Session 3: An Historic Testimony (Jude 3-5)

Kootenai Church

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Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome, come on in and find your spot. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer.

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Then I'll make a few announcements. Our Father, we are so grateful to you for another day that you've given to us. We thank you for the blessings and the mercies that rest upon those who are yours in Christ Jesus.

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We thank you for the grace again of salvation and the opportunity to focus our hearts and our minds upon the great gift that you have given to us in your son.

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And so we pray that today you would keep our minds and hearts alert, that you would shine the light of truth upon our minds and upon our hearts, that we may know you in a deeper and more profound way as a result of our time here together.

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We pray that your grace may rest upon us and upon this time for the glory of Christ our Lord in whose name we pray, amen.

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So with that, I will turn it over to Dr. Kistler. Good morning.

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Now we know who the real Christians are. People have come back.

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I wanna recommend a couple of books that you have sinfully overlooked. None But Christ is the most

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God -honoring, Christ -exalting book I have ever read or published. There's about a half dozen of them back there.

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Can't recommend that highly enough. Anything that honors Christ is good stuff.

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The second one is called The Christian Father's Present to His Children by John Angel James, who was a 19th century

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British pastor. The basic premise of the book is the best thing you can do for your children is to give them a godly upbringing, not necessarily leave them a lot of money for when you croak.

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And it talks about helping them choose friends, modesty, are you kidding me?

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It's a forgotten word and a forgotten concept in our day. It's interesting to me that in church history, during the

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Puritan days, the average age of conversion was six to nine. Today, it's 18 to 27.

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What's the difference? Two things. Parents no longer catechize their children.

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And if you don't like the Westminster, shorter catechism for children, Spurgeon had his own, if you're locked into everything

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Baptist. The other thing is that they were kept in the church worship service.

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Faith comes by hearing, right? There's no age limit on that. You say, well, wait a minute, those are little kids.

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We have two examples in scripture of kids being converted in the womb. Don't take that lightly.

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We had a friend up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. They had seven children. She started reading the scripture to them as soon as she knew that she had a child inside her.

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She would sit in a rocking chair, hold her tummy and read the

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Bible. Every one of those kids made a credible profession of faith by the age of six.

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Probably just a coincidence, right? No, I've never understood why churches, just before the sermon starts, send the kids out.

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If faith comes by hearing, why would you eliminate them from the one thing God has said that he will use to reach them?

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And then somebody always wants to say, well, how about Paul? He was riding a horse on the way to Damascus when he got saved.

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Okay, fine, get a horse and head for Damascus. By the time you hit the Pacific, it's gonna get tough.

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But don't go by the exception, go by the rule. We started catechizing our daughter when she was two.

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The motivation was 50 bucks. But I don't care why she did it, she memorized the whole thing.

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And now the one who remembers it all is me. Every night we'd add a question. Well, enough of that.

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If you have a Bible, and you should at a Bible conference, turn to the book of Jude.

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Now I'm reading from the New King James version of the Bible. I just said once in a teenager thought it was the

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LeBron James version of the Bible. I know the pastor here uses the

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NASB, and I used to, but this comes in an 18 point font.

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And that's why it's my Bible of choice. I will tell you this story.

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I was preaching once in Edinburgh, Scotland, for Eric Alexander at St.

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George's Tron Parish Church. He, my favorite preacher in the whole world. You look up the grace of age in the dictionary, there's his picture.

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And I was invited to preach there. So it's a traditional old church with the wine goblet pulpit and the staircase you have to mount to get up to it, but 20 feet high.

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And I love their worship service. The people sit down and then a church officer named the

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Beatle, B -E -E -D -L -E, walks in with the pulpit Bible. Immediately the people stand up.

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That's the word of God. Then he places it on a podium right in front of the pulpit.

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Then elders come in and they sit down across here, facing the people, which is their way of saying, we support him.

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Architecturally, the reason for the elevated pulpit was twofold. Everything was theological. We want the people to look up to the minister, literally.

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And we want people to sit under the preaching of the word of God. Everything had a theological or biblical reason.

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So we walk up there and we're sitting on a bench and he introduces me to preach and I get up and he looks at the spine on my

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Bible and says, do American Standard. He grabs me up by the sleeve and he pulls me back.

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Now, when I'm ready to preach, I'm focused. I told

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Jim yesterday, the rapture could come and I'd say, can you wait 40 minutes? I'm not done yet. And he pulled me back and he said, and now this is my horrible

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Scottish accent. Don't use that translation here. What?

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Don't use that translation here. I said, what do you use? We use the

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NIV. I said, this is a much better translation. He goes, no doubt, but we don't consider anything

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American, the standard of anything. So all my notes, the scripture is in the

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NASB and I'm having to go back and forth like this. I had to look like a man watching a tennis match going back to the

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NIV. Well, in the book of Jude, follow along as I read verses three and four and five.

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Beloved, while I was very diligent to write you concerning our common salvation,

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I found it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints.

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For certain men have crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men who turned the grace of our

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Lord into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Those two verses are enough. The apostle Jude wouldn't fare well in our day. Our day is marked by ecumenism at the expense of truth.

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Our theology is monitored by ecclesiastical Rodney Kings. Do you remember that man who asked us, can't we all just get along?

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So the issue is no longer whether something is true or not, but what will be the consequences of believing it?

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In other words, will it divide? People get mad at people like me and your pastor for being theologically precise.

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Oh, you're just haranguing about words matter. The Holy Spirit chose certain words to use and not other words to use.

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And they say, well, doctrine divides. No, it doesn't. Error divides.

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Doctrine divides truth from error, but it's the error that's the problem, not the truth.

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Now it has to be truth spoken in love, no question, but still it has to be truth.

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The faith of which Jude speaks has been delivered once for all.

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And he says we must contend earnestly for it. Literally the

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Greek tells us to contend, to strive or to agonize for this faith.

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So we know two things already. It's once for all and it's worth fighting for.

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I told this story last night. And if you were here, tough. If you weren't here, it's the first time.

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But going to England and Oxford and Broad Street, Oxford, where there's a circle about the size of a medicine ball with a red brick cross in the middle, nobody but people like me paid any attention.

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But there in the 16th century, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned alive at the stake for their refusal to accept the doctrine of transubstantiation.

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They said, no, the wafer and the wine do not literally become the body and blood of Christ.

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First of all, that would be cannibalism which the Bible forbids. And while the flames were creeping up around them,

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Nicholas Ridley began to falter and was in danger of recanting. And then

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Hugh Latimer cried out to him, Mr. Ridley, plea the man. Today with God's help, we will light a fire in England that will never be distinguished.

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And then he closed with these words before they all died. Today, we begin to be

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Christians. Wow, where are those people today? Today the motto is, well,

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I don't want to offend anybody. I remember when I left Grace Community Church and went to work at a college in Missouri, it was a

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Methodist college, very liberal. We had a Friday morning, a faculty

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Bible study, which was a really a contradiction of terms because nobody had a

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Bible and nobody studied it. It's just somebody would write a paper and then we'd all discuss it and give our opinions.

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And I was taken aback by the liberal, they denied the deity of Christ, they denied the virgin birth, they denied the resurrection and they call themselves

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Christians. And I wrote John a long letter telling him about this because I'd heard

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John talk about liberalism from the pulpit. And I remember saying, it can't be that bad.

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Then I wrote him a letter, I says, you're not telling it bad enough, it's worse. I want to say something, but I don't want to offend anybody.

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And John wrote back, why should God be offended just so these clowns won't be? Isn't God's offense the one we ought to be worried about?

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Now you're aware, no doubt of the ongoing controversy, which is 500 years old at least and thousand years old at best of the only two theologies that have ever existed.

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It doesn't matter what you call it, Methodism, Presbyterianism, Baptist, Jewish, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, whatever.

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There's only two theologies. One is the theology of divine accomplishment. The other is the theology of human achievement.

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You're either saved because of what God has done or you're saved because of what you've done. Those are the only two options.

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You're either saved by faith alone or you're saved by works alone. And if you try to combine those two into a third possibility, such as faith plus works, it must have necessity fall into the works category because the faith wasn't enough.

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Your works made the difference. Faith alone is divine accomplishment and works alone is human achievement.

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You know, the majority of professing Christians believe this phrase, God helps those who help themselves is in the

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Bible. 70 % of professing Christians believe that man helps

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God save man. I remember when

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I got my Master of Divinity degree in Jacksonville, Florida, and a nice man put about 20 of us seminarians up so we wouldn't have to rent hotel rooms.

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And we were going around saying who we were and what do we do? And it came to this particular man's turn.

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And he says, my name's Bob. I save souls. I thought that's what

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God does. And he said, well, he helps. There are people out there using up good air who can't get anything more out of their brain than that.

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So ultimately, in most people's thinking, man saves himself with some help from God.

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Now we Protestants, we protesters who believe in that reformation formula that justification is by faith alone, hear the reply from Roman Catholicism.

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And again, we're talking about isms. Protestantism versus Romanism. They say that phrase is nowhere to be found in the

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Bible except as a denial in the book of James where it says

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Abraham was not justified by faith alone. They say

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Martin Luther added the word alone to scripture and they defy us to show where can you find it?

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And we search in vain to find that phrase because it's not used anywhere in the Bible. Neither is the word

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Trinity, but we believe that too. It seems to escape their notice that Bibles were printed before Luther was ever born that inserted the word alone after faith.

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One Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Kuhn, who's been in more trouble with that church than Luther ever was, wrote a book called

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Justification. And on page 249, he says the translation of this text with the inclusion of the word alone was not

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Luther's invention. And then he refers to several translations in which the word alone occurs, such as the

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Nuremberg German Bible reading of Galatians 2 .16 that was published in 1483.

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That was the year Luther was born. The same reading occurs in three

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Italian translations, one a Roman Catholic Bible in Genoa 1476,

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Venice 1538, and Venice 1546. And furthermore, Kuhn refers to Cardinal Bellarmine who's probably the greatest

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Roman apologist they've ever had. Joseph Bellarmine cited the following church fathers as having used the expression faith only in their writings.

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Origen, Hilary, not that one, Basil, Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and especially

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Ambrose and Bernard. Here's a quote from Clement of Rome in the first century. We are not justified by ourselves or our own wisdom or understanding or godliness, nor by such deeds as we have done in holiness of heart, but by that faith through which alone

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Almighty God has justified all men since the beginning of time. But you know, so what?

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Because it doesn't matter what Luther said or what Origen said or Basil said or Clementine.

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No, Clement, not Clementine, that's a song. In the final analysis, the only thing that matters is what does the

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Bible say? And what does the

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Bible mean by what the Bible says? The fact that the scripture doesn't use the two words together, faith alone, does not for a moment make it impossible that it teaches faith alone.

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And I believe that we can show clearly without any theological gymnastics that not only was justification by faith alone the war cry of the apostle

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Paul, but of Christ himself. I want you to turn with me to the book of Luke chapter 17.

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And what we're going to read is all in red letters, so you have to pay special attention to it.

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The red letters are infallible, the black letters are optional, right? Beginning in verse one through verse 10.

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Then he, obviously Jesus, said to the disciples, it is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come.

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It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

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Another translation is one of these little ones that believe in me. I don't know about you, but drowning is my least favorite way to die.

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Make it quick, bullet to the head, let's get it over with. We just had to put our dog down, a little miniature pincher, who was 19 years old.

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They should have let her go a long time ago. And we went to the vet and I said, how does this work?

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He says, well, we give it a shot to calm it down. Why do you need to calm it? It's going to be dead.

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No, that's out of human care, that's what we do. And once the dog is sedated, then we give it the injection.

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And I said, and then you just wait for it to take effect? He goes, no, the dog's gone before the needle comes out.

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And I said, all right, give me your card because that's how I want to go. I tell all my doctors,

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I don't care what you do to me as long as I don't feel it. And I say, if I feel it, so will you.

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Take heed to yourselves. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him.

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And if he sins against you seven times in a day and seven times in a day returns to you saying, I repent, you shall forgive him.

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And then the apostle says, okay, that's easy enough. No, they said, we're going to need more faith.

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So the Lord said, if you had faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be pulled up by the roots and be planted into the sea and it would obey you.

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And which of you having a servant plowing or tending sheep will say to him when he's come in from the field, come at once and sit down to eat.

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Will he not rather say to him, prepare something for my supper and gird yourself and serve me till I have eaten and drunk and afterwards you will eat and drink.

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Does he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not.

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So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you were commanded say, we are unprofitable servants.

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We have done what was our duty to do. The NSB says we are useless.

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We have only done our duty. Did you get that last part?

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That's the doctrine of justification by faith alone taught by Christ himself. When you've done everything

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I've ever commanded you to do, say, we're useless. That was just our duty.

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Jesus couldn't say it any plainer than that. The ending of that story is really ironic.

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I mean, you would expect that story to end like this. When you've done everything I've ever commanded you to do, you may say that you are indeed profitable servants.

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You've earned your master's favor and you've earned your pay and you have a right to it as a result of your labors.

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Wouldn't you think that if you did everything Christ had ever commanded you to do, you could puff out your chest just a little bit?

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Wouldn't you think that you would achieve something significant? I did everything

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Jesus ever said. That's why I'm always amazed at that story of the rich young ruler who comes to Jesus and says, what must

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I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, you know what the Bible says, keep the commandments.

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And the man said, I've already done that. Now what? It must've been so hard for Jesus to maintain composure and not use

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Greek words like you twit or something like that. And then he goes to show the man, you haven't kept one of them yet, much less all of them.

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But if you had, wouldn't you think that you were something special? Of course you would.

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You'd think you had a reward coming for being someone who'd actually obeyed all Jesus's commandments.

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Now this ending is a shock. It's a real surprise because not only does Jesus not commend them, he tells them they're utterly useless.

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That's what the word of the Greek means, unworthy or unprofitable. In fact, not only have they not achieved some lofty spiritual status, they had only done that which they were duty bound or obligated to do.

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They'd only been perfect. And that made them useless in God's eyes. When I graduated from high school,

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I was in the top 5 % of my graduating class. I had a friend named

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Rusty who was second to the bottom in our graduating class.

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He went on to serve 12 terms in the California House of Representatives, which explains a lot.

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So the day after graduation, I'm getting ready to have my folks take me down to Los Angeles to go to college.

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And they gave me a couple of gifts, a pair of red tennis shoes and a bedspread for my bed to dorm in college.

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And then Rusty drove up in his graduation present, fire engine red

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Corvette Stingray convertible. He honked the horn and said, come on out.

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So I walked out. What's this? He said, it's my graduation present. What'd you get?

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We haven't opened anything yet. You wanna go for a ride? I can't,

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Rusty. I'm getting ready to head out to LA. That's why we have the U -Haul trailer here and everything. Okay, see ya.

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And he dug out and I go back inside and my dad said, what was all that? That was

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Rusty. He got a Corvette convertible for graduating next to the bottom in his class.

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My dad, hmm. And I was in the top 5 % and I got tennis shoes and a bedspread.

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There's something wrong with this picture. I figured it. Now again, my dad was a cop. Big strapping guy.

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He'd been a mechanic in the Navy and at Standard Oil he had Popeye forearms. Strong guy.

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He walked over and he put his arm around my shoulder. He says, son, the only thing you need to think of is what you would have got if you hadn't graduated at the top of your class.

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I can't argue with logic. This story has eternal significance for every single person in this room.

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Jesus is telling us that if we were in the same relationship to God as these servants were to their master, if we met the commands of God to the fullest extent, we shouldn't stand tall and say we are profitable servants.

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On the contrary, we should still say we're unprofitable because all we've done is our duty. In other words, if we in all cases actually did love

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God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength every second of every day we live, if we loved our neighbor as ourselves in every instance in which we interacted with him or her, if we loved our enemies as we ought in every conflict, if we were never unjustifiably angry with anyone, which means we never get married, if we never spoke an unkind word to another person, if we never hated anybody, if we did all of our duties inside the home as well as outside the home to perfection with nothing less than an absolutely pure motive,

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God's glory and our neighbor's good at all times and in every situation, we wouldn't have even earned a thank you from God.

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In fact, Jonathan Edwards has a sermon, God don't thank men for doing their duty. Now, this doesn't mean for a moment that we actually ever could perfectly succeed in meeting the job description that Christ gives to us.

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What he is saying that is even if we did, we wouldn't deserve a handshake or a slap on the back or even a nod of approval.

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You know, the best thing you can hope for is that when you finally meet Jesus, he says, well done.

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Wouldn't that be enough for you? Now, if you're asking, what does this passage have to do with justification by faith alone?

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I hope you can see how Christ is driving home the truth of salvation by free unmerited grace.

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Even if you did surpass the morality of the scribes and Pharisees. And remember, Jesus said, unless your morality surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you have no chance of getting into heaven.

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You say, well, that's duck soup. He was always getting on the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes and Pharisees were the most noble, righteous, you know, in a moral sense people there were.

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They believed that if any one of them could do a thousand good deeds in one month, he would personally usher in the kingdom of God.

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You think they didn't try? There was a particularly devoted sect called the bruised and bleeding

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Pharisees. They were such because they took seriously the command to not lust after a woman in your heart.

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Now, in those days, the only thing you could see on a woman was her eyes and her toes. But that just proves them, if man's going to lust, he doesn't need much.

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Let him go to the mall today on a hot summer day and see how well they hold up. But they would see a woman walking towards them.

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And instead of stopping, they would cover their eyes and keep walking. They would walk into trees and buildings and bust their faces all up.

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And people would look, now there's a holy man. Look at that nose. Jesus said, if you can't do better than that, you got no chance.

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Now I mentioned that story at church service one time and somebody came up and says, Jesus was talking about positional righteousness.

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I said, is that what the Pharisees who heard that thought? They didn't know anything about positional righteousness.

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They knew exactly what he was saying. So if you did surpass the morality of the scribes and Pharisees, if you had no debts to ask

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God to forgive you of, if you had no offenses for which you needed to repent, if you'd been perfect all your life from the moment of your conception to your debut on the scene, if you work all your life for the

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Father, you have no right to the fatted calf. Most of you would remember

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Shirley Temple, right? She did a early movie when she was just a little kid with Buddy Ebsen.

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I think it was called Captain January. And she was an orphan and he adopted her.

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And on Sundays, he would take out the Bible and read her a Bible story. This particular day, they read the story of the prodigal son.

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And at the end of the story, Buddy Ebsen said, now, when the prodigal son returned, somebody was very unhappy.

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Who do you think that was? The fatted calf. If you're perfect, you've only done your duty.

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Your duty is to be perfect. People say, well, what are the standards in scripture?

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Well, in the Old Testament, it is be perfect. And then we'll say, well, how perfect?

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As if there are degrees of perfection. But we don't have to ask because it answers as your father in heaven is perfect.

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That's all you gotta do. Be as perfect as God is. Well, but the standard has been lowered in the

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New Testament because of Jesus. Jesus went to his father and said, father, chill out, will you? And so God said, okay,

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I'll lower my standards, I guess. No, the standard in the New Testament is be holy.

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Yeah, how holy? As your father in heaven is holy. That's all you gotta do, folks. Be as perfect as God and as holy as God, and you're home free.

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Take the rest of the day off. But if you were, you've only done your duty.

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If you think you have something owed you by God because of your faithful service, you're nothing more than that Pharisee who thanked

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God that he was not like the tax collector. He cited a list of all that he had done, and they were things that God had commanded, by the way.

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It wasn't just a rotary thing of, here's what you ought to do on a good day. But it was the other man who went down to his home justified.

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Remember that story? This man said he was, the tax collector was beating his breast and saying,

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God, be merciful to me. And here's where the translations get it wrong. They all say, be merciful to me, a sinner.

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That is not what it says. Be merciful to me, the sinner.

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I don't care about that guy. I don't care what he's done. I'm the sinner. You know, if you were the only person in the history of the world that would have come to faith,

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Christ would have died for you specifically, as long as you understand that you are the sinner.

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Paul was so clear that it's laughable what Rome denies in Romans 3 .28.

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A man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

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In Romans 4 .4, now to him that works is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.

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You really think God is in your debt? In other words, if you contribute anything to your justification, it means you must have earned it.

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Wasn't from grace, because you were a nice guy. In verse five, but to him who does not work, notice the contrast, not working, but believing, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.

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Paul contrasts faith with working for your justification. Justification is the one who doesn't work for it, not for the one who does.

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The Roman church teaches you actually merit eternal life for your good works. Let me quote to you from the official

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Roman document, the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. Quote, through such good works as he does by the grace of God and the merits of Christ, whose living member he is, a person truly merits increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of eternal life, he dies in grace.

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They said you've earned it. Now, both of the descriptions of justification can't be right.

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Now, we could be right and they could be wrong, or they could be right and we could be, but we both can't be right because those are differing views.

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One of them has to be wrong. How silly can a person be to think that if he was perfect, he had a right to eternal life?

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Could you really say, God, you owe me? The wages of sin is death, so as soon as a person sins, he's forfeited any right to exist.

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So we must be perfect simply to go on breathing, but breathing is not grounds for eternity with God.

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But that's all that you would have attained from being perfect. So how could solely, anyway, soberly think if perfect works can't merit eternal life, and if none of us has perfect works,

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James says in everything, in many things, we all offend. There's nobody without sin.

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How could imperfect works merit it? All of our works are stained with sin, and if our righteousness, as Jeremiah says, our righteousness is as filthy rags, and the word picture there is the cloth that a woman uses during the time where her body cleanses itself.

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That's not something you put on the coffee table for the visitors to see. You hide that, you get rid of it.

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If our righteousness is as filthy rags, what must our sin be? And if our sin -stained works have any merit, how could our sin -stained works have any merit with God if perfection holds none?

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Nothing is more natural to a carnal person than the idea that he can help God save him, and nothing is more repulsive to God.

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Your works can't save you. Now, hold on, your faith can't save you.

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Only Christ can save you. His name is Jesus, for he shall save his people, now that next preposition, very important, from their sins, not in them, from them.

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There are only two things the Bible says sinners need to be saved from. The first is sin. The second is the wrath to come.

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And if you'll take care of the first one, you'll never have to deal with the second one. Faith is not a

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Protestant work that outdoes all the Catholic works. It's merely grabbing hold of Christ and saying,

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I won't let go until you bless me. Our works merit nothing.

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His works merit everything. So there's a sense, yeah, I'm saved by works. What Christ did, not what

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I did. If you try to add to what Christ has done, you will subtract all that he has done.

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It's a fatal mistake I beg you not to make. Luther's teaching was not something he made up. It was an eternal truth he rediscovered for a church that has lost its moorings.

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Let's make sure we don't lose those moorings. I've been using this illustration for over 50 years now.

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I heard it from a man named Jack Lew, who was an assistant pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian Church under Lloyd Ogilvie, who went on to become chaplain of the

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U .S. Senate. It tells of three men who died simultaneously and showed up at heaven's gate seeking admission.

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Christ came out to meet them. He said to them, I'm going to ask you a question, same question for each of you, and your answer will determine your eternal destiny.

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So he asked the first man, why should I let you into my heaven? The man says, well, because I have faith.

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I believed in you. And Jesus says, so you want into my heaven based on what you've done.

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No one gets into my heaven because of something they've done and he sends him away. So he says to the second man, why should

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I let you into my heaven? Well, the second guy is not about the same mistake as the first man did. He says, because I not only believed in you, but I obeyed you.

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Trust and obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus, right? And Jesus said, well,

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I didn't write that song. If I did, it would have gone something like this.

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Trust and obey, for there's no other way to be in Jesus at all, much less happy.

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So you want into my heaven because of something you've done? And the man has no response.

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Nobody gets into my heaven because of what they've done. He sends him away. How'd you like to be that third guy?

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Jesus, why should I let you into my heaven? And the man is trembling, as you can imagine, and with a bowed head, he says,

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I can't think of a single reason, except you promised that if I would put my faith in what you did on the cross, you would accept me.

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And Jesus said, so you want into my heaven based on what I've done? The man says, that's all

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I've got. And Jesus smiles and says, that's all you need. And he shows him the way into heaven.

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There's a YouTube video I really like of Alistair Begg, and it's called

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The Man on the Middle Cross. And he's speaking to a group of pastors, and he says, we need to give ourselves the gospel every day.

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We need to preach the gospel to ourselves. And he says, how about the thief on the cross?

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He dies and he shows up at heaven's gate, and Peter's there and says, how are you on the doctrine of justification by faith alone?

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Man, never heard it. How many good works have you done? I just died.

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Although Dr. Gershwin used to say, that thief on the cross did more good works with the time he had left than many people do in their whole life.

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He praised Christ, he exonerated Christ, he rebuked the other malefactor. Don't tell me that guy never did any good works.

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And so they asked this thief on the cross, why should we let you in here? He says, all

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I know is the man on the middle cross said I could come. I love that. If you're in Christ today, it's because the man on the middle cross says you can come.

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If you're admitted to heaven, it will be because of what Christ has done, not because of anything about you. If I were to have a few moments with each of you, and I were to say, what makes you think you're a

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Christian? If the two first words out of your mouth are, because I, you're lost. Because Christ has paid the penalty for my sin, and has accepted me in the beloved.

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And that's the only reason I think I'm saved. Let's go, brother. This was the heart of the reformation.

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And how we need to hear that preach from the pulpit again today. Let's pray.

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Father, we thank you that the truth of scripture is there for us to see. May we use it wisely and faithfully.

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And may we always be grateful that you have paid the penalty for our sin.