Comforts From the Cross | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, John and I talk about the fact that sometimes as Christians, we think that we have understood the gospel and foolishly sometimes we think we have understood it to the point that we maybe reached the bottom and that there's not a lot left for us to understand.

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And then God comes in graciously and lovingly and explodes our hearts and our minds anew with the wonder and the truth and the mercy and the grace of the gospel.

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We talk today about comforts from the cross. The fact that when Jesus died and said that it is finished, that he had accomplished redemption and that his glory, his righteousness, his merits, his life really was counted to wretched sinners like us.

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We talk about that and its implications in the church. And then in the members podcast, we consider self -righteousness and how bad it is in the church and how if we understand the gospel rightly, it should promote love and unity because we understand that we all have the same righteousness, namely the righteousness of Christ.

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We hope that this conversation is encouraging to you. Stay tuned. Hey guys, as a quick reminder, if you'd like to join

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the

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Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself,

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Our brother, Jimmy Bueller, is busy planting a church and teaching children in school.

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We rejoice for his work in both of those capacities, and we look forward to having him back with us behind the mic next week.

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John, how are you doing today, man? I'm good. I'm good. I was trying to distract you in your introduction, but you just -

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I was locked in, dude. Like, laser focused. You were locked in. I can tell you're a preacher, man, because we get all kinds of distractions.

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Have you ever - I don't even know what you're talking about. Your brain is somewhere else because of something that's happened, but you're trying to keep your mouth moving in the direction it was already going?

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Dude, I had a recording, like a little mic kind of recording device on the pulpit fall over recently.

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We had somebody spill coffee, like right in the middle of my introduction recently. I mean, it's just like, you know, yeah, you got to be able to just kind of keep going.

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So Sunday, I was preaching and it was really hot, the heater was on too high in this cafeteria that we meet in.

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So the door to my left was propped open, and out of the corner of my eye, I see this lady walking, two dogs, and she's walking right for the door.

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I'm like, there's no way this lady's going to walk in with these two, and we're talking like big dogs. And I, at one point, yes,

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I am like at the pinnacle of the point of I'm trying to make about Christ and the cross.

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And I looked to my left and I paused for a moment because I'm like, is this woman going to walk in here with those dogs?

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She kind of peeks her head in and keeps walking. I was like, man, that wasn't distracting. So anyway, people only knew that was,

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I had no, I had no intentions on talking about that. Hey, a couple of things. Some of you may have noticed over the last few episodes that we have some new intro music.

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And I always want to thank Mr. Michael Meadows, who's our audio engineer. Michael started, yeah,

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Michael started editing for TheoCast, man, about a year and a half, almost two years ago,

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I guess. We started paying him pennies back then. We pay him nickels now. And one day we'll pay him more, but Michael is doing a fantastic job.

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He does our video and audio editing for TheoCast. And then if you've been enjoying our graphics, if you do not follow us on social media, you need to, because every week we post a graphic that relates to our topics and they are so much fun.

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We laugh at every week, every time they come out. And Dale Gilbert does just a fantastic job. He's been doing them for, man, almost a year and a half, two years as well.

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He's been doing it for a long time as well. So anyway, just wanted to thank both those guys. Yeah, occasionally we come up with some ideas of like, man, it would be cool if we could do this for the graphic and we'll shoot a couple of ideas to Dale and he always pulls it off.

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And then there are so many times where we don't even give him anything and what he comes up with is just gold. It's great. Yeah.

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So like if you don't follow TheoCast on social media, you should, if for no other reason than to look at the graphics.

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That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So it's been fun. We started doing that year one.

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We just thought it would be funny to put Calvin's head on everything. And then it kind of became, I guess, how people identified with us.

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So anyways, yeah. So just wanted to say thanks to everybody and we're going to go ahead and just jump right into the topic, man.

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I'm ready to go. Forget the rest of this. I'm ready to go too. So one of the things that we do before we record, we kind of get together and drink coffee and just talk about life and hear about each other's day and kind of what's going on.

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And then we always end up sharing with each other, this is what I've learned. This is my experience. Sometimes it's, hey, this is a hard time

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I'm having with a counseling situation or just life. So I always enjoy what we call our pre -time for recording.

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Well, this morning I shared with Justin something that I had recently learned and shared with my church, to which then he then did the same thing and we were kind of going on and on and on.

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I was like, man, we're running out of time. Let's just push record. What I would say ended up happening is both of us started to share what we would say comforts from the cross.

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Both of us were experiencing realities of the gospel and things we had never seen or thought of in a fresh and new way.

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And I would say the experience that I've had, and I know every guy around the microphone has had this, that there's this moment where you think that, man, the gospel is so great and you've learned so much and you would never admit that you kind of hit the capacity of it.

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But your heart can sometimes go, wow, yeah, I've kind of learned a lot about the gospel. And then the

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Holy Spirit comes and opens your mind to a new window into heaven that just explodes your heart into a thousand pieces, realizing

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I never saw that before. And you hit new levels of excitement and joy.

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And sometimes it's at a really important moment because for me, these last few weeks have been a little hard, and I've been dredging through just all kinds of things in life.

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So JP, I know that you want to jump on that, but that's kind of where you're going to hear us a little more excited today because I think the coffee's flowing and we love this subject.

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Just to talk a little bit more about our pre -conversation, you began to tell me about your sermon that you preached on Sunday, and then

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I was telling you about something that I had read this week. I was talking about recently finishing a sermon series in Mark and talking about the cross and different things that we saw.

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And you and I were just going back and forth about the wondrous truth of the fact that the glories of Christ and the merits of Christ and the righteousness of Christ is counted to us as sinners.

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And it was clear we had both had our minds blown in the last week to two to three, just thinking about these realities.

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And we're looking at each other like, what are we going to record today? And then we're like, we should record this. We should just talk about the righteousness of Christ counted to sinners and the glory of Christ counted to sinners and what he secured for us on the cross.

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And honestly, this is what draws people to Theocast anyway, is this message of the sufficiency of Jesus.

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It's why we do what we do, not just here at Theocast, but even just in terms of pastoral ministry.

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I know you and I both could say this, and I know Jimmy would too, it is what is building the cultures of our respective churches is the sufficiency of Christ and his work.

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And so there's nothing that we would rather talk about, and we trust for the listeners, there's nothing that you would rather listen to than to this, to talk about Christ and what he's done for us, who are completely undeserving.

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But then the gospel, like you said, man, we sometimes are stupid enough to think that we've plumbed the depths of it, and then

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God just comes in and blows us up anew, and not in a bad way. Not like he's scolding us, but it's loving, and it's so kind, and it's so full of joy and peace that your mind and heart explodes because you're thinking, oh my gosh, it's better than I even realized.

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And there's more to it than I ever thought. And we continually have those experiences as we wrestle with what

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God's revealed in his word. So John, why don't you kick us off, man, and give us a little bit of John 17 that you were thinking about this past Sunday.

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Just so you know, just to give you what we're going to do, we're going to spend some time in John 17. We're going to spend some time with Jeremiah and Mark.

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The design of all of these is so that you learn to find comfort from the cross and that you walk away from today realizing and hopefully beginning to believe in how much

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Christ has done for you, how much God loves you, and how much rest you truly can have.

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So we're going through John 17, and I was looking at my pace of going through John, and normally

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I do like three to four sermons per chapter, and I think I'm on my 11th sermon in John 17.

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There's so much here. It's hard to go. It's a great chapter, man. So I'm going into my last sermon in John 17, and I feel like I have a funeral coming.

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I'm so sad that I don't know if I'll ever preach through John 17 again.

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So maybe I can have someone invite me, and I can go preach the whole chapter again somewhere. But in John 17,

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Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and this is this conversation he's about to have with them right before he dies.

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This is the last public conversation of instructions. It's very intimate.

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It's almost like if I knew I was about to leave my children, and this was it, and this was the last conversation

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I was going to have with them, this would be a very important conversation for me to have. I actually had one of these conversations with my dad.

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I was about to go away to work for the summer, and he knew and I knew things weren't going well physically for him.

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So he called me into his room the day before I left, and I can remember as if it was yesterday. He pulled me down close, and he said, son, if you remember anything that I've told you, remember, be teachable.

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And that was the last thing he told me, just like that. And that had such a massive impact on me because he could have said anything to me in those last moments.

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And so when Jesus is in these last moments with his disciples, of course, he's not dying forever, but he is going to be leaving this world.

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He's speaking these comforts to them. He is saying some of the most comforting, shepherding, loving things to his disciples.

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And one of these phrases he says to them, which is John 17, 22, and I was telling

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Justin this, this phrase kind of threw me for a loop because I really wanted to understand not just what

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Jesus was saying, but why was he saying this? So he says in John 17, 22, the glory that you have given me, so he's praying to the

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Father, so he's saying, Father, the glory that you have given me, I have given to them that they may be one, even as we are one.

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Now here, Jesus is speaking what's called proliptically. It's a big word for he is talking of the future as if it's reality now.

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So he hasn't actually received this glory yet because he hasn't actually finished his work on the cross.

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But Jesus uses this language quite often in his prayers or even in his conversations.

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So the question then becomes, what does he mean by glory? He can't mean the glory as it relates to his holiness innately because that's part of the

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Trinitarian holiness. And God says flat out, I will not give that to another.

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And it can't be even just the holiness or glory that's related to his nature because he can't necessarily give that away because God didn't give him the glory from his nature because Jesus is never created.

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What he means here, and if you look back at John 7, Jesus is referring to the glorification that he gets from the cross.

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So Colossians 2 speaks of this, Hebrews 2 speaks of this, Acts 4 speaks of this, that the glory was given.

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Jesus was crowned with glory. He was highly exalted by the Father. And so here's where finally all the

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Legos fell in place. I found a place for all of them. And when I got done putting it all together, if I'm just going to be open with the listener,

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I started crying in my study. I was like, I can't believe this reality of this truth.

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Jesus is saying, I'm giving to you.

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So just to help explain what glory means here, how we use it, glory means to provide accolade or to provide praise that is related to something that is far above something else.

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You don't give glory to the average. Normally, we give glory to that which is supreme or the best.

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So we do this in our culture all the time. The best athletes, the best whatever, best business people, we give them the rightful place of glory, not necessarily on a holy stance.

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Jesus is saying the glory that I received from the Father for my actions of this life and on the cross,

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I'm going to take those praiseworthy accolades and I'm giving them to you as if they're your accolades and they belong to you.

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And so just stop and think about that for just a moment. You and I never did one single momentary action that would ever be compared to what

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Christ has done. And Jesus says, listen, disciples, and he says very clearly, this isn't just for you.

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Verse 19, this is for every disciple that comes after you. I'm giving you my glory so that when the

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Father looks at you, he sees what I did, not what you've done. He sees what

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I did. And here's the application and why. This is the end of the verse. He says,

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I give it to them that they may be one, even as we are one. So if everybody has the same accolade, if everyone has the same amount of glory, which is

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Christ's glory from the cross, there is never a moment to compare because if you're in Christ, you have his glory.

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Yeah, dude. So, I mean, we're going to talk later and we're excited to talk about this, about how crazy it is that we then start measuring our own righteousness against one another.

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I mean, it's craziness. It's like we've lost our minds and we've lost sight of the reality that we all have been credited with the greatest righteousness that there is and with the greatest merit and glory that there is.

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Namely, we've been given the works of Christ and then we want to go around and parade our own righteousness in front of everybody.

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It's like, what's wrong with us? And we'll talk about that more later. I think for me, man, one of the, just related to some of the stuff you were saying, one of the biggest mind -blowing realities that I have to remind myself of all the time is that Jesus, in his perfect obedience, in his perfect fulfilling of the law, and even his sacrificial death, like the greatest gesture of love and sacrifice in the history of the world, all of his work of redemption, all these things, that when

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God looks at me, because of the good news of the imputation of Christ's righteousness to me by faith,

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God looks at me and it is as though I have done all of those things that Jesus did.

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It's not even just, oh, well, his account, you know, like my account reads like his account.

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That means that it's as though I have done it myself when

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I have never done any of it. It's remarkable. So when God talks about all of the righteous requirements that he has for us in his law, we really can stand in Jesus and say, it is as though I have done those things, and that is the greatest news in the world.

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And sure, you know, so like Luther will talk about, you know, two kinds of righteousness, you know, there's the passive righteousness that we have, that we receive from God in Christ by faith.

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So that's what we're talking about today. And then there is our own active righteousness, what we do. And we're not saying that there isn't any of that, but that active righteousness, as you were already alluding to,

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John, I mean, it's not as though God the Father would ever look at our active righteousness and say, oh, well, that is somehow more significant, you know, or matters more, or is of some kind of like greater value than that righteousness of Jesus that's been counted to us.

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No, God the Father would never say that. Though our lives matter, as we've talked about many times.

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But yeah, anyway, man, I'll go ahead and transition this briefly to Jeremiah, and then we'll move on to Mark's gospel and we'll see where we go from here.

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I'm excited about where this conversation may lead. So I read this this morning. I mean, so this is like brand new, fresh on my mind.

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And in the context of Jeremiah, I'll do this very briefly. The early chapters, it's a lot of discussion of the sinfulness of Israel and the judgment that is going to come upon them because of their sin.

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Well, in chapter 23, the prophet begins to talk about the righteous branch who's going to come, the righteous branch from David.

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So beginning in chapter 23, we're going to look at verses five and six. I'm just going to read them really quickly, and we can comment on this together.

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Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

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In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called.

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The Lord is our righteousness. I read that this morning and almost, I mean, it was one of those moments like you were describing where your head and your mind, your heart, almost like they practically explode because I'm thinking,

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I've read this before, but I have never seen that that way, where he's talking about the righteous branch who will come from David, who is

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Jesus. And he's talking about the certainty that Judah will be saved. Israel will dwell secure.

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And the name by which that righteous branch, Jesus, will be called is the

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Lord is our righteousness. And so it's so wonderful when you have these moments, when you see, not just from the

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New Testament, not just from Paul, right, but you see it throughout the entirety of scripture. We see it in the Old Testament from a prophet who's living hundreds of years before Christ would ever come.

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And he is stating right there that the name of the Messiah, one of the names he will go by is the

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Lord is our righteousness. It's like, it's always been God's plan. You know, that the righteousness of, the very righteousness of God would be counted to his people through the work of Messiah.

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It sounds just like Paul in Romans, and you get it directly from the mouth and the pen of Jeremiah.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. And we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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And you can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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That's right. What's interesting is that you hear that God accepts you based upon your forgiveness and righteousness, but it's not righteousness that you perform.

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This is where the confusion comes in. It's righteousness that is given to you. For instance, sometimes it's helpful to understand where praise comes from.

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So, in other words, if I give someone a compliment and if they don't know who I am, or if they don't really even respect where the compliment's coming from, it's kind of like, okay, yeah,

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I mean, thanks. I appreciate that. But when a compliment comes from someone that you know and respect and they understand what it is that you have accomplished, there's a side of you that's like, wow, that compliment means more to me than anything else in the universe.

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So, when you think about righteousness and where it really matters where the compliment comes from, there's only one being in the universe that really matters when it comes to their perspective of you and your standing, and that's

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God. So, God's perspective is the only one that matters. It does not matter if,

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Justin, if you go, well, John, you're a really godly man. It doesn't really matter. I mean, that compliment is like, oh, you know, great.

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Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, like, thanks, bro. I appreciate it. Yeah. But when Jesus, so when the

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Father looks at you and says, oh, you're a righteous man, but the clarification is this, because the thing is, if you and I stand before the mirror, we stand there spiritually naked and ashamed because we have nothing to offer, and yet the

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Father says, oh, but dear son, you're righteous. But how? How would you say that?

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Why would you ever give me that compliment? And it's not a compliment to you. It's a compliment to the son because it's his righteousness that he's complimenting, it just so happens to be given to you.

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It's his own righteousness that he's complimenting because he has clothed you in that. That's right.

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You know, bring robes and put them on him, put rings on his hands, you know, and shoes on his feet.

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I mean, God has clothed us in his own righteousness. It's scandalous, you know, in its mercy.

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So I've recently finished preaching through Mark's gospel at CBC. And so near the end of Mark's account is the crucifixion.

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And I was struck as I was preparing for that sermon and delivering that sermon with several things that I want to lay out for us right now.

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And it's relevant for our conversation. I had never seen this before. And when the darkness,

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Mark will describe in chapter 15 in verse 33, how darkness comes over the whole land, when

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Jesus is on the cross, darkness comes over the whole land for three hours. And I had read that before and I thought, well, that's, you know, that's significant, certainly.

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But then I connected that to Exodus, you know, as I was studying and thought about the fact that, you know, the ninth plague in Egypt was darkness.

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There was darkness over the land of Egypt for three days. Well, when Jesus is put on the cross, there's darkness over the land for three hours.

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That's not insignificant. And then, you know, what's the 10th plague in Israel? Well, it's the killing of the firstborn, you know, and the

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Passover comes. Well, Jesus is on the cross at Passover as God's firstborn begotten son being slain for the sins of the world and to save God's people, and so you see this repeat of the

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Passover and the Exodus. And we realize that just as Luke says in the transfiguration that Jesus and Elijah and Moses were talking about the

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Exodus that He would accomplish at Jerusalem, the Exodus happened and the Passover happened because Jesus was coming and He was going to fulfill the

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Passover and He was going to accomplish a greater Exodus. You know, people, God's people in Egypt were liberated from slavery.

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Well, at Calvary, Jesus liberated God's people from bondage to sin and death and hell. And that's remarkable, you know, in and of itself.

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But then we continue on in Mark's account and Jesus quotes Psalm 22 verse one when

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He says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And people misunderstand. They think He's talking to Elijah and all this stuff.

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But then Jesus utters a loud cry and gives up His life.

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And we know from John's gospel that that loud cry at the very end of His life, He says, it is finished.

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And then immediately Mark tells us that the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

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At that very moment. So you see all of these things happening. Jesus says it's finished.

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And then the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies, God's presence from the people that separated people from God so that they wouldn't die in the presence of His holiness, that temple curtain is torn in two from top to bottom.

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It's torn from heaven downward, right? Like God did this and He separated that curtain, meaning through what

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Jesus has accomplished, reconciliation has happened. You now have access to me.

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And when Jesus says it's finished, what did He mean? He means that redemption is over and He means that atonement is accomplished and righteousness has been fulfilled.

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And there is nothing left to be done other than to trust His work for us. And it's just wonderful when you think more and you think more deeply about the work of Christ in the place of the sinner.

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The gospel, it really is just, it's unfathomable, like how deep it is. We could look at it, contemplate it, talk about it for the rest of our lives and never hit the bottom, you know?

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And yeah, I was just struck by these things, man. Go ahead. What's hard is that we hear it is finished, but practically what we apply is

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His part's finished. Now it's our part. Now I got to get going. We keep going back to the

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Old Testament here, and I'm going to go back to David. You know, the shooter talking about David.

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And so when we think about the Old Testament, I love how you just connected how redemption was found in Exodus and completed in the cross.

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So we think of the Old Testament stories and we often lose sight that they are not these grandiose stories of morality, that they are connected in history and they are these intricate lacings of the gospel to when you put the

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Old Testament together with the New, you have this glorious chandelier that just explodes with gospel truths that just has all these twines.

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Well, if I could just say really quickly, not only are they not morality tales, they're not just even epic stories that just kind of stand on their own.

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And that's what you're saying. Those stories exist. Those things happened in history because Jesus was coming.

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Sometimes I think we make the mistake of thinking that, oh, well, God, you know, the Passover happened and the Exodus happened and all this stuff happened, the

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Day of Atonement, all this. And then Jesus came and kind of fulfilled that like post -facto. It's like, no, that's the opposite.

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It's opposite. All of those things happened in history because Jesus was coming and that was always the plan.

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Anyway, go ahead. Well, yeah, Genesis 3 .15 set the scene where God makes a promise to Adam and Eve that a seed will come.

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And then we just follow this thread all the way. So part of this thread is, you know, the seed is promised and then you have it affirmed through Abraham and then you have the

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Abrahamic covenant. And from that, we know that there's one who's coming and then it goes through the line of Judah.

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And then we know that from the line of Judah, as you just read in Jeremiah, there's going to be the shoot of the

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Lord of righteousness. Well, there's another covenant that often was one of my favorite covenants because it impacted me in becoming covenantal.

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It was the Davidic covenant. So if you want to talk about an absolute illustration of how

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Jesus earns by His works our right in the kingdom, it is 2

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Chronicles 6 .16 where we have been given the explanation and clarification of the

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Davidic covenant. And so you have here, it says, Now therefore, Lord God of Israel, for your servant

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David, my father, what you have promised him saying, you shall not lock a man to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your sons pay close attention to their way to walk in my laws as you have walked it before me.

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Well, David's heirs were horrible. They could not fulfill this.

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And every year there's this waiting by Israel. Is this going to be the king? Is this going to be the king of David?

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Is this going to be? And it was a constant failure. And the promise is this, the one who comes and fulfills my laws, they will earn the right for those people to be in the kingdom forever.

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So the one action by the king earns the right for the rest of the people. He does not say if the people live right.

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He says, if the king lives right. Of course, what is Jesus described as? The king in the line of who?

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David is the son of David. And when Jesus lives the perfect righteous life, he then earns the right.

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Not just for, he's not talking about the lineage of the people as far as it relates to just those by birthplate.

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Birthplace. He's talking about the people of God. So we have here this long story of kings and wars and battle.

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The whole point of it was there is not a man who can earn the right for salvation. There is not a man at all, except for the one who came and perfectly obeyed and died on the cross.

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So it is there once again, we are told from the old Testament that when the father looks at us, he says, oh, you have right, you have right of passage because your king, your representative perfectly obeyed in your place.

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As your representative, he perfectly obeyed everything that was required of you. Now you have right to rest in the kingdom.

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Amen, dude. I mean, the Davidic covenant laid out in 2 Samuel 7, and then you just gave it to us from Chronicles.

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It's very clear that the Davidic covenant is conditional. God is saying that this is going to be the case.

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You know, if your son obeys my law and does righteousness and we rejoice in the fact that Jesus has met the conditions of that covenant, right?

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And yeah, it's beautiful. And so we know that, yeah, we do have a king who reigns over us in righteousness and peace, and in him, we will dwell secure because Jesus has done everything that's required.

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Well, why don't we shift, man, and talk about some of the implications of all this wonderful gospel truth that we've been unpacking.

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I know we could talk about, you know, self -righteousness and how we like to compare ourselves to one another, perhaps, but I mean, even maybe before we get there,

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I mean, talking about the comfort that it is to know that God looks upon us and really does see the glory and the merit and the righteousness of Christ, and he no longer looks at us and sees the sin and just the ugliness and the kind of marred image, you know, of himself in us and all the rest.

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It is balm for souls and it is comfort for those who are weary and struggling. And honestly, it's comfort for people who are highly in touch with the depth of their own corruption.

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Because the gospel is not but so comforting to people, if anything, it's offensive to people who think that they've got something to bring to the table.

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But for people who understand, man, I'm a wretch and I've never done anything that isn't tainted by sin.

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This is the greatest news in the world, that the perfect holiness, righteousness, obedience, and satisfaction of Jesus has been counted to us.

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I mean, and that's just to use the language of the Heidelberg Catechism question 60, and that's how they frame it.

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Because I've never kept any of God's commands. I've broken all of them, and I still sin. How in the world could a person like me have any hope before the

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Lord? Well, it's because of Christ. And the thing is that we are told in Scripture very clearly that God does not rate us on percentages.

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It's not a percentage of higher 75 versus, you know, you're good if you're in the 75 rate, you're bad if you're in the 45 rate.

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That is collapsing the law and the gospel together, where we're saying, okay, if I do my best, the gospel comes and makes up the rest.

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No, that's moralism and legalism. It's either perfect or wretch.

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And this is where people, there's a straw. I put this out on social media, and there was a couple of interactions that I saw recently.

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And what I was saying is there is never a moment in your life. Well, I was referencing

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Sunday. Okay, the week has gone by, and in our minds, it's like, yeah, man, I had a bad week. And I'm like, no, you didn't have a bad week.

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It's far worse than you thought. Way worse than you thought. As a matter of fact, if I showed you what your week really looked like, you wouldn't come out of your room out of embarrassment.

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I mean, the amount of sin that resides in our heart. I mean, just go read Romans seven and listen to Paul talk about himself as a believer, the struggle that he has and how he must rely on the grace of God.

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So part of understanding the righteousness of Christ is to keep Christians from going insane.

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I'll tell you right now, there's nothing that drives me more to despair than when

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I have to look at my own goodness, because there's not much there, if any at all.

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And yet it's easy to compare. So this is where we would say the reason we love and can see this so clearly is that we have learned to separate the law, which is do this and live, from the gospel, which is he did this, now live.

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He did this, now live. The moment you collapse those two, you're always going to struggle with assurance.

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Because if at any moment you think, I must do this to live, that is always law.

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It's always law. It's damning because nobody can do it. And so I just started preaching through Proverbs.

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This past Sunday, and Proverbs 1, verse 7 is a famous verse.

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Well, what does that mean? I mean, what does that all entail?

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To fear the Lord, to have reverence for the Lord means what? Well, first of all, you know who he is.

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True. But then immediately after that, and inextricably linked to that, is to understand what he requires.

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And so what does God require? Well, he's given it to us in his law and he has told us, here's everything

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I require and you must do it perfectly. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon on the law ever given in the history of the world is found in Matthew 5 through 7.

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And Christ unpacks the law for us and nails every one of us. I mean, in chapter 5 and verse 48, he says, you must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

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As if there was any question. You're saying that it's not instructions to the believer. Well, maybe we might need to do a dazed and confused on that one.

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We should. Yeah. Matthew 5, 48, you must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. And he said a lot of other stuff in that sermon as well, where he's applying the law of God to the hearts of men in such a way where it destroys every one of us.

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And so if we're going to talk in terms of the fear of the Lord being the beginning of knowledge, well, it begins with knowing who

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God is and knowing what God requires. And in understanding those two things, there is nothing for us to do but to run to Christ, absolutely nothing.

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So this distinction between law and gospel and redemptive history and how that framework is so vital for understanding of scripture, if you don't have those things in view, when you go to Proverbs, you'll do all kinds of crazy stuff with it.

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And you'll turn it into just a bunch of wisdom tips and a bunch of practical tips for living, and you'll turn it into a

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Christian version of like Aesop's fables or something. And here are ways that your life can go better.

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That's not what Proverbs is about. I could rant on that for a while, but yeah, when we collapse these categories, brother, we absolutely damage people, we cause people to despair in the things that they can't do, and we cause them to take pride in the things that they think they can do.

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And neither one of those are good in the church. Justin Perdue Well, I'll tell you this, what people struggle with is they say, well,

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John, you guys are sounding like your antinomian then. Like, if we have the imputed righteousness, impute means to impart, to receive on the credit of someone else.

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So when we say imputed, hopefully you understand. So if you believe that we have Jesus' righteous credence to us, that means there's nothing,

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I mean, what else is there to do? And that's kind of our point. It's kind of like, absolutely, there's nothing else for you to do as it relates to your standing and acceptance before God, because it's either all a gift.

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Yeah, that's right. It's either a gift or it's not. You either were saved as a gift from the

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Father, or you were given the opportunity to save yourself. And I'm telling you that Ephesians 2, 8, 9 tells you the exact opposite.

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Now, if you go back and listen to some of our podcasts where we're talking about good works is not a dirty word, what we're saying is

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God does not need your good works in order for you to confirm your righteous standing before Him, because He already says, you're not righteous.

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He does not. Well, what does John 1, he says, be holy as I am holy. What does he mean by that? That's a great, man.

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We'd do another Days Unconfused on that. There's no way he means you need to be holy in order to obtain your status.

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It's called being what you are in light of. In other words, if I have declared you righteous and I have made your position what it means, go be right.

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You are now free to live and roam and be wild, wild meaning like natural.

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Go be natural in this new state that you're in. The people who need your good works are your neighbors because those are the ones who will be affected by you sinning against them, and they will also be affected by you not administering the gospel to them.

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This is why I want to go back to John 17. Can you think of any other greater way to create unity and harmony than if everybody says we're all equal?

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There is no pecking order. There isn't the person who has done all of this for God, so they must be more spiritual, more respected.

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Absolutely not. It's the exact opposite. Jesus is saying you all equally receive.

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This is kind of like the story of the parable of Jesus of the workers in the field. You got one person who worked there for an hour, and then one who worked there all day, and they received the same payment.

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That illustration works fine. It doesn't matter if you've been a Christian for an hour or for a hundred years, you have the same amount of righteousness from Christ as anybody else.

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Yes, absolutely. I want to give a brief word before I even shift my own thoughts over towards what you're driving us to in terms of unity in the church and how we all are equally legitimate in Christ and equally righteous.

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Just a word in this regular podcast before we transition to the members podcast in a few minutes. A word to those of you out there who are listening who are struggling and are wrestling with assurance, because we get emails from you all the time.

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We get texts from you all the time. If we're all honest, this is something that we all have wrestled with and in an ongoing way battle.

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How do I know that I really am good with God? How do I know that not just now, but in the future that I'll finally be saved?

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When we look inward, we assess ourselves and we come up empty because we think,

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I have never loved God enough, certainly not enough. I don't even know what to say about my love for God because it ebbs and flows so much, and I've never felt the right ways, like the ways that I should feel.

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Maybe I struggle to do the right things. I find myself gravitating toward things that I shouldn't do, and I don't want to do them on the one hand, and the fact that I still do them grieves me and troubles me.

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What do I do? The answer to it is never going to be found within yourself. It's never going to be found in your performance.

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It's never going to be found in what you're doing or not doing. It's never going to be found in your feelings or your affections, because if you look there, it's hopeless.

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It's hopeless. Our confidence and our rest and our assurance and our peace and all of those things can only come by looking outside of ourselves to Christ.

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I know we say this all the time, but it's because we all need to hear it all the time, that Jesus really is enough.

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His work is sufficient. It's been counted to you through faith. It's as though you have really done it, and the

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Father looks at you and you're wearing the robes of Christ, and He is pleased, and He loves you, and He delights to save you because you're in His Son.

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We don't need to chase after our standing before the Father. It's ours, and now we live from it, and we can rejoice together in what

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Jesus has accomplished for us. Because we're never going to feel the right things or do all the right things or love

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God enough. It won't happen. It won't happen. Jon Moffitt Well, there's also this moment where you have to answer this question, so God sees you and accepts you and says, well done, child, you belong to me, and all the benefits of me belong to you because you are righteous.

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If you're going to try to replace that righteousness with your own, do you really think that you have the ability to do a better job than Jesus?

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I mean, that's the answer you have to come to. And I would say don't put that pressure on yourself because it's impossible to replace the level of obedience that Christ has already given us.

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You can't improve it. And here's Justin, oh man, we'll have to get into this in the members, unfortunately.

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Not only can you not improve it, but you can't take away. Your lack of obedience does not remove

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Jesus. It's not like, hey, look, I put money into your account, don't lose it. It's like it's locked.

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Nothing you do, remove it. Justin Perdue Well, you can't out sin the mercy and grace of Jesus, right?

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Like as Richard Sibbes said hundreds of years ago, there is more mercy in Christ than there is sin in us. I mean, you can't, and now that again, when we say things like this, you can't out sin the mercy of Christ.

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Immediately people, some people will hear us say that and they'll say, well, you know, you're just encouraging people to go sin and live licentious lives.

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That's absurd. No, that's not what we're saying. We're comforting people to say, look, no, you really, if you are in Christ Jesus, you will not wreck this thing because he's got you.

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And you have everything that you could ever need by faith, not by works. And there is a depth of mercy that we cannot fathom because like you already said,

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John, we are so much worse than we ever thought and every deed we do is tainted with sin. We've never done a perfect deed in the eyes of God, like on our own merit.

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And so of course we have to look to Jesus for those things and for our perfection.

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Yeah, go for it. I will say this too. If your conclusion after listening to us is, okay, well, then it sounds like I can go do whatever

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I want, go run headlong. And I mean, because if I have Christ's righteousness and I can't out sin it, then I'm just going to do it.

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I'm going to say, first of all, go ahead and try. Your father loves you and he promises that because he loves you, he's going to discipline you, meaning that you may find it pleasurable for a moment, but he will come in and he will make sin unpleasant for you and the consequences of sin unpleasant for you because it's not what's best and it's not what's loving and I promise you he'll do it out of love, not out of anger.

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So anybody who says, well, yeah, I mean, if you believe this, you can go do whatever you want. You're going to find out real quickly, pursuing sin does not produce the joy that Christ promises in pursuing him.

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You just won't have it. It's not possible. The frightening thought, this is sort of related to what we're saying, but I thought of it as you were talking.

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The frightening reality would be when you look around at people who are living in sin and they're comfortable.

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That's a frightening reality. You know, whereas for God's children, it's not that way. When the redeemed run off into sin, it doesn't go well and it's not comfortable.

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There's misery associated with it. That's not because that's how it is for everybody because there are plenty of people who live in sin and are very comfortable there, but God's children won't be because God will not allow that.

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And that's love. Like you said, it's not anger, it's love. I also think that the children of God can find themselves comfortable.

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And this is where Paul says, when someone's trapped and they don't really know how to get out, you know, and comfortable may not be the appropriate, but there are people, because you may be listening to this podcast right now.

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You can remain trapped in sin for a long time. And this is where God uses the church to comfort and shepherd and rebuke.

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And church discipline is a glorious protection for the believer. It's for restoration to help them understand.

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Yeah, listen, we got to take this sin serious. Here's the thing is, if you believe in the gospel, you have to take sin serious because it doesn't make sense.

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So if you say, well, Theocast is a bunch of antinomians, I'm sorry that you've come to those conclusions.

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And maybe you aren't hearing everything that we're saying, which I think has happened in the past. You need to hear us say,

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I think that sin is the reason why Christ had to experience great sweat, lots of drops of blood and agony.

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And that's, I mean, you can't look at hell and take sin lightly. I mean, God's hatred of sin is horrible.

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Well, and God's very clear in his word. Yeah. And God's very clear in his word. Like we've already alluded to, like, stay away from sin because it will destroy your life.

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Nothing good ever comes from sin. And yeah, so that's not like, please don't misunderstand what we're saying.

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And at the same time, it is possible for Christians to sin really badly for a really long time.

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And yet in the end of it all, they are restored and they're brought back to the fold because God will do that.

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And he uses various means to accomplish that. And some of those means, like we've already touched on, are even church discipline and what that looks like.

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Well, before we go into the membership, I'll just say this just to add to what you're saying, Justin. This is why Paul says our flesh is at war with our spirit, which means at times the spirit loses because the flesh is so strong.

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So to assume that once you become a believer that you no longer war against the flesh, then that's to take Romans 7 and rip it out of your

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Bible. So we'll save that for another time. Well, and so if you're feeling that way and you're thinking, I'm doing things

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I don't want to do, and I'm not doing the things that I want to do, then take solace in the fact that every believer through history has known that same experience, including the two guys behind the microphone this morning.

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And we all, with Paul, cry out about our wretchedness, and we rejoice in the fact that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.

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And that we have been justified by Jesus through faith. And therefore we have peace with God, not just now, but forever.

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Because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. That's the good news and that's the hope. And it's rock solid and it's certain.

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So John, let's transition over, man, to the members podcast. There's more to say. I think where we're going to pick this up is on that self -righteousness piece and how we tend to compare ourselves to one another in the church and how the gospel, and in particular, this reality of the righteousness and merits and the works of Christ being counted to us, how that should create unity and how when we're missing that unity and that love piece, it's indicative of a problem in terms of our understanding of the gospel.

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I think that's where we're going to go. So thank you for listening to this episode of Theocast. We hope this conversation sincerely has been encouraging to you.

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For those of you who are out there who are weary and struggling and fighting against your own corruption, we encourage you, press on, remove everything from you that's hindering you and look to Jesus, who is the founder and the perfecter of your faith.

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He has saved you and He has perfected you for all time, even as you are wrestling against sin.