Some of us haven't quite got
it yet that we were justified by a holy God, a God who is holy. He's not a Santa Claus God. He
is holy, holy, holy. He is of pure eyes than to look
upon sin. And yet, I got to slow down just a little
bit because And yet this holy, holy, holy God found a way to
go down into the coal mine of sin and take hold of me, crack
addict, heroin addict, prostitute, drunk, sinner, self-righteous,
and take me all the way to heaven and not get himself dirty because
he's holy. That's why we make so much of
this matter of God being a just God. He will not pass by sin. And so He became sin for us,
He who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of
God in Him. I'm so enjoying my own preaching
today. It is so true. And here is the
effect. When you see the king sitting
on the throne, and you can kind of judge yourself whether you
are converted or not, whether you are a Christian or not, judge
yourself. Here's what happened to Isaiah
when he saw the Lord sitting on a throne. Woe is me! That's what happens when you
see the Lord. In the presence of a holy and
a righteous God, and the lights come on in your cellar. For years
you walked by that door and never opened it because it led down
to the cellar. And you didn't want to see what
was in the cellar. It was a dark place, a gloomy
place. And one day in power, the Spirit
of God took you into your own cellar and clicked on the lights,
and there was creepy crawling things down there in your cellar,
things that you had tried to forget. They were all down there,
and they were accusing you and reminding you of where you'd
been and what you'd done. And then, You had insight into
the glorious substitutionary death, the propitiation of Jesus
Christ on the tree of the cross, dying in your room, in your stead,
bearing your sins away, and ascending back into heaven until time came
to call you from this earth to be with him in glory. That's
the glorious truth for us Christians. We're not what we used to be.
But we're certainly not what we're going to be, one day absent
from the body and present with the Lord.