Comforts From the Cross | Theocast

The Wonder of the Gospel Rediscovered

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.

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. 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.

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.

We hope that this conversation is encouraging to you. Stay tuned. Hey guys, as a quick reminder,.

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Theocast’s Mission and the Hosts’ Introductions

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

Our brother, Jimmy Buehler, is busy planting a church and teaching children in school. 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.

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

I know, 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.

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.

Dude, I had a recording, like a little mic kind of recording device on the pulpit fall over recently. We had somebody spill coffee, like right in the middle of my introduction recently. I mean, it's just like, you know, yeah, you gotta be able to just kind of keep going.

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

I'm like, there's no way this lady's gonna walk in with these two, and we're talking like big dogs. And I, at one point, yes, I am like at the pinnacle of the point of I'm trying to make about Christ and the cross, and I look to my left, and I like pause for a moment because I'm like, is this woman gonna walk in here with those dogs?

She kind of peeks her head in and keeps walking, and I was like, man, that wasn't distracting. So anyways. And people only knew. That was, I had no tensions 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, and I just wanna thank Mr. Michael Meadows, who's our audio engineer. Yeah, thanks, Michael. Michael started, yeah, Michael started editing for TheoCast, man, about a year and a half, almost two years ago, I guess.

We started paying him pennies back then. We pay him nickels now, and one day, we'll pay him more. That's right. But Michael's doing a fantastic job. 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.

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. He's been doing it for a long time, like, so I 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. 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, so like, if you don't follow TheoCast. The gnomes? No, it was excellent. Like, if you don't follow TheoCast on social media, you should, if for no other reason than to look at the graphics.

That's right.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's been fun. We started doing that year one. We just thought it would be funny to put Calvin's head on everything, and then it kind of became It kind of became a thing. How people identified, yeah, how people identified with us, so.

Anyways, yeah, so just wanted to say thanks to everybody, and we're gonna go ahead and just jump right into the topic, man. I'm ready to go. I'm, 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, 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 I'm having with a counseling situation or just life. So I always enjoy what we call our pre-time for recording. 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.

I was like, man, we're running out of time. Let's just push record. And what I would say ended up happening is both of us started to share what we would say comforts from the cross. Like both of us were experiencing realities of the gospel and things we had never seen or thought of in a fresh and new way.

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

And then the Holy Spirit comes and opens your mind to a new window into heaven that just explodes your heart into a thousand pieces, realizing I never saw that before. And you hit new levels of excitement and joy.

And sometimes it's at a really important moment because for me, this last few weeks have been a little hard and I've been dredging through just all kinds of things in life. 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 bit more excited today because I think the coffee's flowing.

And we love this subject. Yeah, 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 I was telling you about something that I had read this week.

And then I was talking about recently finishing a sermon series in Mark and talking about the cross and different things that we saw. 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.

And it was clear, we had both had our minds blown in the last week to two to three, just thinking about these realities. 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. And honestly, this is what draws people to Theocast anyway, is this message of the sufficiency of Jesus.

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

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.

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 God just comes in and blows us up anew, and not in a bad way, not like He's scolding us, but it's like, 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.

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

The Glory Christ Gives to His People in John 17

Yeah, so just so you know, just kind of 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. And Mark. And all of these, 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 Christ has done for you, how much God loves you, and how much rest you really, truly can have.

So we're going through John 17, and I was looking at my pace of going through John. And normally I do like three to four sermons per chapter. And I think I'm on my 11th sermon in John 17. 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. Like it's so, I'm so sad that I don't know if I'll ever preach through John 17 again. So maybe I can have someone invite me and I can go preach the whole chapter again somewhere.

But so in John 17, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. And this is this conversation he's about to have with them right before he dies. And this is the last public conversation of instructions. It's very intimate.

So it's almost like if I knew I was about to leave my children and this was it, and this was the last conversation 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. 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. So he called me in 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. 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. 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.

He's speaking these comforts to them. He is saying some of the most comforting, shepherding, loving things to his disciples. And one of these phrases he says to them, which is John 17, 22, and I was telling Justin this, this phrase kind of threw me for a loop because I really wanted to understand not just what 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 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.

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

But Jesus uses this language quite often in his prayers or even in his conversation. 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 Trinitarian holiness.

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

What he means here, and if you look back at John 7, Jesus is referring to the glorification that he gets from the cross. So Colossians 2 speaks of this, Hebrews 2 speaks of this, Acts 4 speaks of this, that the glory was given.

Jesus was crowned with glory. He was highly exalted by the Father. And so here's where finally everything, all the Legos fell in place. Like I found a place for all of them. And when I got done putting it all together, I mean, if I'm just gonna be open with the listener, I started crying in my study.

I was like, I can't believe this reality of this truth. Jesus is saying, I'm giving to you the, 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.

Like you don't give glory to the average. Normally we give glory to that which is supreme or the best, right? So we do this in our culture all the time, the best athletes, the best, you know, whatever, best business people, we give them the rightful place of glory, not necessarily on a holy stance.

Jesus is saying the glory that I received from the Father for my actions of this life and on the cross, I'm going to take those praise worthy accolades and I'm giving them to you as if they're your accolades and they belong to you.

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 Christ has done. And Jesus says, listen, disciples, and he does, he says very clearly, this isn't just for you, verse 19, this is for every disciple that comes after you.

I'm giving you my glory so that when the Father looks at you, he sees what I did, not what you've done, he sees what I did. And here's the application and why. This is the end of the verse. He says, 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 Christ's glory from the cross, there is never a moment to compare because if you're in Christ, you have his glory.

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. 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.

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. It's like, what's wrong with us? And we'll talk about that more later.

The Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness

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 God looks at me because of the good news of the imputation of Christ's righteousness to me by faith, God looks at me and it is as though I have done all of those things that Jesus did.

It's not even just, oh, well, his account, like my account reads like his account. That means that it's as though I have done it myself when 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. And sure, so like Luther will talk about two kinds of righteousness. There's the passive righteousness that we have, that we receive from God in Christ by faith.

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, 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 or matters more or is of some kind of like greater value than that righteousness of Jesus that's been counted to us.

No, God the Father would never say that. Though our lives matter, as we've talked about many times. But yeah, anyway, man, I'll go ahead and transition us briefly to Jeremiah and then we'll move on to Mark's gospel and we'll see where we go from here.

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. 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.

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

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

Cause I'm thinking 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 Jesus. And he's talking about the certainty that Judah will be saved.

Israel will dwell secure. And the name by which that righteous branch, Jesus will be called is the Lord is our righteousness. And so it's so wonderful when you have these moments when you see, not just from the 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. And he is stating right there that the name of the Messiah, one of the names he will go by is the 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. It sounds just like Paul in Romans.

And you get it directly from the mouth and the pen of Jeremiah.

Faith Versus Faithfulness and the Support of Theocast

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

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. You can do that by joining our total access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation. That's right. Yeah, and what's interesting is that you hear of, okay, God accepts you based upon your forgiveness and righteousness, but it's not righteousness that you perform.

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. 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, 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.

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 God.

So God's perspective is the only one that matters. It does not matter if, Justin, if you go, well, John, you're a really godly man. It doesn't really, I mean, that compliment's like, oh, you know, great, thanks.

I appreciate that. Yeah, like, thanks, bro, appreciate it. Yeah, but when Jesus, so when the 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 Father says, oh, but dear son, you're righteous.

You're like, but how? How would you say that? 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.

Yeah, it's his own righteousness that he's complimenting because he has clothed you in that. Bring robes and put them on him, put rings on his hands, you know, and shoes on his feet. I mean, God has clothed us in his own righteousness.

It's scandalous, you know, in its mercy. So I've recently finished preaching through Mark's gospel at CBC. And so near the end of Mark's account is the crucifixion. 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, and it's relevant for our conversation.

I had never seen this before. And when the darkness, Mark will describe in chapter 15 in verse 33, how darkness comes over the whole land. When 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. 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 Passover and he was going to accomplish a greater Exodus.

You know, people, God's people in Egypt were liberated from slavery. 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.

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

But then Jesus utters a loud cry and gives up his life. And we know from John's gospel that that loud cry at the very end of his life, he says, it is finished. And then immediately Mark tells us that the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom at that very moment.

So you see all of these things happening. Jesus says it's finished. 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.

It's torn from heaven downward, right? Like God did this. And he separated that curtain, meaning through what Jesus has accomplished, reconciliation has happened. You now have access to me. 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. 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.

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? And yeah, I was just struck by these things, man.

Go ahead.

Law and Gospel, the Fear of the Lord, and the End of Self-Righteousness

What's hard is that we hear it is finished, but practically what we apply is his part's finished. Now it's our part. Now I gotta get going. Well, and I'm gonna go back to an old, we keep going back to the Old Testament here and I'm gonna go back to David, you know, the shooter talking about David.

Yeah, and so when we think about the Old Testament, I love how you disconnected, how redemption was found in Exodus and completed in the cross. 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 Old Testament together with the new, you have this glorious chandelier that just explodes with gospel truths that just has all these twines.

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. And that's what you're saying. I mean, those stories exist. Those things happened in history because Jesus was coming. 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 day of atonement, all this, and then Jesus came and kind of fulfilled that like post-facto.

It's like, no, that's opposite. It's opposite. All of those things happened in history because Jesus was coming and that was always the plan.

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

And from that, we know that there's one who's coming and then it goes through the line of Judah. And then we know that from the line of Judah, as you just read in Jeremiah, there's gonna be the shoot of the Lord of righteousness.

Well, there's another covenant that'll often, it's one of my favorite covenants because it impacted me in becoming covenantal. It was the Davidic covenant. The Davidic covenant. And so you have, yeah.

So if you wanna talk about an absolute illustration of how Jesus earns by his works, our right in the kingdom, it is 2 Chronicles 6 .16 where we have being given the explanation and clarification of the Davidic covenant.

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

Well, David's heirs were horrible. They could not fulfill this. And every year there's this waiting by Israel. Is this gonna be the king? Is this gonna be the king of David? Is this gonna 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. 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, he says if the king lives right. Of course, what is Jesus described as? The king in the line of who? David, he's the son of David. And when Jesus lives the perfect righteous life, he then earns the right, not just for, he's not talking about the lineage of the people as far as it relates to just those by birthplace.

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

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 as your representative, he perfectly obeyed everything that was required of you.

Now you have right to rest in the kingdom.

Amen, dude. I mean, the Davidic covenant laid out in 2 Samuel 7, and then you just gave it to us from Chronicles. It's very clear that the Davidic covenant is conditional. God is saying that this is gonna be the case, 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?

And yeah, it's beautiful. And so we know, 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. 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.

I know we could talk about self-righteousness and how we like to compare ourselves to one another, perhaps. But I mean, even maybe before we get there, 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 of himself in us and all the rest. 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. 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.

But for people who understand, man, I'm a wretch and I've never done anything that isn't tainted by sin. This is the greatest news in the world that the perfect holiness, righteousness, obedience, and satisfaction of Jesus has been counted to us.

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

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