Evangelism And The Book Of Romans

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It doesn't take you long to figure out there are many people that talk about evangelism. And when you look at quotes for evangelism, some are very convicting, some are very encouraging.
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John Stott said, the church is under orders. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.
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Oswald Chambers said, angels cannot preach the gospel. Only beings such as Paul and you and I can preach the gospel.
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Dan Green said, witnessing is not a spare time occupation or a once a week activity. It must be a quality of life.
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You don't go witnessing. You are a witness. Spurgeon said, have you no wish for others to be saved?
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Then you are not saved yourself. Be sure of that. Certainly it's important for us to talk about evangelism and good news so people can be born again.
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We have all who those Christians who are here today have been the recipients of someone, are many people preaching the good news to us, the gospel of Jesus Christ to us.
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And so today, we're going to talk about evangelism and what is the gospel so that when you meet people at school, when you meet new people at work, when you're talking to your children at the dinner table or homeschooling them, you know what the gospel is.
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Now, if I handed out a piece of paper to everyone here, and I won't do it, although I'm tempted, to do that, and I gave you a blank piece of paper and a pen, and I asked you to write out what the gospel is,
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I wonder how many people would really write out the biblical definition of the gospel, the good news of the
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Lord Jesus. Maybe some might write Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, they might write other things, but I want to make sure that everyone here is reminded of something that we need regularly, and that is the truth about who
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God is so that we can give good news to people and not just self -help. Not just morality, not just be a better you, have your best life now.
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So today is a reminder from the book of Romans about evangelism. So why don't you take your Bibles and turn to the book of Romans.
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You've heard of Romans Road for evangelism. This is a more detailed version of the Romans Road, and we're going to think about how to work through evangelism.
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Now if you are taking notes, it's going to be very simple. Remember back in the old days, if you wanted a phone number, what did you do?
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If you're really old, you had the white pages and the yellow pages, or maybe you had to call the operator.
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Then you had to start dialing 113, and you could get someone's phone number for directory assistance.
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You could dial 555 -1212 and get the number, or you could dial three numbers that would help you, and you could ask, sometimes they charge you for it, information about a person.
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And those three numbers were what? 411. So today is the 411 of evangelism.
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There are going to be four categories, who is God, who is man, what did Jesus do, what is the response to the gospel.
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Those are the four categories, and there are going to be 11 words, 411. So 11, I know it doesn't match up to 411 exactly, but just so you can remember,
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I'm trying to give you a hook in your mind, that if I can remember these 11 words, I can summarize the gospel, talk about who
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Jesus is in light of the problem that we all have, and that is sin. If you're 15 and under, and you come up to me next week between 9 .45
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and 10 .15 and give me these 11 words, young people, I give you a dollar. And I want all the parents here, you don't have to do it because I don't have the authority to do this, but if your kids can tell you these 11 and explain them generally,
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I think you should owe them $5. So what's the gospel?
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There are going to be four broad categories, but we're going to look at 11 words, 411, so you can kind of remember how to preach the gospel.
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And even if you're talking to someone and you only got a few of these words, it's going to be better than Jesus is going to help save your self -esteem or fix your marriage or give you a better calendar socially.
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What does the Bible say? And it is very, very important, dear Christian, because we are under the command of the great
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King, the Lord Jesus, to preach the gospel, are we not? When it comes to the Great Commission, we are commanded in light of even
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Psalm 2 in the nations given to Jesus by the Father, we are commanded to preach the good news to the nations.
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It's important for another reason before we look at Romans, it's because everybody's born with the eternal soul and they will either go to heaven or hell forever.
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True? Jesus, the theologian of hell as some have called him, has talked about that in a testimony of John the
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Apostle, Paul, Peter, even in the Old Testament. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living
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God. And when you look at the scriptures and you think about eternal punishment and torment and fire and destruction and outer darkness and the worm and weeping and gnashing of teeth, we want our loved ones saved from that, do we not?
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We want our friends to be born again. We even want our enemies, if we understood the reality of hell, we'd want our enemies to be born again as well.
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And it says, one man said, if sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies.
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This is important because think about the Lord Jesus. He was a great preacher. He was a healer. He did wonderful miracles, but he also was a preacher.
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God had one son, Dick Lucas said, and he made him a preacher. And when you see Jesus with Nicodemus, he's concerned about the soul of Nicodemus.
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You see him with the woman at the well, he is concerned about her salvation. When it comes to saving Peter, our
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Andrew, Jesus was an evangelist. And by the way, if there were two ways to get to heaven, your preaching
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Jesus wouldn't be as important because maybe the other way would be preached by someone else. But since there's salvation in no other name, there's the inclusive gospel, it is not in our circles because that's not what we want to focus on.
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It is the exclusive gospel, Jesus and no other, so therefore we must preach. So today we're going to look at the book of Romans and we are going to look at four broad categories but 11 particular words so that you might be encouraged to keep preaching the gospel to your friends and even yourself.
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So the broad category to start with is who is God? And by the way, before I even get into this, you don't have to do this exactly in order.
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And here's the wonderful part about seeing evangelism in scripture. There's lots of different ways that people have evangelized in scripture.
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There's not only one way, so you memorize that one way and then no matter what the person you're evangelizing says, you have to keep on script and you have to do this, that, or the other.
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I know there's a dynamic involvement between other people and you're talking with them and back and forth, but these are just some kind of good rebar moorings and foundations where they have to be discussed.
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You have to talk about God and man and Christ and the response and that's really what we're after today.
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And so the first category is who is God? And word number one is creator, creator.
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Most people don't know who God is anymore and so we're going to start with creator and that's what Paul did when he was dealing with people who did not know the scriptures.
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Look at Romans chapter one, verse 24. We're just going to look at certain verses in Romans, see their context, make sure we understand them properly, but you're going to see how
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Paul does this. Chapter one, he introduces, of course, the book and he gets right into this.
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Chapter one, verse 24. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
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And God here is giving them up. These people are rejecting divine revelation, rejecting the worship of God.
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And then do you notice in verse 25, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
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They bought into the lie, just like people do, that God isn't the only God. God doesn't want exclusive worship.
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God doesn't have to be obeyed. God can just get put off to the corner. They bought that lie, as we'd say in Nebraska, hook, line and sinker.
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Instead of venerating, it's an interesting word for worship there, instead of bowing down to and exalting and praising and giving thanks to this
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God, what'd they do? Well, no, we're not going to worship that God. We're going to worship ourselves.
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We've switched everything around. So instead of creator being worship, we worship people and things that are created.
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So, as I said, Genesis 1 says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God just makes out of nothing time and space and matter with great force and motion.
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God says, let there be light and there is. Why is this so important to talk about when you're evangelizing people?
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Because if God made you, then he tells you what to do, right?
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He gives you rules. The Creator owns everything, it's His realm.
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He makes you, in a supernatural way, He created the world in a sudden way. He makes everything both in heavens and on earth visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.
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All things have been created by Christ and for Him. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.
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So since that's true, then they're going to have to stand underneath this Creator and His law.
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And so it's important to talk about God as Creator. Listen to Paul in Acts 17. Neither is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things.
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And He made, listen to that Creator language, from one every nation and mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation.
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God created. And, of course, you know where everybody's going to go and they want evolution to be true, because if evolution is in fact true, they don't have to honor the
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Creator with obedience. Creators have laws and people are under that Creator.
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So that leads us to word number two. God is not just a creator, He's a judge. Since He's a creator,
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He is judged. Look at Romans 2. Well, let's pick it up in verse 3.
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Do you suppose, O man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God?
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Verse 12. For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
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God is not just a creator, but He's a judge, because He gives His law as Creator, and then when people obey,
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He judges them one way, and if they disobey, He judges them another way.
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Look at chapter 2, verse 16, please, in Romans. And on that day when, according to my gospel,
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God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
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God judges. He has standards. He has requirements. He has laws.
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For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.
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That's James chapter 2. Galatians 3. Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law and to do them.
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You could just look at Scripture in the Old Testament. God is a righteous judge. Psalm 94. O judge of the earth.
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Psalm 9. He will judge the world in righteousness. James 4. There's only one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able both to save and destroy.
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First Peter 4, 5. But they will give an account to Him who is ready to judge, and the old King James would say, the quick and the dead.
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For fallen angels, they were created, and then they were judged. We have been created, and we deserve to be judged.
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Look at chapter 2, verse 13 for a moment. When you think about how do you keep the law of this Creator so you don't get judged, it's very simple.
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Just perfectly obey, entirely obey, always obey, and you won't be judged.
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Verse 13 says that. For it is not the hearers of the law, Romans 2, 13, who are righteous before God.
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By the way, when you think of righteousness, you should be thinking, keeping the law by doing the right thing,
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I am righteous. So when you think of righteousness, it's a legal term, it's a law -keeping term, and if you break the law, you're unrighteous, and if you keep the law, you're righteous.
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For the hearers of the law, not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
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Just simply keep the law of God, obey Him, if you think of New Testament, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, love your neighbor as yourself.
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If you want to look at the Old Testament laws, you can look at those in the Ten Commandments, but God is a Creator, and therefore,
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He's a judge. Now you say, well, I don't think I could get this far with people, and again,
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I'm not saying you have to say every little detail of every little thing, but this is a, actually,
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Pauline pattern when he talks about creator and then judge, but thankfully, wonderfully, word number three is there,
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Savior. He's not just a creator and judge like He was for the angels, period, full stop, but He's a creator and a judge and a
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Savior. Not one angel got saved, and God was still just, but He loves to save people. If you go to Romans chapter five, this great chapter, and I learned it in seminary, and so I've told you often, if you're a good theologian, you should take your
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Bible and let it open up like this. For those of you that are godly and have a real Bible and not some iPad, you should just go like that, and it should open to Romans five.
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So in seminary, I put a crease there on mine just to make sure it happened. Here's Romans chapter five.
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God, He proclaims His saving work in chapter one and all throughout the book, but just for time now,
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Romans five, nine, since therefore we have been justified, declared righteous, by His blood, that is
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His sacrificial death, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. God shows
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His love for people by saving them, seeking them, winning them, sending
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His Son for them. This is amazing. Now, sometimes we hear the word saved, and it's kind of like this nomenclature in Christianity.
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What do you mean saved? A brother, are you saved? It's like R .C. Sproul, the guy that came up to him, and the guy didn't know
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R .C. was a seminary professor, and the guy says, you know, are you saved? And R .C.'s
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like, saved from what? Saved from whom? And ultimately, this word saved means to deliver or to rescue, and we need to be saved, yes from hell, yes from our own sins, but the one who inflicts a righteous judgment on us in hell, and that is saved from God's wrath, saved from God Himself.
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Are you saved? Saved from whom? The Lord God Himself. God saves people.
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I love 2 Samuel, my Savior, my God, my rock in whom
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I take refuge. Psalm 17, O Savior of those who take refuge at Your right hand.
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Isaiah 43, I'm the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. Even I am the
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Lord, there is no Savior besides Me. And of course then, when the Lord Jesus comes to the earth, we celebrate at Christmas and hear this verse often, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a
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Savior, Christ the Lord. He saves us from our sinful patterns.
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He saves us from the wrath of God. He saves us from the flesh and indwelling sin and penalty of sin,
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Satan himself. God has highly exalted at His right hand, Peter said, Jesus to be a
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Prince and a Savior. When you read 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, you hear the refrain,
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God our Savior, God our Savior, God our Savior, 1
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John 4, the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of. So if you're trying to do this, just to memorize it, or for the dollar,
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Creator, Judge, Savior. That's pretty logical. He creates, therefore He judges, thankfully
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He's a Savior. So what we're doing is we're talking about God, the object with the one in whom they have to do and the object of their faith eventually, we need to tell them who
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God is. And now we move to word number four underneath the umbrella, not who
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God is, but who man is. We get a right view of God and His holy, transcendent otherness as Creator and Judge and Savior.
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And now we look at who is man. Then you're going to need a
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Savior when you realize who He is and who you are. Word number four, unrighteous.
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God's a Creator, He's a Judge, He's a Savior. Now let's take a look at mankind, men and women, everybody except the
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Lord Jesus. And it's the word unrighteous. Look at chapter three, verse 10.
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The whole first two and a half chapters are essentially, we have no righteousness and we need a perfect righteousness to get to heaven.
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We have no law keeping to make us right, therefore we need a law keeper to make us right by imputation.
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Romans 3 .10, He's giving the bad news before the good news. As it is written, it stands written, it permanently written.
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The law of the Medes and the Persians written, indelible ink written. None is righteous, no, not one.
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And this is not man describing his condition. This is God looking at us and describing our condition.
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We need righteousness. Verse 11, no one understands, no one seeks for God. There was a
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Russian poet, Turgenev, and he said this, I don't know what the heart of a bad man is like, but I do know what the heart of a good man is like, and it's terrible.
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Unbelievers are unrighteous and they need a righteousness.
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Verse 12, all have turned aside, together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one.
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And by the way, when some teacher would evangelize, and I don't mind this method, and they walk up to people and they say, would you consider yourself to be a what?
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A good person. And most everybody else compares themselves to other people who are worse, and they think, yes, until they see the law of God, that reflects the nature of God as creator and judge, and then they don't think they're so good anymore.
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It doesn't matter if I think I'm good. If God thinks I'm not good, I have a problem. Kind of like, you know,
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I meet people and they don't want to go get certain tests, and they don't want to go have some colonoscopy, and they don't want to have this, that, and the other, and you know, they're proud they've never been to a doctor in 20 years.
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I'm just thinking, A, I think that's bad stewardship. B, it's hard enough to love your wife. This is an easy way to do it, right?
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I love you. I'm going to try to do something for the family. And if you've got something, you should know about it.
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It's not going to do you any good to walk around and just go, I'm not really going to think about it. I don't want to talk about religion.
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I don't want to talk about these things. God says everyone is unrighteous, and you need a perfect righteousness, perfect law -keeping, that is.
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Not only that, number five, and this is a famous verse, so we should look at it, Romans 3 .23. The fifth word, sinful.
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We've described God as creator, judge, and savior. Now we're describing mankind, and we're going to see there's a huge gap there that can only be brought together with the work of Christ.
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For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. By the way, very fascinating.
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For all have sinned, that's probably the garden in Adam, and all present tense continually fall short of the glory of God.
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The glory of God, all His attributes, who He is. Nobody measures up to the glory of God. We keep falling short.
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If I take you down to Hyannis, and I say, let's all stand there and jump, and we're going to try to jump to Martha's Vineyard, in the old days
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I might jump the farthest. Now with this bad knee, I just kind of hop. And if I get a triple jumper, hop, skip, and jump triple jumper, they still are going to fall short because the glory is too high.
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God's holiness makes us come up short because we've been tainted by the fall.
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Look at Romans 5 .8. It's set in a wonderful light. It's talking about the work of Christ, but it shows the status of who people are.
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People don't want to be told they're sinners, but what does God say? But God shows His love, or demonstrates His love, or makes conspicuous
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His love for us in that while we were still sinners as a state, as nature, Christ died for us.
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Romans 5 .12, because all sinned in Adam. We're lost.
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Sometimes I go back to my days at hospital chaplaincy class in seminary, and we had to watch an autopsy.
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You know, they prep you and everything. That's what it's going to smell like and look like, and be careful, and here's what you do and stand if you feel nauseous and everything else and what it's going to look like.
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And when you watch the autopsy, I, working in the operating room, regularly saw people opened up, fixed, put back together, and then they woke them up.
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Here's the person just opened up in the autopsy, and they're looking at all these details and cause of death.
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And one I saw was a self -inflicted gunshot wound, and they're looking at everything. The spiritual autopsy from God as He opens us up, what does
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He see? He doesn't see any righteousness because it's tainted by the fall, and He doesn't see anything that's holy and good.
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He sees unrighteousness and sin. And we say, well, you know, my will's not really affected, my heart's kind of good.
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No, no, mind, will, emotions, everything has been tainted by the fall. No wonder
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Ephesians says we're dead in trespasses and sins. When I read that evangelicals by three -quarters believe that man is basically good by nature, when
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I read that 87 % of some people's theological evangelical groups say
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God helps those who help themselves, Romans says no, God says no.
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When we're talking to people about the Creator and Judge and Savior, we also have to talk to them about who they are.
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Word number six, I could pick a lot of words, let's just pick this one, ungodly, ungodly.
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Romans 5 .6, if you read Romans 5 .6,
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for while we were still weak at the right time, Christ the Messiah, He didn't die for His own sins, but He died for the ungodly.
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Now, when I was a kid, we drank a lot of 7 -Up. Sprite didn't exist, right? When we read the
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Yellow Pages, we drank 7 -Up. And it wasn't like cola. It was the opposite of cola, it was the un -cola, see?
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Thank God for pop culture. Whatever God's like, holy and beautiful and magnificent and wonderful and transcendent, makes you look at with awe, majesty, bow down to.
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Whatever God's like, godly, ungodly, lurid, perverse, soiled, full of blame, everything that's opposite of God.
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In the flesh, Romans 8 says you can't please God. So when you look at the scene, you think, okay, here's this great transcendent
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God. Here's mankind. How are we going to bring these two together?
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Is God just going to be, you know, bygones begot bygones, and I'm just kind of like a grandpa and I'll just let the kids disobey,
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I don't care? Are we going to say, you know what, maybe God's not so holy, we're not so sinful, now maybe we can bridge the gap with, who knows, medicine, drugs, education, cooperation, social good.
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Maybe we can get closer and closer and closer, and then one day the Tower of Babel will be high enough and we can meet
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God. That's the way all your friends are thinking. But now we come to the third
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W. We know who God is. We know who we are. And now the question is, what did
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Jesus do? What did Jesus do? Machen said, men love to be encouraged by false hopes.
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The world is full of quack remedies for sin. But this is not the quack remedy for sin.
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Jesus is no quack. Word number seven, representative. Jesus is our representative.
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He is the last Adam. He's the second man. God is a creator, a judge, a savior.
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And we are unrighteous, and we're sinful, and we're ungodly, and we're enemies, and we're foolish, and the list could go on and on and on.
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But now we see what type of savior he is, and he is first a representative.
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Look at Romans chapter 5. Back to Romans chapter 5. And again, if you're looking for verse -by -verse teaching, we will soon be back in the book of Hebrews.
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I want everyone here to understand what the good news is so that when you meet friends, when you meet that person who's sitting next to you on the plane, you might say,
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I'm going to try to turn this conversation into spiritual things. When you meet the person, you meet the mailman, or the mailman in our particular case meets you.
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Trying to turn every conversation into a theological conversation. You understand the good news. You understand sin, savior.
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You understand guilt, grace, gratitude. Or in this particular case, you understand who God is, who man is, what
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Jesus did, and what the response is with these 11 words. Number 7, representative. Romans chapter 5 has a whole section there about Jesus, our representative.
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Now, before I look at the verses, remember, God has expected obedience from us. Do this and live.
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Obey these commandments. So now we can't because we're unrighteous, and we're sinful, and we're ungodly.
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But those requirements of the law still must be obeyed by a human for salvation to occur.
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So now Jesus is going to represent us. We're quick to think Jesus died for our sins. That's the next word.
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But here he's going to represent us and totally live that righteous life, earning righteousness for us that he might give.
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If righteousness is through the law, he's going to perfectly obey as a representative. And that's why the language here is of Adam.
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One Adam stood as a representative in the garden, and he fell, and we all fell with Adam.
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But since God is a savior and not just creator and judge, he's got another Adam to live that life for us.
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And so when you think of justification, it's not just Jesus pays for my sins, but he lives for me so that he might grant me righteousness.
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That's why representation is so important. I might pick other words for mankind and his plight.
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I might pick other words besides unrighteous, sinful, and ungodly, because there are so many of them. But these three words,
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I wouldn't choose anything else. I wouldn't pick any other words. Representative 512, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, you know who that is, and death through sin, because the wages of sin is death, so death spread to all men because all sinned.
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How did they all sin? He's talking about the representative. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted when there's no law.
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Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses. I mean, the Ten Commandments weren't even given and people were dying. They weren't dying because they broke the
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Ten Commandments from Moses. They were dying for other reasons like Adam's sin given to them as the representative of all people.
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Even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.
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Now, watch the representative language here. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass,
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Adam, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, that last representative, that last
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Adam, Jesus Christ abound for the many. What somebody does affects others. Adam for the negative,
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Jesus for the positive. Verse 16, and the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin.
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For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation. But the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.
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For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man,
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Jesus. If you say, Pastor, that's complicated, please summarize that for me.
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Verse 18, we'll let Paul summarize it. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.
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For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience, the many will be constituted as righteous.
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What's the point? The point is, we don't just need to be forgiven of our sins, we need a positive righteousness.
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As I've talked about before, you're in neutral and God says, go forward, put it in gear and drive, and we sin and we go backwards.
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And so we don't just need our sins forgiven to get back to neutral, but we need to put it in drive and obey the law.
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So here we have Jesus as a representative. Why did Jesus come down on Friday, die, and go back up on Sunday?
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Well, he didn't do that because he came to earth to earn a righteousness for us as our representative. Jesus was a public person.
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He was a federal head. He was a covenantal head, same difference, federal covenantal.
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What God deemed as Adam acted, God took Adam's act, gave it to all of us by crediting, by accounting, by imputation.
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Christ's whole life, typified by his and exalted by and made manifest by his death on the cross, what
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Jesus did, got put to our account, credited because he was a federal representative.
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It's amazing, Jesus was a representative. Not only that, word, number, what word am
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I up to? Eight, see? Somebody owes me a dollar. Substitute, word eight, substitute.
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You can tell how representative and substitute will factor into Romans 3 in justification. He's not just the representative working in our place, our sins now he pays for by substitutionary atonement.
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We can go back to chapter 3, verse 24, if you'd like. We can find these things throughout all the book of Romans, throughout all the
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New Testament and the Old, but just some highlights so you might think through. Simple, I've got to talk about who
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God is, creator, judge, savior, and anything else you want to say about God that's true. Got to talk about mankind, show the need of the dire situation, unrighteous, sinful, and ungodly.
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Then we talk about the Lord Jesus. By the way, the second part really isn't the good news. This is the good news.
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This is Jesus to the rescue. This is the evangelistic message that no matter what your sins are,
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God can cleanse you, not because of you or how bad or how not bad your sins are, but because of the greatness of Christ's perfect life,
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He always obeys the Father, and His substitutionary death. This is the language of justification.
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Verse 24, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption, the buyback,
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I think bottles are redeemed or SNH green stamps are redeemed. You have to buy something out. Slaves are redeemed.
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That is in Christ Jesus. And Jesus is the ransom price to buy the slave out.
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How do I get that slave? You auction the slave off and somebody has to pay for it. Jesus paid with His life.
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He was the ransom price to set people free. As substitute, the payment was the
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Lord Jesus and His death. Verse 25, you get the same kind of language of substitution.
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Whom God put forward as a propitiation, that means God is angry with sin and He's satisfied that the anger for sin has been taken by another.
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As propitiation, our satisfaction, our assuagement, our extinguished all
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God's wrath, Jesus did by His blood. That is His vicious death to be received by faith.
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In other words, it's Jesus dying as a substitute, not just for Barabbas humanly.
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Barabbas, you get to go, they're going to crucify Jesus. But spiritually, I have sins.
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I obviously have sins because I'm unrighteous, I'm sinful, and I'm ungodly, and I need to be righteous.
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I need to be holy, and I need to be godly. When Jesus lived His life as representative,
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He lived a godly, holy, righteous life. And that's given to us by imputation.
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But I still have sins, and so my sins of unrighteousness, sin, ungodliness gets credited to Jesus' account.
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I didn't live the perfect life, but I got credit for it by God's divine accounting. Jesus didn't sin, but He gets credit for it by divine accounting, and that's the language of representation and substitution.
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No wonder Paul said, out of everything in the Bible, this is the most important part. 1 Corinthians 15,
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Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures. Look at Romans 8, verse 32, you just can zip around the book of Romans, and you'll see this language of substitution.
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It might not say substitute, but when you see things like on behalf of, in place of, in the stead of, for, that's the language of substitution.
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He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up, there's the language of substitution, for us.
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While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. That's Romans 5, 6, that's the language of substitution.
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We come now to number nine. I know what you're doing. You're thinking we've got a few left and we've only got a few minutes left.
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But as I've told you a thousand times, the pastor's early points take longer. At the end, they don't take as long.
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So think big picture. God is a creator, He's a judge, and thankfully,
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He's a savior. And we've got a big problem because He expects perfect obedience because His law reflects
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His character and His nature, and it won't change, He doesn't change. And therefore, when we are unrighteous, we don't do the right thing.
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We're sinful, we don't do the right thing, we miss the mark. We're ungodly, we're exactly opposite of God, we need help.
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You can say to yourself, well, by the time I get to all this, what are people going to say? I mean, it's like Spurgeon, more people think about the length of their fingernails and the dirt underneath it than they think about their eternal soul.
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But then we get to Jesus and we begin to talk about Him, how He stands in the place of as a obeying representative.
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He dies as a sacrificial death. All those Old Testament sacrifices, the
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Lamb of God and the goat, Jesus is the one. And we know it's true because number nine, resurrected.
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If He stayed in the grave, this is a farce, we should have slept in. But Jesus didn't stay in the grave and that meant the
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Father took His sacrifice as sufficient. God said, yes, I'm pleased with the sacrifice.
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You have no sin, you've paid in full for the sins of others, I will raise you from the dead.
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To put a stamp on, I am finished. And that stamp is, amen, I agree.
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Resurrected. We go back to chapter one and you see this kind of language of resurrection in the book of Romans.
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Make sure you talk about the resurrected Jesus. It's not good news without it. I often just say resurrected
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Jesus, the Jesus who was raised from the dead, and just add that on as often as possible. Chapter 1, verse 1,
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Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the good news of God, for the gospel of God.
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And this is not about an emperor of Rome, this is the Lord Jesus. And it's not a new thing which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the
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Scriptures concerning His Son, humanly descended from David according to the flesh.
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He's got the credentials. Divinely, He also has the credentials and He was declared to be the
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Son of God in power according to the capital S, Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead.
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That word declared there is where we get the word horizon. You look at the horizon and the horizon distinguishes land from sky, sea from sky.
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He's distinguished, He's marked out a clear line of demarcation, dividing earth and sky.
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Here, the resurrection of Jesus clearly marks out He was the substitute and He was the representative.
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Proof positive that what He did was true. Proof positive that when He said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, it was true.
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I mean, Jesus was either divine because He said He was, or He was demon -possessed, or He was who knows what else.
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Here, we know He was divine because this is the exclamation point. Jesus was raised from the dead and He stands raised even now.
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Jesus, the sinless Savior, dying as representative and substitute, is raised from the dead.
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Word 10, and now we have a response. That's okay.
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I'm going to finish anyway. If Juliet can keep her composure, I can too. You're going to meet people this week, and next week, and the week to follow, and you're going to know they're not
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Christians. I mean, we're not the judges, right? But we understand, okay, the way people talk and act.
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By the way, even if you don't, if maybe they are a Christian, this is good news for Christians too. Jesus died for sinners,
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Christians as well. And you're going to think, okay, I need to talk about God, and sin, and Jesus.
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And if you started with sinful mankind because it came up in the conversation, fine, but I'm just saying, big picture,
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I've got to start somewhere. God is a creator, He's a judge, He's Savior, and therefore, He expects perfect, perpetual, entire, personal, exact obedience 24 -7.
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Therefore, all have fallen short of the glory of God. They've acted unrighteously, they've acted sinfully, they've acted ungodly, and God could just damn everyone to hell, and He would be praised by the angels.
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But God loves sinners. God sent His Son, He sent His best. I read in Philippians chapter 2, did I not, to start the service off.
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Here's this great God, the Son, who humbles Himself to the point of obedience, even death on the cross.
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Why? Because He loves the Father, and went, but He loves sinners, and He loves to go redeem them, and rescue them, and save them from hell.
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He'll take hell on Him, condense into three hours, pour it out on Jesus, so that we don't have to.
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So, this good news, something has to be done about it, there has to be a response. Sometimes Peter would preach in Acts 2.
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He wouldn't even say, repent and believe, but the people would say, well, what do we do? Because this kind of news, there has to be a response to it.
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You can't just sit there and go, well, you know, God's this great God, and the Son came, and humbled Himself, and got spit on, and beat up, and called names, and called demon possessed, and this, that, and the other, and He did all these things, and, you know, okay, fine, that's just more history.
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No, this is, it demands a verdict. No response is, I don't care,
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I hate Jesus. That's a no response. The right response is number 10, believe. Believe.
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Believe. Not decide, not accept Jesus in your heart, not tear up when
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Amazing Grace is sung at a funeral. Believe. And so, I ask everyone here, knowing that God is your
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Creator and your Judge, thankfully Savior, knowing that me with you stand before God as unrighteous, sinful, and ungodly, and deserving to go to hell,
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God was not going to end it there. He sends the Calvary to Calvary. He sends the
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Lord Jesus, who's not going to extinguish these bruised reeds.
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He's going to love, and to serve, and to be that perfect Adam, to love
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God, and love neighbor. And the way this Jesus loves neighbors is living for them, representative, dying for them, substitute, and shows that He can have power over sin, death,
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Satan, hell, and He's raised from the dead. The response has to be, number one, believe.
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Romans 10, 9 is a good place to start. You can see the word faith throughout
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Romans, but let's just do this for time's sake. Romans 10, 9 and 10, this is part of the
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Romans road, because if you confess with your mouth, that's agree, right?
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I agree God is who He is. I agree I am who I am. I agree Jesus did what He did. Confess with your mouth,
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Jesus is Lord. In particular, Jesus is Lord here over death, over everything else. Lord of the cosmos,
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He's the creator. And believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
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For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
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Everybody here knows about Jesus, you've got the knowledge, and hopefully you're saying, I assented that, I agree, that's what happened, it was historical.
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But now the response is trust. I'm trusting, I'm resting, I'm relying on someone else.
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If you have to work your way to heaven, you're tainted with Adam's sin and your own sin, you can't. Therefore, trusting isn't works, it's saying
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I have nothing good, I'm taking the word of another and trusting in His works. That's why the response to this can't be do good.
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I think in the old days I might say repent and believe and follow. It can't be follow because the following would have to be perfect.
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Christians do follow eventually, but the response to the gospel is, I believe it. Jesus said,
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I'm the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. He that lives and believes in me shall never die.
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And then Jesus said, do you believe this? And I ask you, do you believe it? The response here is not baptism, the response here is not
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Latin, the response here isn't do good, I've done more good than bad, I'm a good grandma,
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I'm a good grandpa, I like to help civically, I like to support the police when they call, fine.
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Those things are all fine civically and humanly and show there's a common grace where we have a desire to be kind to other people.
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But you've got to be as kind as Jesus to get into heaven on your own. It'll never happen. Why send
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Jesus if we could get to heaven on our own? Why send the eternal king to rescue us if we could get in on our own?
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So the response is believe, and then finally, number 11, the response is repent.
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God's a creator, He's a judge, He's a savior, we're unrighteous. You guys don't even have to memorize this stuff,
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I'm memorizing it for you. This is the easiest dollar you'll ever make. We're unrighteous, we're sinful, we're ungodly, yet Jesus to the rescue, seek and save those who are lost.
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Born this day, the Savior, and He comes and He lives for, He's a representative, He dies for as a substitute, and He's raised from the dead.
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And we have to believe. And the text also talks about repentance. Repent and believe.
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Essentially, when you say one, you say both. You have a repentant belief and you have a believing penitence.
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Romans 2 .4 uses the word if you want to look at it. John the Baptist preached repentance,
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Jesus preached repentance. Peter preached repentance. Paul preaches repentance here in Romans.
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Or do you presume on the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
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And essentially, when you think about these things that happen simultaneously, I think there's probably a logical order, but simultaneously, you say when it comes to repentance,
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I'm thinking rightly about my sin. It's wrong, I need to turn from it, it's awful.
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Repentance deals with thinking about sin rightly, and belief thinks about thinking about Jesus rightly.
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Repentance and faith, inseparable, simultaneous, mandatory. If I said believe in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, I mean repent and believe. If I say repent, I mean repent and believe.
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You say one thing and you mean two, and that's how it's used. People call these twin graces, both given by God.
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So we have our marching orders. Someone came to you and preached the gospel to you.
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Many people came to you and preached the gospel to you. Maybe it was a pastor, maybe it was someone else. I'm hoping that the
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Lord orchestrates this week an opportunity for you to say, I have some good news for you. There are shootings, like the missionary that just got executed, and his wife, and the arm cut off, and hurricanes and all that.
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It is bad news 24 -7. I have good news. Lots of times I'll tell people,
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I get to fly around the world and stay in West Boylston as well, and here's my job.
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I get to tell people good news. That's my job. I get paid for that. You pay my bills for that. The good news that you don't have to go to hell, you get to be forgiven, you get to go to heaven, you can be reconciled with God.
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Wouldn't you like to be forgiven? I have good news for you. I hope we can get our mouths open to talk to people like that.
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And you say, yeah, but they're probably going to be offended. Well, remember, I have to put this little reminder in there.
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If you get fired at work because you're preaching to people, you're not a martyr.
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You're just dumb. Okay, you're zealous. You get paid to work, but there's times to preach.
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Working isn't the time. If you're a Christian worker, you work harder and better than anybody else.
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If you make shoes, you make the best shoes possible, as Tyndale would talk about. But there are other times you get to preach.
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By the way, if I'm ever at a counter or something at a deli or anyplace else, I say, well, I know you're not allowed to talk about religious things, but I, the customer, am.
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You're forced to listen. We just have good news. People don't know anything about Jesus anymore.
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And I think, humanly speaking, evangelism is going to take longer now because they don't know the person they've offended. They don't know the person in whom they have to believe.
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You talk to people about who Jesus is, they think he's some mystic guru who was a good teacher and he had a few nice things to say, let's be spiritual.
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No, no, he is Lord, and he demands your Lordship, submission to his Lordship, because he made you.
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Jesus is the creator. He's the ultimate judge, John 5. He's going to judge you, but he, in fact, is the
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Savior incarnate, and he saves people like that. So please, friend, recognize your unrighteousness, recognize your sinfulness, and just say,
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Lord, I confess it, I believe it, I am ungodly, and I believe that you perfectly obeyed in my place, you died on behalf of sinners like me, and you were raised from the dead, and now
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I know sin is awful, and now I know you are wonderful. I repent and believe. It's not that hard to process through today, but it's hard to do,
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I know. So if you know what you're doing, you know what you're going to say, I have good news for you. Let's pray.
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Father in heaven, I exalt your name. We realize that you're holy, merciful, kind.
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We realize that we're anything but that, and yet we realize somebody actually did what you wanted.
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You look at all the genealogies of all the people, there was one who perfectly obeyed. How could he?
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Well, he's not just man, but he's also God. God in the flesh, our Savior. There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother, and it's our
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Lord. And Father, we may have all kinds of other problems, and we do, but we as Christians don't have this problem, that the
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God of the universe who made us and whom we'll give an account is mad at us, is angry at us, will make us pay.
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Because that'll never be the case for us, Father, as Christians, because your word is true, and Jesus paid it all.
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And so Father, in light of that, I pray that you'd give me and every person here an opportunity this week, we don't need to feel led, we just need to obey great commission, that we could tell someone about the
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Lord Jesus, and how He loves sinners, and how He asked them to come to Him, because He knows they're laboring and heavy laden, and they need rest in this world of works righteousness.
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And I pray this in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, we're going to celebrate the