The Gospel for Christians

Yesterday I talked about two barriers that often keep us from appreciating what Jesus did for us on the cross. 

1.  We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.

2.  We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.

Today I want to tackle the first barrier, and then tomorrow, I will wrap up with the second barrier.

What is our debt?

We deserve God’s wrath because we are sinners.  Do we really believe that?  Consider what the Scriptures say about us:

Psalm 51:5  Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Isaiah 1:2-6 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the Lord has spoken:  Children have I reared and brought up but they have rebelled against me.  The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”  Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly!  They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the holy one of Israel, they are utterly estranged.  Why will you still be struck down?  Why will you continue to rebel?  The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint.  From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it…”

Jeremiah 9:5 Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves committing iniquity.  Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the Lord.

And in the New Testament we read in Rom. 3:10-12 None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.

We could go on and on with many Scriptures, (and we should read and consider such scriptures often!), but the problem is that although we read such words, in our sinfulness, we struggle to believe them.  We read them and immediately start thinking of all of our good qualities and we think, “I’m really not that bad!    We hear Paul say in Romans 10:12 that “no one does good” and we immediately think of all the many good things that we HAVE done.

But if there IS anything good in us, where does it come from?  If the Scriptures are true, and we really are as bad as what we just read, and there really is nothing good in “not even one”  of us, and we have “together become worthless”, then where do those good qualities and good actions come from?

The answer is that they come from God.  Romans 1 hints at this when three times Paul uses the phrase, “God gave them up” or “God gave them over” when referring to the wickedness of the gentiles.  He implies that God had been keeping them from being as wicked and as evil as they could have been.  It is only God’s restraining influence upon us as sinners that keeps us from displaying every day in our actions the kinds of things we just read about in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Romans.

For example, when a non-believing parent loves his/her child and protects and cares for that child, that love is coming from God.  It is God’s grace to the human race as he keeps our sin from fully manifesting itself.  

But as sinful human beings, we take God’s grace to us and appropriate its fruit as our own.  We fail to give thanks to him (Rom. 1:21), and we are so bold as to tell him he should overlook our rebellion and wickedness because we have these good qualities that didn’t even come from us to begin with!

Not only does Scripture tell us how wicked we are, but God reveals to us what our sin deserves:  his holy and just wrath.  Ephesians 2:3 describes it well, “we were, by nature, children of wrath”  

ALL of us, even those of us who are believers, apart from Jesus’ saving work on our behalf are facing the wrath of God in Hell for all eternity.  Consider these Bible passages:

Isaiah 63:6  I trampled down the peoples in my anger; I made them drunk in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.

Jeremiah 21:12,14  …Thus says the Lord:  “Execute justice in the morning, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed, lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of your evil deeds.…I will punish you according to the fruit of your deeds, declares the Lord; 

Romans 2:5  But because of your  hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men…

Colossians 3:5-6 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:  sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.  On account of these the wrath of God is coming.

Revelation 6:16-17 Then…everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”

God clearly and explicitly reveals in His Word that this wrath is real, and will be eternally experienced by all unrepentant sinners in Hell.  

2 Thess. 1:7-9 …when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…

Matthew 25:41,46  Then (the King) will say to those on his left, depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels….And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Revelation 20:15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.  Revelation 21:8  But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.

This is our debt.  We are by nature sinners, who do NOTHING good.  Anything good in us is due to the grace of God.  We are under God’s wrath, and even suffering that wrath for all eternity, our debt could never be paid, for it is an infinite debt.  And THIS is what Jesus paid for us when he hung on the cross!

The more we understand the magnitude of this debt, the more clearly we will see what Jesus did for us, and the more real and manifest to us will be the expression of his love at Calvary.  Tomorrow we will look at God’s love from the angle of what Jesus paid for us.

Over the next three days, I want to post some thoughts on the death of Christ.

Because my access to the internet is limited, I will probably not be able to post anything on Resurrection Day, but I pray that anyone who may run across these thoughts will be better prepared to appreciate the joy of Resurrection Day by meditating on the tremendous grace displayed in the death of Christ as our substitute.

As God’s people, I believe we all desire to truly love one another.  We want to be a community of selfless, giving, servant-hearted brothers and sisters in Christ.  As God’s people we also long to love lost people with God’s love.  We want to be compassionate and caring and earnest in our love for those who do not know Jesus the way we know him–as Savior and Lord.

As God’s people, we know that these desires are within us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  And we know that these desires can only be fulfilled in us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  

We understand that love for one another flows from the love that God has shown us at the cross.  But isn’t there often a disconnect between knowing this in our heads and experiencing it in our daily lives?  What exactly is the connection between God’s loving act in sending Jesus to be our Savior, and the loving acts that we desire to see manifested in our relationships with one another as believers and with the lost people around us?

As we celebrate passion week, I want us to meditate together on the Scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to help us “connect the dots” between God’s love for us shown at Calvary, and our love for each other shown in our life together as a community of believers and in our evangelism of unbelievers.

Basically the dots can be connected with this truth:  We can only love with the love that we have received.  We must be experiencing the love of God in our lives if we hope to love those around us.  And the Scriptures are clear that the way we experience the love of God in our lives is through considering the supreme manifestation of that love at Calvary.

Here are two important Scriptures that point to this truth: 1 John 4:9 and Rom. 5:8. 

1 John 4:9  In this was the love of God manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…10 In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 

God’s love was “manifested” among us when he sent Jesus to die as our substitute.  Therefore, when we meditate on what Jesus did for us at the cross, it is a means of experiencing personally the love of God that was manifested at the cross of Christ

And Romans 5:8

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  

Here Paul says that God “shows” us his love in THIS:  “Christ died for us.”  It is Christ’s death on the cross that shows us God’s love.  This is why the Lord Jesus left us the sacrament of Communion.    If we want a present experience of the love of God for us, we should consider the cross of Christ, because it is in the sacrifice of His Son that God DEMONSTRATES (present tense) his love for us.

However, even understanding this and doing our best to apply it, there are still two barriers that often keep us from experiencing the love of God when we take Communion or whenever we think about what Jesus did for us at the cross.  

1.  We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.

2.  We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.

Obviously, since Jesus paid our debt these two barriers are related, and therefore, the more we see the magnitude of our debt, the more we will understand what Jesus did for us.  Likewise, the more we see the magnitude of what Jesus experienced as our substitute, the more we will understand what we owed.

Imagine that you are a small business owner whose accountant comes to you and informs you that you owe a huge amount in fines, taxes and penalties.  But out of his generosity, he pays everything you owe and then comes to you and says, “You know, you had a huge debt, but don’t worry about it, I paid it for you.”  

If that is all he says, you may think that he paid just a few dollars, and you may very well appreciate his generosity.   But there are two ways that you can begin to appreciate better what he has done for you.  First of all, he could show you all the paperwork in which the fines and penalties and taxes are listed.  You could look at each one individually and after awhile begin to get a sense of the magnitude of the financial problem you were faced with.  Secondly, he could show you his bank account and as you begin to add up the payments of everything that he had paid for you and see that it cost him everything he had, you would understand the magnitude of what he had done for you.

Applying this to our spiritual debt, we can do the same thing.  First of all, we need to consider our debt, and then we need to consider the payment that Jesus made for us.  Over the next two days, I want to post some thoughts on these two things.