Isaiah chapter 1 verse 18 the
Lord says come now let us reason together says the Lord though
your sins are like scarlet they shall be as white as snow though
they are red like crimson they shall be as wool and now if you
turn over to Jeremiah chapter 6 Jeremiah chapter 6 And we are going to look at verse 16. Now, in all the three
scriptures we're going to look at, these are going to be the
words of the Lord Himself. They are not the words of prophets,
they are the words of the Lord. written down by prophets maybe
even spoken aloud by prophets but these are actually things
dictated to them from the Lord. Come now let us reason together
he says in Isaiah and then here in verse 16 this is what the
Lord says. Now if you could be sure that
what followed upon words like that were indeed going to be
the word of the Lord wouldn't you want to know what it was?
If someone came to you and said, this is what the Lord says, and
you were confident that he knew what the Lord said and was going
to tell you honestly, wouldn't you want to hear what he had
to say? Well, that's what we've got right here. It says, stand
at the crossroads and look, ask for the ancient paths, ask where
the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your
souls. I read several times now, and
a meme that comes across Facebook, someone said, if you want God
to speak to you, read the Bible. If you want God to speak to you
audibly, read the Bible out loud. And that's true, the scripture
is God speaking to us, and that's what he said. Come, reason together,
stand at the crossroad and ask for the ancient path, and now
if you look at Matthew, chapter 11, Matthew 11, and we're going to
see what the Lord says, not the Lord through the mouth of a mere
prophet, but the Lord himself as he appeared here a couple
thousand years ago. Matthew chapter 11 Verse 28,
he says, come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and
I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest
for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden
is light. Now, here we have the word of
three prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the one who was called that
prophet, who was not only a prophet in the sense of one of the sons
of men whom God touched with special inspiration that he might
know and declare the word of God, but that prophet who is
not only a prophet, he is also the message that the prophet
speaks. He is the one that God promised
Moses he would come. said I shall raise up another
prophet from among you and to him all the people will listen
and indeed all of those who are truly the people of God will
listen to that prophet and that's of course our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now Though Isaiah and Jeremiah lived about 100 or more years
apart, both spoke of the same time in history, God's judgment
on Jerusalem and the land of Judah by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. But spiritually speaking, all
three of these prophets pointed to the same day. The first two,
as a day yet to come, And then that prophet spoke of the day
which he would inaugurate by his life and death. Now, God
says through Isaiah, let us reason together. The religions of most
men, and if you pay any attention to what goes on in the religious
world and particularly the spirit of our day, the religions of
man are for the most part driven by emotion. In fact, the mind
of man craves these emotional and ecstatic experiences to such
a degree that they will reject plain, simple preaching, calling
it dry and uninspiring. And yet they will embrace the
most ridiculous forms of religion, religious theories of God, simply
because when they hear them, they're made to feel good. But
what does God say? Does he say, come now, let us
feel together? Does he say, come now and be
enraptured in ecstatic experiences of unparalleled joy? No. God says, come now, let us reason
together. God appeals to his people by
meaningful and rational words. Now words are simply units of
thought. If we have a thought and we want
to express it to somebody else, we have to use words. There is
no such thing as the Vulcan mind meld. I mean, you just cannot
transmit information to someone else without using words, and
these words are little units of thought that we trade with
one another. Now, they communicate meaning, and that may seem silly
to have to make such an obvious statement, but in our day, words
have come to mean almost nothing. And I see it so often as I try
to read, not only religious stuff, but the political stuff. You
see, this is the trick of liars. Use words that people think they
understand, but actually use them in a way different than
the way they use it. And eventually, words become
completely bereft of meaning. They're made to mean so much,
they mean nothing at all, eventually. They have become stripped of
their objective meanings, and they've become little more than
missiles of emotion. In our day of PC language, when
we have to be so careful about exactly which words we use to
describe something, you know why that is? Because they aren't
listening to what you're saying, they listen to how what you're
saying makes them feel. Consequently, you can use one
of two words and these two words mean exactly the same thing but
if you choose the wrong one it has an emotional reaction in
someone and suddenly you're bad for using that word. And it's true in religion too
that these things, these words are buzzwords. They're words
designed, usually in religion they do this, they're words designed
to make you feel good, inspired, to get you excited. And vain speakers will craft
their speeches so that each person that listens to them may take
their own meaning out of it. I remember watching on television
one time and this was, it could be anywhere from my late teens
to early twenties, somewhere in there. Dad and I were sitting
there watching the TV at home and some politician was talking
and he rambled on and on. And this went on like for two
or three minutes, this guy's just continually spouting out words
and he got done. And I looked at my dad and I
said, did he say anything? And my dad said, no. But how many people thought he
did? He was one of the more clever liars in Washington, and that
was how he would do it. Say stuff that sounded like it
meant something, but it didn't, and each person could impress
their own meaning on it, and therefore he had a lot of followers,
even though not a one of them really understood what he was
going for. Now that's sad enough in the world of politics, but
when it enters the world of religion, Paul said, if the trumpet gives
an uncertain sound, How will the army know what to do? And yet the world clamors after
preachers giving an uncertain sound. They don't speak clearly. They speak in the words of the
day or they speak in the words of the seminary or something
so that people really don't understand what's being said, if anything's
really being said at all. But they're able to sit there
and they hear certain words like grace and Jesus and cross, and
they think the guy's telling the truth because those words
got mixed in there somewhere. But God, he uses words full of
meaning. As I've said before, our Lord
Jesus Christ was not crucified because they did not understand
what he meant by what he said. Our Lord didn't go there when
they arrested him and they accused him of this, that, and the other,
and he did not say to them, wait, you just misunderstood me. What
I really meant was, and then clear the matter up. They said,
he holds himself forward as the King of the Jews. And Pilate
said, are you the King of the Jews? And the Lord said, well, you
said it, which was one way of saying yes in those days. They said, he calls himself the
son of God, which means he's making himself to be equal with
God. He didn't deny it. He didn't say, oh no, you guys
misunderstood what I meant when I used that phrase. We're all
sons of God, you know. They crucified our Lord because
they knew exactly what he meant. They knew exactly what he meant
when he said that they had to have a righteousness which exceeds
even the righteousness of the Pharisees. They felt the sting of his rebukes.
They realized that if what he said is true, the power is being
taken away from them. And they were right. They understood
him quite well. God uses words full of meaning.
He came not to engage our emotions by dramatic speech. He came to
change our minds with plain speech. Now, when I was young, I used
to get real excited about preachers that could get you whooped up.
Now, understandably, with the religious tradition I came from,
you don't have to get very whooped up, and you really think you
are whooped up a lot. I was raised in a church that
kind of kept things on low key. But I remember when I started
hearing some of these brethren that you and I know, and some
of them are pretty country folk, and they can get pretty wound
up when they preach, and I thought that's the way to do it. And
we had some guys that were capable of speaking as though they had
the voice of thunder, you know, and some that they could have,
if they'd opened the doors to the church, they could have broadcast
it all over Ashland without using speakers. And I thought, this
is great, this is good, powerful preaching. And the older I get,
the more I like what I call flat-footed preaching. our brethren who just
stand up here and they say it. And I have found that the gospel,
plainly spoken, has a power in the soul that doesn't disappear
when the preacher quits preaching. You know, if your excitement
in the message comes from the style of the preacher, then your
excitement is going to go away when the preacher goes away. But if your excitement in what
you hear arises from what you heard, it will continue. It will abide in you. It will
make changes in you that don't go away. The Word of God has
all the power it needs without the various styles of men adding
their power to it. Now, we who preach, we can't
help but preach according to the way we are. And some people
are more exciting, charismatic, whatever you want to call it,
in their manner of delivery. But here's the point, when God
speaks, he's not speaking emotionally. He's speaking with
words that can be understood, no matter how they're spoken.
He says, come let us reason. Reason is what our mind does
with words. When I had to take a logic class
in college, one of the first things the professor taught us
was that logic will not necessarily lead you to truth, but all truth
is logical. And the reason was, is logical
is just a way of thinking. If you start out with bad information,
you may think quite logically, and you'll still end up with
the wrong conclusion. But logic is just the pattern
that God chose to wire our minds so that if we begin with the
truth and truly think logically upon it, we will arrive at more
truth. When God called his people to
reason with him, he gave this first premise. Now again, that's
a word from logic class, but in any form of logic, you'll
have two premises. and then a conclusion. You get
your first premise, your second premise, and then a conclusion.
And all that is is a statement of fact, another statement of
fact, and then what you can conclude from those two statements of
fact. And so the first premise or the first statement of fact
that God gives as he tells his people, let's reason together,
he says, your sins are like scarlet, they are red as crimson. Now,
right away, you can see why people end up with the wrong conclusion
sometimes, even when they think logically about their religion. Because they right away start
with a false premise. They start not with, your sins
are like scarlet. They say, they start with, eh,
you got a little stain here and there. They don't start with
red as crimson, They say there's a couple of pink spots here and
there that you know some religious Clorox will get it out. But God
begins with a message as he says let's reason his first premise
is for natural man a real smack in the face. Particularly it
is that way for religious man because he says to them your
sins are like scarlet they're red like crimson and I'm not
trying to pretend as though I do the laundry at our house, I don't.
But I've been told that the most difficult stain to remove is
red. And so here as God is describing their sinfulness,
he describes it as though it is white robes. stained scarlet
and crimson. Scarlet, a bright red, a glaring
red, a red you can see all the way across town. Scarlet, the
color associated with prostitutes, and I suppose that's because
you can see scarlet all the way across town and it provides good
advertising. Bright, unhideable, Scarlet and
in crimson a deep deep red So deep you can't get deep enough
to get it out So our Lord says though your sins they are Scarlet
they are red like crimson That's his first premise But then he skips right to the
conclusion without giving us a second premise. Because he
says, if sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.
Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. And so
we start with scarlet and crimson, and we end up with snow and wool. And yet at this point, the Lord
did not give us the middle premise or the middle statement that
we get us logically from crimson and scarlet to snow and wool. How did that happen? Actually,
he spends the rest of the book of Isaiah pretty much giving
us that middle portion. For he says, all we like sheep
have gone astray. There's your crimson. There's
your scarlet. But the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. And that's how we end up as snow
and wool. But right here at this point,
God simply gives us the first premise and the conclusion. And so that leaves us, and if
you wanna turn now over to Jeremiah chapter six, actually this just
brings us to the crossroads that Jeremiah is talking about. Now when a person is preaching,
normally speaking, he's wanting to lay out the way of salvation and he may describe what salvation
is he may describe what it's like if a person is saved or
what a saved person is like just as our Lord did when he described
snow and wool just a way to talk about white
and then he may say well here's this but here's the problem we
are crimson We are scarlet. How can we get from this scarlet
and crimson character to the snowy and woolly one? Well, Jeremiah
puts it this way, this is what the Lord says, stand at the crossroads. Now what's a crossroads? Anybody
knows what a crossroads is? It's a place where two roads
cross. And when you get to a crossroads, normally speaking, you have two,
three, or even more choices you can take in getting to your destination. And of course, when we're driving
somewhere, that's always the tense time, particularly when
you come to one of these places where several interstates come
together. You talk about a crossroads. When we go to visit Mary and
we try to get through Nashville and go south of Nashville, there
are three interstates coming together right there. And with
that is some of those belt lines intersecting. It is a mess. And
you talk about coming to the crossroads and asking, which
one's the right one here? But it says here, stand at the
crossroads and ask for the ancient path. Ask where the good way is and
walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. So here
we're on the road and we have accepted the first part of this
road, the crimson, the scarlet. We're on that road. And what
we're wanting to do is get to snowy and woolly. And we come
to a crossroads. Which one of them is going to
take us where it is we want to go? And that's what Jeremiah is asking.
Or that, shall I say, that's what Jeremiah is telling us to
ask. Or even more accurately, this
is what the Lord God himself tells us through the prophet
Jeremiah that we should ask. We should stand at the crossroads
and look and ask for the ancient paths. Now not everybody's come to the
crossroads. Not everybody has even accepted
the first part of this journey, that he is like crimson and like
scarlet. And all you can do with such
people like that is keep reminding them of it, keep preaching it
to them, until maybe, by the grace of God, they come to a
realization of what they are. And they set off on their spiritual
journey, so to speak, towards snowiness and wooliness. But you come to the crossroads, and there's a lot of paths. Each one of them saying, this
is the right path. This is the way to be white as
snow. This is the way that you can
get away from all that scarlet and crimson of your nature and
actions. and you can become pure, white,
and clean, like the driven snow, and like a wooly little lamb.
Every one of them is saying that. You know, at least when we're
trying to drive down there to see our daughter, they've got road
signs, and for the most part, you can believe them. And we
know which road takes us down to her house, so all we gotta
do is follow the signs for that road. But what if you get to the crossroads
and every road has the same sign on it? He says, stand at the crossroads. One
of the hardest things for us to do is just stand. We want to be on the move. Do
you remember when Pharaoh was chasing the Israelites and the
Israelites were there blocked up by the Red Sea on one side
and Pharaoh's army on the other? And you can imagine, and don't
laugh at them, this would be just exactly how you'd feel about
it. What are we gonna do? And they're running around and
they're getting scared. And I'm sure there are a lot of them
trying to devise some way out of this. They're saying, they
say, what should we do? Maybe we should go back to Pharaoh.
Maybe we should throw ourselves upon Pharaoh's mercy and say,
Pharaoh, we were wrong to leave. It was that Moses guy, not our
fault. I mean, we just came out here to do some sacrifice and
we were going to come back all along. This wasn't our deal.
Take us back. I'm sure there were people that
wanted to do that. And there were others that probably
said, well, we can't get across this water, but you know, if
we'll shoot along north here or whatever way would have been
appropriate, maybe we can get around it. Maybe we can outrun
Pharaoh and his army. But whatever, I'm sure that if
they weren't moving physically with their feet inside, they
were going 100 miles an hour. And you know what Moses told
them to do? Stand still. and see the salvation of the
Lord. The fact of the matter is you
can't see the salvation of the Lord while you're running. The most difficult thing for
those people to do at that point was actually to do exactly what
Moses said, stand. Here it says stand at the crossroads
and look Look at what's there. Look at the various roads set
before you. You will discover that you do
not have the capacity to know which road is the right road.
Not naturally, we don't. However, he didn't say just stand
there and look. He said ask for the ancient paths. Now nearly everyone thinks that
their religion's old. But there are a lot of people
going after an old path that's not an ancient path. There are
people who trust themselves to the traditions of their parents
and grandparents, people with whom they go to church, people
who it seems like to them, well, they must be walking the right
path and if it's good enough for grandpa and grandma, it's
good enough for me. It is something, you know, when
you're a kid, you look at older folks and you think, man, they
must have been here forever. Well, let me tell you, you younger
people, from the mouth of someone who's oldish, you get here a lot quicker than
you think you're going to. I am utterly amazed that in a
few months I'll be 63 years old. That just blows me away to think
of that. How did I get here so fast? As that one internet meme
I saw one time, it just said, I thought it would take longer
to get old. I may look real old to you, but really I'm not all
that old. In the great scheme of things, I'm one of the newest
things on earth. No, not me, not your grandparents,
not your parents. You all that are here, your parents,
grandparents may be sitting in here with you. And you may be
here precisely because they believe the testimony that's being preached
at this church. And you might say, well, I can
follow them. No, don't do that. It'll be good if God gives you
grace to walk the same path they're walking, but don't follow them.
Because their path, that is, any path of their making, is
not old enough. It's not an ancient path. And
there are many people, and some of you have had to experience
this your own selves, when the Lord showed you the ancient path,
and you had it thrown up in your face. Are you telling me that
what your parents believed, and what your grandparents believed,
and all this, and they take you to the tradition of your rather
recent ancestors, and they want to act like that's old? That's
nothing. Here recently we just celebrated
the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Now this town is
full of churches which can trace their religious ancestry back
to that Reformation, which is why they're called Reformed churches.
Now I'm not faulting them for that, I'm just saying that that's
just a historical reality. There are some who will celebrate
this 500 years and think, oh, we're the ones that have been
holding on all this time. What we got is old, it's ancient. Really now? The scriptures say
that so far as the Lord's concerned, a thousand years is a day. A
day is like a thousand years. So the Reformation, and don't
get me wrong, I thank God for what He did in the Reformation.
And I believe much of the theology that actually came out of the
darkness. You know, God just allowed ancient
truth to come out of the darkness again. I'm thankful for it and
I believe it. But you know something? That
thousand years and a day and a day and a thousand years, if
you hold that, that means that the Reformation happened about
the time I went to bed last night. Half a day ago. Half a day ago. Well, you say that, there'll
be somebody else that says, boy, you got that right, preacher.
I tell you, our religion, you can go all the way back to the
beginning of the mother church. The Roman church will try to
tell you that Peter is the first pope. There isn't a shred of
proof of that. But they'll tell you that the
Lord Jesus Christ established what has now become the Roman
church back in that day. And they'll tell you that's why
we've got the truth and nobody else does. We're 2,000 years
old. Well, you know, there's a Baptist
group claims the same thing. There's a group of Baptists.
They're thicker down there in the southeast where I come from.
Many of them are Sovereign Grace, but they also hold this, and
it seems to be more important to them than their Sovereign
Grace. But they hold the idea that there is an unbroken succession
of these Baptist churches from now all the way back to the apostles,
and in all reality, unless your church is part of this unbroken
succession. What do you mean by that? Well,
there was the original church, and it started more churches,
and those churches started churches, and all that. And unless you're
in the line of one of those churches, you ain't really a church. You're
not the bride. And they actually believe that
when, at least some of them, I'm sure like all religions you've
got some that are a little bit more far-fetched than others,
but they believe that in heaven there is going to be a distinction
between the bride and the friends of the bride. And the bride's
going to be made up of these Baptist churches that have, that can trace their
church ancestry, so to speak, all the way back to the apostles
and the rest of us, like you and me, Well, we'll be in, but
we won't be the bride. Well, if all they can go back
is 2,000 years, that's the day before yesterday. That's not
very old, is it? And immediately some will pipe
up, well, you're right there because we think we should go
back all the way to Sinai. That's where our religion started,
ancient times. And certainly that's what Jeremiah
meant when he said the ancient paths go back there to when God
spoke to Moses, friends, that's 3,500 years ago, half a week.
Not very old, is it? You know something, the ancient
path that Jeremiah is speaking of is so old, it predates time. If you can stand here at the
crossroads, Any road that you can look down through time to
find the beginning of it, that ain't the road you need to walk.
If you can see the beginning of this road, don't walk it. Because this road is as old as
the one who built it. In fact, it's as old as he because
he is the road. He is the way. And it's written
of him. How old is he? Says, but as for you, Bethlehem,
Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah. From you
will go forth for me to be ruler in Israel, his goings forth from
long ago, from days of eternity. Now that's old enough. This road
has its beginning in eternity. and it has its end in eternity. It will begin, or it will end
where it began, with Christ, the Lamb slain from the foundation
of the world. Do you know that everything that
we declare in our gospel, while yes, it has happened in time,
yet before it ever happened in time, it happened in the eternity?
The timelessness of God's existence? We were chosen in Him before
the foundation of the world. Jesus Christ is the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world. It says we were called. It doesn't
say we shall be called. It says all those that God predestined
to be conformed to the image of His Son, said He called them.
What do you mean He called them? Way back yonder in eternity,
He called them. And He glorified them. You see,
as God, looks at our history, it is from his viewpoint all
one big thing. He's like the author looking
at his book. Here's a front cover, here's a back cover. All the
same to him. It's all been written. As far
as he's concerned, it's all been done. Now all these things will
come to pass on earth as they have in heaven, but nonetheless
the path is that old. It's from eternity. And therefore, Jesus Christ is
that second premise. He's that ancient path. He is
that way from scarlet and crimson that gets us to snow and wool. How so? Well, first, by qualifying
himself by being snowy and woolly himself. Now you realize I'm
using these, of course, as the illustrations as the prophets
used them. In other words, he was without
spot. There were no stains on him. He was pure, white, clean,
just like the driven snow. So he himself lived that life
that merited him, the judgment of God which says of him, I am
well pleased. God his father looked at him
and looked at him with that all-knowing eye that God possesses. And God
said, I find no fault in him. He is pleasing to me in every
aspect. Jesus Christ is that middle premise
That middle statement, because by a judicial act of God, Christ
was made scarlet and crimson with our scarletness and crimsonness. Now I want you to think of that
a minute. Your sins are like scarlet, they're red like crimson, yet you're white like snow and
wool. How did that happen? There's
only one way that happened. God just can't make it disappear.
He moved it from you to him. In the eyes of God, the judge
of all the earth, when our Lord hung there on the cross, it could
have been said to him, your sins are like scarlet, they're red
as crimson. I'm not going to try to delve
into what that would have felt like for Christ, I don't know.
Horrible, I'm sure. I'm not going to try to unravel
details that God has not been pleased to reveal. I just know
this, that by an act of God, a judicial act of the judge of
all the earth, the sins of all of God's chosen people were taken
off of them and put onto the Lord Jesus Christ. He bore our
sins in his body on the tree. That's how Peter described it. There are some mysterious aspects
to this transaction. How can the sin of one person
be transferred to another? How can the suffering of one
person lead to the justification of many? God doesn't give us
complete answers to this. He just tells us it happened.
And then thirdly, by another judicial act, God grants the
snowiness and wooliness of the Lord Jesus Christ. His perfection
is granted to them as a gift of grace. Isaiah has told us to reason
with God, and we have. Jeremiah tells us to stand at
the crossroads and ask for the ancient path. Isaiah brought
us to the crossroads. How are we going to know what
path to take? Let me quickly tick off several characteristics
of this path. First of all is the path you're
on, an ancient path, because it said ask for the ancient path.
We like new roads. I enjoyed it here in the past
couple of years Rock Valley has done a significant amount of
road work and that always kind of excites me I like to see things
being renewed improved and all that but when it comes to the
gospel friends you do not want new improved you want old improved. So old comes from before time. Second Is it a path on which
we are told, go this way? Or do we hear as our Lord said
in Matthew, come unto me. Religion's all about going. Religion's
all about, you know, go do this, go do that. This path that we need is the
word of God who says, come now, let us reason. Come unto me. All you that are weary and heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me, and you will find rest for your souls. And Jeremiah
predicted those very words, for he says in verse 16, ask where
the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your
souls. What is that good way? It's the way of Christ, that's
all it is. It's the way where Christ beckons us to himself.
Thirdly, is it a narrow path? The scriptures say that this
path, this way is narrow. It's got a narrow gate. It's
got a narrow path after you get through that gate. In fact, it's
so narrow you can't go through with anybody else. People like
to try to get on it through their parents, you know. And there's
churches that even, you know, kind of act like that's the way
it's supposed to be. Why, you were born of believing parents,
so you're kind of in. Nothing doing, friends. This
gate is so narrow, it's exactly as wide as the one man Christ
Jesus, and it will admit only one person at a time, so to speak. You may be in a line with your
parents, and thank God if you are. If both you and your parents
are brought to go through the same gate and walk that same
narrow road, wonderful. Wonderful. But you can't go through
with them. And they can't take you through.
It's a narrow path. It's Christ and Christ alone. Fourthly, we can ask, is this
the path? in which we follow the Lord.
And I don't mean follow the Lord by being goody two-shoes. I hear
people say, well, I'm following the Lord. Well, what are you
doing? Well, I do this, that, and the other. You know what following
the Lord is? He said, take up your cross and follow me. And what did that mean? Well,
what's the cross indicate? Well, first of all, it indicates
a separation between you and the world and all the world's
ways. For Paul says I'm crucified with
Christ and by being crucified with him I'm dead to the world
and the world's dead to me. The cross was Rome's way of hanging
those criminals up and to torture them to death and also to demonstrate
to all the world they have been utterly rejected by Rome. They're
under a curse and the worst of all curses. Well, that's the
path Christ went. He suffered, the scriptures say,
outside the camp. Therefore, let us go outside
the camp unto him. We're following him. We're following
him in confidence that the suffering that he endured is sufficient
to clear our record in the sight of God and give us entry into
God's presence. The Lord Jesus Christ could have
gone back to the Father without the cross. He could have. He told his disciples that when
they arrested him. He said, don't you realize? I
could ask my father and he'd send legions of angels down here
and rescue me from this. I could just go right back to
heaven and skip all this. But he didn't. He went to the
Father through the cross, and that's exactly how we get there.
Not by suffering on the cross, but walking the path of his cross,
following him. And then lastly, he said, ask
for the ancient paths for the good way. How do I know what
it is? Well, the good way brings rest to the soul. Now we are, in this life, a mixture
of flesh and spirit. Everything about the flesh troubles
us, but if we've been born again by the Spirit of God, everything
the Spirit hears concerning Christ brings peace and rest to our
souls. You know, the gospel irritates
some people. It does. And you know what it says about
those it irritates? They don't believe it. It's confronting
them and telling them things they don't want to believe. But
if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you have
seen the crimson and scarlet of your own nature, the wonderful
story that Jesus Christ bore that sin and bore it away, and
open the door to the throne room of grace so that we may boldly
enter in it by way of his blood and find the mercy and help we
need. That is rest to my soul. My sin, oh, it troubles me. And
sometimes it's very hard for me not just to think about my
sin and to stand there at the crossroads of that moment when
guilt is upon my conscience and look and say, oh, I'm just going
to stay at my sin because I can't walk this path of works here.
I see other people, they do so much better than me. And you
know, I guess I'm just stuck here at the crossroads and I
look at this road of ceremony over here and I know that is
not going to work. And sometimes it takes a long time. We ask
for the ancient path and the Lord may not show it to us right
away. Brethren, stand there until he
shows you the ancient and good path. And when he does, walk
it. Walk it boldly. Trust yourself to Christ Jesus
completely. Oh, but my sins are so great.
He's a greater savior than you are a sinner, friend. That's
just truth. He's a greater Savior than you
are a sinner. Lay it all upon Him. Trust God's promises concerning
Him. He that has the Son has life. That's the ancient path. That's
the good path. That's the way God reasons with
us. You're like scarlet and crimson. My Son is perfectly white like
wool and snow. And I will lay upon him your
crimson nature and give unto you his spotless righteousness. And you will be white as snow,
just like him." Well, the Lord bless his word.