Thank you, Mike. I first heard
that song. I was down from Brother Fortner's.
And David Coleman, he's the first one I heard sing that. And he
loved to sing that. And he's now with the Savior
for a few years. And thank you, Mike. Appreciate
you coming over and helping us in our time of neediness of somebody
to play the piano for us. And appreciate the church in
Wheelersburg loaning you out to us. And may the Lord bless
their, they've called new pastor, Eric Floyd. is going there, I
think he begins in two weeks, right? And I pray that God will
bless the work there. Several of you fellows, I believe,
worked on the building there many years ago, and may God bless
as the gospel of his grace goes forth there. Well, you hardly
need to look at the statement I'm going to deal with tonight
because you just sang it. I want to kind of keep on with
the subject that I dealt with this morning or tried to last
Sunday night. That is, Christ is all in all. And I want to try to deal with
Christ is all in all the works of God. I know this, our Lord Jesus,
he is all to all of his true people. And I would ask you a very pointed
question. Is he all to you? I know to lots of people, maybe
the majority of people, he's nothing at all. His name is only a name they
use when they want to say something very foul and impure. And they take his name in vain. The words of Lamentations 1 and
12 came to my mind when I wrote those words down. Our Lord Jesus
says, is it nothing to you, you who pass by? Behold and see, is there any
sorrow like my sorrow? which is done unto me wherewith
the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.
Is it nothing to you? There was so many people that
day there at Mount Calvary watching three men being crucified. And that one on the middle cross Why, they considered him to be
the vilest of the vile. When he stood before Pilate,
and Pilate asked the people, what shall I do with Jesus who
is called the Christ? They said, let him be crucified.
Let him die the harshest, worst death possible. They thought
nothing of him. The cross of Christ meant nothing
to them. And when I say the cross of Christ,
I don't mean the wooden beam upon which he was nailed. I'm
talking about the doctrine of the cross. I'm talking about
the message of salvation by a crucified, buried, risen Savior. It means
nothing to most people. And then, to many people, he's
a little something, but certainly not all. To many people, he's
a great teacher, taught a lot of good moral lessons. He was a great healer. And even today, they'll call
on him if they're seriously sick. But as far as his cross death
is concerned, and the reward for his sufferings
and death, his exaltation to the right hand of the Father,
they see no glory in him. They learn from him to be kind
and charitable. They say live by the golden rule
that Jesus taught. They feel sorry for him. And
they might even give him a little of their spare time on the C
and E days of the year, Christmas and Easter. but he's really not much to them. To steal others, Christ means
quite a bit. For he is their hell insurance
policy. They know they'll die someday.
They're gonna face God. And they don't wanna perish. So one day, many years ago, they
decided to let Jesus save them. Of course, they don't know anything
about his lordship. They don't know anything about
his sovereign reign and rule. But they say they got saved way
back then in a little old country church. And they're all fixed up for
heaven. And when time comes to die, they reel in that profession
they've made many years before And they say, there's my hope.
I walked the aisle for Jesus. I gave him my heart. And I'm surely bound for heaven,
where I'm gonna get to see my family and my friends again. He's something to them, but he's
not very much. And then the many others, he is all in some areas, but
not all areas. He is there all in forgiveness, but he's not there all in sanctification. Because they think they've got
to do things, they've got to be faithful, they've got to live
by the commandments in order to make what they call progress
in sanctification, progressive sanctification. And they think
that they will become better and better until they're like
ripened grapes. And then the Lord will pick them
because they're ready for heaven then. To many people, they believe
he's all to save them, but he's not all to keep them. He'll save you, but you got to
keep yourself. And it may be you'll be saved
today by Jesus Christ. and you'll be lost the next day
because of your own lack of faith and faithfulness. But to some people, to all that the Father gave him
in covenant grace, to all who were bought with his precious
precious blood. To all who have been effectually
drawn by the Spirit of God to see the glories of Christ, and
led to cast your poor soul, the helplessness of your heart, cast
yourself on Him, called by the Spirit of God to faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ, To all who have heard his voice in the gospel, to all who see that Christ Jesus
is the great physician of sin sick souls, to all who have run
to him for everlasting salvation, To all who have cast themselves
upon the Son of God, who loved them and gave himself for them. To all of those people, Christ
is all. Christ is all. We see him to be the author and
the finisher of our faith, don't we? We do, don't we? We see the whole work of salvation
from beginning to end is all Christ. It's all His labor. It's all His work. It's all His
faithfulness. It's all of his submission to
the purpose of God in salvation, in coming down here and suffering
and bleeding and dying in the stead of his guilty people. We
see Christ is all. He's all we want. He's all we
need. He's all we have. And if we have
him, we have all. We have all things in Him. He's the Alpha and the Omega
of our salvation. He's the first promise of the
Bible. The seed of the woman is coming. He's the last promise
of the Bible. Lo, I come quickly. And He's
all the promises of God in between. Every promise God has given to
us is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Truly, Christ is all. And in all, He's in all of His
people. He's in all of His people. We read Christ in you. That's the hope of glory. He
is our life. We have no life apart from Christ. He told his disciples, I am the
way, the truth, and the life. And when he humbles us, when
he breaks down our rebellion, when he shows us our sinfulness,
And He stakes His claim to us and establishes His very throne
in our hearts. He will be our all. You see, that's what's necessary. Christ must come within us. He
is our life. Now what Paul said, when Christ,
who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with
Him in glory. I have no life save Christ. He's the only life I've got. And when He comes in, when He
comes into a heart, when He comes into the soul, when He makes
a welcome for Himself, When He causes us to believe all that
the Bible says about Him. When He comes in, He brings life
in. And that life is a life that'll
never die. It's a life that will never cease. And he will never leave us nor
forsake us. Because if he did, Alan, we'd
die, right? If he's our life. If he left
us, we'd die. Well, that can't happen. You see, The Shepherd, Mike sang
about this, well, it was last Sunday night. Seeking the sheep,
my lost sheep. The shepherd sought us, he found
us, he picked us up, he put us on his shoulders, he's taking
us all the way home. And if it should happen, it never
will, but if it should happen that on our journey home upon
the shoulders of our almighty savior, if it should happen that
he was to let one of his little lambs down and say, now you're
on your own for a while, Well, we'd be lost. We'd have no hope. He is all of our salvation. You understand that, don't you?
Oh, God give us intelligence in this area. It's not you. It's never been
you. So I had to believe that faith
had to be given to you. Well, I had to turn from sin,
I had to repent. Repentance is a gift from God. You're never going to repent,
you're never going to believe unless those twin gifts are given
to you by God the Spirit. I turned from all other hopes
and I turned to Christ. See, you can't divorce, you can't
separate repentance and faith. It's like two sides of the same
coin. In order to turn to Christ, you
gotta turn away from all those things that are against Christ. And we turn away from all our
false hopes. And we turn to Him who is our
life. My life is all tied up in and
with the Lord Jesus Christ. I have no other hope, do you?
I have no other desire but to be
with Him and see Him and worship Him as He is. That's my longing,
that's the desire of my soul. When Brother Bunyan was dying,
and his children gathered around him. There's his wife and his
children, and there's all crying. That's natural. I understand. He said, don't weep for me. He
said, I'd go yonder to be with my Savior. I go to be with him who laid
down his life for me. I have longed to see him. I have preached him. I've talked
about him. I've praised his name. I'm going to see him face to
face. He said, don't weep for me. Don't
cry for me. He said, you cry for yourselves.
You got to stay here and wrestle with the flesh. I tell you, Christ is all in
all, in all the works of God. Christ is all in the covenant
of grace. In the purpose and counsels and
designs and decrees of God, Christ was all. He who is our all in
all, He was our all back then because in that covenant of grace,
we had a representative. We had somebody who stood for
us, the Son of God. And the Father who chose Him
to be the Savior and then chose us in Him, the Father said, I
gift these to you. were given to the Lord Jesus.
All that the Father giveth me shall come to me, and him that
cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. And Christ received
us and he said, I'll be surety for them. And he entered into
a legal binding eternal contract with Father and Spirit. The Father
said, these are yours. You're their shepherd. I give
you these sheep. Christ said, I'll stand good
for them. I'll bring them all home safely. You see, a surety is someone
who has entered into a contract with another person This surety
is committed to the safety and the welfare and to retire any
indebtedness that the one they're being surety to happens to owe. And the best illustration is
in the book of Genesis. Joseph, you know, was in Egypt. He's in charge of the granaries
of Egypt, you know. And things got kind of lean over
in Canaan. Jacob said to his sons, he said,
you boys need to go to Egypt. See that prime minister over
there. See that man who's in charge
of the granaries. And get some grain for us. They
said, now, Benjamin, no, you're not going, Benjamin. You're going
to stay here with daddy. The rest of you fellas go. And y'all be careful, I've already
lost one son. He thought he'd lost Joseph.
So they go off to Egypt. They come before Joseph, and
you know the story. Joseph, he recognized them, but
they didn't recognize him. And they said, well, we're, our
father's back, he's back in the land of Canaan, and we got a
younger brother back there, and we're hungry. The grain's running
out, and we want to buy some grain from you. He said, now,
if you fellows are really on the up and up. He said, you go back home, and
you bring your younger brother. He said, meanwhile, I'm going
to keep one of you, you. What's your name? Simeon. You
stay here with me. The rest of you fellas, you go
back home, and if you're telling me the truth, you bring your
younger brother to see me. And so they go back, all except
Simeon, and they get home, and Jacob says, where's your brother? Well, that fellow there in Egypt, he
kept him. And he said, we're supposed to
bring Benjamin back with us. And Jacob said, all these things
are against me. Do you ever feel that way? All of God's providence is against
me. Who or what can be against you
if God is for you? Huh? Well, Reuben, you know him. He had a sandwich named after
him. Y'all serve a good Reuben down
there at your restaurant. I'll put in another plug for
you. It's the best one I've had around here. Reuben said, hey,
Dad, Trust me, I'll go back, I'll
take Benjamin with me, and I'll get the grain. And he was such a nice fella,
he said, if I don't bring Benjamin back safe, you can kill my two
boys. He just threw his sons under
the bus, just like that. And Jacob said, no, no. Not gonna happen. So they ate
up about all their grain and Judah came to him, Judah. Our Lord Jesus is the Lion of
the tribe of Judah. Judah came to Jacob and said,
Dad, we gotta have food. Well, I mean, we're scraping
the bottom of the barrel. He said, you let me take Benjamin. He said, I'll be surety for him.
You can count on me, I will bring him back safe and sound. And
if not, I will bear the blame forever. That's what he said. And you know how the story goes. Let me tell you something, Judah,
greater than Judah, Christ our Lord, In that covenant of grace,
he stood for us. He said, Father, I'll stand good
for them. I'll bring them all home. They're
gonna fall into debt. They'll be in debt so deep, they
can't even begin to pay one farthing of what they owe. But I'm gonna
go down. I'm gonna join my deity to humanity. and I'm gonna pay everything
they owe. All of my Benjamins, I'll pay their indebtedness, and I'll bring them all home
safely. He's our surety, you see. In that covenant of grace,
for us, he was our only and all. Nobody else could help us. He
did. And then Christ is all in creation. These people that the Lord chose
into salvation, they gotta live somewhere. And you know what
Christ did? He created all things by the
word of his own power. All things were made by him and
without him was not anything made that was made. And see, here's what he did.
He got everything ready. He had the right environment
for man to live, the right kind of climate, for
man to inhabit the earth. He filled the earth with good
things, with things that would sustain his people. Remember
that the people that our Lord Jesus Christ has always loved
are those that the father gave him. The rest of the world, the
unbelieving world, the lost world, they just get in on a lot of
the good things that are just for us, really. And when he got everything ready
for us, he said, now, I'm gonna create man. And the Trinity said,
let us make man in our image. And the image of God made him
man. Male and female created he then. For you see, in Adam, there was
Eve. She was already there. just like
we were in Christ from old eternity. That's the reason before Eve
was ever taken from a rib from Adam's side, Eve already existed
in the purpose of God, because it says there in chapter 1, male
and female made he then. Say, well, she's not even made
yet. Why not hang on a minute? When God made Adam, Eve was in
her. Just like we have been in Christ
Jesus from old eternity, one with Him, united to Him by free
and sovereign grace. Can't anything ever happen to
God's elect? Because we're in Christ. We've
always been in Christ. When all things were ready, He
said, I'm gonna make man out of red dirt. We came from
red dirt, we're going back to dirt. Ain't much of us, ain't much
to us now except dirt, except for that which God has created
within us. Life in Christ. Christ was all that. He was all
in the purpose of God, Covenant of grace. He's all in creation. And you know, when sin entered
into this world, Christ revealed himself as being all. Adam sinned. God gave him one
rule, and he defied God. What a rebel. No more walking
with God. No more fellowship. No more communion. Adam sinned, and we all became sinners in
him. And when he heard the voice of
God, Adam and Eve said, let's hide. You take that tree, I'll
take this tree. Sin has really made fools out
of us, hasn't it? Think you could hide from God?
Hear me, there's only one place to hide from God, that's to hide
in God, in God the Son. And we see two things in the
end of Genesis, from the middle of Genesis three to the end,
we see two things. We have a mediator with God,
And I've said this a hundred times and I'll keep on saying
it as long as God gives me breath. God's not gonna speak to and
he's not gonna be spoken to by any son or daughter of Adam except
through a mediator. You know who that was that spoke
in Genesis 3.15? God the Son. And he announced his own coming. The seed of the woman is coming. It's going to crush the head
of the enemy. And we see him as the mediator. And then he illustrated what
he himself would do thousands of years in the future. He illustrated his own death.
He killed animals that were innocent of any wrongdoing against God. They didn't defy God. They didn't
betray of trust. And he killed them. The very
first blood that was ever shed on this earth was shed by the
Son of God, illustrating the shedding of his own blood. The innocent must die for the
guilty if the guilty are to go free. That's a principle established
right there toward the end of Genesis chapter 3. And the only innocent one is
the perfect one, our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ is all in all
in our salvation. stripped those fig leaf aprons
off our mama and daddy. Said, that won't do. He said, I'll clothe you with
these. A picture of his righteousness.
There's blood redemption and righteousness given to his people. And it's not just a coat of righteousness
to us. It's not a pasted-on righteousness. The Scripture says in 2 Corinthians
5, 21, For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,
that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. We're made the
righteousness of God in Christ. And then fast forward about 4,000
years when the world by wisdom knew not God. when the Egyptian Empire and
the Assyrian Empire and the Persian Empire and the Grecian Empire
and the Roman Empires had only brought more confusion and superstition
into the world? And as Paul says in 1 Corinthians
1, when the world by wisdom knew not God, God did something. Christ did something. He stepped
out of glory. And he clothed his deity with
humanity. But really it's more than that.
He joined himself to humanity. And he would forevermore be the
God-man. The God-man. Who's that baby
in Mary's arm? That's the God-man. Who's that 12-year-old boy in
the temple, talking to the doctors and the lawyers? That's the God-man. Who's that man who walked the
roads of Galilee? Who instructed? Who healed? Who
taught? Who saved? Who welcomed sinners
to himself? They said, he's a friend of publicans
and sinners. Hallelujah for that. Who is that? That's the God-man,
that's who that is. But he came to do more than live,
because living is great, but dying's how he's gonna save us. Because the law of God demanded
death for sin. That's what law demands. The
guilty's gotta die. And so he took our guilt. He
took our sin. He took our sorrows. He took
our transgressions. He took our iniquities. Isaiah
53, six says, it was all made to meet on him. Oh, what a hellish
mass of filth he bore. And he bore it away into a land
uninhabited. by his sacrifice upon the cross
of Calvary. He did something about our sins.
He washed us from our sins. And he justified us by his blood. And he arose again because of
our justification. He had justified us. You sang this morning. It is
finished. The work was finished by our
Lord Jesus Christ. See, He's all. He is all. He's all in the salvation of
sinners. He's all in the substitutionary
work of sinners. And having died and arose, He
ascended. If He's all, what's He doing
now? Interceding for us. I love that
passage in 1 John 2, Alan. If any man sin, we have an advocate. We have an advocate with the
Father. Who is he? Jesus Christ the righteous. An advocate. He never lost a
case. And he doesn't plead with the
father as though, well, he's got to beg the father to show
us mercy. It's just the wounds that he
bears, the wounds that he bears, they ever plead for us. And those
wounds cry out and say, forgive them. Forget their sins, they're gone. And someday he's coming again
in power and great glory. Creation won't always groan like
it does now. And the people of God will not
always groan over our sinfulness, mourn over our weaknesses. It
won't always be that way. The time of the restitution of
all things, it rapidly coming to pass. There's gonna be a new
heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Christ is coming back. I don't
know all the details of his coming, but I know this. When he comes
back, the saints of God who've passed away, beginning with Abel, The soul's gonna be joined, their
souls to their bodies that have long since seemed to be disintegrated. There's nothing left of them. I promise you the Savior knows
where every speck of dust is. He's gonna raise them by his
own power and glorify their bodies. Our bodies, because I'll probably
be dead then anyhow when he comes. I'll be with him. And we shall all be with the
Lord forever. Then he's gonna usher in a new
heaven and a new earth. And he's gonna be the judge when
he sets and separates the sheep from the goats. Who are the sheep? Those to whom
Christ is all. Who are the goats? The rest. The rest. And then we shall be with Him
and like Him forever and ever. You see, He's all our righteousness. He's all our cleansing. He's
all our hope. He's all our plea. He's all our
confidence. And He's all our desire. And I'll be finally satisfied
when I awaken his likeness. That's when we'll be satisfied,
Mike. When we awaken his likeness. Christ is all. Is he all to you? And I say by the grace of God
he is. By the grace of God.