Now this morning's message is
entitled, God's Opinion of You. We're pretty much interested
in everybody else's opinion of us. We like to have a good reputation. Now some of us are more concerned
with that than other people, but nonetheless, all of us have
at least a measure of interest in what others think of them.
Sadly, for many, that drives their entire life. They decide
what they do, how they're going to dress, how they're going to
act, based upon how people are going to respond to them. And
I suppose one of the worst ways in which this desire for a good
opinion of others, one of the most destructive uses of it that
can be made is when those who set themselves up as preachers
of the gospel determine what their message will be according
to what reaction they're going to get from the people as to
whether the folks are going to like them, whether the folks
are going to say good message when they go out the door or
possibly say, I'm never coming back here again. But we all have this tendency.
to some degree. And I suppose it has some benefit,
at least in this, it makes most of us behave probably better
than we would if we didn't have a tendency to want the approval
of others. But have you ever given serious
consideration to what God thinks of you? Now, most people don't. And one
reason they don't is simply that it's not natural for man to give
a lot of serious attention to that subject. The things of God
do not occupy their hearts and thoughts. Esau was such a man. He was the firstborn. He had
the birthright. The blessing was rightfully his.
He squandered away for a bowl of soup. That's how much he thought
of God and his blessings. He didn't care. Here's another
reason that most people don't give serious consideration to
what God thinks of them, is because false teachers have been going
around telling them a lie about what God thinks about them. Because
they go around saying, God loves you. Now, there are some people
in this world whom God loves, I know that. But they go out and say this
indiscriminately as though God has spoken in the scriptures
saying that he loves every individual in this world. And you cannot
find that in the scriptures. Now you might say, well, what
about John 3.16? God so loved the world. Loving the world's
a different thing than loving everybody in it. God loved the
world in Noah's day. But the only people in it that
he loved were Noah, his three sons, and their wives. So there's a difference. And
actually, the way John was using it there, and we don't have time
to go into the meaning of the Greek word translated world there,
but it always has to be translated within its context. All that John was saying was
that his love is not confined only to Jews. That was his basic
statement there. And we should be thankful. I
don't know of anyone here that claims a Jewish ancestry. So
when John said, God so loved the world, that meant that we
Gentiles, some of us Gentiles are included in that love. But
people have been told this so much, it never even enters their
mind to look in the scriptures and find out what God says. Find out God's opinion. Do you care what God thinks of
you? Do you care whether or not he
likes you or loves you or accepts you? It is written, Jacob have I loved,
Esau have I hated. So there's at least one person
he hated. But it also says that the workers
of iniquity, he said, my soul hates. So here we are this morning,
and I know that many of you profess to believe, and I have no reason
to doubt that you do. Some of you don't. But here's the truth. God's opinion
of us is plainly revealed in the Scriptures, and we do well. We do ourselves good if we'll
listen to what God says and act on that. So what is God's opinion
of you and me? Well, if he perceives us outside
of Christ, This is his opinion. Romans chapter 3, beginning in
verse 10, as it is written, there is no one righteous, not even
one. There is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have
together become worthless. There is no one who does good,
not even one. Their throats are open graves,
their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their
lips. Their mouths are full of cursing
and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed
blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of
God before their eyes. That doesn't sound very much
like I love you, does it? That doesn't sound very much
like God is saying, I'm just tickled to death with humans. God speaks in the harshest terms
that we can understand in rendering his opinion, his judgment of
us considered in ourselves. Now, you who believe, you probably
know where I'm going to go with this. But I understand this. If God were to look at you right
now, that's what he would see, what
I just read. If he would look at you without
a mediator, if he would look at you outside of Christ, he
would still see this. I hear people say, well, you
know, when God says you, you become a different person. Well,
it's true. Something new is added. But all
that was ever there is still there. You talk to any believer. And you ask them, have you overcome
sin? And they will probably tell you
something to the effect, no. I feel worse than I did before
God saved me. We know that this description
written here in the beginning of Romans chapter 3 verse 10
is true of us, every one of us here, if we are viewed in ourselves
and not in Christ. What it says, there is no one
righteous, not even one. Well, preacher, come on, I've
done some bad things, but don't tell me I'm not a righteous person.
Well, if you go by human standards, you're probably a decent person.
But going by human standards is setting the bar very low. Sometimes people even express
it that way. They don't realize the significance of what they're
saying. Well, I'm not a murderer. Is that the standard of righteousness
now? You've just not killed anybody? Do you know what it is to be
righteous? Do you know what God's standard is? Brother Mahan used
to say, God didn't say, be as good as you can be. He said,
be as good as I can be. That's what righteous is. He
said, be holy as I am holy. Or anyone raise their hand and
say, I'm holy as God. I am as righteous and pure as
God himself. Brethren, that's the standard.
And if you don't meet that standard, what we just read in these verses,
that's how God sees you. He says, there's no one who understands,
no one who seeks God. There's no one who understands
the wickedness of themselves. In Jeremiah, it says, the heart
is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can
know it? The human heart is so deceitful,
it deceives itself. Now we speak pretty poorly of
the Pharisees, don't we? And it's true that our Lord's
harshest words were reserved for them. But you know something?
They were just deceived people. Deceived by the father of all
lies and deceived by their own hearts. And they are nothing
other than what we would be if God had not undeceived us with
the truth. There are none who understands.
People don't understand who they are, they don't understand who
God is, and they don't understand the
way to God. That's why it says, no one who
seeks God. Well, preacher, I sought God. I can't remember exactly how
the hymn goes, but it starts off something like, I sought
the Lord and afterward I know that truly it was Him seeking
me. Yes, everyone who's a believer
at one time sought the Lord, but the only reason that happened
is the good shepherds sought them and found them. And when
he found them, they started seeking him. No one left to himself seeks
God, not the God of scriptures. They go after the gods of their
own imagination. Many of them make gods out of
stone and wood and precious metals and some just have a faulty view
of the God of the Bible, such a faulty view it doesn't even
resemble him at all. And they're not seeking God as
he is. All have turned away. In Adam we turned away. When
Adam turned away from God, all of us were in him. And we turned
away from him. But when we came into this world,
and you know, I love babies. I mean, I love to hear about.
People are going to have a baby. I love to hear about it. When
they do have a baby, I like to see them. I'm not a baby holder.
You know, people say, would you like to hold it? No, not really.
But that's because I'm afraid I'll drop it. I mean, I don't
have any aversion to the baby. I just, you know, it's so fragile.
It's like, to me, it's, you know, like hand me a million dollar
vase. Would you like to hold it? No, no, you just. Maybe if I was sitting on a couch,
with my hands like this, and it had a gate up or something,
and then you handed it to me. But I'm so afraid I'm going to
mess up. Babies are wonderful things,
and we think they're innocent until the middle of the night.
They want something. But they just look so precious,
don't they? Just wait. They may not have borne much
of the fruit of sinfulness as we normally think of, they will. I wonder at these people who
say, oh, children are born good, they've got to be taught to hate.
Did you ever have kids? That's what I want to, did you
ever have children? I don't know of a single parent who purposely
pulled their child aside and said, listen, you need to learn
some hate. Now here's how you hate people.
What do we spend our time doing as parents? We try to get our
children just to treat people decent. All have turned away. We have
together become worthless. Notice this. Not each one of
us is worthless. He says, put all of you together. And it's still worthless. There is no one who does good,
not even one. Well, I did this, that, and the
other. Wasn't good. Not good the way God describes
good. Their tongues are open graves. Excuse me, their throats are
open graves. Got up the other morning, and
Bonnie had gotten up ahead of me, and I went in there, and
I'd just gotten out of bed. And so I gave her a hug and I
kissed her on the cheek, and I said, that's as intimate a
kiss as you'll get until I brush my teeth. Because until then,
it's kind of like your mouth is an open grave. But that's
the way we are spiritually speaking in the sight of God. What comes
out of our mouth is like rotting flesh. You see all these religions
in the world and all their pomp and circumstance and all the
human glory demonstrated in them. And a lot of them, you know,
they've got their robes and their headdresses and their jewelry
and their staffs and others. It's just a nice suit or whatever,
but they've got fantastic displays of all kinds of human glory. And you may as well be looking
into an open grave. And you can tell it when they
open their mouth, because the things they say are words of
death, though they have artfully learned how to make them sound
like words of life. Their tongues practice deceit. They don't practice it in the
sense that they're not good enough at it yet, so they've got to
practice. It just means this is what they do all the time.
Paul said, let God be true and every man a liar. And he didn't
say that as though he's saying, well, for the sake of argument,
let's just suppose that God is true and every man's a liar.
He's saying, this is the way it is. In particular, that's true with
regard to spiritual things. We lie to each other. We lie to God. The poison of vipers is on their
lips. Every one of us believed and
spoke a soul-killing false gospel until God saved us. And we'd
still be doing that if he did not work in us to will and to
do according to his good pleasure. Their mouths are full of cursing
and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and
misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know."
You say, well, wait a minute. Feet are swift to shed blood?
I never shed any blood. I don't remember a path of ruin
and misery, that I'm leaving a path of ruin and misery behind
me wherever I go. The way of peace, I don't know. God, for the sake of His people, restrains
men from acting as bad as they otherwise would. We think that the devil is the
epitome of evil. The devil is simply an evil being
unrestrained. You want to see human depravity
on full display? You go to Jerusalem 2,000 years
ago on the day of our Lord's crucifixion, you will find unexpressable
cruelty. I mean, it's bad enough to think
that they would do that to any kind of human being. But they
did that to someone who even if you just looked at him as
a human being, he never did anything other than that which was good
and helpful to others. But we know who he was. That's
God in human flesh. And if you want to see what the
human heart, what your heart apart from Christ, what your
heart apart from Christ thinks of God, Just see what Herod and
Pilate and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all who gathered
that day crying, crucify him, crucify him. And those soldiers
that mocked him and beat him. That's man's opinion of God. So you can imagine God's opinion
of man. And then lastly, There is no
fear of God before their eyes. Well, I know why in most of the
United States there's no fear of God before people's eyes.
It's very rare that preachers declare a God worthy of fear. They're not afraid of Him. I
think most people, even religious people, really don't believe
that God judges, that God is strict. They view him as this
doting grandfather type. That's not what God is like. It goes on to say, now we know
that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the
law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world
accountable to God. If you're not under grace, you're
under the law. If you are not in Christ, then you are in Adam.
And this is how God sees you, and everything God sees in you
is revolting to him. Now, this is not me saying that
what I see in you is revolting to me. I think you're fine people.
But once again, I'm using a pretty low standard. I say, yeah, you're
fine a guy as I am. That's a low standard, folks.
You haven't reached very high if the best you've done is be
as good a person as me or twice as good as me. God does not judge
by the standards of men. God's standard is himself. And I tell you this day, and
I say it with sincerity, this is not self-righteous judgment
of you. I'm just trying to be honest with you about God's judgment
of you. If he looks at you without Christ in between you
and him, if he looks at you outside of Christ, he sees you as one
so wicked. that nothing less than eternal
torment is suitable for you." That's true of me. It's true
of you. It's true of the teenagers here
this morning, true of the little children. You say, that's pretty rough.
Sometimes the truth is, isn't it? Fortunately, that's not really
a good word. That's not all the truth there
is. That's just one side of the truth. And some religion loves
that side of the truth because they use that to control people. Well, I'm not here trying to
control you. I'm not here. I don't want to put you under
bondage to me by putting you under a sense of guilt and then
using that guilt to make you do what I want you to do or what
I think you ought to do. I'm telling you this so that
maybe you'll think seriously about your soul And you'll start, what does God
think of me? Well, here it is. Question is, what are we going
to do about that? Well, there's nothing that we personally can
do about that. But turn over here to John chapter
3, verse 21. Outside of Christ, God sees you. as one mass of undiluted wickedness. Not a mixture of good and evil.
He doesn't see you as someone trying to be good. He sees all
evil things in you outside of Christ. But now how does he see a man
who is in Christ? John chapter three, verse 21. And that's not what I wanted.
Let me see if I can find it. Okay, John chapter one. Well, I'm going to be honest
with you. I read it, and I thought I wrote down the right one. But
when our Lord was being baptized, I'll just have to tell you this
way. When our Lord was being baptized, it says that the Spirit
descended on him like a dove, and there was a voice from heaven
that said, here we go. Now I know. I got the wrong book.
Luke. Chapter 3, verse 21. I'd rather you look at it right
in the scriptures than just hear me say it. When all the people were being
baptized, that is by John the Baptist, Jesus was baptized too,
and as he was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit
descended on him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came
from heaven, you are my son, whom I love, with you I'm well
pleased. Now I introduced this last part
of the message with this question, what does God think of you in
Christ? We just read it. You say, no,
that's what he thinks of Christ. Yes, that's what he thinks of
the Lord Jesus Christ. And if you're in him, that's
what he thinks of you. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. Now we know this, if God thinks
that about any one of us, it's not because of what we've done
or what we've thought. It's not even because of what
we wish we could be. Because we saw the description
and opinion of God regarding us if we are simply viewed as
we are. But the scriptures teach us that
before God made the heavens and the earth. He chose a people
in Christ. He determined that they would
be in Christ. What's that mean? Well, the other
side of it is to be in Adam. And the idea is if you're an
Adam, then you were represented by Adam in what he did in his
rebellion and the wickedness of his rebellion has passed on
to you. But if you are perceived as in
Christ, then all the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ, all
His being well-pleasing to His Father, that's how God sees you. And you say, that's going too
far. I want you to think of the alternative.
What did I say is God's standard? God's standard is Himself. In
order to have His blessings, You have to be as good as Him. Has there ever been a man as
good as God? One. Because He is God. Everything that we can know about
God is in Him, Jesus Christ. He is the radiance of God's glory,
the very express image of His person, says the scripture. He
is the eternal Word. made flesh, and he lived in this
sinful, corrupt environment and was tried in every point, just
like you and I are, yet he never sinned. He was born with, he
had no paternal ancestry, that is, no biological paternal ancestry
to Adam. God is literally his father.
Therefore, he does not bear the guilt of Adam. He, Adam's not
his head, therefore he wasn't in Adam, he didn't participate
in Adam's sin. He came into this world with
no sin and he never thought sin, he never desired sin, he never
did sin. That's the only way God would
have opened up the heavens and said, this is my son whom I love,
with him I am pleased. Because God's not pleased with
anything less than himself. You say, well, that sounds pretty powerful. Is it true? It must be. 1 John says, as He is, so are we
in this world. And it says, and that's our confidence
in the day of judgment. As God perceives Christ, so does
He perceive all those who are in Him. I stand before you as
one guilty of awful things. And I'm not talking here about
just, you know, trying to be super spiritual and saying all
the things that go through my mind. Things I've done. Wickedness. And yet God looks at me Through
the lens of Christ, if you will, he's between me and God, or you
can say I'm in him, however you want to express that. But when
he looks at me, he sees Christ. I remember when a young woman
in the church at 13th Street, I didn't even know she could
sing, but she got up to sing a special. And I'm going to have
to find this hymn because it was just beautiful, but the chorus.
And when he sees me, he sees the blood of the Lamb. He sees
me as worthy, and not as I am. He sees me in garments made whiter
than the snow. For the Lamb of God is worthy,
and he loves me, this I know." Brethren, that's what the gospel's
about. That's what the good news is.
That by reason of what Christ did, God's no longer looking
at us and forming his opinion of us according to what he sees
in us. For everyone who is a believer,
everyone who is in Christ, when Christ sees you, he sees Christ. And he is as pleased with you
as he is with Christ. Brother Don Fortner used to like
to say something to get him in trouble with people. And that
was Brother Don Fortner's way. He liked to say, make provocative
statements. And he would say, David was just
as loved, accepted, and pleasing to God in the arms of Bathsheba
as he was when he wrote the 23rd Psalm. You say, wait a minute, how can
that be? Because God did not look at David
outside of Christ. Now that does not give us an
excuse for the way we act, and it does not mean that there are
not consequences in this life for the way we behave. But brethren,
with regard to eternal things, when God sees one of his chosen
in Christ, he sees Christ and he loves them as he loves Christ,
he accepts them as he accepts Christ, and he will bless them
as he has blessed Christ. They tell you that it's not good
to have black and white thinking and living in this world, that's
true. I mean, because there's nothing white in this world,
and there's nothing black. We live in a gray world. But
here is where black and white does exist. We are either altogether
wickedness in His sight, or we are altogether righteousness
in His sight. And it has nothing to do with
what we've done or are doing. It has to do with who Christ
is and what he has done. One more quick point and we'll
be done. Matthew chapter 17. Pretty sure I got this one right. Verse 5, while he, that is Peter,
was still speaking, our Lord, this is the Mount of Transfiguration,
and he's been transformed in the sight. I mean, he looks glorious. It says, and a voice from the
cloud said, this is my son whom I love. With him, I am well pleased. Listen to him. Now, first part of that is exactly
what we've already read, but then there was that last part
the Lord said, this is the Father speaking, said, listen to him. If you are in Christ, God perceives
you as perfect in Christ. And he also believes that you're
worth listening to. That doesn't mean it's worth
listening to everything you've got to say. But when you're speaking
the things that Christ spoke, when you are telling the gospel,
God says you should listen to them. Now, this shouldn't inflate us
with pride, but it should remove any hesitancy on our part to
be bold in speaking the gospel of God's grace. When we're telling the truth
of God, God says we're worthy to be heard, just like the Lord
Jesus was worthy to be heard. And so the next time you feel
like you would like to speak of word and of the truth of God,
but you think, who am I? You're a child of God, that's
who you are, if you're in Christ. To God, you are like Christ. And as you speak his truth, you
are worthy to be heard as Christ himself was. Do not fear. Don't worry about what opinion
men will have of you because of what you say regarding the
truth of God. Know this. God Himself will be
delighted. He always loves to hear about
His Son. Paul said, we are a sweet-smelling
savor of Christ unto God. We may not be to the world. It says, to some, we're the savor
of death unto deaths. To some people, we'll preach
the gospel and it would be like they just passed a dead animal
in the ditch. Eww, that smells awful. To some,
we'll be the savor of life unto life, like those beautiful smells
that swirl around in the spring as life begins to spring out again. I guess that's
why they call it spring. But always to God, when we are
declaring Christ, we are a sweet-smelling fragrance to Him. And I'm much
more concerned with His opinion than with anybody
else's. Because in the end, the opinion
of men will not matter at all. The opinion of God. So what is
God's opinion of you? All hinges on this, are you in
Christ or out of him? Now it's God that puts people
in Christ, but I know this, here's his promise. Everyone who calls
upon his name will be saved. All who come to him are in him. All who trust him are saved. And all who are like that, are
perceived by God to be like the Lord Jesus Christ, and He's pleased
with them, and He loves them. All right.