Regeneration Conference Part 3 — Paul Washer

The Burden of Preaching the Gospel

Please turn in your Bibles to Romans 3. It is a both wonderful and terrible burden that is placed upon the preacher of the Gospel. It is a wonderful thing to be able to speak the greatest things of God that are found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is a terrible thing to be given a lifelong task in which every time you seek to complete it, you know that you will fail. I can remember one time walking out in a field, crying out to God about this very thing, how terrible it is to be given a message so glorious that you fail in every attempt to even share what you know, knowing that you do not even know the tenth part of it.

And I asked God, I said, just on the day that I step over into glory, a glorified body, that He might grant me the opportunity to preach one last time in a way with a glorified mind and a glorified body and glorified tongue that I might be able to preach the Gospel in a way that was worthy of Jesus Christ.

I asked Him to give me that. And I didn't hear a voice or anything like that, but as quick as a razor cut or the lightning shining in the sky from the east to the west, this one thing was impressed upon my heart.

Even then, Son, you will not preach Him as He deserves to be preached. The message of Jesus Christ is so glorious, so infinitely beyond the voice of seraphim or men, that we would have to relegate the only true Gospel preaching would come from Christ Himself.

Only Christ Himself is able to proclaim Himself and what He has done. But it is a glorious chase. Eternal life is a present tense thing to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Americans have such a materialistic view of heaven.

It's not that much different from most secular utopian ideas. A perfect place where everything is fine. I suppose the most perfect place in the world being finite, that given enough years would drive a person mad.

It may take a long time, but the finite will always lead to boredom. What makes heaven heaven is an infinite God who has revealed Himself in an infinite Gospel. That even after a thousand eternities in heaven, we will still not have reached the foothills of how glorious God truly is or how glorious His Gospel.

One of the greatest evidences of true conversion is that you begin to chase and you continue chasing all the days of your life. Many think of the race, the Christian race, as a race of sanctification.

And it is that to some degree. As a race to grow in knowledge. It is that to some degree. But it is a race because it is a chase. It is chasing after a person. I'm going to share some things from the Gospel today.

The True Gospel Versus Religious Self-Help

And it will take a while. And if you have to leave, that will be OK. But these are the things that you must know in order to be proper in your behavior toward God. These are the things that you must know in order to be godly.

These are the things that you must know to be pleasing to God. Paul tells us quite plainly that the mystery of godliness, the thing that produces godliness, that leads to godliness, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Many of you think you've heard the Gospel. Do you realize that some of you sitting in here have been in churches all your life and you've never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ? You may have heard something about spiritual laws or five things God wants you to know.

Maybe you've never heard the Gospel. We're going to go through the Gospel. And I wish that I was a better man. I wish that I had a greater mind. I wish that I had speech beyond what I know I possess. And even in prayer for this, I cannot pray that God would honor a man, but that God would honor a message.

That God would help you to understand that any other driving force in your life other than Jesus Christ is pure idolatry. That everything in our life comes from and goes to Jesus Christ. That ultimately, He is the reason for everything.

I don't love my wife principally for my wife's sake. It would be idolatry. I love her for Christ. I don't want to be moral for morality's sake, but to be moral for Christ. And you can even take all these great terms, holiness and sanctification, put them all in a basket, I'll have nothing to do with them in comparison to Christ.

All of them are only for Him. Not to rejoice in our power, not to rejoice in our holiness, not to rejoice in our growth in Him. It is all about Christ. Everything is Christ. And the more that we enter into that, it's just so sometimes depressing.

I mean, I'm 49. I should have made some progress by now. Sometimes I envy the antediluvians, the men who lived prior to the flood. They were given 600, 700, 800, 900 years to work these things out, to make progress in their knowledge of God before they come before Him.

We're given just a brief moment in time. Sometimes it doesn't seem fair. But then again, we have to be careful because it's not even the correctness of our knowledge or our comprehension of deep things that saves us, but it is Christ.

Don't be mesmerized by anything except Christ. Don't be propelled by anything but Christ. It says here in Romans 3, for all have sinned, verse 23, and fall short of the glory of God, being justified, and we've spoken of that, as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith.

This was to demonstrate His righteousness because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law of works? No, but by a law of faith. Many theologians and great preachers, two of my favorite, of course, Martin Lloyd-Jones and Charles Spurgeon, referred to this text as the Acropolis of the Christian faith.

The fortified city of the Christian faith. The most important passage in the Bible. Think about that. That's saying a lot when you realize the dust of this book is gold. And then to say from this, that this is the Acropolis of all of it.

It's an amazing thing and it's something that we should know. And we've spoken about part of this, but let's go on. Being justified. In the last meeting, we explained what that means. As a gift by His grace.

And I'm going to have to go through this rather quickly, but it seems rather redundant that He would say this, doesn't it? Just look at it. As a gift by His grace. It seems that there's a repetition here.

And I think there is something of a repetition. It's very important. It's the emphasis on grace. All of grace. You see, because only grace is the only thing that will lead to a religion that glorifies God.

This is not a union of God and man. This is not a cooperative work. This is not us teaming up together to do something. This is not God putting in His part, me putting in my part. This is all of God and therefore all glory to God.

All glory. Justified as a gift by His grace. The word gift here is used in another place in the book of John where it says, they hated Him without a cause. The word is dorian. They hated Him without a cause.

And what He's saying is here, we were justified without a cause. What does grace mean? You were justified and even though you never gave God a cause to justify you. You see, what you need to understand is that it's not that there is some emptiness in deity or something lacking in Him that He had to create or even that He had to return and save what He created.

Absolutely not. Creation and everything that God does is not a result of some lack in Him. It's a result of the overflow of His person. The superabundance of who He is. He needs nothing, cattle on a thousand hills.

Absolutely nothing from you. Even if you had maintained a pristine, holy place before Him, He would still not need you. But we were vile and corrupt. Enemies of God, hating and hating one another. And He looked at you and me and found no cause for salvation, but every cause for condemnation.

So He did not save you because of you, He saved you in spite of you and that leads to great gratitude and great humility on the behalf of the one that's been saved. I do want you to understand the depth of your need, the greatness of your sin, so that you will revel in Christ.

It's like I always ask people, I say, where did all the stars go this afternoon? Did some gigantic cosmic giant come and pick them all up and throw them in a basket and take them to the other side of the world?

Where did they all go? They're still there. They're there right now. Then why can't we see them? Because of the light of the sun, we cannot see the stars. But when the black night appears, we see the glory of the stars.

In the same way, our sin acts as that pitch black night upon which the glory of God's grace shines through. If you do not want this part of Christianity, then you cannot have a Christianity with any glory or any power at all.

You must take this medicine or you won't be able to see Christ, at least not the Christ of the Bible. He's being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption. I've read several old men and heard men speak that there were some words in the Bible that you should only say with a trembling lip and afterwards hold for a moment silence.

This is one of them. Be very careful how you handle the terms of Scripture. Be very careful how you even pronounce the name Jesus. Redemption had no cause to redeem us, but He did redeem us. He redeemed us not because of who we are, but because who He is.

He redeemed us. But how did He redeem us? In that place we find the value of this. How did He redeem us? Not with trinkets, not with gold, not by emptying all the coffers of heaven and laying them before someone's feet.

No, He redeemed us through the blood of His Son. There is one sense in which the Christian man, Christian woman, the man of God is free. He's free beyond anything you could ever imagine. Free. And there's another sense in which he is a prisoner in chains stronger than anything you could imagine, anything that could be forged by men or angels, stronger than the chain that will wrap the devil and hold him in his place in the abyss.

There is a chain around someone who truly understands the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What is that chain? It is the Gospel itself. That we become a prisoner to this marvelous, wonderful thing that God has done for us.

We can't escape the fact that He died for us. That He shed His blood for us. That controls our life for all the days of our life. I knew a young man who was saved in the university. And he went from being sort of kind of a guy on campus to know, to a guy standing out in the middle of the campus, handing out tracts saying, Jesus saves!

And everyone mocking him. And I remember one telling this story about this young man. And his friends came to gather him and take him into the library and sit down with him and say, can't you see you're ruining your life, your possibility of career and everything else.

And the young man's only reply was, did He shed His blood for me? If He shed His blood for me, I have no choice now. I'm not my own any longer. Paul referred to himself as a prisoner in chains. Wasn't talking about Rome.

Well, he was, but that was just a small, small thing. The chains that bound him were the chains of the Gospel. You see, my hope is that the Spirit of God would do two things. That He would illuminate your mind to know the Gospel.

And that He would change your heart, regenerate your heart, so that you could appreciate what you see. Your only need here is to see Christ. To see His Gospel. He shed His blood. Now down through the ages, there have been some very peculiar interpretations with regard to just to whom was the payment made.

Early church fathers, some of them even came to the point of saying it was made to the devil himself to set us free from his chains. Absolutely not. And this is the amazing thing about the redemption paid.

It was paid to God. It was paid to God's justice. I remember one time hearing Dr. R .C. Sproul talk about your problem is not so much sin, your problem is God. God's coming after you. You see, when a person is saved, sometimes someone will tell me, they'll go, well, I've been saved.

And I say, saved from what? Well, I've been saved from my sin. Sin wasn't coming after you. If you have been saved, from what have you been saved? You have been saved by God. You have been saved for God.

And you have been saved from God. In your sin, His justice is coming for you. A payment had to be made. And that's why we have this word here. We have the word redemption. And then in verse 25, we have the word propitiation.

What is a propitiation? A propitiation is a sacrifice that does what? Satisfies justice, appeases wrath, and makes it possible for a righteous God to forgive the unrighteous. Now, I've said this one million times, and I'm going to say it again.

God's Justice and the Necessity of Propitiation

Do you really understand the core of the Gospel? Do you really understand what the great problem of all of Scripture, of all of theology, truly is? What the Gospel is all about, what the Bible was written about.

There is one issue that is superior to all the others, that comes to the forefront, that must be solved. It can even be called a divine dilemma. It is a great problem, and it is what the Gospel is all about.

Do you know what that is? I'll tell you what it is. It's this, if God is just, He cannot forgive you. You see, people don't talk that way anymore, because they don't think biblically. We are not a people who has a sense of righteousness.

The great problem in Scripture is this, if God is just, if God is good, He cannot forgive you. Some of you have never heard it put that way. And yet, that is the very core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's why people tell me America is Gospel hardened. No, it's not. It's Gospel ignorant. It's Gospel ignorant because its preachers are Gospel ignorant. What is the Gospel? If God is just, if He's good, He cannot forgive you.

Let's look in Proverbs 17, 15. It was mentioned yesterday, I believe. It's just a text that wonderfully illustrates this problem. Proverbs 17, 15. Look what it says. He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.

The word abomination is one of the strongest words in the Scriptures. It is a terrible thing, the worst of things before God. And what does it say? Anyone who justifies the wicked is an abomination before God.

Now, herein lies the problem. What have we talked about yesterday and this morning? God justifying the wicked. Do you see the problem? The entire Christian faith is wrapped around this, that God justifies wicked men, and yet the Scriptures themselves, and Scriptures cannot be broken, say that for anyone to justify the wicked is an abomination before the Lord.

So how can the Lord justify the wicked without being an abomination? That is the question of the Gospel. This is it. This is the core. You don't get this, you don't really get the Gospel. How can a just God simply pardon, forgive wicked men?

What is worse? How can a just and holy God declare wicked men to be legally right with Him? It's the problem of Scripture, of everything. Let me give you an illustration, very vulgar, but it functions.

Imagine you were to return from this conference and go to your home and find that everyone in your family has been slaughtered, and the murderer is standing over them with blood on his hands. In a fit of rage, yet withheld by justice, you run over there, you grab the man, you knock him to the floor, you tie him up and you call the police.

The police take him, and after a few months, he's called to trial. Since it's a small town, everybody in the town has gone to the courtroom, and they're all awaiting to see what happens. This man who brutally murdered your family and their friends.

Then all of a sudden the judge appears, he stands up and he says this, I am a very loving judge, compassionate and slow to anger. Because of that, I pardon you, you're free to go. And the man who murdered your family walks out of the courtroom.

What will be your response? Are you going to say, that was absolutely wonderful? No, you're going to write the Congress, you're going to write the President, you're going to write the Mayor, the Governor, you're going to be calling TV stations, writing newspapers.

You're going to say that there is a judge on the bench that is far more vile, corrupt, abominable than the very criminals that he sets free. Why? Judges do justice. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?

You see, therein lies the problem. Do you understand? Maybe you understand now what I was leading to yesterday when I told those university students their greatest problem was terrifying. It was this, that God's good.

Why is that a problem? Because we're not. And what's a good God supposed to do with us? Some evangelists will tell you that instead of being just with you, God was loving. Why do they not teach logic anymore in high school?

Because if God has turned away His justice in order to be loving, then His love is unjust. Now understand this though. I have seen it put forth in popular literature in a way that is not appropriate. Where people will say, well, there is this principle of justice that God Himself cannot even violate.

Therefore, God must do something about justice before He can demonstrate love to the wicked. That's not true. There is no principle of justice hanging over the head of God, independent of God, that He has to submit to.

The justice that must be satisfied is God's own justice. He's perfect in all His attributes and in all His works. And God does not love at the expense of justice. He does not diminish His holiness in the name of loving the wicked.

God is a perfect God. In order to demonstrate forgiveness toward the wicked, He must satisfy His justice that makes claims upon them. Do you see that? And that's what God has done in the person of Jesus Christ.

That's what the cross is all about. That someone has to die carrying the guilt of man, carrying the sin of man, and being crushed under the full force of God's wrath, under the full force of God's anger, under the full force of God's hatred for evil.

Now, I've used some language here that disturbs some of you. Because most of you have never heard a sermon on the hatred of God. Most of you have never heard a sermon on the anger of God. As a matter of fact, some popular evangelists, the first thing they will do when they climb to the pulpit is say this.

Some of you believe that God is an angry God, but I'm here to tell you God is not an angry God. I'm here to tell you that the book of Psalms says He is. That He's a God that's angry every day. He is an angry God.

He is very angry. And one day He will show His anger. You say, but I thought God is love. He is love. And God is angry every day. You see, you can't take one part of the scripture and throw out the other part.

Let me give you an example. You pick up a newspaper and you read that some little child has been kidnapped by some man and held in a basement, tortured for 15 years. Are you neutral about that? Do you feel neutral?

Does it not move you? If you're a human being at all, it sets you on fire. It burns you with anger. If you were to be unmoved by that, we would almost conclude that you're as immoral as the man who did the deed.

You see, I love children. If I love children, I must hate abortion. I love African-Americans. I must hate slavery in the early part of the foundation of our country. If I love Jews, I must hate the Holocaust.

Do you understand? If you love what is righteous and true and perfect and beautiful, if God in His own glory loves everything that is conformed to Himself, I want you to know He hates evil. Also, you've probably heard the thing, God loves the sinner and hates the sin.

It's a beautiful cliche to put on the back of a Christian t-shirt. There's only one problem. It's unbiblical. You probably need to stop doing it. Because whether you go to Psalms 5 or Psalms 7 or on throughout the Bible, you will find that God makes direct statements where He says, He hates all those who do wrong.

It does not say He hates the sin. It says He hates the sinner. God does not throw sin into hell. He throws the sinner into hell. And hell is hell not because God's not there. Hell is hell because God is there in the fullness of His wrath.

This is the God of Scripture. No, it's not the God of American evangelicalism. No, it's not the God of the Sunday morning pulpit. But it's the God of Scripture and the God of history. And unless you understand that His righteousness moves Him to a holy anger and a holy hatred of evil, you can never appreciate the cross and you can never appreciate what was done there.

The question is, what can be done for those of us who deserve the hatred of a holy, righteous, loving God? What can be done? In the great mystery of God's providence, things that the greatest minds cannot even begin to understand, God decreed and designed a means to satisfy His justice that railed against us.

And that is through a sacrifice. Now, we know that that sacrifice had to be a man because the blood of bulls and goats will not satisfy justice. It is Adam's stock that has sinned. One who participates in Adam, one who is a son of Adam, must die.

Man has sinned. Man must die. If someone is to die in man's place, it must be a man. But not only that, the one who dies must be God. It is the very Judge who condemns humanity, that takes off His robes of glory.

He doesn't lay aside His deity, He lays aside the glory of it and takes upon Himself human flesh. In the Incarnation, in the Kinesis, God did not become something less than God. He became something God had never been.

He did not lay aside His deity. He was the fullness of God. The fullness of deity, but in bodily form. He took upon Himself the form of a man. Now, why is this necessary? Well, let's just look at some things.

First of all, Isaiah makes it very clear that God is Savior and He does not, does not share that office with anyone. Not even an angel. If Christ is not God, He is not our Savior. Because God does not share that office.

That's why the doctrine of so many of these cults that deny the deity of Christ, this is why their doctrine is so abominable. Because according to their religion, they are forced into seeing God creating a creature and sending the creature down to do something and become our Savior.

And that is not the case. It is God who condemns us rightfully in His holiness and His righteousness and then takes off His robes of glory and comes down to pay the price for us, to satisfy His own justice by the death of His Son.

He had to be God. He had to be God, the Puritans say, because who could withstand the wrath of God? But God, the mountains melt and run like water down a slope, the prophets tell us, before the wrath of God.

The seas dry up before the wrath of God. Everything in its path is absolutely disintegrated. Who can withstand this? And rise again. And I believe that they were right in this, but I give you some caution.

Know this, that when Jesus was suffering on that cross, He was suffering as a man. He was sustained by His deity in some way, but know this, there was a man there suffering and dying under the full force of God's wrath.

And He had to be God. Well, one time a student raised his hand and he goes, I've got a problem with your message. I said, okay, what is it? He said, how can one man suffer for a few short hours on a cross and pay for the sins of a multitude of men and save them from an eternity in hell?

I looked at him, I said, son, thank you so much for that question. As a matter of fact, it's my most favorite question in the whole world to be asked. That one man could suffer a few short hours on that cross and save a multitude of men from an eternity in hell because that one man was worth more than all of them put together.

You take suns and moons and crickets and clowns and mountains and molehills and everything that exists on this planet and any other planet that's ever been made, you empty all the value of heaven touching not the throne of God and you put it all in a scale.

And then you put Jesus on the other side of that scale and He outweighs them all. He outweighs them all. When theologians talk about Christ as a perfect sacrifice, they're not just talking about His sinless perfection, His impeccability.

They are talking about the infinite value of His sacrifice. And see, this is what I want for you more than anything. I want blazing white holiness out of you, but I'm not going to get it from you through principles and laws that I myself cannot subject to.

I'm going to get this out of you if you could just catch a glimpse of how valuable He is. He's everything. Everything He is. He's everything. And more and more and more on top of that. And the more you see of His glory, the more you see of who He is and what He's done, the more your heart, if it's been regenerate, yields to Him.

Yields to Him. Force you into some prison of do's and do nots. Now, put before you Christ in all His glory. Christ in all His glory. Isn't it amazing that in all your studying, even some of you went to seminary, you've hardly spent any time studying the attributes of God.

Almost nothing. The attributes of Christ. How many of you have spent several months studying the beauty of God? Now, we've become a religion of principle. Of ritual. Of say this prayer at the end of the track and you're in.

Of come and do good by showing up on Sunday. This is not Christianity. Not at all. It's not even close. It's being engulfed in this glorious person. And the more you know of Him. Now, listen to me. You know, if I came to you right now.

I'm making something of a detour. If I came to you right now and said, you need to love God more. You would rightfully look at me and go, yeah. I do. Preachers will always tell you, you need to love God more.

It's funny that absent most of the times is how can you do that? How can you make yourself love God more? Have you ever thought about that? You know you need to love God more. How can you make yourself do that?

You can't make yourself do that any more than you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I have been married for many years. And I loved my wife when I married her. I love her more now. Why? Because I know more about her now.

I know more about her attributes. Her qualities. I've experienced more of the good things in her character. The more I know her, the more I love her. Now if I can say that about a human being. How do you love God more?

You get to know Him more. And the more you know Him. See, this will be one of the ways you'll know whether or not you're converted. The more God is preached to a converted heart. The more that converted heart longs to be conformed to God and be dedicated to Him.

The more God is made known to the true Christian. The more the true Christian's heart is inflamed with God. But the more the lost, carnal churchman hears about God. The more he kicks against Him. Your great need is to know God.

Jeremiah was right when he said rich men shouldn't boast in wealth. Strong men in strength. Or wise men even in human wisdom. But the one who boasts is boasting this. In God, that He knows me, God says.

You say I don't love God as I ought to. Study the attributes of God. In the Scriptures. Call out to Him. It's amazing to me. I go to most churches that have never even studied the attributes of God. I think what on earth are we doing?

To know God. The more you know of Him. The more you will love Him. And the more you know the Gospel. The more you will be moved by the Gospel. Now I want to talk for a while about several things that are often times said.

But not often explained. Let's go to 2 Corinthians. Oh before I do, let's stay here in Romans for just a second. I want you to see something. Look what Paul says in Romans 3 .25. He says, Whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith.

This was to demonstrate His righteousness. Because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time. So that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Now, notice the word publicly. Publicly displayed. Martin Lloyd-Jones said publicly placard. Like put on a sign. Christ is lifted up at the very center of the religious universe. There in Jerusalem. For all the world to see.

God is wanting to publicize. Make public something. What is it? He tells us. This was to demonstrate His righteousness. God had Christ publicly crucified. He put away sins publicly on a tree. Why? Because God wanted to demonstrate something.

What did God want to demonstrate? God wanted to demonstrate that He, God, is righteous. Now why should God have to do that? I mean, did God do something in history that would kind of make us believe that He wasn't really righteous?

Yes, He did. What did He do? Let's look. Verse 26. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness. Or no, verse 25. I'm sorry. This was to demonstrate His righteousness. Because in the forbearance of God, He passed over sins previously committed.

So why was it necessary to demonstrate to the whole world that God is truly righteous? Because in the past, because of His forbearance, He passed over sins. See, there's the problem. If He's a just God, He can't pass over sins.

Let me give you an example. Noah. He should have died. With everyone else. Abraham. God called him a friend. He believed God and God reckoned him to be righteous. But he put his wife in jeopardy. He lied and sometimes he doubted.

David called God his son. A man after my own heart. How could God do that? David lied, murdered. His pride led to the death of many of his people. Committed adultery. You see, here's the great problem.

Throughout history, God has shown mercy to wicked men. How can He be just? Imagine the great accuser standing before the throne of God. God, I thought you were just. I rebelled against you. And perfect justice was poured out upon me.

Noah. He should have died. Abraham. Abraham is your friend. He believed you and you counted him to be righteous. He was not righteous. He put his wife in jeopardy. He lied. He doubted. Are we forgetting the incident with Hagar?

Oh, and David. David, your son. A man after your own heart. He was a murderer. And a liar. And proud. And an adulterer. How can you just forgive them? Two thousand years ago, God answered that question.

Do you want to know how I can save Noah from the deluge? Do you want to know how I can call Abraham my friend? Do you want to know how I can call David my son? Because now my son dies for the sins of all of them.

The Lamb slain. Planned before the foundation of the world. He died on that cross. For Noah. For Abraham. For David. For you. And for the last one who will ever be redeemed on this planet. His death demonstrated once and for all, once and for all, that God is righteous.

Do you want to know how much God hates sin? When our own sin laid upon the shoulders of His Son, He crushed Him. Sinner, what do you think He'll do to you? Do you know what it took to save you, believer?

To end all accusation? Look in verse 26. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. You say, well, I'm justified by faith.

By faith, I'm accounted righteous. But that presents a problem unless there's a sacrifice. Because it still doesn't solve the problem of how can God declare you to be righteous when you are not? Justice demands satisfaction and we'll have it.

There's only one way. God becomes a man. He takes upon Himself the sins of His people, those whom He declares to be righteous. And He dies under their punishment. So that now He is just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ.