and nursing those, you know, turning them around again and again before our mind, our eyes sight, you know, turning them around in front of our mind's eye, cherishing them.

Now, as a Christian, we start to store up in our memory the truths of Christ.

Think about our imagination, same thing, once devoted to things that were impure, now the imagination devoted to things that are pure.

So, from head to toe, however you look at the human existence, the evidence of being in Christ is that I'm a new man.

The name Charles Spurgeon can evoke countless stories and quotes, but how much do you know about the man himself?

In the feature -length documentary, Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, get to know the man many consider the best preacher of the 19th century.

My text should be, unto you therefore, which believe he is precious, and I would trust the

Lord to open my mouth in honor of his dear son. He seemed a great risk and serious trial, but depending upon the power of the

Holy Ghost, I would at least tell out the story of the cross and not allow the people to go home without a word.

To learn more about Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, visit Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

So, after hearing all of this, John, so many evidences for the cure, but particularly there at the end,

I hope that we all understand now why we went through so many weeks of understanding and detailing the nature of sin in our lives.

The fact that our hands are swift to it, our memory runs to it, all of these things, so that when we see the work of Christ and the evidence of the cure, that is made all the more precious to us.

And so there's a bit more that we want to get to. We're going to hit in one more episode coming up next week, but before we do,

John, we've got a prayer this week from Henry Law. Yeah, Henry Law, who's become one of our favorites around here.

This is what he wrote. Holy God, we know that in us, that is, in our flesh, there dwells no good thing.

We bewail our many and our mighty sins. We loathe ourselves because of our original vileness, our deep inner corruptions, and the iniquities of our every hour from the cradle to this time.

We lie in dust and ashes before the majesty of our God, but in all our misery of sinners, we look to you, and our hearts fear not.

We triumph, and we glory in your saving name. It is a treasure house of all riches for us.