Well, it's just delightful to
be back here. I first met Kevin and Kimberly
nine years ago. That's remarkable, isn't it?
Nine years. And I've been coming back to
San Diego, this fellowship here in San Diego for, is it five
years? It's at least five years, isn't
it? Six. Anyway, it's a lot. Anyway, I just appreciate you
very much and I appreciate the opportunity to be with you and
to share the gospel again and I thank you for the way you've
looked after Daisy and I'm nervous that it might have been too well.
She has to come home. As Kevin said, the Lord made
those remarkable promises about what happens in the lives of
his people in this world and how he knits their hearts together
and how he creates bonds and I'm just going to tell you the
old, old story again today. And I love what happened when
Paul and Barnabas came back to the church. And this is what
I intend to do tonight with you all. After Paul had been on that
first missionary journey, he came back and when they had come
together, they gathered the church. This is Acts 14, 27. They gathered
the church together and they rehearsed all that God had done
with them. I don't want to say anything
new tonight at all. I just want to tell you what, I just want
to rehearse. We're just here rehearsing, aren't we? Rehearsing
what God, all that God had done with them and how he had opened
the door of faith unto the Gentiles. That word rehearsing is used
again just over the page in Acts 15 and it talks about declaring. It's declaring. We are just declaring
the old, old story again. And we have a great gospel and
we have a glorious, glorious saviour to proclaim. And so I
want to take you to one of my favourite verses in the Bible
to Galatians chapter 2 and I want to spend our time looking at
verse 20 and I trust as I go through verse 20 the context
of the rest of it will become very, very clear to you, but
it's one of those verses that's been my favourite verse, one
of my favourite verses in the Bible, because they keep growing,
your favourite verses, don't they? Every time you sort of
think you've got them nailed down, you find another one, and
then, and the Word of God is living and active, and so each
time we come to the Word of God, we're actually expecting it to
say something that we hadn't seen before. Kevin might testify,
And John as well, the number of times I've actually studied
and studied and studied and you stand up in the pulpit and all
of a sudden you see something on the surface of scripture that
you hadn't seen and you're just humbled by the fact that this
is a living word. And the glory of that, of course, is that the
living word speaks of he who is alive now and he who speaks
now and speaks to the hearts of his people through the gospel.
Let me read this verse. I'm sure you know it well, but
I want to rehearse it because I rehearse it all the time. And
I want you to rehearse it all the time. You who have been granted
the glorious faith in our dear and precious Redeemer. says Paul,
I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not
I, but Christ liveth in me and the life which I now live in
the flesh, I live by the faith of the son of God who loved me
and gave himself for me. It's a glorious, glorious picture
and it's a glorious description of the gospel, isn't it? And
I just wanted to look at it just briefly, eight times in that
one verse of scripture, Paul uses a personal pronoun, I or
me, eight times. And that, I think, is the first
thing that we need to see in this verse, isn't it? That Christian
life is personal. It is a personal relationship
between you and a living God. It always is personal, isn't
it? I, I, I. And he's not being egotistical.
You know better than that about our brother Paul. But personal
faith, all saving faith is personal faith. And I love the simplicity
of it. He says, I am crucified with
Christ. In fact, in the original, it
says just two words. The first one is one that includes
him and Christ. He says, with Christ. I crucified. And they're just two words in
the original Greek. It's amazing how much can be
said in just two small words. I am crucified with Christ. I with Christ am crucified. So
it speaks, these verses speak of a blessed union between the
believer and his Lord. And it speaks of a blessed new
birth. And it speaks of a blessed indwelling between us and our
Lord. And then it speaks of a very,
very blessed faith. The faith that I live by, the
faith that Paul lived by, the faith that every believer lives
by is the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith looks
away from ourselves and looks to him always, always. And then at the end of it is
there is a glorious glorious description of the love of God. He loved me. His love is always particular.
His love is always personal. His love is always saving. His love is always powerful. He loved me and he gave himself
for me. So there we are. That's our outline.
And that's what I want to rehearse before you tonight. So if you're
ready for a rehearsal, I'm here to give you in as simple of terms
as I possibly can, the glory of this particular passage of
Scripture. He says As I said earlier, the first thing I want
us to note is that it is extraordinarily personal, isn't it? It's I who
believe. It's I who receive. It's I who
embrace him. It's I who see him. And all of
these things are the activity of the new birth. The new creation
sees him as he is. And I trust him. And I know him. And as with baptism and the Lord's
Supper, it's personal, isn't it? When you're baptised, you're
personally baptised and that's a picture of your union in the
life and the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
when you take the Lord's Supper, you literally take it into your
body and it becomes your life, doesn't it? It becomes a part
of you. 98% of our bodies are changed every
year. And so we are in this continual
state where we are what we eat and we And so we feast on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and the more we feast on him, the more we
grow to appreciate him and to like him. But it's personal,
isn't it? I, I, I, he says. But he speaks of this blessed
union. I am crucified with Christ. This is Paul's personal testimony.
And you know from 1 Timothy 1 that Paul is a pattern for everyone
who would hereafter believe. to the saving of their souls.
And so Paul's a pattern. So he's a pattern for us. We
can rehearse this pattern. I'm crucified with Christ. He
says, literally, I have been once and with finality crucified
with Christ. Crucified with the Lord Jesus
Christ. And obviously he's not talking
about the physical. Paul wasn't there at the physical
crucifixion of the Lord. He's talking about that real
spiritual union between the Lord Jesus Christ and his body. Christ and his bride are one. The head and the body are one.
The vine and the branches are one. They all derive life together,
don't they? The husband and wife are one.
All of the pictures in the scripture picture this glorious eternal
union between the Lord Jesus Christ and his bride. I love
what Thomas Goodwin wrote something about this. As in the womb, head
and members are not conceived apart from one another. but having
relation to each other, so were we in Christ as making up one
mystical body to God, formed together in the eternal union
of election. I can never get my head around
that. I can never get my head round the wonder of the fact
that the Lord God put a people into his son before the foundation
of the world and he gave them to her to be his bride. How precious was she? How precious
is she to God? How precious a gift to be given
to a recipient like the Lord Jesus Christ by God the Father. Oh brothers and sisters, let's
not undervalue, let's not undervalue the glory of our God in his redemptive
purposes. Let's not undervalue the glory
of God in this union. And it's in the church that he
gets glory for his son, where these things are rehearsed and
revealed. He gathered that church together back there in Antioch
and they rehearsed what God had done, how he opens the door of
faith. And the door of faith sees these things here that we're
talking about now. It's a real spiritual union. All of humanity except the Lord
Jesus Christ is in Adam, but all of Christ's mystical body
are in him eternally. This is the eternal covenant
that holds the Bible together. It's the covenant that David
died. He laid his head on his pillow
for the last time and he said, the Lord has made with me an
eternal covenant, ordered and sure in every detail. When was
the ordering? When was it made sure? by David
doing something that was made sure before the foundation of
the world, brothers and sisters. It's made sure and it's ordered. And that encompasses all of the
events of all of our lives. Every step on this journey through
this life is ordered and sure. So all of Christ's mystical body
are in him. eternally. I'm crucified with
Christ. Every single member of his body
was crucified with Christ. When he died to sin under the
law, they died to sin. Why did the Lord Jesus Christ
go to Calvary's tree? Because of the union with his
people. Why did he, why was he put to death? Because the wages
of sin is death. He was made, if you go to Galatians
there, Go over to Galatians chapter 3, He's redeemed us, Christ has
redeemed us from the verse 13 of Galatians 3, Christ has redeemed
us from the curse of the law being made a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is
everyone that hangeth on a tree, that the blessing of Abraham
might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive
the promise of the Spirit through faith. We are crucified with
him. We are crucified with him. We're
buried with him in baptism under death. We're raised with him
to newness of life. We're sitting together with him
in heavenly places in Christ Jesus in Ephesians 2. He's entered
into heaven to appear in the presence of God for us. We are
one with him. Wherever the head goes, the body
must be. I can't for the life of me explain
that, but I can believe it. And I've been rejoicing in this
for a long time and I like rehearsing it. I like rehearsing things
that I've enjoyed. I don't know about you, but the
things that I really enjoy, I like to hear them over and over again.
The things I love to eat, I love to eat them over and over. I
love them. And this is food. This is real food for the souls
of God's people. We are one with him. We're one
with him eternally. We're one with him spiritually.
We're one with him vitally. We're one with him, really. We
really are one with him. And someone might say, well,
that's how God sees things. Well, brothers and sisters in
Christ, how God sees things and how God declares things is how
they really are. God creates reality by speaking. How did this universe come into
existence? God spoke and reality comes into existence. Spiritually
speaking, God speaks and our reality comes into existence
and we just believe it by the new birth that he brings us. That's how God sees things. This
body of flesh that you see with all of its sins and all of its
frailties and all of its infirmities and all of the offences you might
see and all of what you see has been crucified with Christ, been
crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, And there's so
much more to say, Kevin can pick up the pieces of all this and
adjust it in time. But nevertheless, says Paul,
nevertheless, I've been crucified, nevertheless I live. He's crucified
yet alive, he's dead yet resurrected. He really does have a physical
life, but he really does. And the real life that he has
is a life, a spiritual life in God. If Christ be in you, the
body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because
of righteousness. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not
I, says Paul. He's speaking here, of course,
of the glorious new birth. We are raised. to a newness of
life. We have a new life. We have a
new history. We have a new heritage. We have
a new family. Daisy's met a whole lot of family
members here in America, hasn't she? And then when Kevin and
Kimberly come to Australia with as many others as can come in
December, They'll meet a new family, won't they? And we have
a family that is just, as Kevin said, we are scattered throughout
the world and all that I have is all, they own it equally with
me in a sense, don't they? They have freedom to it. This passage of scripture is
Paul speaking again of this extraordinary reality that we are crucified
with Christ and yet we live in this world. And what we live
in this world is what Paul describes in Romans chapter seven, that
in his flesh dwells no good thing. And when he would wish to do
good, sin is right there with him. And he has a desire to do
good and the things he desires to do, he can't do. It's just
flesh. It's flesh, brothers and sisters.
And regeneration is a new creation. It's a new man formed in you. It's a new creation. And as much
as there are some extraordinary changes to the old creation,
the reality is for you, any of you who've walked any time with
the Lord, you would realise, like I do, that the more you
walk, the more you realise how much sin is just there all the
time. It's lurking there all the time
and it gets stirred up in ways that horrify us again and again
and again. And we look to ourselves and
we look inside and we say, how on earth could someone who has
those thoughts dare call themselves a Christian? How could someone
who has those thoughts dare stand up in front of people and speak
on behalf of the true and living and holy God? I just love the fact that salvation
is by grace. And Paul is no different to Kevin
and I and others who speak before you on God's behalf. I love what
Don Fortner said some considerable time ago and he got into trouble
for it and he was right and they were wrong. He said, my relationship
with God affects all that I do in this world. But all that I
do does not affect my relationship with God. My relationship with
God is all of Christ's doing. My relationship with God doesn't
change from day to day, from moment to moment. It changes
in my apprehension of it, but it doesn't change from God's
perspective. And as I said, when God speaks,
God creates reality and it's his reality that is the real
reality. So there is nothing in the flesh
that's made holy and there's nothing in the new man that is
not perfectly holy in the sight of God, which is why the Lord
Jesus Christ can take his bride on that last day and he can present
her to the Father wholly spotless, unblameable and unapprovable
in his sight. Not in the sight of man, in his
sight. And one day that's how we'll
see each other, brothers and sisters. And if that's how we
see each other that day, then it's a good thing to start looking
at them like that now, isn't it? If God has put away all of
their sins and they have no sin before God and the Lord Jesus
Christ has borne all of their sins and borne them away and
suffered the infinite wrath of the God, what right have we got
to bring them up, brothers and sisters? What do they need when
they stumble and fall like you do and I do? They need to hear
the gospel again, don't they? They need to hear the gospel.
They just need to hear about the Lord Jesus Christ. The life
I now live in the flesh. Let's go back to our verse. I
am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me. Christ liveth. That means that
he lives now. He always has lived and he will
continue to live, don't he? There is an eternal union and
it's the resurrected Christ that lives in me, the reigning Christ
that lives in me, the returning Christ that lives in me. This
is a remarkable reality that is just so evidently on the surface
of scripture and yet is not taught. And yet it's there everywhere,
isn't it? The more you look for it, the more you see it all over
the scriptures. Listen to what the Lord Jesus Christ said about
eating his flesh and drinking his blood. It's a synonym for
coming to him. It's a synonym for believing
in him. It's a synonym for receiving him. Whosoever eateth my flesh
and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him up
the last day for my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink
indeed. He that eateth my flesh, John 6, 56. He that eateth my
flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him. We declare a mystery brothers
and sisters. That's what God says. That's what the Lord Jesus
Christ said. He speaks of a day in John 14
20. He said in that day he speaks
of his disciples and he's bringing comfort to them in John 14 verse
20. In that day you shall know this
is something that believers know you shall know that I am in my
father and you in me and I in you. There is just I do love what
Romans 15 says, isn't it? There is the joy and peace of
believing. It's not the joy and peace of
understanding and explaining, it's the joy and peace of believing.
This is the prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ to his father. Listen to what he says at the
end of that high priestly prayer. He says, And he says in verse
22, we can start there, And the glory which thou gavest me, I
have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me, that
they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that
thou hast sent me and hast loved them, verse 23, even as thou
hast loved me. Father, I will. The Lord Jesus
Christ petitioned his father in John 17. It's a glorious exercise
for the comfort of your face to go into your Bibles and if
you dare write on them, put petition beside all the petitions in John
17 and then write Amen after every single one of them because
that's what they are, aren't they? This is a petition from
the Lord Jesus Christ just before the cross to his father. Did
his father grant these petitions? Of course he did. He raised him
from the dead. He's seated in heaven right now.
Has he the power to make these petitions come true? I think
he does. Last time I checked, he did.
Listen to this. Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast
given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory,
which thou hast given me, for thou lovest me before the foundation
of the world. O righteous father, the world
has not known thee, but I have known thee and these have known
that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them
thy name and will declare it that the love wherewith thou
hast loved me may be in them. In them, is what he says. And
I in them. Brothers and sisters, the safest
place in all of this universe is to be in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The safest place and the securest place in all of this universe
is for him to be in you, isn't it? No harm will befall the righteous. We live upon the faithfulness
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so much of our joy and peace
is just upset by us taking our eyes off these glorious truths,
aren't they? This is just the reality, isn't it? This is the
joy and the peace of believing. And as we are enabled by God,
by his spirit, to live on Christ and to draw from him all that
we need, all of our resources, all of our hope and all of our
peace and all of our righteousness, all of our salvation is simply
in him, isn't it? It's from him. And he's the one
that actually gives the gift of faith so that we can hold
onto it. And he's the one that gives that new creation that
sees these things and rejoices in them. So all spiritual life,
as all life, must come from God. Ultimately, the wonder of it
all is, isn't it, it's not our interest in Christ, but Christ's
interest in us. It's him sustaining what he's
produced, isn't it? It's him sustaining that life.
The life that I now live in the flesh, Paul does have a real
human existence, just like all of us. And he knows what flesh
is and he knows the weakness of his flesh. And one of the
glorious things about our gospel is it never hides the infirmities
of the flesh of God's people. and it never makes an excuse
for them, but it never hides them. So that there is no hierarchy
amongst sinners, brothers and sisters. Isn't it a glorious
thing to think that when Abraham, if you picture now Abraham seated
in glory and Rahab the harlot seated next to him, what's the
dress that they're wearing? It's exactly the same, brothers
and sisters. He's washed us in his blood and
he's robed us with the very robe of the righteousness of our God.
So the life, the life I live in the flesh, if God would grant
us the grace. for this to be our portion, wouldn't
it? The life, I now live in the flesh. I live by the faith of
the Son of God. I live by the faithfulness of
the Son of God. I don't live on the basis of
my faith, I live on the basis of the faithfulness of the Son
of God. How faithful is our glorious, glorious Saviour? He was faithful
in that eternal covenant of love, wasn't he? That eternal covenant
of peace. Faithful as a servant to his
father, he's faithful to all his promises, he's faithful to
all his threatenings, he's faithful yesterday, today and tomorrow. I change not, I will never, never,
never leave you nor forsake you says our God. If you turn with
me in First Thessalonians, a lovely description of the faithfulness
of God and it's outworking in First Thessalonians chapter Tip
to five, verse 24. Faithful is he that calleth you,
and he will do it. What will he do? What's the it
that he'll do? Just go back to the previous verse. The very
God of peace sanctify you wholly. There's nothing missing in the
sanctification. that the Lord Jesus Christ is to his people.
We sanctify you wholly, not a little bit, not with you adding your
little bit to it as you go along and progressively getting more
and more ripe like a piece of fruit to fall off the tree into
the arms of God. We are perfectly sanctified and
perfectly holy. in the Lord Jesus Christ. This
is what the it is, isn't it? He's faithful to doing this.
He'll sanctify you wholly and I pray God your whole spirit,
soul and body be preserved blameless until the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ. Preserved. Preserved. Preserved in him. He's faithful
to all the words of this book, isn't it? He's faithful, thy
testimonies thou hast commanded are righteous and very faithful
said our God. So is he faithful to the words
that we've just read out of Galatians 2.20? It's a terrible thing to even
ask the question isn't it? It's a terrible thing to even
ask the question and yet You, like me, will spend a bunch of
time in this life doubting whether that's true. And that's that
flesh, isn't it? That flesh that rages and wars
against us. That flesh that is continually
at enmity against us. That flesh that is stirred up
by the reality of the new creation in us. There is no war between those
that don't have two natures, but those that do have two natures
have this war. Paul says in Galatians 5, for
the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh
and these are contrary one to the other so that you cannot
do the things you would. What would you do? If you were
a believer you would just live for God wouldn't you? You'd live
in the delight of his company, the delight of his presence,
the delight of the reality of who he is. You would fix your
eyes upon the beauty of his holiness and just be enraptured. And you
would walk in his ways, and you can't, and you don't, brothers
and sisters. But also, on the other side of
that coin, if you were left, if you were left, you would be
more extraordinarily evil than you could possibly imagine. We
are restrained in both ways. who walk with God, we who have
this extraordinary gift of this new creation, this new birth,
we find that battle and the battle humbles us, the battle causes
us to look on our brothers and sisters with a care and an empathy
and an understanding of their weaknesses and their failings
and it never causes us to rise above them so that we can look
down on anyone at all. But God's Faithfulness is how
we live, isn't it? We live by the faithfulness of
him in eternity. We live by the faithfulness of
his promises. We live by the faithfulness, his faithfulness.
What remarkable faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. When
his father turned his back on him and he cried out from Calvary
Street, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? He was perfectly
faithful to his father. He entrusted himself into his
father's care. He entrusted himself perfectly
into the word of God and the promises that God had made. And
brothers and sisters, when he did it, I did it. And you are
in Christ, when he did it, you did it. That's what this verse
is plainly telling us, isn't it? Again and again. There's
a story of an old lady who someone, pastor in her dying days, came
to see her and he opened up her Bible with her and she had TP
written on the margin of the Bible in so many places. And
the pastor turned to her and said, what does the TP mean? Kevin knows the story, probably
heard it better told than I have. But anyway, it was, she had written
there, tried and proved, tried and proved. You will never ever
find God unfaithful to his word, brothers and sisters in Christ.
Never ever. Faith is a gift from God. It's the faith of the Son of
God. Christ is both the author and
the finisher of faith. I love that word. The author
means the chief leader, the one the arch one, the one that goes
ahead, the one that, in a sense, writes the book of our lives,
hasn't he? And he's written it all, hasn't he? All your days
are numbered, brothers and sisters, and all the steps are numbered.
Proverbs 16, verse 9 says that in our hearts, in our minds,
we plan our paths, and God determines our footsteps. God determines
our footsteps. All of them. All of them, all
of the time. He's the author of all of it. The author of the time of love
is the author of that time when he will come with the preaching
of the gospel and breathe life into your dead body and you will
see again and you will live and you will have a new creation.
that sees the glory of God, the new creation that hears the voice
of the shepherd, that hears the promises of the shepherd, a new
creation that sees the Lord Jesus Christ in his glory. He's the
finisher of faith, that means he's the perfecter of faith.
He's the author, Hebrews 12. He's the author and finisher,
the author and perfecter. Eternal God, faithful. The life I now live in the flesh
I live by the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was
faithful to me and he's faithful to me when I was unbelievably
wicked and unfaithful to him. He's faithful to me and he's
faithful to all of his people in all of our failings and all
of our disappointments and all of our discouragement. He remains
the same, our God faithful. And listen to what this faith
does at the end of this verse. He loved me. He loved me. And he gave himself for me. He loved me. He loved me. Child of God. They are the words
of God to you, child of God, aren't they? That word love is
such a misused word, isn't it? It's almost been so terribly
abused in this world that it's almost lost so much of its power. But in the lips of our great
God, it is a remarkable statement. He loved me. When did he love
you? From before the foundation of
the world. I just love to think about that.
He loved me from before the foundation of the world. He loved me knowing
all that was going to happen to me. He loved me knowing all
of my failings and all of my weaknesses and all of the disappointments.
I have loved thee, says the Lord. He's appeared of old unto me
saying, I have loved thee, Jeremiah 31 through, with an everlasting
love. I've loved thee everlastingly. Therefore, So God's love is an
active love and it's a powerful love and it's affective love,
isn't it? Therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee. He does the drawing, doesn't
he? He draws his people to himself. You think of the life of Saul
of Tarsus. There wasn't anyone more unlikely
in all of Israel in the eyes of those believers to have been
saved. You can't possibly imagine, Peter,
And John, after they'd buried Stephen, saying, well, that Saul
there, he's our brother. Could they? There was no way
in the world they would have thought that God loves this man.
You see, one of the problems we have, brothers and sisters,
is that when we look through the eyes of flesh, we're always wrong.
We're always wrong. We're always wrong. When we look
through the eyes of flesh, we're always dethroning God. The eyes
of faith. have our Lord Jesus Christ on
the throne. He's right in proper place, isn't
it? We love him. We really do love him because
he first loved us. There is a real love, isn't it?
It's a real love. It's a real love that loves what
he loves and hates what he hates. A real love that finds what diminishes
his glory in the eyes of his children in this world is offensive
to us and we just continually want to raise him up and we continually
want to declare to our brothers and sisters the glory of this
union. I love what the old hymn writer said, nothing between
my soul and my saviour, so that his blessed face may be seen,
nothing preventing the least of his favours, Keep the way
clear, let nothing between. Just believe what God says. Paul said, didn't he? He said,
I know whom I have believed. I know whom I have believed. If you know whom you have believed.
Believing is about a whom, isn't it? And what you believe will
be determined by whom you believe. And the whom you believe is the
whom of these verses. You'll believe all that we said
here, won't you? And I've entrusted you entrust
everything into him, unto him. The songs of heaven are songs
of redeeming love. Unto him that loved us. and washed us from our sin. He loved me. He washed us from
our sins in his own blood. The Lord didn't ever love us.
The world will never love us. But he loves his own. Amazing
love. It's amazing love, isn't it?
It should overwhelm us. It should just warm our hearts.
It should, in the depths of our despair, cause us to smile and
say, well, behind these dark clouds, there's a sun still shining. He loved me. He loved me. And he gave himself for me. This is the last of the petitions
in this verse. and I pray the Lord might cause
you to go back and read the rest of Galatians and you'll see the
power of what Paul is saying in the context here. He gave
himself for me. Some of these little words in
the Bible have just the most extraordinary power. That word
for means on behalf of, for the sake of, instead of, in the place
of, It means to hover over one as a chicken hovers over her
little ones, to shield and defend them. That's what he does. That's when
his death is doing that, isn't it? For me. It's to hover over and to shield
and defend for that one's safety, for that one's advantage and
for that one's benefit. So much in a little word, isn't
it? Just a little word for. When you find that little word
for in the Bible, go and have a look and look up your concordance
and then smile. It's amazing. He loved me and
he gave himself for me. He gave himself. He gave himself
in his entirety. He gave himself. He gave himself
in his covenant purposes and his promises. He gave himself
to be made sin for us. He gave himself to be made a
curse. He gave himself to bear the wrath
and the hatred of wicked men. He gave himself to bear all the
fierce arrows of Satan. But most of all, he gave himself
to bear the infinite wrath of God on the sins of all his people. that were his sins, he earned
them as his sins when he was made sin and hung on Calvary's
tree. He was made sin and he bore those
sins, particularly, infinitely, knowingly, he bore them all in
his own body on the tree and he bore the infinite holy wrath
of God upon every single one of those sins and they are no
more. The wrath of God has been expended
on them and it is absolutely impossible for God to punish
those sins ever again and for God to remain holy and for God
to remain just and to God to remain faithful. It is impossible
brothers and sisters. This is love. This is love. It's not a love that sits by
and waits. It's a love that's active isn't
it. So nothing less than the entirety of deity could bring
Adam's chosen sons to glory. He gave himself for me. Nothing less than the entirety
of deity in human flesh could bear their sins in his own body
and bear them away and bear the infinite wrath of God. Christ
was offered once to bear the sins of many and unto him that
look for him he shall appear a second time without sin unto
salvation. Gave himself for me. For me. He gave himself for a
particular people. He gave himself. And now in heaven's
glory. He has the glorious, glorious
privilege of the blessed Holy Spirit being sent out into this
world to gather all of those sheep and to gather them back
to himself, aren't they? The Holy Spirit will come at
the time of love and he'll take the things of the Lord Jesus
Christ and he'll reveal them unto you. We have just touched
the surface of the glory of this passage of scripture, just this
verse. I pray the Lord will cause you to go as I do again and again
and have for many, many years and just drink it in and have
it as a pillow to rest my weary soul on. And I pray that that
might be your portion. We finished our services back
in Australia singing a doxology from Jude, so Kevin and Kimberley
can practise now with me. But listen to this, listen to
how God speaks. in Jude 24, now unto him, this
one that gave himself for us, now unto him that is able to
keep you from falling and to present you faultless before
the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. For the joy set before him, brothers
and sisters, he did all this. Two things we must understand
about our saviour from the scriptures, he is joyful now and he's satisfied. Now unto him that is able to
keep you from falling and to present you, it's his job to
present us, not our job to present, he'll present you faultless,
faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy
to the only wise God our saviour Be glory and majesty, dominion
and power, both now and ever. Amen. Just let me read our verse
one more time and then I'll close. Thank you. I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not
I. But Christ liveth in thee, and
the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith
of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Amen. Amen, brothers and sisters. Thank you.