The Grim Diagnosis

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Don Filcek; Romans 3:9-20 The Grim Diagnosis

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawa, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. All right, well, good morning to everybody.
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Welcome to Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsek, I'm the lead pastor here. And I am glad that we are together to worship
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God this morning. I hope that's part of the reason that you've gathered together. Also, to connect with his people, that's fundamental to what we are all about here.
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And then to hear from God through his holy word, to really get to know him from the way that he's revealed himself to us through scripture.
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Our goal as a church is that everyone here would be growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service. That's kind of our tagline as a church.
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And we've been at that for going on 10 years now. We're still in the process. That is not a line that we believe we're gonna cross.
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That's a place that I hope that we are even 10 years from now, that as a church, we're still growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service.
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That's kind of the long game of the Christian life, is that we would be constantly a people of growth.
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Not talking about how many people are sitting here, talking about growth in our lives, of trusting God more.
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More connection to his people, more connection to understanding about how God has put us together so that we can serve one another.
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And I really am a firm believer, as you can see, by kind of the way that the church is structured in our gathering when we get together on Sunday mornings.
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I believe that most of the growth that we experience comes to us through God's word.
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Really, ultimately, through his spirit, bringing his holy and true word into our hearts with its transforming power.
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And so that's part of why we do things the way that we do here. You'll notice that we're a little bit heavily loaded on the teaching portion of this.
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Not that I think that my words are all that important, but at the end of the day, God's word is indeed that important, and that we would keep our focus there is fundamental.
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Obviously, we also have some opportunities to worship him together, and that's great, and I love that as well, and so we organize a service around those things for our strength and for our encouragement and our connection and community.
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So we're gonna dive back into the book of Romans this morning and let God continue his indictment of us.
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And what really proves to be a pretty severe text this morning, just to be honest, potentially maybe the most direct indictment of all of us, of the whole human race, found in the entirety of scripture, the most direct teaching about our fallenness and our brokenness before our creator.
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The apostle Paul has told us that we need the gospel which brings a righteousness from God. He established that back in Romans chapter one, verses 16 and 17, and so he established that what our hearts need is a righteousness that comes from him, not a righteousness that we muster on our own or are able to produce on our own, and that righteousness is necessary because God's wrath, it was said, will be poured out on all those who practice unrighteousness and ungodliness.
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All of those who do not honor God the way that he wants to be honored, so a broken relationship this way, and then also an unrighteousness and injustice toward each other.
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And that's the nature of the human heart is a broken relationship with others and a broken relationship with God.
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And then he set about in chapters one and two to explain that Gentiles and Jews, Gentiles meaning non -Jews, and then the
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Jews as well, have different struggles. The religious person has a different struggle than the irreligious person.
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The religious sinner and the in -your -face pagan sinner are in the same boat, Paul has said through these couple of chapters.
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And now that he's danced around the edges sewing up all of the loose threads at the edges, now he is going to be less subtle in showing us that we are all sinners.
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He's going to bring it all to us here in a kind of crescendo of sorts in this text.
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He's not gonna be subtle, and he's gonna level the final, complete, and comprehensive indictment on every single human.
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Our text this morning says some radical things. They are hard things to hear said about ourselves and maybe even potentially hard to hear about those that we love, to hear about those who are out in the world that we care about, or people that we know that are outside of Christ that you might be able to identify as fairly good people.
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But there are things that must be said to help us correctly diagnose our problems, and my hope is that nobody is quick to rush out and get a second opinion after this diagnosis.
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The text is a crescendo at the end of a long line of argument that began back in Romans chapter one, verse 18, and the conclusion is simply this, that humanity without Christ is worse off than we could even imagine.
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And so let's open our Bibles if you're not already there. Romans three, verses nine through 20 is our text this morning.
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Romans three, nine through 20, we're gonna read that in its entirety. If you've got one of those scripture journals, you can read it in there.
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I'll follow along in there. If you've got an app or a device, you can open that up and follow along in that.
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But recast, it is a privilege to read God's word. Sometimes it's a pain to read God's word.
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Sometimes it strikes us in our hearts and cuts us a little bit. And I would suggest that as we read this and doubts come into your mind about whether this text is true about everyone, recognize that that is just God identifying where we need correction.
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So let's read together Romans three, nine through 20. What then? Are we
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Jews any better off? This is the Apostle Paul saying this. What then? Are we Jews any better off?
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No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.
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As it is written, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands.
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No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless.
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No one does good. Not even one. Their throat is an open grave.
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They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips.
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Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery.
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In the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
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For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
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Let's pray. Father, what a convicting text.
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What a convicting thing to read, to actually identify and to see the status of our hearts without Christ.
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And it takes us faith to even believe that because our wicked hearts would choose to self -justify so quickly.
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We would even seek to be more compassionate than you, to seek to be more justifying of others than you are.
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To seek to see you as less holy than you are. To see ourselves as more righteous than we are.
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So Father, I pray that you would give us a right understanding of this so that we would get the gospel right, we would get ourselves right, we would get you right, and we would understand and even be able to praise you better in light of your awesome holiness and the great salvation that has been worked on our behalf through the cross of Christ.
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Father, how dire and desperate is the situation of the human heart without faith in Jesus?
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So Father, I pray that that might ignite our worship together this morning, that our voices would be raised up in maybe just a little bit louder, a little bit more enthusiasm, a little bit more emotional engagement because we recognize what we have been saved from and what we've been saved to.
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The very righteousness of Christ gifted to us. The unrighteous, the ones who did not do good, the ones who did not seek after you.
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The ones who used our mouths to curse and to harm and to hurt and the ones who were swift to violence.
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And Father, you've redeemed us. You're changing us day by day and moment by moment. We praise you for that and ask that you would receive these songs as worship to you together this morning in Jesus' name.
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Yeah, you can go to be seated, but remember if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, you're not gonna distract me, so take advantage of that.
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And then please keep your Bibles. If you lost your place, turn over to Romans 3, nine through 20.
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That's our text for this morning and that's what we're gonna walk through. And so our goal is to keep our focus and our attention on God's word as much as possible over the remainder of our time together.
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I wanna start off with a question. I want you to answer it out loud. How bad are you?
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How bad are you? Apart from Christ, apart from his spirit residing in you, apart from the work that God is doing in you and has done for you through the cross, what are you?
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The text is gonna paint the picture of a human being as a monster. And that's us.
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Apart from Christ, what are you capable of? What are the depths of your depravity?
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What are the depths of your sin? Is that a good feel -good start to this message? You can kinda see where we're going.
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How many of you know we need to hear this message? How many of you know that we need a real assessment of who we are so that we know how bad things are so that when the light shines, it shines all the brighter in the darkness, the backdrop of what we are without Christ?
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Just to contemplate even for a moment, to spend time here as a church thinking about our condition before Christ broke into our life with grace and mercy.
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We see, I'm convinced that if we get this wrong, if we misunderstand this from the beginning, there's a lot at stake in misunderstanding the very nature of a human heart apart from Christ.
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If we get this wrong, fundamentally, we will go askew in so many areas as a church, as an individual, as a
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Christian. We will be at risk, first and foremost, of getting the gospel wrong if we misdiagnose the problem.
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If we get the wrong diagnosis, then we don't rightly understand what the remedy is. And the gospel will make less and less sense the more you think about it if all we need is a little bit of reform, a little bit of fix in our lives.
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Second of all, I think we'll be at risk of missing the amazing grace of the cross. How glorious is our salvation?
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Is it just a little thing that you needed? Did you need a Band -Aid? Or did you need a wholesale, full -on rescue attempt where the one who was sent to rescue you died in the process?
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Third, we're gonna sacrifice some of the deepest motivations for evangelism if we misunderstand the depravity and the nature of a human apart from Christ.
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And lastly, we will likely get the wrong mission for the church. We're gonna come back to those four things here at the end of the message.
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But that's what's at stake, to misunderstand fundamentally what we need if we misdiagnose this, if we get it wrong.
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And this text is gonna diagnose the problem of the brokenness that we all experience, we all know to be true. Every human being that's ever walked this planet knows that something isn't quite right.
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How many of you already knew that before you walked in here this morning? Something's a little busted, something's a little skewed, something is off.
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Now, there's many potential diagnoses, right? And the world is coming up with diagnoses all the time.
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Some would assume that the problem is knowledge. We just don't know enough, we haven't matured enough into knowledge.
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And so if we could just be educated and more informed, we could fix the world with education.
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Some assume the problem is scarcity, a scarcity of resources, not having enough stuff. And so the solution may look like eugenics or population control or redistribution of wealth.
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Some assume that the problem is that we haven't advanced scientifically yet far enough, and so they're awaiting the arrival of the far -advanced aliens to guide us into all the new technologies.
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There you go. But this is no joking matter, because Paul begins in verse nine, clarifying where all of his argument has brought us.
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And a recap is good. He reminded us that the Jews had been given the very words of God in the text last week.
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He'd been bouncing back and forth, equal opportunity criticizer, criticizing the Jews, criticizing the non -Jews, identifying the sinfulness of every human being, the religious is indicted, the irreligious is indicted, all of us breakers of the law of God, even those who were not given the written law, still breaking the law written on their own hearts, still not even keeping their own standards, not keeping their own laws and their own rules that they agree to.
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And so he begins in verse nine with a question. Since the Jews were given the written law, are they any better off?
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Well, he's carrying off from where he left off last week in our last text. And it's important to understand that the phrase better off is not denying that there's any advantage to the
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Jews. Just last week, he mentioned that there is a benefit to being Jewish. There is a benefit to that people group in the
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Old Testament having been given the very words of God. That's a privilege. How many of you think having access to God's word is a privilege?
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Is that a good thing? That's a glorious thing, that's a beautiful thing. But this better off here, what does he mean by the
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Jews not being better off and really ultimately saying, in essence, nobody is better off than anybody is where he's driving for.
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And this better off is to be understood in the context of his long argument all the way that was begun with the problem back in chapter one, verse 18.
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In chapter one, verse 18, he set up a problem and now he's been arguing about what the ramifications and the results are of that problem.
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And it is simply this, this is the problem that you and I hope to be better off about. It is that God's wrath is being poured out on all unrighteousness and ungodliness.
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How many of you see that as a problem? If God's wrath is always consistently poured out on ungodliness and unrighteousness, how many of you recognize the hot water that you're in?
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We're in trouble if his wrath is poured out on unrighteousness and ungodliness because we're unrighteous and we are ungodly.
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That is the conundrum that the gospel is set forth to solve. That is what, how many of you wanna be better off than that?
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And he's saying, in the law, in the rules, in the natural order of things, no one is better than anyone else.
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Did you know that if you're at the highest point of a sinking ship, you're still in trouble? And isn't that kinda like what we're doing when we're trying to look better than everybody else, when we're trying to fake it and we're trying to use law and rules to try to make ourselves look better than those people or than this people or than you or than me?
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And so all you're doing is you're scrambling for the high point of the sinking ship. That's all that it is.
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It's all pretense and it's all silliness at the end of the day. It's foolishness is what it is. That main problem, his wrath, is being poured out.
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Better off here means getting out from underneath the just wrath of God towards everything that is sin.
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The Jews are not better off in this sense, he says. And Paul is stepping back at the end of verse nine and admiring his handiwork.
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He's saying, I feel like I've already charged pretty well and established that everyone is under sin. I think you can go back, and if you doubt it, if you don't think that he, if you're sitting here and you're kind of questioning this and you're kind of wondering, am
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I really that bad? I'm probably not really that bad. Let me encourage you, along with what Paul is kind of suggesting here, is to go back and reread these past two chapters and look for yourself in there.
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You'll find yourself there. You'll find your sins. You'll find your tendencies. And if that's not enough, just continue on through this message and I think you're gonna be able to see yourself in this message as well.
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You see, the diagnosis is here at the very beginning in this chapter, I mean, in this text, in this portion of the chapter.
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Our problem is not that we sin from time to time. You see, I think many of us have a tendency to think my problem is that I do bad things.
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But our problem is that all humanity is enslaved to sin. We are owned by sin.
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As the text says, as Paul says it here, a phrase that might be missed on many of us as we read it, he uses the phrase under sin, all humanity under sin.
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Sin rules over the human race without Christ. It is complete and utter control of sin over our natures and the way that we respond to things and the way that we do things.
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So now in verses 10 through 18, Paul's gonna back up his diagnosis, his diagnosis simply that all of humanity is under the rule and reign of sin apart from Christ.
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And so 10 through 18, he backs that up by quoting various Old Testament passages, expressing the symptoms that point to this dire and grim diagnosis.
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In verses 10 through 11, he identifies three things that all humanity lacks. Apart from Christ, you do not possess these things in sufficient portions to be able to be saved or be right in God's eyes.
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The first thing that all humanity lacks apart from Christ is righteousness. No one has righteousness apart from Christ.
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In other words, the first breaking is our morally, we are all morally broken inside.
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The comprehensive nature of this indictment isn't just doubled for emphasis, it's tripled. Almost all of these are tripled in emphasis.
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In verse nine, he says all are under sin. In verse 10, none is righteous. No, not one.
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Do you get the picture here? Do you get the impression that Paul's going over the top to emphasize that no one comes out from underneath this indictment?
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There is no one you have ever met that is righteous apart from Jesus Christ.
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And notice he begins by getting to the heart. He starts with our hearts, with our nature, not with our externals, not with our behaviors.
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We often think that the problem is just behavioral, it's acting out, but the problem begins with our hearts and what's broken in here.
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We might expect him to attack the external behavior, and he will in a second, he'll do that for us as well.
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But first, we need a substantial identification that the deepest problem is in our hearts.
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It's not just the things that we do in a moment of weakness. You see, we are not sinners because we sin.
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We sin because we're sinners. And we sin because of a lack of righteousness.
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No one has it. We are not a just people. We are not born inherently loving.
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We are not born inherently giving. We are not born other -centered.
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We are born self -centered. Now I take these truths by faith because as I read them and I study them,
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I see them in God's word and I believe firmly that this is God's revealed word declaring to us who we are.
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And I take that by faith despite the fact that my mind will turn to potential exceptions. Does your mind do that?
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Are you a little bit more of a cynic when it comes to things? Do you have to have things proven to you or shown to you?
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And some of you are already kind of starting to scratch your head. No one is righteous, are you sure? There's no one who is doing anything good?
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Like what about really good and nice people who do kindness without Christ? What about a man in a military company who jumped on a hand grenade and saved his platoon or whatever?
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I mean, what about him? And your mind turns to exceptions, but I believe firmly what is said here to be true, that a lack of righteousness is a genuine reality for all of humanity without Christ.
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And I'm gonna take that by faith because I believe that the God who sees the human heart better than I can see anything, better than I can see you in this room,
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God can discern and assess the hearts of every human that has ever walked this planet and I believe that he has rightly diagnosed that all of humanity without Christ lacks righteousness.
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The second thing that all without Christ lack is understanding. It doesn't mean that they can't understand some things, but fundamentally there is a reality that they are not just broken morally, but we were broken mentally as well.
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Human wisdom, what I think that this is really getting at is more oriented towards the gospel. Human wisdom will never arrive on its own at the gospel.
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You will never get there to the Lord Jesus Christ hanging on the cross by human wisdom.
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That mode, that method of salvation is not man -made and it is not conjured up by the human mind.
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Nobody will reason their way into heaven. And the understanding of God's grace and mercy will be absent from anyone without Christ.
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Have any of you ever just talked with somebody outside of Christ about the things of the gospel and it just was like, it's just not making sense, it's just not connecting?
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Without a work of the spirit there, it's sometimes just like you're talking past each other, you're just not even getting it.
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And even the very nature of the way that the world works, thinking about understanding, the way that the fabric of the nature of the world works is misunderstood by the person without Christ.
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Without God at the center of it all, having created it all, without the proper diagnosis, we see fear running amok in the world.
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We live in a culture that has increasingly surrendered a biblical understanding of the fabric of reality.
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I don't even know if a Christian worldview is the predominant worldview in our culture any longer.
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And so we see panic increasing as hope is placed in all kinds of things.
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I mentioned some of them in the introduction, a hope placed in population control or environmental salvation or politics to save us.
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Without Christ, humanity skips the true understanding of God's good intention for his creation, which he's bringing about through his redeemed people.
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You see, politics isn't bad, we need more Christian politicians. Environmental concern is a great thing and concern for those less fortunate than us is commanded.
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Do you hear that? But all of these good things are completely and utterly impotent saviors.
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They cannot save you. And a whole host of other things that humanity is scrambling for without understanding, without even acknowledging, oh,
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I'm looking for a savior here. I'm looking for something to save this planet, save these people, to save myself.
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And our lack of understanding, humanity consistently turns to the wrong things to save.
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The third and final thing that all humanity lacks before Christ breaks in and maybe potentially one of the hardest things to take on in this passage is that it says no one seeks after God.
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No one seeks after God. This took a little bit more thought on my part over the week and a little bit more reading, a little bit more research to go.
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Is there no one? Is there no one out there that's looking for God? No one is seeking him?
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Nobody really wants to get to know him that doesn't yet? What does that imply? Well, first, let me back up.
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We are all broken morally, we are all broken mentally, and in this one, we are broken, a big word, volitionally or in our will.
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The idea that nobody seeks after God might resonate with some of you as just patently untrue.
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There's gotta be somebody out there. Somebody who's looking for him, right? But I believe that what
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God is teaching us here is consistent with salvation being a work of God from beginning to end.
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You see, what I would suggest is that anybody who's out there looking for God or who you would perceive to be looking for God in religion or in religious attempts, think about all of the world religions that seem to be pursuing
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God. All of those religious attempts to get to God before the gospel breaks into a life and the blinders are removed from eyes and the light is poured in, all of that religion is not really at all about finding
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God. It is about finding self, about finding myself, and that's proven time and time again by many religious
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Christians who set out not to find the true and living God, but a
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God who will serve them. And they've invented a God rather than seeking the God who truly is.
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And I believe that's the status of the human heart apart from Christ breaking in. Apart from his spirit, apart from his revelation, apart from him removing blinders from eyes, we have no hope to truly pursue him.
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So fundamentally consider what this implies for our message to a completely broken world. The picture that is being painted here is dire of the world around us, but think about what message we have to carry to our coworkers, to our family members, to our friends, to the kids who play
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Little League with our kids, and to the world around us. What is our message? What do we have to bear? To those who have no righteousness, we bring to them an offer of the righteousness of Christ.
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To those who lack understanding, we have been given the true and living word and the true and living gospel that can call a sinner to repentance and call a wayward, broken sinner into the family of God.
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To those who lack a pursuit of the true and living God, we offer a relationship of love, forgiveness, and grace with the
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God who has pursued them. The God they weren't even pursuing, but he has been pursuing them.
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See, the gospel is a perfect fit. It's a perfect remedy for the disease that humanity has contracted.
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But that's not it. We know that's not the end of our text because he's gonna go on and he's gonna pile on more and more and more.
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In verse 12, we see three more indictments. He's gonna say all of us were on the wrong road.
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We were going the wrong way. All of us have become corrupted. The word corrupted there would be great to translate that spoiled or rancid.
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No one does good, not even one, he says. The comprehensive nature of this accusation against humanity is like a dog pile after a fumble in a championship game and Paul is just heaping on indictment after indictment after indictment.
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Everything piled on the one ball. See, he starts off, humanity isn't heading down the right road.
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And then he goes on to say we are all like rancid, worthless food. It's like we ain't had nothing but maggoty bread for three stinking days.
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Some of you guys. But the last indictment in verse 12 makes us doubt again.
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Here we are back at doubts about whether or not the text is correctly assessing our hearts. You see,
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I'm convinced that we're so blinded to the depravity that when it tells us that no one does good, we doubt it.
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We believe that there's gotta be somebody who does good. Someone out there has done something.
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How many of you know what I'm talking about? Am I the only one? Because I could just skip a section here. If nobody else wonders about how in the world is it possible that no one out in the world does good?
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Did some of you, how many, raise your hand if you think that you know somebody who does good, has done something good? Yeah, I think that all of us have that feeling in our guts, right?
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But I'm convinced that we are so blinded to the depravity of humanity that we have a hard time believing that the world is really this bad.
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No one does good? Come on, Paul. You had to know someone who did some good before they were a
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Christian. And self -justification runs so deep within us as an impulse that our depravity shows, even in our inability to assess things correctly on that level, how hard it is to accept these truths about us and those out in the world around us.
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Raise your hand again if you know somebody, a non -Christian who does good. Raise your hand if you know a non -Christian who does some good.
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No, you don't. That's what the text just said, you don't. It's a trick question, folks.
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Were you reading the scripture? You don't. The reason we answer yes, though, in all honesty is because we think we can justify others.
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We think we are the assessors of what is good and what is not good.
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We see ourselves as the judge and the jury of goodness. Now, before you get mad at me, though, let me clarify.
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Everybody's like, I saw you raise your hand. Some of you raised your hand and now I know. But no, no, for real,
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I don't do this very often, but it's beneficial in this context for me to throw some Greek at you.
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It's a very unique word for good. It is a very rare word for good that is used in the
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Greek language. It's only used 10 times in the New Testament. Now, and just, I'm gonna set that in some backdrop here.
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But just like we have several synonyms for good in English, there's a bunch of different ways that I could declare to you someone you don't know and you're gonna meet them tomorrow and I wanna tell you that this is a good person.
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I could say this person is good. I could use the word righteous. I could use the word nice. I could use the word kind.
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All giving you, painting you some kind of positive image of this individual you're gonna meet tomorrow, right?
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Are there a bunch of words in English that I could use to denote that this person is a good person?
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Well, Greek is the same way. There's all different kinds of words in the Greek language for good.
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But I'd like to highlight three of them, including the last one, which is this word that's used here, the first. The first word is the
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Greek word agathos. It means good and is used 94 times in the New Testament, translated primarily good in our language.
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The Greek word kalos means approximately good. A couple other translations that are more like kind or grace, but it's used 71 times in the
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New Testament for good. But our word here is christotes. It's used 10 times in the entire
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New Testament. So you have over 160 times that when you read the word good in the English Standard Version of the
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Bible, 160 times that you read the word good, it is not this word.
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It's a different word for good. But 10 times, it is this word, christotes. And how is it used in these other times?
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Six times, it is designated strictly as a character quality of God himself.
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Six of those 10 times, God has christotes. It is about him. Three of those times, it is used for something that a believer receives and can now express after coming to faith in Christ.
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You can now christotes. You can now be good because of his Spirit resting within you.
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As a matter of fact, one of those times, it's actually a fruit of the Spirit. Some of you know that list and you go, oh, that's the word for goodness.
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No, it's the one we translate kindness, but it's, I don't know why, but it's translated as kindness, but it's that fruit of the
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Spirit that is good towards, in a genuine God -honoring way to the world around you. And only one time is it used in this way as a negative for something that someone without Christ cannot do.
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Do you hear that? So that we have a better picture of what this goodness is that Paul is saying no one does.
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What is the good that no one out there in the world does? A God -honoring goodness.
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A goodness that is centered on honoring him. How could they? They don't even believe in him.
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They don't wanna honor him. They wanna honor self. So that an unbeliever could do agathos, an unbeliever could do kalos, but an unbeliever cannot do christotes.
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They cannot do anything out there in the world that is genuinely bringing a smile to the face of God.
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That's the condition of a human apart from Christ.
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No opportunity to please their master and creator. Do you see why
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I wanted to go into the Greek on that? It helps us to understand, how is it that nobody out there does good?
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Well, it's a brand of goodness. It's a God -honoring kind of goodness. In other words,
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I think it's possible, well, I said it already, that a person could produce agathos or kalos, but not christotes.
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And so now in verses 13 through 17, Paul goes on to tackle two common areas of external sin as examples of our outward behaviors that indict us.
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In verses 13 through 15, he gives us a dark tour of the apparatus of our speech, the way that we talk.
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Our throats, our tongues, our lips, our mouths, all using anatomy of speech and identifying in what way we use them for harm.
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Our words are waiting to swallow others up in the grave. We are devastatingly violent with our words.
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That is the nature of human history, with their mouths. And I would suggest to you that you can think of both literal and metaphorical death that has occurred at the sinful words of humanity.
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People who have literally died because of things that have been said or criticisms or frustrations or things expressed, and in the end, it's led to death.
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Our tongues are quick to deceive others, the text says. And whether for our own advantage to boost ourselves up, we use our mouths in deceit, or whether to result in the demise and the pushing down of others, we use our mouths for deceit.
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We will do it both ways, won't we? Every one of us in this room.
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I think I'm fair, I think I'm on solid ground to say this. Every one of you is deceived. Every one of you has deceived somebody.
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Poisonous, toxic words are waiting right behind the lips of everyone at the wheel. I mean, not just everyone, but, yeah.
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Everyone. And ready to spew that vitriol, ready to spew that poison and that toxin towards strangers, and even those that we love.
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We can relate to this. Our mouths are full to overflowing, he says, with curses and bitter complaints.
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I'm convicted. I mean, how many of you could raise your hand and suggest that maybe you struggle a little bit with complaining and whining from time to time?
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Anybody? Little inconveniences, little weather patterns, polar vortexes on their way here over the next 48 hours, things like that.
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Where in the world is spring? I'm doing it right now, golly. Just can't even get away from it in the pulpit.
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But for real, we know. We know what it is like to use the apparatus of speech, the anatomy of speech for evil ends.
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All of us indicted. And verses 15 through 17, he takes on our bent towards violence.
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And we might not personally consider ourselves a violent individual. As a matter of fact, somebody's out there breathing a sigh of relief.
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You're going, okay, whew, I can take a break. I can take a breather on this one, one that I don't struggle with. But I believe that every single one of us, even down to the most meek and demure woman in this room, has it in them to harm another individual or to throw a knife at them in their wrath and anger.
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We can be moved quickly. We are swift to be moved from pleasure to anger.
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And humanity has a long, long, long history of being swift to shed blood.
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Without Christ, we leave a path of pain and misery and ruin, the text says.
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And so we have not figured out, we have not discerned, we have not seen the paths of peace apart from Christ.
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And one thing that's been consistent down through the ages, one thing that you can go back in history and study and see, verifiably, this text can be historically verified by going back and studying the lack of peace in every generation.
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The world has not known peace. Interestingly, by the way, I think this is beautiful to uncover this, and every once in a while, a nugget like this just shines in the middle of my study, and I'm like,
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I'm gonna share that. The way of peace that we do not know was predicted to be brought by Christ.
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In the mouth of a prophet, Zechariah, in Luke 1, verse 79, you can jot that reference down.
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Luke 1, 79, Zechariah uttered a prophecy when his mouth was opened, and he uttered prophecy around the birth of Christ, and he said before Jesus was born that he who is coming, and he was coming, the one who's coming is coming to give, here's the quote, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
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To guide our feet, recast, into the way of peace. What did
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Christ bring into your life? What did he come to bring to the world? A redeemed people who is beginning to march into the way of peace.
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I love that picture. I find it beautiful that the very thing that we are said to lack in verse 17 is one of the very things that Jesus was sent to bring to us.
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He would guide our feet into the way of peace. Further, quoting from Psalm 34, one,
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Paul says that all without Christ have no fear of God before their eyes. We do not have a respect for the righteous and just holiness of our
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God, and understanding his holiness and his rightful rule over us ought to produce a legitimate fear in us.
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When we lack a specific revelation of our own depravity, we think of God as less scary and less holy, and so the weird, strange conundrum is that those who are under the deepest darkness, those who are under the deepest indictment are likely those who have the least fear of God.
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Why? Because they've crafted a God who's okay with them. They have sought a
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God of their own devices who will not judge them, who will not tell them the harsh and hard things, who will not preach on these passages, because this is uncomfortable.
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This is scary. This could potentially, you know, I mean, you're not gonna walk out of here going, wow,
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I feel really uplifted and great about that sermon. I mean, better five ways that God has loved you and will care for you this week.
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That'd be cute. Some of you are like, please, Don, bring that one. What about this?
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Like, I mean, but there's room for this. There's gotta be a place for this. There's a reality where we need to hear the truth.
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We need to hear the truth about who God is and who we are apart from him. You can tell a worldly way of viewing
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God, by the way, and you can even identify and put a stamp of false religion in certain places by whether or not there is any fear of God.
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If God is only ever a sugar daddy in the sky, then that is a false God. The true
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God revealed in scripture has a terrifying, devastating wrath towards sin and sinners apart from Christ.
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But you couldn't tell that, by the way, that many churches kid -glove his holiness and make God out to be a vending machine for our blessings.
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The reverent awe of God and his holiness is a byproduct of coming to the foot of the cross where the wrath of God was spent on his own son for us.
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It doesn't mean that you live in fear any longer. It doesn't mean that you live in terror, but it means that you recognize the terror that was rightfully yours when
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Christ took it on himself. Do you hear me, church? There is a room, there is plenty of room for reverent awe of this
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God in this church. And then, therefore, a respect for how devastating sin really is and what it really costs, and therefore, how we ought to put it to death wherever we see it in our own hearts.
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So now, having given some very direct indictments from the Old Testament, all of that section being a quote from various passages of the
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Old Testament, and that indictment toward all, now Paul is gonna close out the section by making sure that we get it.
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In verse 19, he reminds us that the law is speaking to those who are under the law, therefore, all Jew and Gentile alike, all of those who are under the law, whether it's the written law or the law written on our hearts, all of us under the law, so therefore, it is speaking to you.
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This has not been a journey of some nebulous generalization about humanity out there.
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Recast, let this come to roost in your heart. Let this come back home to where you're looking at this and saying,
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I am one under the law who has broken it. I am one who has not honored
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God. I have not done good. I have not been righteous. I have not used my mouth to honor others and to honor him.
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And he goes on to say, since the Old Testament itself that he's just quoted so clearly indicts all of us, what more do we have to say in our defense?
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What could any human being coming before the holiness of God say and speak in their defense?
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And so, Paul is confident that he's caught all of us in this net of indictment.
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He's caught us all by explaining our depravity and inability to save ourselves. And the only thing left for us to do in light of this indictment is to put our hand over our mouth.
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We have no defense, no excuses to offer to God, no self -justifying words, nothing to speak.
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All of us held accountable and worthy of judgment before the Holy One. And the way that he says it in verse 19, now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law.
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That's all of us. So that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
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Here he establishes his final conclusion in verse 20. Without Christ, we are all ungodly.
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Without Christ, we are all unrighteous. Without Christ, we are broken morally. Without Christ, we are broken mentally.
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Without Christ, we are broken even in our will to seek for God. So that nobody is able to even look for him.
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Without Christ, nobody is righteous. Without Christ, nobody does any God -honoring good.
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Without Christ, we use our mouths to harm others. Without Christ, we rush headlong into violence.
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And without Christ, we will never have peace. And therefore, this condition renders us, in conclusion, completely incapable of being saved by works of the law.
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You probably haven't made this connection, but if you were to read Romans in one sitting, you probably would.
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And that's just simply that way back in chapter two, verse 13, Paul said, it is doers of the law who will be justified.
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And here he says, no one will be justified by doing the law. And scholars have written eons about,
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I mean, pages and pages about this issue. He says, doers of the law will be justified.
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No one will be justified by doing the law, by doing works of the law. Well, is Paul off his rocker? Is he that inconsistent that within just a couple of pages of his book, he contradicts himself?
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Not at all. Because chapter three, verse nine exists in between those two to hold them in tension.
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See, the standard is keeping the law. If you wanna try to keep the law, keep all of it. And then God will be like, wow, you're amazing.
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And he will, he will. He will say, you're amazing if you can do it all. But he's also identifying here in three, nine.
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All are under the rule of sin. Therefore, no one will be justified by the law because the very nature of who your master is, you can't serve the law.
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You can't really keep it is what he's saying here. That's the argument. You cannot be justified by law keeping because you cannot do it.
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You're a slave to sin without Christ. The law cannot save. What the law can do is vital.
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The law can reveal the knowledge of our sin. It can reveal the knowledge of our brokenness before God, our incapability of keeping the law.
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And that's not a minor thing because the law does have a vital role to play for each and every one of us.
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It does this simply. It shows us how bad we are. And therefore, it paves the way for us to recognize the need for a righteousness from outside of ourselves, a righteousness we can't muster on our own.
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It prepares us to see our need for a savior. And in this sense, we see that those who are most acquainted with their own sins are often most closest to the kingdom.
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Rejected tax collectors, cast off prostitutes, and wicked sinners flock to Jesus because they needed a savior.
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Religious people who trust in the law, they don't even know they need a savior.
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They think they're doing all right just themselves. They're too busy lying to themselves and to everyone else about how good they are.
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And what they truly need is to take Paul's indictment here in this text. I mentioned earlier that if we get this diagnosis wrong, we will get four very important things wrong, and that's how
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I want to conclude by way of application, to allow this text to correct our diagnosis of the world around us and then set our feet on the right trajectory.
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You see, I fear, and I would love to talk with anybody here, if any of you want a second opinion, if you get this diagnosis and you're like,
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I just am wrestling with this. I'm struggling with this. Is this really the reality of the world around me?
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I'd love to sit down and talk with you further about that. I think it'd be vital for you to be able to take on what the word is saying is true about the world around us.
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But here's what at stake. If we get this diagnosis wrong, we'll be at risk of getting the gospel itself wrong.
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The remedy matches the solution. If we think the problem is just that we needed a good example to follow, we will see
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Jesus is nothing more than a good example. Not the Savior, but a good teacher. If we do not see our complete corruption and inability, we may even allow room,
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I think this is at risk, is understanding the humility that's necessary to come to the cross and necessary for salvation will be absent from our lives and will allow pride over our salvation to creep in.
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I mean, we might be tempted to think I figured it out or I was the one who was seeking after God and found him.
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I wasn't that unrighteous. Or even worse, we might be tempted to think I was pretty good.
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And so God came and helped me out of a pinch and got a really good bargain deal with me. If we don't understand what we were without Christ, we will misunderstand the gospel itself.
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Second, we'll be at risk of missing the amazing grace of the cross. The beauty and the glory of that event set in the backdrop of our desperate need, our complete and utter corruption.
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The severity of the cross is a testimony to the devastation of the disease. Did you realize that? Look at the cure to understand how bad the illness is.
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Gangrene is a nasty disease. And when you know somebody who's had to have an amputation, you know that their condition was pretty serious, right?
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How many of you know that if that's the remedy, then the disease was pretty terrible, right?
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Are you tracking with me? Some of you look like blank stares right now. Am I losing you? Still speaking English, aren't I?
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It's a pretty devastating disease that would require, that would bring a doctor to go, you know what, I think we're just gonna cut it off.
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What? How bad is it, doc? Well, it's a hangnail, but you know, it's, let's just make sure.
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We're just gonna make sure on this one. How many of you don't wanna see that doctor anymore, right? Not that one.
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The cross. The cross of the son of God himself was the remedy to reconcile you to his father.
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How bad was your disease? How devastating was the illness? That that was the required remedy.
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Do you feel that, church? Oh, what were we? Monsters.
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How severe was our disorder that it required God to pour out his wrath on his only son for our spiritual healing?
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You will not understand and be moved by the amazing depths of the grace of God at the cross until you understand how desperately broken you were before he busted into your history and saved you.
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The third thing is if we get the diagnosis wrong, we will sacrifice the deepest motivations for evangelism.
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If you look at the world around you and you see people as primarily, basically pretty good people, if that's the condition that you look out there and you see and you're kinda going, you know what?
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Everybody's probably pretty close. They just need a little tweak here or there and then you're not gonna get the crazy, dramatic urgency that we should have in evangelism.
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Even further, if you see that, believe that people in other religions are actually seeking after God in their own way, why in the world would we send missionaries to those people if they're already okay?
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Their urgency would be gone. There is no hope. Hear me carefully, church.
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You gotta take this on. There is no hope for any member of humanity without the revelation of Jesus Christ as Savior.
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There is no hope for your neighbor. There is no hope for your kid's teacher.
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There is no hope for the waitress that's gonna wait on you this week. There's no hope for anyone apart from Christ.
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There's no hope for your Muslim coworker. There is no hope for your extended family member.
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There's no hope for anyone apart from Jesus Christ. Why?
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Because all of humanity, everyone is in the condition that this text has spelled out for us.
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We have this gospel. We have this mission, and that's the last thing that we will get wrong, and I'm seeing it crash down.
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I'm taking a class right now, I'm auditing a class up at GRTS on what it's like, how the church should be interfacing with a post -Christian culture, and it's very intriguing to see what do people in the world think the mission of the church is today, and it is scrambled.
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It's getting worse and worse by the day in terms of what pastors think is the mission of the church.
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See, the church at large today has muddied the message of the gospel to the degree that the gospel, you can ask 10 pastors and get seven different answers.
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Some will say that the mission of the church is to point others, is really feeding the poor, fixing the environment, saving people from human trafficking, providing clean water and wells in Africa.
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How many of you heard some of those as the mission of the church? That is not the mission of the church.
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These are good things. These are good endeavors, but they are not the mission of the church.
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They are not what Jesus left us to do. Proper understanding of the human condition should point us to the primary mission of the church, which is to point others to glorify our
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King, Jesus. See, I want to just point out, because some of you are doubting that.
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Some of you are literally going in your mind right now, Don, how dare you? I mean, feeding the poor, that is vital.
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Didn't Jesus do that? Didn't Jesus do that? Isn't that part of our mission? Some of you are doubting that I've got this right, but I want to point out one particular interaction to highlight.
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Jesus certainly interacted with a variety of people in a variety of ways, but one interaction has just constantly, constantly, just is in the back of my mind, driving me forward, and it is the simple interaction of Jesus and the thief on the cross.
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How did he interact with that man? How many of you know that that man was suffering? How many of you know that that man was in dire straits, more than the average person in poverty today?
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They were on, he was on his way out that afternoon. He's going.
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Pretty significant physical needs for that man. Would you agree with me? And Jesus, Jesus, think about this.
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Jesus did not fix that man's immediate situation. He could have, right? How many of you think that Jesus had the power to pull that man down off the cross, dust him off, heal his wounds, and send him on his way with a lifetime supply of fish and bread?
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He could have taken care of that man's every need right then and there, and instead, in the very short, limited time that he had to interact with this one individual, suffering and dying next to him, he gave him the thing he needed most.
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Reconciliation with his father, and eternal hope for forgiveness of his sins, and love for eternity in his kingdom.
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Today, you will be with me in paradise. Jesus gave him what he needed most, and how dare we think that what the people around us need something more than what
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Jesus would give? Jesus took care of the most fundamental thing that that man needed, salvation and reconciliation with his father.
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What is the mission of the church? To bring the good news to the dying world around us, the only hope that they have for purpose, for forgiveness, that they might actually be able to do deeds of righteousness, that Christotes might be theirs because of the spirit that comes alive in them through this good news.
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That is the mission of the church. The church should do good. Don't hear me, don't quote me as Don said, don't feed the poor, don't do good deeds, don't drill wells in Africa, don't do any of that good stuff, but do it as you go sharing the gospel.
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That is our calling. Our mission is wrapped up, by the way, in the reminder of communion that we take every week.
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We come to the tables in the back to take a cracker to remember his body that was broken for us. We take the cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for us.
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And we do this in remembrance of his sacrifice that has covered our unrighteousness, his sacrifice that has covered our ungodliness, his sacrifice that has covered our poor use of our mouths, his great love that has covered our swift movements towards violence.
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He has brought us to the way of peace and to a God -honoring goodness. So if you belong to Christ and have been forgiven by faith and trust in his work on the cross, then
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I encourage you to take communion at your own pace. Go back to the tables. You can take the cracker and the cup back to your chair.
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You can stand up in the back and take it there. And recast, let's go out from here with a renewed and corrected view of God's great mission.
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His great mission is to carry hope to the hopeless this week. Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace.
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Thank you for your mercy. I thank you for setting our feet on the right path and that everyone here who belongs to you has hope in Christ.
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And I just pray that you would protect us from the insular mindset of holding this to ourselves or even the faulty notions that we would wrap ourselves in some kind of blanket of falsehood that would put people out there in better condition than they are, that would take those that we love that are not in you and even insulate them further from the gospel by the assumption that they're okay.
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Father, I pray that you would move in our hearts to take bold steps, even crazy and amazing and radical steps to share our faith with others around us to promote the glorious, life -changing, destiny -altering truth of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And Father, I thank you that we have a chance to celebrate that and remember that and to go to these tables with joy as those who are broken and completely, if I could use the word, irredeemable, aside from the amazing, drastic, wondrous, mystifying reality of the incarnate
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Son dying for us, redeeming us. Give us joy and send us out on your mission today.