Alright, if you'd open your Bibles
to 1 Timothy chapter 2, and we'll read the first six verses. I urge then, first of all, that
requests, prayers, intercession, and thanksgiving be made for
everyone. For kings, and all those in authority,
that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness
and holiness. This is good and pleases God,
our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a
knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one
mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave
himself as a ransom for all men the testimony given in its proper
time. We're going to speak on a message
from the title, An Exclusive Religion. Men like to make clubs,
organizations, associations. And one reason they like to make
clubs, organizations, and associations is so that they can collect together
people of like mind or similar backgrounds, similar natural
talents and qualities, and exclude everybody else. Mankind, whenever he makes an
organization, part and parcel of that, making that organization
is this. There's some people they don't
want in. They are exclusive. Now in our
culture, well, it's illegal to be exclusive
in some kinds of organizations. You can't exclude anybody. I
remember it wasn't that many years ago. Is it Augusta? Gulf? It was just men only. Been
that way for generations, but eventually now it is no longer
allowed to exclude women. But they do find ways to exclude. There's country clubs from which
I am excluded. They did not say, Joe Terrell
can't come. They simply made the cost of
going there more than Joe Terrell will ever be able to spend. It's
exclusive. Now, I've entitled this message,
An Exclusive Religion. But I do not mean by this that
the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ puts up a barrier to anyone
who wants to participate in it. Sinners is not who is excluded
in the gospel. Now there are a lot of churches
that are exclusive that way. Their very reason for existence
is that they might keep out those that they don't want to associate
with. And so you have churches, some
of them, well, you realize that's where the wealthier people in
town go. And I realize there's not so
much of that in this town, but the city that I grew up near,
Huntington, West Virginia, its nickname was the City of Churches.
It was in Guinness, the Book of World Records, because along
Fifth Avenue there were more churches per mile than anywhere
else in the world. Churches everywhere, and churches
suitable to all kinds of groups, and exclusive of those groups. they didn't want. Once again,
it was not as though they could write that down, that'd just
been a little bit too obvious, but you know that at the First
Baptist Church, the people there were significantly more well-to-do
than, well, nobody ever calls themselves Second Baptist or
Third Baptist, that just doesn't seem right, but they have other
names for it. And that's where your middle-class
people go, and then you got the poor churches. You had white
churches, you had black churches. People exclude, but God does
not. I'm telling you right now, I
say I'm telling you, it doesn't matter that I'm telling you,
it's what the scriptures say. There is no distinction in the
flesh which will bar you from entry into the kingdom of God.
That's what it's meant here when it says that, in verse 4, speaking
of God our Savior who wants all men to be saved. Now, in virtually
all languages, but particularly in the Greek language, that word
translated all does not mean that God is actively seeking
the salvation of every person. What it means is, He's seeking
the salvation, yea, is bringing to pass the salvation of all
kinds of people, which was a shock to the Jews. Because they were
kind of exclusive and thought God was exclusive and had excluded
everybody from His grace except the Jews. And so Paul says, no.
No, God is actively seeking and working and bringing to pass
the salvation of all kinds of people. Old people, young people,
middle-aged people, pretty people, ugly people. Smart people, not
so smart people. White, black, yellow, red, whatever
color you want. Paul says in Christ Jesus there's
neither male nor female. There's not civilized or uncivilized,
primitive or cultured. None of this means anything. On the role of the Lamb's Book
of Life, and let's face it, it's true because we're in the flesh,
there are people who you would not want to be close to. I mean,
our natural reaction would be to draw away from them. People who, because of their
culture, or what we might call a lack of it, are dirty, smelly, whatever. You know, we Americans, we're
pretty big on that aspect of hygiene, and we don't like being
around people that don't practice the same level of hygiene that
we do. The Lord Jesus Christ is not put off by such things,
and He has come to say to the uttermost all kinds of people. people you wouldn't allow in
your club if you had one. From every kindred, tongue, tribe,
and nation, the Lord has a people. He has a few from the ranks of
royalty. He has many from the ranks of
peasantry and all classes in between. He has godly women and
godly men. He has those who throughout their
lives have lived what we might call a decent and honorable life,
yet He has called them, made them aware of their innate sinfulness,
and caused them to repent, and they are His. And he has within
his church those who are, even by human standards, a total mess. Who have made so many bad choices,
it hardly seems they could ever recover from how far down they've
gone. Some of these whom He recovers,
He is pleased to give them a certain level of liberation from the
temptations that once brought them into such trouble in this
world. And others, our Lord has been pleased to leave them to
struggle with everything they struggled with before. Don't
ever get in your mind Maybe I'll put it this way. Drive out of
your mind, because it's pretty much naturally in our minds.
Drive out of your mind that a person who struggles with sin has not
been saved. I'll tell you, nobody struggles
with sin like somebody whom God has saved from it. Because he's
been saved from his love of it. And there's a warfare within
him and he struggles against it and fights against it. But
like in any fight where it seems as though the two combatants
are rather evenly matched. There's sometimes when you're
on top and sometimes when you're on bottom. Don't ever count somebody out
just because they're on the mat. Don't even count them out if
in your heart you've counted to ten. Because once you're done
counting to ten, the God of all grace and comfort is going to
keep counting. and will count for however long
it takes for them to get back up. When we speak of an exclusive
religion, we're not talking in any way as though there's anybody
in the world who is not permitted, if they are of a mind to, to
come to God in Christ and find full forgiveness. We have in
this congregation, actually, we're a rather homogenous group. Even though we're from various
places in the United States, still we're all Americans, I
think. But we got young and old. And to anybody here, I don't
care how old you are, the door to salvation is open if you are
of a mind to walk through. And I don't care how young you
are. I'm glad you young people and
you children that your parents bring you to church, and I remember
being young and in church, and when I was young and in church,
I pretty much wished I was young and somewhere else. I understand
that aspect. But let me tell you, you are
in need of God's salvation, and the door is open to people like
you. Your youth need not keep you
out. Now I say that any may come,
and any may. Anybody. You say, well I thought
you believed in election. I certainly do. But election
is not a list of who may come, it's a list of who will. Or maybe it would be better put
this way, it's not a list of who may come, it is a list whom
God will go get and bring. One of the distinctions you were
probably taught, at least my generation and previous generations
were, you were taught in English grammar was to distinguish between
the meaning of may and can. Now most of the time when we're
talking, we don't pay any attention. Can I come over? Sure. And what
we're doing is we're asking permission. Now technically what we should
have said is, may I come over? But we don't pay much attention
to that distinction. But remember this, may means you have permission,
can means you have the ability. And so we can say this, all may
come, none can come. That's the problem. That's the
problem. The door's wide open, but everybody's
dead. Do you remember how at the scene
of Lazarus' tomb, the Lord told those there, roll away the stone. And you know, at that moment,
Lazarus was free from all external hindrances to coming out of that
grave. He had permission to come. But if that's all that had been
done, Nothing else would have happened.
That's why this whole form of religion that says, well, God's
done all he can, the rest is up to you. Well, then God may
as well have done nothing. Because if he's done all he can
and people still are lost, then they are going to remain lost. Dead men cannot give themselves
life. The lame cannot put strength
in their legs. The blind cannot make themselves
see. It requires a miraculous work
on the part of God, a work that He doesn't ask permission to
do. The Lord Jesus Christ did not stand at the tomb of Lazarus
and say, Lazarus, can I raise you from there? Is that okay
with you? No, we're going to have the disciples sing a few
verses of a hymn. And while they're singing, you
come out and I'll give you life. There's nothing like that, was
it? Yet that is an illustration of
what passes for Christianity. That's how they do it. That's
how they perceive it. No. Salvation, the door is open
to all. But God has a people chosen from
the foundation of the world, and they're dead in trespasses
and sins just like anyone else. But the Lord, who is the good
shepherd, will not leave his sheep out in the wilderness. And though they cannot come home,
he knows where they are, and he knows the way home. And he
goes and gets them. If anybody refuses the Lord's
salvation, they have none to blame but themselves. Why? Well, you may be dead in trespasses
and sins, you may be spiritually dead, but you're rationally alive
and you hear preachers talk. You know, most of you here, you
know the way of salvation. It's laid there before you. And if you are lost, if in the
end you're lost, it will be because of this, From your own heart
and from your own will, you said, no, that's not what I want. You said, well, everybody wants
to go to heaven. That's true. Everybody wants to go to what
they think is heaven anyway. Everybody wants to go to heaven,
but not everybody wants to take the only way there is to heaven. Everybody wants As I said, their
own conception of heaven, which for most Americans, I think,
has something to do with gold streets and colonnaded mansions
and, in other words, all the stuff they couldn't afford in
this life. They think that's what's coming for them in glory. But even if they have better
views of what heaven actually is, what most people do not want
is to come to God by the only way that He has designed. You see, I said that the title
here is an exclusive religion. Not because there are any sinners
whom it excludes. Christianity, or the religion
of the gospel, or the religion of scriptures, whatever you want
to call it, is exclusive in these ways. It excludes all gods but
one. Jehovah. It excludes all saviors
but one, the Lord Jesus Christ. And it excludes all messages
but one, the message of God's free and sovereign grace in the
Lord Jesus Christ. And on those matters, it is utterly
and completely exclusive. Right now, with all that's going
on in the Middle East, here in super tolerant America, you have
those who would say, well, you know, Islam is just another way
to God. They worship the same God, and
if they are sincere in their approach to Him, They will be
accepted. No, they won't. No, they won't. Why? Well, I realize in some
sense they worship the same God because they claim to be worshipping
the God of Abraham. But when they describe him, he's
nothing like the God that Abraham worshipped. But even if it were
the same God, they deny that Jesus Christ is the one and only
way there. They don't even perceive Him
as a Savior. And therefore, no matter how
much truth there might be in their religion, and I'm not pretending
that there is any. I've never read the Koran. You
know, once you find out that 2 and 2 equals 4, you don't need
to study other math books with other opinions. And so having
found the truth in the Scriptures, I don't feel inclined to read
anything else. So I can't tell you for sure
what they believe, but I know this, they do not believe that
Jesus Christ is the way to the Father. And it doesn't matter
how sincere you are, it doesn't matter how decent a person your
religion makes you to be. If you are coming to the Father
by any other means than the Lord Jesus Christ, once you get in
the presence of the Father, you will find He is not your Father,
He is your Judge, and He will judge you with an everlasting
judgment. That's true of every non-Christian
religion. It's true with regard to every
one of those forms of Christianity. which make a way to the Father
other than the doing and the dying of the Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 5, for there is one God. Now this is why we declare salvation
for all kinds of people. Why? Well, there's only one God,
who is God over all. There is not a Jewish God. And
a Caucasian God. And a... I don't know what you
call the other races. Now, I don't know what's the
accepted terms for them. But there's not different gods
for different races and different nations and different cultures.
There's one God. One God. And only one. Men invent gods, but they are
fictions. They build gods, but that's all
they are, is so much wood, stone, or gold, or whatever. There's one God. He's the only
God. And the Bible says He's the God
with whom we have to do. What is He like? Now, in our
Bible study classes, we're going through various doctrines, and
we just started today. on the doctrine of God. And the God of the Bible, as
he's described in the Bible, is unknown to most professed
Christians. It is written of Paul that he
went into Athens And his heart was grieved by all the idols,
the shrines that he saw, to the various gods. And Greek culture
had scads of them, Greek and Roman culture. And he went by
one, a little shrine where you could give an offering, an oblation
of some kind, to the unknown God. That's an awfully good name
for the God we worship. And Paul said, that God that
you do not know, I'm going to tell you about. What is this God like? Well,
He is holy. What do I mean by holy? Well,
I mean this. The word holy means set apart.
And when we speak about the holiness of God, we're speaking that God
is out there separate from us. He is above us. He transcends. He goes beyond any conception
we can have. He is greater than anything we
can think of. Even we who believe, we try to
enlarge our minds, and by that I mean we try to expand them
to think thoughts as big as God, and we can't. No matter how far we stretch
our thoughts to try to come up with how great and magnificent
our God is, He's beyond that. He's holy. Isaiah said, in the
year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up,
and seated on a throne. And seraphim, with six wings,
surrounded the throne. And with two they covered their
eyes, and two they covered their feet, with two they flew. And
they circled the throne, calling back to one another, Holy, Holy,
Holy is the Lord God Almighty, the whole earth is filled with
His glory. And it says, the pillars of the
tip shook. Shook at the sound of His name.
Shook at the voice of the angels giving praise to Him. And that sight of God was such
that Isaiah, that great prophet, crumbled to the ground. And he said, Oh, woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips and
dwell among a people of unclean lips. Another one of those fellows
from the Old Testament, I can't think of who it is right now.
I just remember what he said, and that's all that's important. He says, I'm going to die. Because
I've seen the King, meaning the King of the universe. Everybody has, I say everybody,
the greater part of religion in America has designed a God
who is our pal, our buddy, someone we sidle up close to, we have
a little talk with Jesus and everything's going to be alright.
Can you imagine Isaiah doing that? The seraphim call him back
and forth, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And Isaiah strolls up there to
the throne, says, hey old pal, how's it going? Called a preacher friend of mine
one time, went to high school with him. Just wanted to get
in touch with him, see how he was doing. When I got him on
the phone, he said, oh yeah, me and the Lord just having a
coke. I thought, well, you may be having
a coke. I don't think the Lord is. He doesn't take breaks. He never stops being the Lord. He is the Lord, the Holy One. And Isaiah, where did he see
Him? High and lifted up and seated. on a throne. Now, what throne
is that? The throne of glory. The universal
throne. The throne that rules absolutely
everything. You know, if you're not in charge
of things, nobody fears you. You go to work, you don't fear
the people beneath you. Say you're somewhere in the middle.
You don't fear the people beneath you. You fear those above you. Why? Because they have power
over you. They can fire you if they're
of a mind to. When it comes time for a work
review, job review, it's them going to decide whether or not
you get a raise. And therefore, you show respect
to them. Because they've got power. You
talk about power. Not a speck of dust moves in
the air without His direction. Not an atom vibrates in whatever
frequency it vibrates without His conscious approval. In the Bible class, This morning
we were talking about the greatness of God, the power of God. We talked about the sun and how
far out there it is. It'd take a man 150 years to
drive there. And yet, even though it's so
far away, we stand here on the earth, and if we don't put on
our sunscreen, it can burn us from 93 million miles away. That's
a lot of power. Do you know how many suns, stars
there are in the universe. And of course, this is just the
universe we can see. The estimation is 77 followed by 22 zeros. That's 770 septillion, if you
want to know. But we can say that where we
have no clue what it means. And just to give you something
to compare it with, Oliver is holding up a sign back
there. I printed those numbers on a piece of paper. When I was
done, I gave it to him, so he's holding it up. But Oliver, I
can't see those numbers from back here, so it's not helping
me. But as I recall, a gallon of
sand has around 5,680,000, I think, grains of sand. And on that piece of paper, that
was a number about that wide, and the number of stars took
up the whole sheet of paper. And our God spoke, and they popped
into existence. Now that's a lot of power. That's
a lot of authority. And men say, Well, He wouldn't violate a man's
will. He wouldn't. What do you think is going to
happen on the Day of Judgment? When these come before Him, who
have lived their lives in rebellion against Him, do you think it's
going to be their will to perish forever in that place the Bible
calls hell? Is God going to ask them permission?
Is it okay for me to judge you and send you to hell? Because
I'm a gentleman, I won't violate your will. God does what He wants
to do. He always has, He always wills. And that's the only God there
is. Everything that happens in this
world, whether it's something we call good or something we
call bad, it's God that ordained it and brought it to pass. When
we shout for joy, whatever we're shouting for joy over, God brought
it to pass. When we are brought down in tears,
whatever it is brought us there, it's God that brought it to pass.
And everything in between. He's that much in control. He's in control whether we live
or die in this world. And He is in control of whether
we live or die in the next. I will probably never forget,
until I just lose my memory altogether, something that Brother Mahan
said back when I was a member of that church in Ashland, Kentucky.
He was setting forth God in all His absolute holiness and sovereignty. And he says, you might think,
well, that's a monster. And then he made this comment,
then get ready to deal with a monster. Because that is what he is. That
is his holiness, his sovereignty, his power. No matter what you
think of him acting that way, that's the way he is. Nebuchadnezzar
said of him, and this is the way people that have ever had
dealings with God, this is the way they talk. Anybody that ever
had to come face to face with God, or had dealings with God
in this world, here's how they talked about it, talked about
God. He said, I extol the Most High
God. I praise the God of heaven, who
does as He wills in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants
of the earth, and nobody can stop Him, and no one even has
the right to question what He does. There's one God. And the Christian religion excludes
all gods but that one. And the Christian religion excludes
all saviors but the Lord Jesus Christ. I recall there was a preacher
and Christian University president on the Phil Donahue show one
time. Now those of you that know Phil Donahue know that he's very
far on the left politically, socially, everything. And does
not believe that anybody should ever take a real strong stand
about anything. Actually, you know, we're supposed to accept
everything. And he was talking with this
preacher and they allowed some questions from the crowd. And
this woman stood up and said, when my mom got old and Lost
her memory, lost her ability to take care of herself. I took
care of her for years. And you mean to tell me that
doesn't count for anything? And I disagree with a lot of
what this preacher believes, but he nailed this one. He said,
that's exactly what I mean. And I'm not the one that said
it. The Lord Jesus Christ is. Because he said, I am the way,
the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except
by me. People say, well, you're being
too exclusive. I'm not being any more exclusive than the Lord
Jesus Christ was. In fact, that's one of the reasons
they crucified him. In John chapter 6, that's the
reason that many of his disciples no longer followed him. Because
he set forth himself as the only way of salvation. And they said,
alright, that's too much for me. Rabbi, we were willing to
follow you as someone who had some wisdom, and as someone who
could improve upon our understanding. But now, you take too much on
yourself. You're saying, it's only through
you that we can be saved, and I just can't go that far. Well, the Lord Jesus said, No one comes
to the Father but by me. That's a pretty exclusive statement. That's why we cannot have a neutral
position on the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why we cannot say, as
some do, well, I don't believe he's the Son of God, but I think
he's a good man. No, he's the Son of God, or he
is a religious charlatan, one or the other. He can't be someone
in the middle. He went around saying he is God.
He said to those who asked him at one point, who are you? And
he said, Abraham, rejoice to see my day. And somebody kind
of laughed at him and said, what do you mean? He says, you are
50 years old. What do you mean? Abraham saw your day. And the
Lord Jesus Christ looked at him. I'm imagining this part. I suppose he looked at him. But
he said, before Abraham was, I am. And they knew exactly what
he meant by that. That he was claiming that he
is the I Am that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. That he
is that eternal, existing, self-existing One. And they took up stones
to stone him. He is the only way to the Father. God has made no other provision
for the salvation of sinners other than the Lord Jesus Christ. Abraham and Isaac walking up
the side of that mountain. Isaac with a bundle of wood on
his back. Abraham with a tinder box with coals in it so he could
get a fire started. And Isaac could see what Abraham
planned. There was going to be a sacrifice. And so he asked his father, he
said, father, I've got wood and you've got fire. Where's the
lamb for a burnt offering? I mean, it doesn't do any good
to burn sticks to God. God's not interested in firewood. Where's the lamb? And Abraham,
knowing what the command to him was, that he would sacrifice
his son, yet he was a man of faith, he believed that his seed
would come through Isaac. And Isaac was just a young lad
at that point. They estimate he was 13, 14,
15, like that. He had no children. So Abraham,
by faith, said, OK, God's called on me to offer my son up as a
burnt offering. I'll do it, but God's going to
raise him from the dead, because he has to make good on his promise
that the seed will come through Isaac. But he hadn't told Isaac
that yet. And so Isaac says, where's the
lamb? But I also think that Abraham
knew something about God. Maybe we don't give him credit
for understanding. I think he figured that what
ended up happening, he figured that's what was going to happen.
Because he said to Isaac, son, God will provide for himself
a lamb for the burnt offering. And 2,000 or so years later,
a rough-hewn man who wore camel skins for clothes and ate honey
and locusts and lived out in the wilderness, John the Baptist
saw Jesus walk by. And he said, there he is. There's that lamb provided by
God, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. All
between Abraham going up the side of that mountain and the
coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, how many lambs had been sacrificed? Millions! And for all that blood, not one
sin had ever been put away. But God provides a lamb, not
a real lamb, He provides the one to whom all
those other lambs pointed, the Lamb of God, whose sacrifice
actually takes away the sin of the world, people from all over
the world, not just Jews, from all over the world. He's the only way. If you come
by any other way, you will be excluded. But you'll not be excluded
because of your person. You won't be excluded because
you're too sinful for the Lord to save. You won't be excluded
because you weren't from the right race, or hadn't achieved
the certain level of education that He wants. You won't be excluded
because you're not the kind of person the Lord came to seek
and to save. You'll be excluded for this one
reason. You came by some other way than the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the only way.
But he's the only way we need. How many roads do you need to
the Father? The Lord Jesus said, narrow is
the gate and narrow is the way that leads to eternal life and
few there be that find it. Well, it may be a narrow gate
and it may be a narrow way, but it's wide enough for you. The
gate is wide enough for you. The road is wide enough for you. Now, it's not wide enough for
you and your suitcase full of all your good works. No, you
can't get through that narrow gate with you and your suitcase
full of good works. Can't pass. Got to drop it off.
In fact, Brother Maurice Montgomery, who is now with the Lord, I remember
hearing him say, that gate is so narrow you can't even get
through with your own clothes on. You must go through naked.
Indeed, the work of the Spirit of God is to strip us naked from
our own righteousness. That we confess, spiritually
speaking, that we have nothing and are nothing. But blessed
be God, though that gate is so narrow, it strips us of all the
clothes we're wearing, there stands one on the other side
with a glorious robe of righteousness. And he wraps us up in us and
sets us on our way. A narrow way, exactly as wide
as Christ. And that's wide enough for you. Wide enough. I don't need a lot
of ways to God, I just need one way that's a sure way. You ever
gotten lost when you're out driving around? And you might think,
you know, there's a lot of ways to that city, but I don't know
if I'm on the right one. I don't know if I'm on any one
of them. And you might think, I just wish
I knew one way to that city, that I was absolutely certain
that was the right way. Well, brethren, God has laid
before us one way, one way. And it's all the way we need,
because it gets us all the way from where we are to the presence
of God, blameless, without sin, full of joy. Now, what else do
you need? The Bible excludes all gods. but Jehovah. It excludes all
saviors but the Lord Jesus Christ. And it excludes all messages
other than that gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. God's free and sovereign grace. When the Lord Jesus Christ went
back to glory, His last command to his apostles was go into all
the world and preach the gospel, preach the good news. And that's
what they did. And they all preached exactly
the same message. Why? Because there's only one
message. Now, Paul talked about another
gospel. In Galatians chapter one, he
said, there are those who are preaching another gospel. But
he said, but it's not really a gospel at all. You see, the
word gospel, as our kids told us in the Christmas program they
put on, the word gospel means good news. I understand its original pronunciation,
the word gospel, was something like good spiel. A good spiel. You've heard people giving my
spiel. Actually, it used to just mean
story. It's a good story. Good news. Beloved it is. Oh, what good news. You know
what the good news is? The good news is that sinners
like you and me, who can't stop sinning, say,
well, I can. Well, then do it. You think you
can? Just stop sinning right now.
Quit. Well, you've already messed up. We can't stop sinning. We have
more sins than we can count. As the psalmist said, they're
more than the hairs of my head. All but sinners like us can be
received by a holy God because the Lord Jesus Christ, who knew
no sin, was made to be a sin offering in the place of sinners. Tell you this this morning, you
are a sinner. I'm a sinner. Don't deny it.
Don't deny it. Don't let pride say, well, now
just a minute, I've done some things wrong, but I'm not a sinner
sinner. I'm not really bad. Yeah, really
bad. We're so bad that the Bible says
the good things that we do. sin. We're so bad that the Bible
says God cannot look on us with favor. We are so bad that it
says there is nothing, naturally speaking, there's nothing left
for us except the certain fearful expectation of judgment. And there's not a thing that
we can do about it. But blessed be God he sent his
son to do something about it. And what we could never do, He
did. You say, what's that? Well, first
of all, He lived the righteous life. We cannot live. Oh, I'd
like to live a righteous life. Everybody born again by the Spirit
of God would like to live a righteous life. But I don't. I'm like the Apostle Paul who
said, when I would do good, evil is present with me. And I find
this principle at work within me. And the more I want to do
good, it seems the more I do evil. The more determined I am
to do the right thing, the more I do the wrong thing. He said, woe is me. What a wretched man I am. That was the apostle Paul talking.
What a wretched man I am. But Jesus Christ lived the life
that we could not. And then he died the death that
we dare not die. He died with sin on him. The prophet Isaiah put it this
way. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of all his sheep. Peter put it this way, he bore
our sins in his body on the tree. You know, when people die, it's
common for folks to talk about whether or not their death was
well, everybody said, I'd like to go peaceful, peacefully in
my sleep. And I suppose that'd be just
fine. And others would talk about going
through an illness, a horrible illness unto death and how difficult
that is. And that's true. Looking at it from those viewpoint,
we might choose one way or another to die. But brethren, the one
way you don't want to die is in your sins. You don't want
to die with sin on you. Because if you die with sin on
you, you appear in the presence of God with sin on you, and you
see what happened to the Lord Jesus Christ when He came into
the presence of His Father with sin on Him. And if God judged
Jesus Christ for the sins that He bore, sins that He Himself
did not do, nonetheless the just judge saw those sins upon Him
and poured out His wrath upon Him if He did not spare His own
Son. He won't spare you if you come
before Him in your sins. There's only one way to not come
before God in your sins, and that's if your sins are on someone
else. If we trust the Lord Jesus Christ
and call upon His name for salvation, we will discover this, that before
we ever called, God had laid our sins on His Son and dealt
with Him there. And God, who is just, will never
punish sin twice. If He punished my sins in the
Savior, He will not punish them in me. Now, folks say, I don't like
being called a sinner. I suppose I don't like being
called a sinner either. But I'd whole lot rather know
the truth about what I am and find that Savior for sinners
than to accept some lying message that tells me there's something
good in me that God saw, that moved Him to be nice to me. Much rather would I calm my heart concerning
its guilt with this message, that there's something good that
God saw in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and for His sake,
He does me good. Because I know the Lord Jesus
Christ is good. I know that He is righteous.
I know that He is loved and accepted by the Father. And if there is
a message that says, I am loved and accepted by the Father in
Him, that's the message I want. That means my failures will not
destroy me. That means my unrighteousness
will not condemn me. That means that the judge of
all the earth will not punish me. That means my Heavenly Father
will not reject me. One God, and only one. One Savior, and only one. And one Gospel, and only one. But oh, what a God. Oh, what
a Savior. And oh, what a Gospel. I don't
need any more than that. I don't want any more than that. And may God give all of us the
same heart and attitude.