Why would you hang on to that for which your Savior died? | Clip from Looking Unto Jesus

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Yeah, so chapter 11, the weak were made strong by faith, we're told. Yeah.

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So it's a great group of weaklings. Yeah. Which, great, because that... Yeah, yeah, I qualify. Okay, so great, it's our people, weaklings.

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We say to people oftentimes kind of religious and spiritual sounding things, which aren't in themselves wrong, but maybe not as helpful as they could have been.

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We say, well, you do that by faith. Yeah. So, Jordan, in this passage, we have some very specific aspects of faith's activity.

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Yeah. How does faith grab hold of the realities of Christ in a way that produces a race? Yeah. So, why don't you help us with that?

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Okay, well, just to use the analogy that the author uses in chapter 12, this is a race, the

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Christian life is a race. We've heard it said before, this is a very good way to put it. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.

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And so as we're running this race, we're to do it with endurance. Well how do we endure?

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How do we continue to plot along in this long marathon type race of the

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Christian life? Well, one is, don't carry things that impede your race toward Christ.

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So that's the weight, that's the encumbrance in the passage. Maybe not necessarily a sinful thing, but something that for you has proven to be a distraction in your pursuit of Christ.

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And I think you look back at chapter 11, a lot of people laid aside a lot of things that may not have definitively been sinful in every situation, but they were unhelpful.

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And so we want to constantly be taking inventory, you know? And if I'm in a marathon, am

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I going to wear a, you know, a coat of armor to try to run down the pathway? Probably not.

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But the second thing is more clear. Every sin. Lay aside every sin.

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And it goes back to what we were saying in our previous episode, how would we hang on to that for which our

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Savior died? And you know, again, I think tenderhearted

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Christians can easily beat themselves up about this. We all feel the pain of our retained depravity.

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That's not going away until we meet Christ in glory. But we do have an answer for our sin.

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And the answer is not, continue to live in it because your depravity is not going away. The answer is all over Scripture, places like 1

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John, confess, you have an advocate. He sits in the presence of the Father.

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He'll forgive you. He will empower you to walk in obedience. So that's one part of the race.

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Put away everything, every encumbrance and every sinful thing that impedes your progress in moving toward Christ, His fullness now and His face forever.

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So that's one part of the race. It does remind us all through Scripture, this same basic reality.

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Romans 6, do not present your bodies any longer as the instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God.

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You can't present yourself to sin again. You can never go back. Present yourself to God. Present your bodies as instruments of righteousness.

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Not long ago, you preached at Christ Church in New Albany using Romans 6 with the question, how is your slavery paying you?

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How do you like your slavery? Slavery to Christ or slavery to the old sins?

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And yeah, so to run well, laying aside even good things that would impede us, especially sinful things.

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But what about this looking unto Jesus? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's hard not to just have already said that earlier because that's actually the answer.

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And so, you know, if you're going to run a literal marathon, it would behoove you to know where the finish line is. So, you don't just run aimlessly through the city, you know, for endless hours or days to know where you're going.

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How do you lay aside encumbrances? How do you lay aside sin?

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How do you run this race to which, you know, we're all as believers called? The answer is looking unto

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Jesus or New American Standard would say, fix your eyes on Jesus. And this looking is, as you mentioned earlier, an impregnated word in the original, aferentes.

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That alpha, that a sound at the beginning is actually a negative.

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So if we said unholy, it negates holy. That's kind of how that first letter works on this

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Greek word, it negates it. It means look off, that's the negative part, as you look upon Christ.

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So it's look off everything that distracts you from seeing him as you look on, fix your eyes upon him.

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So you can't look in two directions at the same time, you know, it's humanly impossible. Similarly, you can't look at Christ and, you know, be empowered to run the race that he's called us to run, while we're also looking, you know, elsewhere, particularly in sinful directions.

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So the laying aside of the weights and sins, it's a participle, I -N -G, laying them aside.

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It's an ongoing, you know, keep laying those things aside. Well, so is this looking unto

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Jesus, it's a participle, it's an I -N -G, but it's meant as a command. Fix your gaze on Christ.

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You can't look two ways. So he's the finish line. As you look at him, you're actually drawn in to faithfulness in the race toward him.

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