All right, we'll begin here.
1 Peter chapter 1. 1 Peter chapter 1. The first three words of our
text make up the title of this message, verse 10. concerning
this salvation. Peter's already mentioned the
word salvation twice. Many search the scriptures to
find rules to live by. And there's no question there
are some commandments given. But they seem to think that that's
the major message of the scriptures. Some like to scour the scriptures
for calming quotes. Nothing wrong with looking for
passage of scripture which bring comfort and peace to your soul. Though I have noticed that often
they take these scriptures out of their context and they have
no application to the situation that they are addressing with
the scriptures. And probably the worst of all
is there are people who take scriptures and they must always
take them out of their context and misapply them to use them
this way, but they try to use them to justify their political
actions. I would be quite happy to have
a congressman, a senator, a president, or whatever, who believed God. but I do weary of these people
that go around holding a Bible and reading portions of scripture
from it as though it justifies what they intend to do. The Bible
was not written to tell the United States of America how to govern
its affairs, or any other country. Paul said this, he told it to
Timothy. Speaking of the holy scriptures,
he said, which are able to make you wise unto salvation. Wise unto salvation. And that is its subject. From
the very beginning to the very end, the subject is salvation. And they make us wise to salvation
because from beginning to end, they are a testimony of the Savior. Salvation, people look at it
as a subject. Let's study salvation. Some of
them look at it as a plan. It's kind of like an insurance
plan. It's a set of you know, a pattern
which if you follow it, it ends up with you being saved. But salvation is a person. So
the Bible makes us wise into salvation by making known to
us the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Peter
says concerning this salvation, He continues this theme, teaching
us that this business of salvation was the business of the prophets.
You know, folks like to make a big distinction between the
Old Testament and the New Testament, and I'm not saying that there
is not a distinction to be made. I believe Brother Henry Mahan
stated it best when he said, the Old Testament is the New
Testament concealed, and the New Testament is the Old Testament
revealed. They both have the same message.
They're just revealing it in different ways with different
levels of clarity. Years ago I said the most unfortunate
page in our Bibles is that page that divides between Old Testament
and New Testament because God was simply continuing His revelation
which He began way back in the Garden of Eden. So the New Testament books It's
not like God said, all right, I've got a new message. No, it's
the same message, just a different way of saying it and a clearer
revelation of it. He says here, Concerning this
salvation, verse 10, the prophets who spoke of the grace that was
to come to you searched intently and with the greatest care trying
to find out the time and circumstances to which the spirit of Christ
in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ
and the glories that would follow. Now let me make an aside here
for just a second. If the prophets of old to whom
God spoke personally If they searched intently and with the
greatest care to understand what was being told to them, how much
more should you and I do the same thing? Now, I know there's a kind of
searching and studying that's not good. People open up this
book and they're looking for something new. There's nothing
new. But we ought to be searching
God's book God's written revelation, trying to learn as much as we
can and understand as much as we can about the grace that came
to us, about the sufferings of Christ and the glory that will
follow. We dare not pretend as though
we've got a handle on this. We don't. I don't want to say more to learn
because we've learned the truth. I don't know exactly how to express
it except we can learn it better. We can see it revealed in new
ways and it can come to speak to us more deeply and more powerfully
than before. Concerning this salvation. Now there's many ways of salvation,
many kinds of salvation that are held forth by the various
religions of the world and by the various denominations of
Christianity. To some, and in America you don't
have to go far to find them, salvation consists of an eternal
vacation, possessing those things that quite frankly Christ told
us to avoid on earth, They misunderstand the scriptures that describe
the church in symbolic form, think that's heaven, and they
think they're going up to where they're gonna have a golden street
and probably a golden driveway up to their fancy mansion, you
know, and they're gonna live the life of luxury that they
never did have on earth. And to them, that's salvation.
To others, salvation means nothing more than to escape the flames
of hell. to other religions or well I
can even say in some versions of Christianity they actually
believe that salvation is a process by which we ourselves become
a God. I can't remember which one of
them it is now and I'm not going to try to name it because I don't
want to misrepresent anybody but one of the various cults
or sects of Christianity believes that we will actually become
our own little gods like Jehovah is God. Imagine that. We're going to become an I am.
And we're going to be able to speak worlds into existence.
No. Scriptures never promise that.
And to be honest with you, I have no desire for that. I can't manage my own life, I
don't want a whole universe to take care of. This salvation, what is this
salvation? In the Bible class, when we turn
back there to Colossians 1, I'll just mention something that we
dealt with more at length in the Bible class, but here is salvation
summarized. In Colossians 1, verse 21, it says, once you were alienated
from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil
behavior. So there's three things said
about us as we come into this world, our natural selves. Alienated,
estranged from God. Secondly, enemies of God. where people say, I've never
been an enemy of God. If you've never been an enemy
of God, it's because you've never met him. Now, I realize that
the enmity of the flesh toward God isn't as violent in some
as others. You've got to understand, to
be opposed to God is to be his enemy. And we were all opposed
to God's way until he made his way known to us in our hearts
when we believed the gospel. We were all walking a wrong way
until he put us on the right way. And walking a wrong way
is to be an enemy of God. So we were estranged from God,
enemies of God, and evil. I didn't realize until just now,
that's three things that begin with E. So it'll be easy to remember.
Estranged, enemies, evil. Now that's us by nature. And
I can't imagine a worse condition. The only worse condition would
be hell, but that is hell. Hell is simply our natural condition
taken to its final end. Because in hell, men are forever
estranged from God, they are forever enemies of God, and they
are forever evil. And all of this without any of
the restraints of God's common goodness towards this creation. Well, that's us by nature, estranged,
enemies, evil. Now let's skip down to verse
28, the last half of that verse in Colossians 1, 28. so that
we may present everyone perfect in Christ. Now, brethren, this
is salvation, to go from estranged enemies evil to perfect in Christ. And anything that doesn't start
with us as estranged evil enemies is not the salvation of God.
And anything that does not end with us being perfect in Christ
is not the salvation that Peter is talking about when he says
concerning this salvation. We must always be careful when
we're talking to others that we make sure we're talking about
the same thing, because they'll talk about salvation and they'll
say, oh, and salvation's by grace and all this, and we think that
we're agreeing. Then you talk and you find out
they don't mean the same thing by grace that we mean. They don't
even mean the same thing about salvation. A lot of the work in preaching
the gospel and trying to spread it is dismantling the false versions
of it, that the devil keeps building up and he sticks Bible words
on it, Bible names on it, and people think they're following
what the scripture says because the devil's been putting Bible
words out there, but it's not Bible truth. So always be careful
when you're talking to people and discussing things, you're
talking about the same thing. Peter said concerning this salvation, Now there's three things he mentions
about this salvation which provide us a good framework of viewing
the entirety of it. You know you can't in one sermon
cover all the details there are concerning this salvation. I've
been preaching here a long time and I haven't got it all covered
yet. And I'm not going to be able to cover it all this morning.
And I imagine when the time comes that I move on and someone else
moves in here and begins up this work, you know, I will not have
got it all covered. But here are three basic things. They're kind of like posts you
set in the ground that are immovable and you know that whatever else
you believe it's got to be in alignment with these things or
it is not this salvation. It says concerning this salvation
the prophets who spoke of the grace, grace, this salvation
is a salvation that is a matter of the grace of God from beginning
to end. It is not by grace, but it's
just by grace. For by grace are you saved, says
Paul. That's pretty simple, isn't it?
We need to learn to put a period where many others put a comma.
Salvation is by grace, period. Not salvation is by grace, comma,
but you gotta make sure that this, no, Salvation is by grace, period,
full stop. Don't add to that because whatever
you add to grace makes grace no longer to be grace. When the prophets were writing,
they were writing of grace. It's true that the blinded Jews
who had those books in their hands, they didn't see the grace.
And it's also true you and I didn't see the grace until God in grace
revealed His grace. We saw, yeah, salvations by grace,
and yet then we went on doing things that we thought were necessary
to do in order to somehow maintain grace. Grace that needs to be
maintained is not grace. You can't earn grace by the things
you do, you can't obtain it by the things you do, and you cannot
keep it by the things you do. It's grace and grace only. Grace turns our eyes from ourselves
to God who gives grace. I like that song, Marvelous Grace
of Our Loving Lord. You get to the chorus, grace,
grace, God's grace. I've listened to messages. You'd
almost think that the preacher thought we needed to give God
grace. But you know, God's been telling
us what to do and we're upset. Well, you need to let him save
you. As though somehow or another,
He's begging because he's sort of the one at fault that got
all this mess started by making demands. But we're gonna consent
to let him have his way. God doesn't need grace from us. We need grace from him. He's
done nothing to us to merit our enmity, has he? Is there anything
God has done that justifies us being the least bit angry with
him? Here, several months ago, there was a brother and sister
down there in Hinton that were killed. Tragedy, tragedy. And I don't want to take away
from the sorrow, the grief, and the tragic nature of that event.
But I ran into a woman who knew those people and she was hopping
mad at God because he allowed that. I've heard people say, well,
I can't believe in a God that allows children to have cancer. Well, there are some difficult
things in this life, almost unbearably difficult. You bear them simply
because you have no choice. But this is always true, what
the psalmist said, he has not dealt with us according to our
transgressions. We've never gotten it as bad
as we deserve it to be. So none of us has any right to
be upset with God. He doesn't need grace from us.
We need grace from him. We've done a mountain of offenses
against him. We are guilty of innumerable,
unspeakable acts of rebellion and defiance against him. You say, well, I don't feel that
I've done anything all that bad. Well, that's because you don't
understand what you've done and you don't understand the God
against whom you've done them. I realize in day-to-day life,
we make a distinction among sins. And we count murder to be a worse
sin than telling a white lie. But you gotta understand, when
we're talking about our sin before God, we're talking about sinning
against an infinite being. And therefore, any sin committed
against him is infinitely sinful. Henry said, there are no small
sins, because there's no small God to sin against. And David
said, against you and you alone have I sinned and done this evil
in your sight. And he said that about killing
Uriah after having taken Uriah's wife. You say, well, it sounds
to me like he sinned against Uriah. That's not what David
said. He said, I sinned against you, God. And that's what makes
sin bad. It's against God. So when we hear the word grace,
it turns our eyes from ourselves. It turns our eyes away from anything
good we've done, because those who are good don't need grace.
So since salvation comes by grace, it's obviously not bestowed upon
those who have something good to offer. It turns our eyes from
what we might think is good about ourselves, but here's the blessed
truth of it also allows us to turn our eyes away from the sin
that has estranged us from God. You know, people, because of
their pride, may not like the idea that they cannot take some
pride in the things they've done which they think are good. What they don't realize is if
you are going to be allowed to take note of what's good about
you, you'll also have to take note of what is evil about you. And if God, and if you're honest,
as you begin to look at yourself, you will see less and less of
what you think is good and more and more of what you think is
evil. But grace removes our eyes from ourselves altogether. It
says, in this salvation, what you have done is utterly irrelevant. It is irrelevant if you have
done evil. It is irrelevant if you have
done good. Grace takes the work of salvation
out of our hands and it's now completely in God's hands. It's
not what we're doing, it's what He's doing. And that's good news. At least it is to me. I'll bet
you it is to many of you. I don't have to be concerned
regarding my soul salvation. I don't have to be concerned
with what I have done. I don't have to be concerned
with what I did before I believed. I don't have to be concerned
with what I've done since I believed. I have to be concerned about
one thing. What has God done? And I know what he did. He laid our sins on Christ and
punished them there. And that means that those sins
which he bore are gone. You say, but I've sinned so much.
Yeah. And if you're one of his, All
those sins you did, the unspeakable and innumerable sins that you've
done, they were all laid on Christ and every last one of them is
gone, they don't exist. That's why we don't have to be
concerned about them as concerns our salvation. It's grace. There's nothing we can do to
turn God's grace toward us. In Romans 11, verse 5, it speaks,
it says, even now there is an election, or excuse me, a remnant
according to the election of grace. And if it's by grace,
it's no more of works. Otherwise, it would, grace would
no longer be grace. Now, we, strive to do what is
right and good, don't we? But our striving to do what is
right and good has nothing to do with God's gracious work of
salvation. Grace comes to us, and that's
what it says here. Who spoke of the grace that was
to come to you. We don't go out and get grace.
Grace comes to us. We were busy doing what we thought
was necessary to prepare for our eternal future. And grace
came to us without our asking for it. Without our looking for
it. without us even knowing the need
of it. I mean, Saul wasn't looking for
grace when he took off toward Damascus, was he? Grace came
to him. Grace from beginning to end. John Newton, in writing of Amazing
Grace, said, "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and
grace my fears relieved.'" It's grace that chose us, the election of
grace. It's grace that moved the Father
to send His Son to be our substitute. It's grace, the grace of God
in the heart and mind of Jesus Christ that made him determined
to do the work that had been given him to do. It's grace that
kept him on the tree, just as putting there But it was only his grace and
love towards his people that allowed it to happen. Because
at any time, he said, I could call my father and he'd send
a legion of angels, six legions of angels, I think he said. And
they would release me from all of this. Grace. It's grace that
sends the Holy Spirit to God's elect one by one. and reveals
to them the things they didn't know before, causes them to understand
things they thought they understood before, but all at once, oh,
now I see. And it's grace that keeps us day
after day after day. I'm a testimony of that. in the world, am I still doing
this? After so many failures, after so much sin, after so much
doubt and confusion over these years, why do I keep on going? Well, brethren, it's nothing
in me. I'm one of those guys, it's kind of easy to make me
give up on grand designs and ambitions. Grace. I'm still preaching grace because
of grace. And if God were to withdraw his
grace from me, I know he won't, but I'm just setting up a hypothetical. If he were to withdraw his grace
from me, I would stop believing him, and I would start preaching
to you a message that would sound strange to you. You say, what
are you talking about? You never preached like that before, Joe. If God were to withdraw His grace
from me, I would be like others have heard. You know, I've been
preaching a long time, but I realize there's some things I've been
missing. I've heard that happen with preachers. Preach 20, 25
years and all at once, they think they've been missing something
all along. And what it always comes up with is something that
puts the burden upon the people. Grace. And when we stand before
Him, perfect in Christ, there will be no other principle
than the principle of grace to explain why we're there. God's
favorable attitude towards us. So grace is the first of these
three things. the sufferings of Christ. Last
part of verse 11, speaking of the spirit of Christ, he predicted
the sufferings of Christ. Now in our way of thinking, salvation
comes by the strong, it comes by overthrowing Someone does
not save by dying. Now, there are some who have
engaged in a rescue, you know, some kind of rescue of somebody
in trouble, and in the process of rescuing them, they died.
But it was not their dying that rescued them. But our Lord, His death was not
just an accident of His work of saving us. It was the very
method by which he saved us. He suffered. When did his sufferings
begin? The moment he was conceived in
his mother's womb. He for whom it was not robbery to claim equality
with God. He made himself of no reputation. He emptied himself. Imagine that now. There you are,
having enjoyed already eternal, unbroken fellowship with the
Father, a being of pure spirit, of absolutely nothing to cause
you any concern, and suddenly you are condensed down to a single
cell in the womb of a woman who is a sinner. And you come into
life the same way all of humanity has, except for Adam and Eve. And you get cold, and you get
hot, and you get hungry, and you get thirsty, you get dirty. Some people like you, most people
hate you. Everything that you and I experience
in this life, he experienced it, and worse. He suffered being numbered with
transgressors. You know, we are transgressors,
but even we hate being numbered among them, don't we? We certainly would hate to be
numbered among those who have committed sins that we haven't
committed. And we would count it an embarrassment if it were published in the paper
that we had done some horrendous thing. And yet, if God did not restrain
us in grace, we would do the horrendous thing. And there are
horrendous things we've done, known only to us, and we would
hate for it to be known, because we'd hate to be numbered among
people who do things like that, right? Imagine being numbered
among those who are guilty of the worst of transgressions,
and you've never done any at all. You see, our Lord hates sin,
utterly despises it. He has the same heart as his
father towards that which is sin. He came into this world
and when he saw the sin, it's not like he came with a more
lax attitude towards sin than his father had. He didn't say,
well, yeah, I can see now under these circumstances how you might
do that. To him, every sin was a great offense, a shameful thing. And yet it's as though he was
splattered with all of it. And his name was published among
those who are guilty of it. He was made a curse. He was made
a shameful thing. He suffered being rejected by
men, betrayed by a friend, and forsaken by his followers. He suffered the cross. We can maybe imagine a little
of what that'd be like. But I've read some of what a
crucifixion was and it was a finely tuned means of torture unto death. And then he suffered God's wrath. Something none of us know what
that is. Look over at Psalm 22. Let's
spend a few minutes thinking about the sufferings of our Lord,
the sufferings that we could not see, and the sufferings that
by his grace we never will see. You think about that now, we
never will see these. Not if we're in him, but he saw them,
he experienced them. Psalm 22, my God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? Remember I said salvation finds
us estranged. cut off from God. Jesus Christ
was cut off from His God. You have forsaken me. Why are
you so far from saving me? We talk about salvation flippantly. And we have days when we wonder
about whether we're saved or we don't feel much about our
salvation or something like that and we just go on. Oh, for our
Lord to be cut off from God and to find that his God would not
come and help him in the day of his trouble. That was a grief
untold. You're so far from the words
of my groaning. Can I be honest here? I can't
remember the last time I groaned in prayer. I can't remember the
last time I was so heavily burdened that there were not words to
tell out how bad I felt, how awful I felt, that all I could
do was groan. Our Lord did. And I've experienced
such times, and I have found great comfort in knowing that
he heard the sound of my groaning and he brought relief, not to
the Lord, not to Christ. Why are you so far from the sound
of my groaning? Oh my God, I cry out by day,
but you do not answer by night. I'm not silent. Verse six, I am a worm. and not a man. This was the man. This is the
only good man ever lived. This is a man who said it is
my food to do the will of him who sent me. This is the one
of whom the father said this is my beloved son and whom I
am well pleased. This is the one who knew what
it was to be glorious with the glory of God. And now he says,
I'm not even a man. I'm a worm, a maggot. People say I'm so convicted of
my sin. Really? You've never felt like
the Lord Jesus Christ felt when he bore our sins in his body
on the tree. I'm scorned by men and despised
by the people. Verse seven, all who see me mock
me. They hurl insults, shaking their
heads. He trusts in the Lord. Let the
Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him since he
delights in him. Can you imagine what that was
like to be hanging there on the cross, our Lord, as the old timers called him,
the darling of heaven. And men with evil heart and malicious
intent mocked his pain. And in their hatred of God, they
said that he was being hated by God. He suffered. And who can tell
the tale of his suffering? In verse 14 of Psalm 22, I am
poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My
heart has turned to wax. It has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like
a pot shirt. You know what a pot shirt is? It's a shard of broken pottery. He said, that's me. I'm just,
there's nothing left of me. I'm just all broken into little
useless pieces. My tongue sticks to the roof
of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. I don't ever want to belittle
anybody's suffering, but none of us have ever come
close to this. not in your deepest sorrows.
Turn over to Lamentations, chapter one. Verse 12. Is it nothing to you, all you
who pass by, Boy, it was. If it was anything to them, it
was a reason for sport. It was a reason for having fun,
a reason for rejoicing. Is it nothing to you all who
pass by? Look around and see. Is there
any suffering like my suffering? There's a lot of suffering in
the world, you know, and sometimes it gets me upset, it makes me
angry, because I know it doesn't have to happen. I see evil men
causing others to live more difficult lives than they have to live,
and I want to rise up, you know. We've got to do something about
that. It's horrible the way some people in this world have to
live. But there's never been anybody that suffered like our
Lord Jesus Christ has done. As any suffering like my suffering
that was inflicted on me, that the Lord brought on me in the
day of his fierce anger. You reach back in your memory
to your deepest, darkest hour. when you despaired of life, you
haven't even begun to understand what our Lord was dealing with
here. There's only one reason it didn't
kill him. There's only one reason he didn't die until he was done
with the work he came to do, and that's because he's the son
of God. What he endured would have killed anybody long before
our Lord ever left this world. God's fierce anger fell on him.
He says, from on high he sent fire, sent it down into my bones. God sent hell to our Lord and
sent it into the very midst of his being. He spread a net for my feet and
turned me back. He made me desolate, faint. all the day long. And then these
next words are almost impossible to believe. My sins have been
bound into a yoke by his hands. They are woven together. They
have come upon my neck and the Lord has sapped my strength.
He has handed me over to those I cannot withstand. Those first
two words, our Lord says, my sins. What do you mean, my sins? Lord,
you're burying my sins in your body on the tree. That's true,
that's how we see it, and that's how we should see it. But blessed
be the name of our Lord. When he bore our sins, he said,
they're my sins. He took them to himself and he
held them tight as though he would not let them go, because
he knows if he does not bear them as his, they shall come
back to us. My sins. He stood there in the
court of the universe. and was charged with every despicable,
disgusting thing that his people have ever done. Every despicable,
disgusting thing you have ever done was charged to the Lord
Jesus Christ and he said, guilty. Guilty. I did it. I don't even want to confess
the things I actually did. Our Lord confessed the things
he never did. He pled guilty to crimes he never
committed. Oh, the sufferings of the Lord. More than we can understand,
we return to the subject time and time again, and we're still
baffled. This salvation is by grace. It's a tale of the sufferings
of Jesus Christ, but that's not the end of it, and the glories
that would follow. Oh, it's good that God doesn't
stop halfway through this thing, isn't it? Our Lord, in talking to those
men on the road to Emmaus, I believe it was there, but he said, he
told them, about the sufferings of the Christ and the glory that
would follow. And Peter says that's the gospel.
The sufferings of Christ and the glory that would follow.
What glory? Well, the glory that belongs to the one who's victorious.
The glory that belongs to someone who bore sins he never did, but
he called them his own, but he bore the full weight of the wrath
and endured it, survived it, came out on the other side alive. God raised him from the dead,
testifying that he accepted his work and said, it's good enough.
Twice our Lord spoke and said, this is my beloved son in whom
I'm well pleased. But none of those testimonies
of the father can equal what he said when he pulled his son
out of that tomb. He said, this is my beloved son.
And if it was possible, God said, I'm even more pleased with him
now than I was before. Before I was pleased with him
as one who never broke my law, but always did what I wanted.
But now I'm even more pleased for he who always did what I
wanted. has taken upon himself all the horrible things that
my people did against me, and he bore them, he endured my punishment,
and now he is without sin, because he is a sufficient sacrifice
for sin. And he said, you're a righteous
man, you don't belong in a tomb, come on out. And Jesus Christ
came out, and that was just his first step back to the throne,
for the Lord said to him, sit right here at my right hand till
I make all your enemies a footstool for your feet. How much glory? The glory of the entire universe.
All the glory you can think of and more. He, as it were, approached the
gates of heaven and said, lift up your heads, O ye gates, and
be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and let the King of glory
in. How many phonies had approached
those gates and said, let me in? And they didn't do it. But
that time they opened, and Jesus Christ came in to the gates of
glory. Jesus Christ came in to the sound
of triumph, came in to the sound of angels and thousands of saints
who had gone before. glorifying Him, praising Him,
magnifying Him, as His Father says, right here, Son, right
here. This is where you were before, and this is where you will be
forever. You are my Son, and never shall we be separated
again. And all who are in you, they're
my sons too. And they are seated with you.
And never shall we be separated again. This salvation, I don't know about you, I'm not
interested in any other salvation than that one. That's good enough
for me.