Your Faith Has Saved You!

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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Well, I want to begin our time this afternoon by asking you a question. And it's a pretty basic one, but an important one.

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What must you do to be saved? For those who

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I think were low on children today, but for the one child that's here, what must you do to be saved?

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This is the question that I post to my children this week as we drove from their piano class to prayer meeting this week.

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By God's grace, every week I get the opportunity to have two 30 -minute blocks of time to have intense, uninterrupted, and precious time to discuss deep theological matters with our kids.

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Where they can't leave the car, I have a captive audience, and they're usually occupied enough with at least the scenery that I can talk about some of the more profound and important things in life.

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And this week, just as we do every Thursday, we loaded up into my

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Honda Civic to trek across the entire city to go to piano lessons. And I made it a point, as I normally do, to ask a question to spur on conversation.

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And my son Noah asked the question eventually, which was music to my ears. If you know anything about me, he said,

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Dad, what is the difference between Catholics and Christians? Now, if you know me, you know that I love

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Reformation doctrine. I love Reformation history. And so I was very happy to discuss the difference between Catholics and Christians, as he put it.

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It's a good question. It's an important one. Considering there are, according to many sources, about 30 % of the population of Edmonton are professing

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Catholics. And so I was delighted to get into the conversation. And where would you start if your child asked you, what is the difference between a

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Catholic and a Protestant Christian? I like guardrails. I like structure.

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And so we started talking about the five solas of the Reformation. And if you know the five solas, it's that we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the scriptures alone, to the glory of God alone.

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And one of the things that I said to my son Noah as we were discussing this is that the linchpin, the crux of the difference between us and our

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Catholic friends, they are friends, not brothers and sisters, but friends, is the issue of sola fide, of justification by faith alone.

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And I went into some detail about what the Catholic Church teaches, or the Roman Catholic Church teaches about justification.

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And I relayed to my children that we are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ, not by faith alone plus works, not by faith plus sacraments, not by faith and spiritual disciplines, not by faith, as the

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Mormons would put it, after all that we have done. But every Christian who is a

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Christian is saved by the grace of God through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

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And again, knowing me and knowing this topic, I was starting to get excited and animated about things, and I asked my children,

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I turned to each of them and I said, I quizzed them and I said, what must you do to be saved?

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And most of us parents, whether you have parents of small children or parents of older children, feel like our children aren't fast enough to respond to that question.

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There's maybe a pause and a thought and too much time elapses between when the question is asked and when the answer is provided.

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But I would venture to guess that probably many Christians today, many professing Christians, if you were to go to the bus stop at Capilano Mall or to one of the new transit stations along the

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LRT line and say, are you a Christian? Yes, I am. What must you do to be saved?

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I'm afraid that too many people would take too long to answer that question or would not be able to answer that question altogether.

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What must you do to be saved from the eternal wrath of God that you deserve and to be completely and perfectly reconciled to a holy

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God? What is the response? I'm lost.

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I've already lost myself. What is that response to Christ that makes the difference, there we go, that makes the difference between eternal heaven and eternal hell?

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What must we do to be saved? Now, the Bible tells us clear as day.

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If you read passages like Acts chapter 16, we read, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

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Now for many of us, for those of us who are Christians especially, this is hardly a revolutionary idea.

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And yet it's a fundamental truth, I would suggest, that we must continuously be refreshing in our minds as we preach the gospel to ourselves day after day after day.

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We are too apt to forget that it is by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone, that we have assurance of salvation.

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Now, I've made a big point already about faith and faith alone. Why do

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I bring up this story? Well, it's because this is exactly what our text deals with this afternoon.

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It's a preach the gospel to yourself kind of text that is before us.

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And it deals with one of the most fundamental aspects of eternal salvation, a basic one, yes, but a necessary one for each of you, whether you're a believer today or not.

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The chief message as we get into Mark chapter 10 is this, that Jesus Christ is, if I can put it this way, is in the business of saving people, of making people whole.

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He's a righteous and powerful Savior who concerns himself with redeeming and with restoring those who are despised and rejected and blind and lost.

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And what I think our passage teaches us here is that the way to access Christ's saving power, whether you've been a believer for 10 years or you don't know what it means to be a

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Christian, is nothing other than faith. And regardless of how dirty and how wretched and how undeserving we all are,

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Christ is pleased to save all who come to him by faith on his terms, by faith in his work and in his name.

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So that's what we're going to do today as we look in Mark chapter 10. And it's a really small passage, smaller than what we normally preach through.

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But I had an incredibly difficult time breaking up how it was that we were going to look at these six or seven verses.

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Hopefully it doesn't scare you, but what we'll do is this. I'm going to make four brief points of observation from the text.

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Four brief points of observation and then four points, brief points again, of application.

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So we're going to do as we have done in times past, the heavy digging up front, mining the text of Scripture, and then in the second half we'll apply that to our lives.

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And so we'll begin now in Mark chapter 10 in verse 46. And we're actually going to parse verse 46 in half, but I'll read the whole verse for context.

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It says this, And they came to Jericho, and as he was leaving

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Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bar Timaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside.

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So the first observation that I want to make, and you'll find this in the outline in the bulletin if you look there, is this, that we find first a wicked city.

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The context of this whole passage is a wicked, an evil, a depraved setting.

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And I'm going to show you how that is. So as we have observed now over the last couple of weeks, we've seen how the disciples were making their way from Pariah, on the east side of the

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Jordan River, up toward Jerusalem. You'll remember the last time that I preached that it was a 28 kilometer trek from Jericho and 3 ,500 feet of elevation gain from the city of Jericho to Jerusalem.

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And so Christ and his disciples are on their way to Jerusalem. And as we find in our passage today, in order for them to get from Pariah to Jerusalem, they must first pass through Jericho.

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It was an uphill climb to the place where Christ had fixed his gaze and where he would be crucified.

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And Jericho, if you talk to many historians or archaeologists, is universally recognized as one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.

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One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. And not only is it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities, but it's one of the lowest cities in the world at 840 feet below sea level.

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And in terms of the topography, it is as far down as you can go and live on solid ground in the earth.

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At least what has been inhabited, I should say. And not only was Jericho an old city, and what we would say a low city in terms of elevation, but as I've already indicated, it was a wicked city.

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And what I want to do is take us through a little bit of the extra biblical evidence followed by the biblical evidence for just the fallen, despicable, perverted nature of this particular location.

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So in terms of extra biblical evidence, archaeologists who have excavated parts of Jericho have made over the years many disturbing finds that paint a vivid picture of the lifestyle of the earliest inhabitants of this city.

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In many homes, when archaeologists went into them, they found some children might expect that you'd find if there's something going on, maybe there's old toys or old linens or pottery or pots and pans.

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They found all of those things, but in addition to that, what they found in many of the homes in Jericho were human skulls that had been covered with plaster.

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And what was happening, what they determined in Jericho, even the earliest inhabitants, is that when a relative in Jericho died, when

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Uncle Ed died or Aunt Nettie died, they would take uncle or aunt and they would decapitate them, remove their head, remove their hair, their skin, their eyes, their brain tissue, and allow the skull to dry out.

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And then once the skull had dried out, they would form it with a plaster to make it look like Uncle Ed or Aunt Nettie.

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And if that isn't disturbing enough, and you can go on Google and see this for yourself, if that isn't disturbing enough, what they would do with these plaster -covered skulls is they would set them up in their homes and they would worship them.

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It was a twisted form of ancestor worship. It was a fallen place by all accounts.

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And in the Bible, we see this as well. For instance, old Jericho was part of the

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Amorite Kingdom, if you remember hearing about that in your Old Testament. It's one of the many people groups that lived in ancient

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Canaan, the land that would one day become the nation of Israel.

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And according to Scripture, the Amorite Kingdom, when Israel finally invaded it,

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Remember, they crossed over the Jordan River, they circled around Jericho seven days in a row, and on the seventh day, they blew their trumpets and the walls of Jericho fell.

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When Israel finally invaded Jericho, Scripture would tell us that it had already reached its full potential for evil in God's eyes.

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Now, how is that? If we were to rewind just a little bit to the time of Abraham, in Abraham chapter 15 and verse 16,

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God promised Abraham that He would give him or his descendants the land of Canaan.

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But He said that He would do it when the sin of the Amorites was complete, when they were ripe for judgment.

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In Genesis 15, it says, And they, Abraham's descendants, shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the

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Amorites is not yet complete. Implying that when it was, God would bring

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Abraham's descendants back to take Jericho. And so the reason why

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Israel marched around Jericho and put the people of that city to death by the sword was because they were altogether corrupt and their iniquity was complete.

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They could not get more evil. John MacArthur says of that time in Jericho, he said,

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Jericho was part of a grotesquely violent, totally depraved, and thoroughly pagan culture.

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Amorites were so hell -bent on the pursuit of everything evil that God Himself had condemned them and ordered the

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Israelites to wipe them from the face of the earth. Now some would see that as ethnic cleansing or genocide.

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It is not. It is the judgment of God against a sinful and rebellious people.

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And so when God enabled Israel to destroy Jericho, the city was so evil that in Joshua 6 and verse 26,

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Joshua laid an oath and he said, Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds the city

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Jericho. At the cost of his firstborn son shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son he shall set up its gates.

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Now I always like passages like this where you see a curse that is issued about a particular place.

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And I noticed when I was on Google this week, I was searching for various things about Jericho and one of the recommended questions was,

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Did anyone ever try to rebuild Jericho again? I'm not sure if anyone's had that thought in your own mind, but the answer is yes.

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There was one who was bold enough to, at least one, who was bold enough to test that curse. And we won't go there, but in 1

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Kings chapter 16 and verse 34, we'll remember the wicked King Ahab.

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He was married to Jezebel. During his time, there was a man named Hiel. And it says in 1

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Kings 16 and 34, In this day, Hiel of Bethel built

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Jericho. He laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram.

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We get the name of his firstborn son. Abiram, his firstborn son, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son,

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Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Joshua, the son of Nun.

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Jericho was a wicked city and God was serious when he said, No one will rebuild it again unless it is at the cost of his own children.

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But there's even, we have a biblical account for that. There's even extra biblical account of that as well.

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And forgive me, I really enjoy this aspect of inter -biblical history. But in the first century before Christ, we heard about King Herod last week.

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Maybe, I'm always looking for the children and I'm lost when I don't have them here. I know how Frank felt last week.

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But in terms of the first century, King Herod was called

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Herod the Great. And our brother Frank Parker reminded us, it's not because Herod was a great man, but because he was maybe at very best, he was a great engineer.

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And Herod himself developed or built his own city of Jericho, about one mile away from the old city.

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And so you had old city Jericho and one mile away he built new Jericho. And there he built his winter palace.

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And even for first century BC standards, it would have been quite magnificent. A massive palace complex, multiple pools, a hippodrome.

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Alice, I'll ask you. Alice, what is a hippodrome, do you think? Any adults that might want to help what a hippodrome is?

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Yeah, very good. Hippopotamus is a water horse. And so at King Herod the

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Great's palace, he had a horse arena where horses could go around. He had an amphitheater.

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He had a gymnasium where he could exercise and get afternoon sun. And built around the palace complex were, again, modern homes by first century

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BC standards that formed what became a very attractive place known as Jericho.

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But what's really interesting is even Herod himself, even though he built Jericho one mile away, it's very possible that he was subject to the same curse.

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Herod the Great's first son. His name, if we look back through the history of the world, is

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Antipater. Born from his wife Doris. And he became the sole heir to the throne of Herod the

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Great. After Herod the Great had his other two sons, or two of his other sons,

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Alexander and Aristobulus executed. But only three years later,

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Antipater, Herod's first born, was also executed. Now, why was he executed?

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Because he was planning the murder of his own father, Herod the Great. And so, Herod built

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Jericho number two, 2 .0, and lost his first born son. But what happened to his youngest son?

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We read about him in scripture. Herod's youngest son, Philip the Tetrarch, married his niece,

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Salome. You'll remember in the story of John the Baptist, it was Salome, Herodias' daughter, who danced and then asked for John the

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Baptist's head on a platter. Well, after Philip married his niece, he died shortly after, at the age of 38, without having any children, no descendants of his own.

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And so, even the curse of Jericho fell upon Herod, who built a second

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Jericho. And it's telling that Caesar Augustus, one of Herod's family members, sorry,

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Caesar Augustus said of Herod's family members, it is better to be Herod's pig than to be

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Herod's son. And so, we know from this passage, it's a big introduction, but we know from this passage and from other gospel accounts, that it was here, between old

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Jericho and new Jericho, in this historically wicked place, rich in wickedness, that the blind man stood at the edge of the road, crying out to Jesus.

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So, we have a wicked city. The second observation I want to make, and a shorter one now, is this.

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That here we find not only a wicked city, but a blind, nameless beggar.

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Now, how can he be nameless? We're given a name for him. I'm going to explain that in a second. But we see that in verse 46b, the second half of verse 46.

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So, here we come to the scene of the very last healing miracle recorded in Christ's earthly ministry.

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And it is the first time in Mark that we're given the name of a person who

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Christ will heal, sort of. I highlight that word, sort of, that we sort of get his name.

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And I say that because we don't actually ever learn the name of this man that is called

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Bartimaeus in Mark chapter 10. Excuse me. In Mark chapter 10, in verse 46.

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Because Bartimaeus is the combination of two words. It's the combination of the Aramaic prefix bar, which means son, and then the

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Greek name Timaeus, which means honor, which would have been the name of Bartimaeus' father.

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And so this man was not only blind. It was not enough that he had the occupation of a beggar.

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But here he sits on the edge of a dusty road outside of a wicked and forbidden city, and he is essentially nameless.

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Now, picture this if you went back to your hometown, and instead of everyone referring to you as your own name, they said, oh, you're

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Timaeus' boy. Oh, Timaeus' boy down the road who begs outside old

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Jerusalem. The people didn't even take time to get to know his name.

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It wasn't important to them. He was essentially nameless. And he was so rejected by his culture and his people that not only did people not care to know his name, but he was unprovided for and left to beg like so many other blind people did in Christ's time.

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In Israel, he was often a merciless place for the blind and the infirm.

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It was a frequent occupation of the blind to beg for their daily necessities.

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We see this in passages like our brother just read, or just before what you read in John 9, verse 8.

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When Jesus healed that man, he found him begging outside of the temple. And not only was he a beggar by trade, but in the context of that passage, we see that people believe that these men and women who were made blind, they were made blind as a punishment, either for their own sin or for the sin of their parents.

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So they were not only wholly disabled, but they were rejected as sinners and outcasts, relegated to the literal gutters, to the edges of the roadways in society.

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So outside of this evil city, we have this blind, nameless, presumed sinful beggar.

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As we move along, the third observation I want to make is this. Here we find a desperate confession.

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I want to read that in verses 47 and 48. It says, And when he heard that it was

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Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.

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And Jesus stopped and called him. And they called the blind man, saying to him,

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Take heart, get up, he is calling you. So a desperate confession.

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As blind Bartimaeus sat at the edge of that road, he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was coming.

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Now if you're reading from the New American Standard Bible, or maybe the Legacy Standard Bible, you'll actually see that it says,

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Jesus the Nazarene. And this is probably a more accurate translation.

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That's actually an adjective that's used. Jesus the Nazarene. Now that might seem insignificant, but what it means is that this blind man, as he sat waiting, he didn't simply hear a man of a man named

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Jesus who came from a place called Nazareth, the hometown of Nazareth. But he was told that Jesus, a

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Nazarene, like Samson, in the book of Judges, was coming. As a matter of fact, if we go back to the

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Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of that particular text, Samson is referred to as the

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Nazareos Theou. I'm going to try that again.

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Nazareos Theou. And that's what this blind

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Bartimaeus heard as he sat on the road, that here was coming Jesus the Nazarene, the

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Nazareos Theou, which meant God's powerfully anointed one.

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And Bartimaeus, unlike his disciples, as we have seen over and again, he gets it.

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He doesn't call out to Jesus. He doesn't just call out Jesus' name, but he cries out

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Christ's name and then his redemptive historical title,

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Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.

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Now a biblically literate Jew knew that God had promised

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David an eschatological son who would reign as Messiah forever.

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We read about this initial promise in 2 Samuel 7. And if you can remember all the way back,

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David wanted to build a house for God, if you remember. And what God said is, no, no, no, you're not going to build a house for me.

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I will build a house for you. And he establishes what has been called the

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Davidic Covenant. And he says there in 2 Samuel 7, 12 and 13, he says, when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers,

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I will raise up your offspring after you who shall come from your body and I will establish his kingdom.

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He shall build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

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And so even when the fickle crowd tries to silence him, he just shouts louder.

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I love the persistence of this blind man. As they try to shush him, he just shouts louder,

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Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And one commentator writes aptly, he says the kingdom of heaven is not for the well -meaning but for the desperate.

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And desperate he was. And we'll get to it in a minute here, but in verse 51, if we can just look ahead for a second, when he finally does get his audience with Christ, he calls him

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Rabboni. The ESV again renders it Rabbi. I like the

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ESV, but I'm picking on it a little bit today. Again, the NASB and the LSB say

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Rabboni. And it's an important distinction. Because if we look back, if we think about what the rich young ruler said to Christ, he called him what?

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Good teacher. When James and John approached Christ, they called him Rabbi. Well here, blind

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Bartimaeus cries out Rabboni, which is completely different. It's used only twice in the

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New Testament altogether. In this passage, and then in John chapter 20, when

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Mary encounters Christ in the garden after his resurrection. And the reason why it's used so infrequently is because it wasn't used to refer to human teachers, to ordinary men.

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But it was a term that was used to speak to God in prayer. The true teacher, the righteous one, the

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God of Israel. It was referred to him or was reserved for him alone.

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And so, Bartimaeus might be blind. And he might not be able to describe the colors of the sky, or the majesty of Herod's Temple in Jerusalem.

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But God has, in a sense, opened his eyes to see who it was that was here on the road before him in this long -awaited, sorry, it was the long -awaited

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Davidic king. The Messiah of Israel. The visible image of the invisible

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God. And he cries out for mercy to the only one who can save him from his wretched existence as a desperate, blind, nameless beggar in a wicked city.

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And the fourth observation I want to make briefly is this. Here we witness, in the midst of this setting, a full deliverance.

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And I'll read from verses 49 through 52. And Jesus stopped and said,

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Call him. And they called the blind man, saying to him, Take heart, get up, he is calling you.

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And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him,

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What do you want me to do for you? And the blind man said to him, Rabbi, or L -S -B -N -A -S -B,

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Rabboni, let me recover my sight. And Jesus said to him,

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Go your way, your faith has made you well. And immediately he recovered his sight.

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And followed him on the way. So here we have this full deliverance in Christ.

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In verse 49, it's interesting. I always like to watch the attitudes of the people change in the narratives of Scripture.

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It's interesting how quickly the attitude of the crowd changes when Christ sets his gaze on Bartimaeus.

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They go from trying to silence him to saying, Oh, take heart, take heart, he is calling you. And so Jesus commissions the crowd to call him.

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And in verse 50, we're told that the man threw off his cloak. The outer layer of his garment.

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He sprang up. Kind of like we were singing, And I will hasten to thee.

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Hasten so glad and free. He literally jumped to his feet. He came immediately to Christ.

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And literally, he prays to him, Rabboni, and asks him to be healed. And in verse 2, the title of this sermon, if you look in your bulletin, comes from verse 52.

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Jesus tells the man, Go, your faith has made you well.

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Now I've been told I shouldn't focus too much on Greek words and language, that that gets boring over time.

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But I want to draw your attention to just one more word that's important. When he says, go your way, your faith has made you well.

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Made you well. Is the Greek word, sozo. Which literally means, your faith has saved you.

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86, what is it? 86, 89 out of 106 occurrences in the

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New Testament of sozo refer specifically to salvation. It's the same word that Matthew uses.

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In Matthew 121, She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus for he will save, sozo, his people from their sins.

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This man's faith in Christ's saving ability not only healed him physically, which it did.

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He restored his sight, Christ did, in a moment. But it saved him eternally from the punishment of his iniquity.

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He didn't just have healing faith, he had saving faith. Again, if I can quote from MacArthur, he says,

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Bartimaeus' physical and spiritual eyes were opened at the same time.

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The outward healing reflected the inner wellness of salvation. And so, in that instant,

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Bartimaeus went from being a blind beggar on the edge of the road to a full -blown disciple on the road.

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Right then and there, he recovered his sight and without a moment of hesitation, he followed

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Christ. So that is our passage today. Now, how do we apply that?

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If you were preaching this passage, how would you apply that? It's an interesting question, isn't it? Some will read this passage.

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I'm certain some have read this passage and have, or will, would engage in what something that has been called, what

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I would call, narcissus. There's exegesis, where you try to determine the full meaning of the passage of a text or the full meaning of a text.

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There's eisegesis, where you read your own meaning into a text. And then narcissus is where you read yourself into the text.

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Now, many people have done this and they would say that it is our job, like Jesus. We are the Jesus of the story and we need to go now and we need to be compassionate and we need to use the spiritual gifts that Christ has given us to heal people.

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And that is the only application of the text. I think it's an incorrect assertion.

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It's a misguided application. Instead, I think what this Bible teaches, it teaches us the very nature of Christ's heart toward us as sinners and the means by which we come to Christ in faith.

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And so in response to the four observations, again, briefly, I'm going to make four points of application.

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And the first I want to do is this, is recognize your helpless estate for every one of you in this room.

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Dear friends, we are not to insert ourselves into the place of Christ in this story.

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As a matter of fact, if you're going to insert yourself into any one role in this story, you could say that we are the blind beggars of this story or the beggar with newly opened eyes in this story.

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When we rightly understand this passage, we recognize that we, brothers and sisters, friends, are the despised and helpless.

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We are rightly accounted as sinners. We are from a, if I can say it, a wretched place.

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And all we can do is sit in the gutter outside the crumbled walls of our fallen city and beg apart from Christ.

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That's an important distinction. We are children of Adam and citizens of the same world that transgressed

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God's command in the garden. We dwell in the very world that took the sinless savior of this world and cursed him and spat upon him and tore out parts of his beard and whipped him and flogged him and nailed him to a tree where he became accursed of God.

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We are, as Isaiah would say in Isaiah chapter 6, we are men of unclean lips and we dwell amongst a people of unclean lips.

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This world is the dark alley of God's creation and it's where we live and where we grew up and where we learned to be who we are.

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No one in this room is good. If you think you are, you're not.

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I am the chief of sinners and then so are you. It's true.

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I thought about taking this particular line out, but I'm going to keep it. You are a worm and not a man and so am

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I. Now some people might hear that and go, Shane is in a bad mood today and he's being mean and he's being judgmental.

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Why would he say that about me? He doesn't know me. No, but God knows you. And I'm simply being honest.

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And honesty is what we need. Because it's when we discover, when we appreciate that we are sinners, that we are wretches, that we are the beggars in the story, then we realize that it was the

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Son of Man who did not come to save the righteous, but to bring sinners to repentance.

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That is a trustworthy saying that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

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And so if you're not a sinner, you're not eligible for salvation. But by God's grace, you are a sinner.

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Or at least you've come to know that you are a sinner. If you're going to be called from the ditch of your own demise, you must first acknowledge that.

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And we get to confess that God is in the business of saving wicked and wretched people from wicked and wretched places.

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Millennia before this story ever took place. In the first Jericho, when the walls were still standing, who did

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God save from that city? He did not save the priests. He did not save the ones who walked around in long robes.

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He saved one prostitute in her family who hung a scarlet cord out of her window by faith.

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And the Lord saw that wretched woman's faith, and He saved her. The second application.

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Not only are you a sinner, but you must cry out to Jesus by faith.

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I once heard a story. I believe I've told the story to my children several times. Because to go back to the introduction, just how important it is to get first things first.

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To get first things right. And I remember hearing this story about a man who was hiring military chaplains for,

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I can't remember which world war it was. But the question that he asked, the interview question, the most important question was this.

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You're on the battlefield, and there's a young soldier who is in a pit, and he is dying.

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You have two minutes with him. What are you going to tell him? And some chaplains would come in, and I'm not sure what their answers were, but maybe they waxed eloquent about the nature of the

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Trinity. Or maybe the Calvinists came in, and they wanted to talk about election, and predestination, and unconditional election, and limited atonement.

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But the chaplains that he picked were the ones that when they were there in the trench with the dying soldier, they could tell them one thing.

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What must you do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.

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If you are like me in this room, and you are a beggar, and you know before a holy

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God that you have nothing to offer except filthy rags, then we need to take heed of what the military chaplains were to teach people.

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That our only hope in life and in death is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

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When I lead family worship, and my children love when we read Acts chapter 16, when there's the earthquake in the jail,

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I shake the table, so there's a good thundering roar in the kitchen. And then

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I act out the prison guard who comes down and turns the lights on in the room, and he's about to take his own life, or even before he turns the lights on, he's about to take his own life.

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Peter tells him to stop, and he asks him, what must I do to be saved? I love acting out that scene with my children, or with other children.

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But to tell them that what Peter tells him is this, sorry, what Paul tells him, where am

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I going? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.

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Ephesians chapter 2, For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is a gift of God that no man should boast.

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Romans chapter 10 and verse 3, The Jews, they had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

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Why was it? It's because they sought to establish their own righteousness, rather than submitting to the righteousness of God that is by faith.

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It's one thing to recognize that you're a sinner in need of grace. It's another thing altogether to recognize how you remedy that.

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And what the word of God says, and what this passage says is this, It is by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.

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And as I've talked in times past, there's faith, and the

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Lord even accepts weak faith. So long as it's a weak faith in a strong Savior, in a mighty

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Savior. I once heard a story of a woman who became unconscious, and all of her family and friends around her had thought that she died.

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And they were loading her into a casket, and they were about to take her to the cemetery to bury her body.

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And just as they were preparing her for burial, one of the people noticed just a quiver in her eyelash.

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And they, I'm not sure what they did to wake her, to shake her, but they aroused her enough that they discovered that she wasn't dead.

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And it was just a quiver, just the quiver of an eyelash, that saved that woman from dying.

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Can you imagine that? Waking up as they're heaping the dirt onto your casket. Well, in the same way the

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Lord is pleased to save people, with just a quiver of faith, to see

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Christ for who He is and to believe on Him. So we have our helpless estate, we have crying out to Jesus by faith, and then receiving salvation at Christ's hand.

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Matthew Henry says, in coming to Christ for help and healing, we should look to Him as the promised

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Messiah. The gracious calls Christ gives us to come to Him, encourage our hope that if we come to Him, we shall have what we come for.

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Those who would come to Jesus must cast away the garment of their own sufficiency, their own cloak, must free themselves from every weight and the sin that like long garments most easily besets them.

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I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but how many people in this room struggle with assurance of salvation?

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Trusting that you are indeed saved. And if Christ were to come at this very moment, if the last trumpet were to interrupt this meeting, that you would be right with Him, and that you would look forward to and rejoice at His coming.

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How many of you lack that assurance of salvation? If you have placed your faith in Christ, He has saved you.

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And what a wonderful saving it is. Your works will never save you. If God were to permit you to live 10 ,000 lives, you could never earn salvation, but would only accumulate 10 ,000 years or lives worth more of sin and treachery.

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But when Christ saves by grace through faith, He saves to the uttermost.

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In the words of the hymn writer Fanny Crosby, if you know anything about her, she was a blind woman.

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She was blind from infancy, I think six weeks old. This woman wrote 8 ,000 hymns as a blind hymn writer.

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One of the hymns that we know and we've sung before reads like this.

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Oh, perfect redemption, the purchase of God to every believer.

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Sorry, I'll try that again. Oh, perfect redemption, the purchase of blood to every believer, the promise of God, the vilest offender who truly believes that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

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Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Let the earth hear His voice. One 19th century preacher, his name might have been

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Spurgeon, but I try not to mention Spurgeon too, too much. He said this, that one might better try to sail the

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Atlantic in a paper boat than to try to get to heaven on good works.

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But in glaring contrast to that, John Flavel says this about the redemption of Christ that is by faith.

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He says, oh, what a complete, finished, perfect thing is the righteousness of Christ.

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The searching eye of the holy and jealous God cannot find the least flaw or defect in it.

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And dear brother or sister, despite the wretch that you are, if your faith is in Christ, if you've cried out to Jesus the

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Nazarene for salvation and placed all of your confidence in Him, God can examine your credentials for all of eternity.

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And so long as your credentials are Christ's, He will find no flaw. You are freely and fully loved, accepted by God, based on the merits of Christ.

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And then lastly, with that salvation as we saw in Bartimaeus, follow

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Him. James R. Edwards says, faith that does not lead to discipleship is not saving faith.

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Whoever asks of Jesus must be willing to follow Jesus, even on the uphill road to the cross.

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In Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 10, it talks about how we were created in Christ Jesus for good works, but that's only after we have been saved.

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In 2 Corinthians 5 .15, it says, and Christ died for all of us. He died so we would no longer live to ourselves, but for the one who died and was raised to life.

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And with what zeal, dear friends, with what zeal ought we to follow the

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Christ who has saved us from our own wretched sin? Did Bartimaeus grumble and complain as he got on the road to follow

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Christ? No, the Lord opened his eyes to behold His beauty and His glory and His goodness, and it was all he could do.

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You'll remember that Christ said, go your own way, your faith has made you well. What did Bartimaeus do?

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But he went on the road after Christ's way. He immediately followed after Christ with joy.

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And so it is with every true disciple of Christ that we ought to follow

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Him, run after Him, hasten to Him with joy and with zeal.

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See, I wasn't going to mention Spurgeon's name because I was going to use a different Spurgeon account here, but Charles Spurgeon tells a story.

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I cannot escape this guy. I promise I don't go looking for these. They find me.

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But Spurgeon tells a story that he once heard of an enemy ship that was being fired at by a cannon in a fort.

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And despite the good guys in the fort hitting the ship, the cannonballs were not penetrating the ship.

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And so the captain of the fort said, heat up the cannonballs. And so they threw the cannonballs into a furnace.

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And one after another, they would take these red, hot cannonballs and load them into the cannon and fire them.

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And before long, all the ships that were approaching the fort were at the bottom of the ocean. Spurgeon says, the bottom of the sea in three minutes.

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And what he did with this application is, he said this, this is what you must do with your life.

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Make yourself red hot. Picture this. Never mind if men say you're too enthusiastic or too fanatical.

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Give them red hot shots because there's nothing else half as good for the purpose you have in view.

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And then Spurgeon said this, he said, when I've used up all of my ammunition, then I ram myself into the great gospel gun and fire myself out to my hearers.

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There was a young preacher that said, how do I build a church? He said, set yourself on fire and then invite the people to come watch you burn.

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Live in such a way that the Lord has saved you from your sin forever for all of eternity.

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And only one life you have. And only one life will soon be passed. And only what is done for Christ will last.

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And so, if you're a wretched sinner like me today, you come from a wretched place and you've been saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, have great assurance.

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He will find no flaw in you. And with no flaws, forensically, before the living

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God. Make yourself red hot and follow after him. So I'll end with this.

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Alice, what must we do to be saved? Believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. And when he saves you, follow him.

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Let's pray. Father in heaven, Lord, I pray that you would use this preaching of your word to get glory for yourself.

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Lord, I feel like I didn't start preaching until the last two minutes. But Father, use this, this preaching of your word to get glory for yourself.

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Oh Lord, would you convince your people, for all those who are in Christ today, would you convince them, oh

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God, that they are yours. Oh Lord, how we would live differently if we only understood how wonderfully forgiven we are.

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There is no sin between us and you and Christ. And that when you see us, you don't feign love for us, but you love us with an everlasting love.

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And that Lord, you are our Father and we are your children. Oh Father, we thank you that you've shown compassion on us.

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Lord, that you have opened our eyes to see the beauty of Christ. And Father, help us now to live with the beauty of Christ in view.

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And Father, if he leads us to Jerusalem, to a wooden cross, then Lord, help us to follow him there.

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And if he leads us to a sunny spot on a grassy knoll for whatever period of time,

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Lord, whether with much or with little, Lord, help us to be content and to follow him there.

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But Lord, with all that we do, oh God, we don't just want to be saved so that we can die and go to heaven.

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We want to be saved so that we can enjoy you here and now and serve you here and now.

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And when we die, to rejoice that we will see you as you are, Lord, and we will be like you.