Galatians chapter 5, we're going
to read the first six verses. Beginning at verse 1, the Apostle
Paul says, Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ
hath made us free. And be not entangled again with
the yoke of bondage. Behold, I, Paul, say unto you
that if you be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing. For
I testify again to every man that is circumcised that he is
a debtor. to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect
unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law, you are
fallen from grace. For we, through the Spirit, wait
for the hope of righteousness by faith. For in Jesus Christ
neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision,
but faith, which worketh by love. I've entitled this message, Free
in Christ. Freedom is something that men
value. If you think for just a minute about your own self
and your own experience, what freedom means to you. I remember
sitting in class, in school, waiting for the recess bell.
There didn't seem to be any happier sound than that bell going off
so I could get out and go do something profitable, like play. You know that feeling? It's just
like a ball of energy. You can't get it out. Or maybe
when you got your driver's license for the first time, the freedom
to be able to go where you wanted to go. That made you feel something. There's a lady whose name is
Alice Marie Johnson who recently was released by the president
after serving 20 years in prison for a first-time offense, a drug
offense. If you listen to her, you get
the sense of a person set free. You don't. You see many people
so happy and thankful as that woman is. And you've seen pictures,
perhaps videos of people. Getting off of a plane, having
been a POW, a prisoner of war for years, never seeing their
family and suffering under the ravages of that, emaciated and
barely able to walk and just so thankful that tears come to
their eyes and they fall on the ground and kiss the pavement
on the tarmac where they get off the plane. Bob Dylan said,
you got to serve somebody. Freedom, freedom. That's what
we want to talk about here. Free in Christ. What does it
mean to be free in Christ? When Bob Dylan said, you've got
to serve somebody, he was really saying we have to serve somebody,
and we have to serve them either against our will or constrained
by our own will and our own nature. We either serve against our will
someone else, constrained by their will, or we serve willingly
and submit to the will of another in freedom. But you've got to
serve somebody. That's what he said, and it's
a truism. All men, without exception, do serve God's secret will. God
says in Psalm 76 10, even the wrath of man shall praise me. That's what the Lord says, the
wrath of man. The evil men intend God turns to his good and that
was his will from eternity. Remember when the Jews and Gentiles
killed the Lord Jesus Christ, Peter told them that you did
it according to the determinant counsel and foreknowledge of
God. It was used for God's will to bring about this good, the
salvation of his people. Pharaoh served God's secret will,
but in rebellion to God's revealed will. He rebelled against God's
command to let Israel go, and yet all of his rebellion was
in accord with God's secret will to actually bring him to destruction
and bring Israel to freedom. And so we have Judas, remember?
He was serving God's secret will when he betrayed the Lord Jesus
Christ. And we could go on and on. The God's sons are free. Galatians chapter 4 said Abraham's
two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, are really a picture of all men.
All men are either in bondage, like Ishmael, or they're free,
like Isaac. And it's not talking there about
a physical freedom. Many died in America in order
to be free. They came from England and moved
to America and were willing to live off the land, laboring with
their own hands in order to be free. from the tyranny of someone
else. They weren't looking for a handout.
They were looking to be free. So freedom has to do with something
that costs something. It costs something. Freedom doesn't
come cheaply, does it? Freedom costs something. But
we are all, by nature, not free. By nature, God says, we are slaves
of sin. We're slaves of sin. And we're
slaves to God's law, actually. God requires from us. to obey
Him without fail, perfectly, completely. And His threat is
that if we do not, then we will suffer the curse of God's law.
But because we're sinners, we can't do what God requires. And
that's the hardest thing to learn as a sinner, is that God does
require of us, and He does so justly and righteously, but we
can't provide one thing of all that He requires. And He gives
us His law in order to show us what we truly are. like Adam
in the garden. He hid because he didn't know
that though he was a sinner, what God required and demanded
of him because of his sin, he could neither give nor did he
have any influence over God to give it for him. God had to come
up with everything in his salvation. And so this is the way that God
teaches us that we're slaves to sin under the curse and the
bondage of God's law, and we need to be free, but we can't
bring about this freedom. And so in verse 1 of Galatians
5, the apostle summing up all that went before, he says, Stand
fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us
free. Christ has made us free. That's what he's saying here.
Christ made us free. We didn't free ourselves. Salvation
is not a process that we go through in order to achieve something.
Salvation is like the drowning man. The lifeguard comes out
and rescues him from his inability to swim. or the strength of the
current or the water to have power over him. We can't deliver
ourselves. That's the big news to us that
comes to us as sinners. We are sinners. We are guilty.
It's all our fault. And we're helpless to do one
thing about it. God has to act and he has to act out of his
own purpose and will in order to save us from what we deserve. All by his grace to remove our
offense to God, to reconcile us to himself. And so freedom
is what Christ has done for his people, not what we do to get
ourselves free. And it comes at a high cost.
Remember the cost that the Lord Jesus had to pay in order to
free his people. In Matthew chapter 20 and verse
28, he says, I didn't come, Jesus said, he says, I didn't come
to be served. I didn't come from heaven to
earth in order that I might be served. You would think he certainly
deserved it, didn't he? But he didn't come to be served,
he says, but I came to serve, to minister and to serve in this
way, to give my life a ransom, a ransom for many. A ransom is
a cost. It's the price paid, demanded
by our captor in order that we might be free. Our captor, is
our sin, in God's law, the death we deserve. God has to have a
payment in order to release us. And the payment he required was
the ransom price of Christ, giving himself in sacrifice and offering.
So freedom comes at the highest cost. It comes, he says in Matthew
20, 28, the ransom of the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself
a ransom, that we might be released. And released from our, from what? From what we've been made free.
And first of all, we're released from the debt of our sins. If you look to Luke chapter 7,
you'll see this scripture that explains that in a little parable
Jesus gave in verse 41. Jesus was at the house of a Pharisee
and a woman came up behind him while he was in the house of
the Pharisee and this woman was a sinner. If you read this, in
fact, I'll read up before verse 41. He says in verse 36, one
of the Pharisees desired him, Jesus, that he would eat with
him. And he went into the Pharisee's house and sat down to meet. And
behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she
knew that Jesus sat at meet in the Pharisee's house, brought
an alabaster box of ointment and stood behind his feet, behind
him, weeping. and began to wash his feet with
her tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and
kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now when
the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake within himself,
saying, speaking about Jesus, This man, if he were a prophet,
would have known who and what manner of woman this is that
touches him, for she is a sinner. And Jesus answering said to him,
Simon, this Pharisee who had these thoughts in his heart.
Simon, I have somewhat to say to thee. And he said, Master,
say on. Probably expecting him to congratulate
him on the dinner or something. He said there was a certain creditor
which had two debtors. A creditor is someone who has
money. A debtor is someone who borrowed the money and owes it
and owes it back to the creditor. A certain man, a creditor, had
two debtors. The one, the one debtor, owed
500 pence and the other 50. And when they had nothing to
pay, he frankly forgave them both. And so Jesus asked the
Pharisees, he said, tell me therefore, which of them will love him most?
Simon answered and said, I suppose that he to whom he forgave the
most. And Jesus said to him, thou hast
rightly judged. And he turned to the woman with
Simon looking at him. Jesus turned to the woman and
said to Simon, you see this woman, I entered into your house. You
gave me no water for my feet, but she has washed my feet with
her tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest
me no kiss, but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased
to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not
anoint, but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore
I say unto thee, this is freedom. Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven. For she loved much, that's the
evidence that she was forgiven, but to whom little is forgiven,
the same loveth little. And he said to her, thy sins
are forgiven. And they that sat at meat with him began to say
within themselves, who is this that forgiveth sins also? And
he said to the woman, thy faith has saved thee, go in peace.
The Lord Jesus Christ forgave this woman all her debt. And
what was that debt? It was her sins. Her sins were
an offense to God. and yet he forgave her all that
debt. We really don't know what sin is, do we? How do you understand
what sin is? If you sin against somebody,
you really don't feel the impact of that sin unless you understand
what your sin did to them. Isn't that true? If you were
in the place of the one against whom you sinned, then you would
understand what your sin truly was. You think about that, you
get in a line at the grocery store and somebody runs their
cart right before you, like, oh man. And you kind of get offended
at that. So you understand something about
how it's rude to take someone else's place in line. And that
realization of that should make us more sensitive to doing those
kinds of things, and it does too. But I wanted to give you
an example of this, our sin against God and the debt we've been forgiven.
Remember King David in 2 Samuel chapter 12. There's a summary
of what took place after this and I'll read it to you in a
minute. But let me give you the background. King David was the king in Israel. That means he had all the authority. He could set laws and he could
bring judgment upon people. He sat in the place of the judge
over everybody. He was the absolute ruler in
Israel as a man rules over people. And he was actually a good king.
But one day he saw another man's wife and he wanted her and coveted
her and he committed adultery with her. And this man, his name
was Uriah, this man was out fighting the king's battles. He was a
very loyal man. And so David wanted to cover
up his sin and he tried to get the man Uriah to come back to
the palace. But when he came back, he wouldn't go home to
his wife. He stayed at the king's steps and slept there outside
all night. And even though King David tried
to get him drunk to go back, he wouldn't go. He was so loyal
to King David. And so, because David couldn't
cover up his sin that way, he sent Uriah out to the hottest
place in the battle Knowing that by his enemies, Uriah would be
killed. And this was a great sin of David.
But David, who was a man after God's own heart, as the king,
didn't realize what his sin had done. And so God sent a prophet
to make him feel what his sin had done. And that's what happened
in 2 Samuel chapter 12. Take a look at this with me.
This is the way God made David understand how evil his sin was. He put David in the place of
God in order to feel what this sin he did was in 2 Samuel chapter
12 verse 1. And the Lord sent Nathan, he
is a prophet. He sent Nathan to David and he
came to David and said to him, there were two men in one city.
So he's giving him a parable, a story. The one rich and the
other poor. Now David realized this is after
he committed these terrible sins against God. And he's living
as if nobody knows about it. Everything's okay. And so Nathan
the prophet comes to him to tell him God's thoughts. Because David
was okay as long as men didn't think anything of him. But God
wants him to understand his thoughts. So in verse 2, Nathan the prophet
goes on. The one rich, the other poor,
the rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds. But the poor
man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, a female lamb, which
he had brought up and nourished and it grew up together with
him and with his children. It did eat of his own meat and
drank of his own cup and lay in his own bosom and was unto
him as a daughter. That's how dear this one little
sheep was to this poor man. It was the only sheep he had.
And then Nathan goes on telling David the story, he says, and
there came a traveler unto the rich man, a visitor, his guest. And he, the rich man, spared
to take of his own flock. In other words, he wouldn't take
one of his own sheep. He spared to take of his own
flock and of his own herd to dress for the wayfaring man that
was come to him. But he took the poor man's lamb
and dressed it for the man that was come to him. And David, the
king, is sitting in judgment over what Nathan said. Because
that's what they would do in those days. They would bring
a difficult matter to the king and ask the king to give judgment. And so David's thinking about
this, about this rich man. Not giving from all of his flock,
but reaching over into this poor man's place and taking his only
dear lamb, this sheep that was so dear to him that lay in his
bosom like a daughter. And he took that man's only sheep
and he killed it to feed his guest when he had that so much. He was so covetous and cruel. And here's David's reaction.
David felt anger. David's anger was greatly kindled
against the man. And he said to Nathan, as the
Lord liveth, the man that has done this thing shall surely
die. Now, David felt the offense that
he just had a natural reaction in David, the offense of this
rich man that he would so covetously and cruelly take this poor man's
sheep. He's worthy of death. He didn't
kill a person. He took a sheep. But David saw the injustice in
it. And so it raised his indignation, his righteous indignation. And
that's what this was intended to do. Because God knew that
David's heart was like his heart and he could make the judgment
that this was a great evil that this rich man had done. And so
in verse six, David goes on, he shall restore the lamb fourfold
because he did this thing and because he had no pity. No pity. And Nathan said to David, thou
art the man. You're the man. Now, David is
looking at himself through God's eyes. And he sees this rich man. He had no pity. And he realizes
that the sin he had committed against Uriah, the man, the loyal
servant of his who he had killed at the hand of his enemies and
took his wife. He realizes now what God truly
thought of that. He himself was so covetous that
he took this man's only wife for himself when he had a wife.
And not only that, but when he knew that others would find out
about what he did, what did he do? He killed this man in order
to cover it up so that men would not think less of him. Now that's
a great evil, isn't it? He killed a man because of what
other men would think of him. He didn't care what God thought,
but he did care what man thought. That's hypocrisy. And so Nathan
goes on, verse 7, Nathan said to David, Thou art the man, thus
saith the Lord God of Israel. I anointed thee king over Israel,
and I delivered thee out of the hand of Saul. And I gave thee
thy master's house, and thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave
thee the house of Israel and of Judah. And if that had been
too little, I would moreover have given unto thee such and
such things. Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the
Lord to do evil in his sight? Thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite
with a sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and
thou hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.
these wicked people. Now, therefore, the sword shall
never depart from thine house, because thou hast despised me,
and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife. Thus
saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out
of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes,
and give them unto thy neighbor, and he shall lie with thy wives
in the sight of this sun. For thou didst it secretly, but
I will do this thing before all Israel before the sun. And David
said to Nathan, this is what David confessed now. Now he sees
from God's eyes, I have sinned against the Lord. And in Psalm
51, he said it this way, against thee, thee only have I sinned
and done this evil in thy sight. You see, David saw his sin in
the eyes of God, his offense, what it was to God, and he suddenly
realized, I have sinned against God and God only. And that was
a huge, huge debt. And listen to what the Lord said.
And Nathan said to David, the Lord also hath taken away thy
sin, thou shalt not die. This is the debt, this is the
burden, the load of guilt and shame before God. The load of
condemnation and the curse of God's law lifted from David. Everything taken away, the guilt
of his sin, the condemnation for it. all taken away. What
would you do in order to have a full conviction in your heart
that all of your sins against God have been lifted and taken
away, and God will not remember them anymore, nor will he call
them into remembrance? That's what freedom is. Freedom
is being released from the debt of our sin and from the curse
of God's law and from the fear and torment that come from these
things. Because you see, the sting of death is sin. The reason death has torment
and fear is because of our sin. We know we have to stand before
Almighty God in judgment and we can't answer for one thing. And so here in scripture, God
shows that he is a God who lifts the burdens of our sin from us.
And he does so by the ransom price, paid, the high price for
freedom, the blood of his own son. This is amazing, isn't it? Release from the debt of our
sins. The woman who had been forgiven
so much, what was her response? She loved much, she loved much. But I want you to think about
how God's grace in Christ frees us. Look back at Galatians 5. In Galatians 5, stand fast therefore
in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. How did Christ
make us free? Well, if you look at chapter
3 and verse 13, it says, He was made a curse for us. He bore
our sins and the curse for our sins in order that we might be
free from our sins and from the curse against us because of our
sins. We are made free by Christ in
his substitutionary suffering for us that made satisfaction
to God for our sins. Because there's only way that
God can forgive sin. Is it if he receives to his justice
a full payment for our sins? That's why there was a ransom
paid in the death of Christ. That ransom price was his blood,
it was paid to God, and God in justice released us from the
debt we owed. There's nothing like that on
earth, is there? Have you ever seen a murderer go free because
someone else stood in his place? I don't know of any case like
that. Perhaps there has been, but what God has done in Christ
goes well beyond anything that we could ever imagine. So we
were set free from our sin and God's judgment against us by
the death of Christ. And so the apostle says, don't
be entangled again with the yoke of bondage. If you do, and what
is this entanglement? Well, the bondage that we had
before was that we had lived our lives thinking that God's
favor to us, God's blessings on us, God's love to us, somehow
dependent on our own performance. That God's grace and God's gifts
and God's favor somehow were linked to what we did. Have you
ever felt that someone, maybe your boss at work or one of your
friends, their friendship or their loyalty to you depended
upon your performance? That's the way the whole world's
set up, isn't it? I love you if. And it's a rare thing to
have love that, to us, seems unconditional. But I don't know
that there's really much of an example of unconditional love
on Earth, except perhaps some of the closest things to it are
the love of a mother for a child. Where the mother bears the child
in all the pain and suffering, her body, she spends her life
caring for her children, and then she's given up her life. And we see that love of a mother
for her child. That seems to be pretty unconditional.
And then, of course, there's the love of a man for his wife
and the wife for her husband. Those things are pretty amazing,
too. But love that doesn't depend
on us is God's love. You see, God is love. The love
of God towards us is not because of what He finds in us. Our nature
is to think exactly the opposite of that. We see somebody who
suffers a great deal, we think, well, God must really love them
because they suffered so much. Or we see somebody who's a really
good person and we think, God must really love that person.
How many times have you been to a funeral and they talk about
somebody being with, in heaven? Maybe they even say, with the
Lord, and they then begin to talk about all the good things
they did. And how seldom or how rare have you ever heard someone
talk about somebody being in heaven for nothing that they
did, but for all that God did. That's giving glory to God. That's
the only true way of having eternal life. So when God speaks here
in verse 2 of Galatians 5 through Paul, he says, If you're circumcised,
Christ shall profit you nothing. If you do something in order
to gain or make certain to yourself God's promises and blessings,
if you do anything, no matter how holy it seems to you or to
others, it will profit you nothing. That's completely backward of
what we're geared to think. If you look at Matthew, I won't
take you there right now, but if you look at Matthew chapter
7 and verse 21 through 23, people will appear in judgment before
the Lord Jesus Christ and give an answer for themselves. And
the answer that the men in Matthew 7, 21 through 23 give is they
stand before the Lord and they say, Lord, Lord, haven't we prophesied
in your name? We were preachers and teachers.
Haven't we done many wonderful works? We cast out devils in
your name. And Jesus said to them, I never knew you. Depart
from me, you workers of iniquity. And so we think that what we
do, no matter how holy it is, that's the basis on which God
will accept us. What are you gonna say when you
appear before the Lord Jesus Christ in judgment? And we begin
to gather in our mind, well, let's see, I have to have the
right, have done the right things, I have to know the right things,
I have to have all these things, I gotta get my ducks in line.
But the love of God and the grace of God depend nothing upon us. There's no part of God's grace
that depends upon us. It only depends on Christ. That's the gospel. All that God
requires of us is necessary. We can do nothing about it. We
can bring nothing for our sins. We can do nothing to fulfill
the obedience God requires. We're helpless to save ourselves.
God acted, and He acted in His Son, and that's the good news
of the Gospel. And so He says, but if you go
about trying to earn this from God by your circumcision or something
else, take something else. then Christ will profit you nothing.
Verse three, for I testify again to every man that is circumcised,
he's a debtor to do the whole law. You see, there's two ways
of coming to God. Based on your works or based
on the work of another. Based on your holiness or the
holiness of another. God looks either upon you entirely
or he looks on his son entirely for you. It's not what God thinks
of you that will justify you. It's what God thinks of Christ
for you that will justify you. And so he says, if you want to
come to God that way, if you say, Lord, I'm coming to you,
I'm bringing all this stuff, like the Pharisee in Luke chapter
18, God, I thank you, I'm not like other men are. Not like
this publican over here. I fast twice a week, I haven't
embezzled money, like this guy. I haven't committed adultery,
haven't done all these things. And I'm even here praying before
everybody so that they would know what a good man I am. And
Jesus said, this man did not go down to his house justified.
He did not, because he trusted. He came to God like Cain, bringing
something from the fruit of the ground. It was a blessing God
gave. It was fruit from the ground, and yet he added his work to
it, the sweat of his brow. He didn't come through the blood
of the sacrifice that pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ. And
so he was rejected. He was a debtor. A debtor to
God, he had to do the whole law. He had to answer for all his
own sins. He had to fulfill all of the
obedience God required him personally. He had to do it. The law is a
covenant. It either stands or falls all
together. You can't have part of it. You
have to have all of it or none of it. It's not our works plus
Christ's works. It's not a mixture of what we
do and what Christ has done. It's only what Christ has done
that saves. He is the way, the truth, and the life. And there's
no other way, no other truth or life but by Him. And so in
verse 5 he says, for we through the Spirit, we don't do this
out of our own internal intrinsic goodness, but we through the
Spirit, by God's power, by God's gift of His own Spirit in us,
we wait for the hope of righteousness by faith. So by the Spirit of
God, we are expectant and waiting patiently for the reward of Christ's
righteousness. The hope of righteousness is
the promise God has given us because of what Christ has done.
The hope of righteousness is the blessing, the inheritance
of eternal life and eternal blessings. with God, with Christ in heaven,
because of what Christ has done. And we wait for that by the strength
of God's Spirit, by faith. We look at it. We look at God's
Word. We hear what God has said and we rest our eternal souls
on Him. And that's it. And then he says,
for in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision. It's not about you. It's about
Him. but faith which worketh by love.
You see, faith looks away from itself and sees Christ only.
In Isaiah 45, 22, the Lord Jesus spoke. He says, look unto me
and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and
there's none else. And so we see here that we've
been set at liberty by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. set
at liberty, and we walk in that liberty, not by what we do, but
by looking to Christ, that's faith, and seeing in Him, not
in ourselves. In fact, looking away from all
that we are, or all that may be called ours, to all that He
is, and all that may be called His. That's what faith is, is
finding our all in Christ and resting upon him only and coming
to God that way. Imagine yourself as a sinner
over here and the Lord Jesus Christ is there, all these people
surrounding him, and you know the guilt of your sin, like David
perhaps. You've done worse than David.
And here he is, the Lord Jesus, holy and harmless, without any
sin. sent from God, God in human flesh,
and there He is. And what do you think? I can't
go near Him. I can't come to Him. What am I a sinner to do? Listen to the words of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Sin-laden, guilty, condemned,
lost man without strength. He says in Matthew chapter 11
verse 28, come unto me, come unto me. You who are heavy laden,
burdened and are heavy laden, I will give you rest. That's
what the Lord Jesus himself says. And so what does this freedom
do? Well, it frees us from the guilt of sin before God. It frees
us from the guilt of sin in our conscience, because in our conscience
we're persuaded that God has received payment from Christ
for us. And it frees us from the bondage
of trying to earn God's favor, earn His blessings, secure for
ourselves eternal life by our own personal obedience. It does
all those things and more. It frees us from the torment
of fear because of our sin and the torment of death which the
devil holds over us because we know we're sinners and he accuses
us. And we know it's true, and so we walk in life mostly subconsciously
aware of this. But when God sets us free by
giving us this faith to see that everything that he requires of
us, he found in Christ, that's freedom. That's freedom. What
does this freedom do that God gives to us? What does it do? Well, it makes us feel a load
lifted, doesn't it? Freedom causes us to serve God
We've never served him until we're free. In Exodus chapter
21 verses 2 and following, the Lord says if you have a Hebrew
slave and he comes in as a slave and he works for you and then
the master gives him a wife and children after the slave has
served a time, you can let your slave go. But if you let him
go and the wife and the children were given to him by his master,
then he can't go out free unless he goes out by himself. But if
he loves his master, if he loves his master, and his master has
given him a wife and children, and that slave comes to his master,
he says, I love my master, I love my wife, I love my children,
I will not go out free. Then his master is to take him
and put his ear against the post and bore his ear through with
an awl, and he will serve his master forever. You see, this
is a freedom that we know nothing about until God makes us free
in Christ and makes us free in our conscience through faith
in Christ. He makes us free in the court
of heaven by the blood of Christ, and He makes us free in our conscience
through faith by the Spirit of Christ, as we just read in Galatians
5. What does this freedom do? Well,
it causes us to have joy in God and peace with God we've never
had before. How can you have joy before God
if you're always thinking God's looking for something from you?
and he's never going to be happy because you know you can't give
him what he requires. How can you have joy working for someone
like that? You do everything. You think
you've done it all right. Well, yeah, but what about this
thing over there? There's never any satisfaction. But when God
gives us faith to see God is satisfied, in fact, He's delighted
with Christ for His people, then we can have joy. Because we know
that there's nothing God can ever find in us, but we know
and we're convinced that God has found everything in Christ.
That gives us joy. And we have peace, we rest. Before
we were in unrest and turmoil and torment, now we rest in Christ. For the first time in our life,
we are happy to serve God, not men. Served not by our own strength,
but by His. Not out of our own goodness,
but by His grace and to His glory. Knowing that all of our labors
as a free man are accepted because of Christ. by God's strength. He'll work it all out. He will
get glory. He'll take it to himself. That's
freedom. Freedom is to know that God in all of his holiness with
no compromise to his justice and righteousness is actually
delighted with me. And I don't have to do one thing
to earn his delight because he looks to Christ for all. And
he's given me this faith to do so also. And so doing, I see
the truth that God sees. Free to know all my sins, past,
present, future, sins of thought, sins of word, motive, deeds,
all of them, small and great, the ones I know about, the ones
I forgot about. The ones that haunt me and keep
me awake at night, all my sins are forgiven for Christ's sake,
and he will not remember them anymore. Look at Hebrews chapter
10. I have to take you to this scripture.
This is such a wonderful scripture. This is freedom. Hebrews chapter
10 and verse 14, and read this carefully here. This is the gospel
in a verse. For by one offering, he's speaking
about the Lord Jesus Christ, for by one offering, the offering
of himself, offered himself to God, by one offering, he, not
we, he, hath perfected forever them that are sanctified, them
that God has set aside and given to him to save. He absolutely,
completely, and perfectly made them holy before God, and he
goes on. that this is something God has
spoken about before. Verse 15, whereof the Holy Ghost
also is a witness to us. In the Scripture, God's own Spirit
has recorded this truth. After that, He had said before,
this is my covenant, or this is the covenant that I will make
with them after those days, saith the Lord. I will put my laws
into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them. And
listen to this next verse. And their sins and iniquities
will I remember no more. It says in Jeremiah 50 verse
20, the Lord looked in that day and he found no sin in all of
Israel and all of his people. God writes his gospel on our
hearts. The gospel is what Christ did.
We see in the gospel Christ fulfilled all obedience to God for our
righteousness and covered all our sins with his blood. And
therefore God remembers our sins no more because a ransom price
has been paid, a full remission has been made, and God will not
remember our sins anymore. That's his promise. That shows
that he's satisfied with Christ. Now, verse 18, now where remission
of these is, there is no more offering for sin, no more need
to offer for sin, because one offering has been made and a
full remission has been paid and Christ has perfected forever
by his one offering all those God gave him to save. That's
freedom, isn't it? Knowing this, this is free. I
am free of all debt. Have you ever paid off a bill?
Man, I'm so glad to have that paid off. Or maybe, I remember
I was in the fifth grade in school. And in those days, I don't know
if they do it nowadays, but the teacher would send home a report
card every quarter. And I had one class where there
was a report was required, and I didn't do the report. And I
was always getting good grades in school, but I got a D on my
report card. And there it was, written in
ink by the teacher. And I took that report card home.
I knew I was in deep, deep trouble. Because my mom and dad would
ask me what happened. And I would have to tell them,
because I didn't do the work. I was lazy. And I was, I had
to get out of this. So I got a pen. And I changed
that D into a B. And then the next time the report
card came out, they would put a carbon copy of the last one. So they had that same D showed
up again. So I had to find a pen in that
color and change it again. You see, the weight of this sin
went with me. And it wasn't that I was trying
to remove it before God. I was trying to remove it before
my mom and dad. But the principle still applies.
The memory of my sin tormented me. Here's the good news. God has forgiven all of our sins
for Christ's sake. This kind of freedom is something
that you cannot purchase. Christ purchased it. Something
you cannot acquire. God gives it for free. It's called
grace. But when he gives it, it does
something. Look back at Galatians chapter five. He says in verse
6, in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision.
It's not what you are by nature or what you are by religion.
None of that is going to profit you. But faith which works by
love. It's looking to Christ, God's
gift of grace that allows you to see in Christ all God ever
intended. to glorify himself in his righteousness,
and holiness, and justice, and his grace, and his wisdom, and
his power. Everything about God is magnified
in the obedience of his son unto death for his people. An obedience
of love, self-sacrifice, without measure, all of that. He says, seeing that, he says,
faith which works by love. That kind of faith, what does
it do? It causes us to love. Now, we
talk about freedom. But you know, and I mentioned
this about Bob Dylan's song. He said, you got to serve somebody.
And I said, there's two kinds of ways to serve people. We either
serve them constrained by their will against our will, or we
serve them according to their will because we are compelled
to out of love. But that's something that we
rarely know about. But I know that this is true for a husband
and a wife, because when they get married, a young man and
a young woman are saying, I pledge myself to you and you only for
the rest of my life. And they're happy to do that.
There's nothing that could be more. This actually for the young
man is the greatest freedom. And that's why you hear all these
country and western songs saying that she's a ball and chain or
something like that. Because they want to turn it around and
make it seem like marriage is slavery. It's not. Not when it's
done out of love. That's freedom. That's the greatest
gift on earth a man could know is to have a wife that he, he
himself can give his life for her in order that he might please
her and raise their children out of love together. That's
a great, great thing. It's called freedom of love.
We see that. But there's another example here
I want to take you to, and I'll close with this real quickly
here. In Mark chapter 12, verse 41, Jesus sat over against the
treasury. So he's sitting in the temple
where the people would come in and they would put their money
in the treasury. And he beheld how the people
cast money into the treasury. Many of them were rich and cast
in much. And there came a certain poor
widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing, the smallest
possible money. And he called unto him his disciples. And he said to them, Verily,
I say to you, that this poor widow hath cast more in than
all they which have cast into the treasury. For all they did
cast in of their abundance, But she of her want did cast in all
that she had, even all her living. When Jesus saw the people cast
into the treasury what they were giving, and he saw many rich
cast in much, he brought attention to this woman. In his own estimation,
This woman's two mites amounted to more than all of the much
that was added together of these other people, which the rich
cast in. To the Lord, her two mites were
of greater value than the whole treasury. Can't you admire this
woman? Out of her want, she gave all
that she had, even all her living. And do you ever, like me, read
scripture and find that your best, the best you do, is to
admire those who so act out of their God-given faith? That's
the best I can do, is just admire these people who do that. And
when I read the Sermon on the Mount, for example, I think,
my master is so good, and my own heart is so evil, I'm so
far from the description he gives his disciples. At best, I can
only admire those qualities that he describes and then pray, Lord,
make me go in the path of your commandments. That's the way
we are, isn't it? We have no strength in this thing.
I find such a gap between me and my Savior that there seems
to be in me opposition to him. Opposition rather than alignment.
I see how far, how far short I fall and I feel my shame. Just
listening to this woman, don't you feel your shame? Yet I admire
my master for his goodness. How thankful I am for those words
he spoke in that Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor in
spirit. This woman was poor, wasn't she?
But the Lord Jesus is teaching us about poverty of spirit. I
have no spiritual value, I have no spiritual savings account,
I have no good deeds in store, no experiences to bring, only
my spiritual bankruptcy and poverty. I have nothing to pay, and I
lack anything, any potential for future value in myself worthy
of God's investment. And so the Lord says, blessed
are the poor in spirit. And so here we see that Christ
treasures the empty. He treasures the barren. He treasures
the spiritually bankrupt. The one with nothing is said
to be blessed. Why? Why is the person with nothing
blessed by the Lord Jesus? Because all who have nothing
find their all in Christ and their glory in him alone. So
in spite of my shortcomings, I greatly admire this woman.
You know, in absolute terms, she had nothing, really, that
amounted to anything, really. And yet, she gave all that she
had. Like infants and children who can do nothing to help God,
we are in constant need. And her two mites, in these absolute
terms, were of no value. And yet, Jesus scolded his disciples
when they thought, along these lines, that there was no value
in her. Perhaps this woman thought about the Sidonian woman in the
Old Testament who gave the last loaf of bread she had to Elijah
and her son and her were going to die. Or perhaps she thought
of Hannah in the Old Testament who had no children but when
God gave Samuel to her she gave her son back to the Lord. But
whatever she thought, she actually is a picture of the Lord Jesus
Christ. Because through this woman, God
teaches us about God's giving. God's giving. If God blessed
the two mites, think about this, if God blessed the two mites
that this woman, this poor woman gave, how much more Will he bless
the emptying out of his only begotten son who gave himself
and gave his all, who gave heaven for sinners? How much more will
he bless Christ who obligated himself forever to his father
for his people and who poured out his soul and suffering to
death and did all that he did in love and in worship to his
father for his undeserving people? Can anyone deserve or earn this
love? To think so shows a complete ignorance of love. True love
is free. It looks for nothing before and
looks for nothing after it gives itself. To attempt to earn or
repay love is the greatest insult of love. The only appropriate
response to love is to believe and worship God who gives it
in Christ. When God gave his son, He emptied
heaven. He gave everything. And think
how that, please God, just like this widow woman, she gave everything.
It's freedom, you see, to know that in Christ we have all things,
and therefore give all that God has given us to Him in our lives,
knowing it's not the value of what we give. It's what He has
given to us in Christ, that we come to Him And we bring it back
with thankfulness, like this woman freed from prison, or like
so many, freed from the debt we owe. Let's pray. Dear Father, we thank you for
the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for us. We pray, Lord,
that we might be given eyes to see it and a heart to believe
it, persuaded of it in our conscience, so we might live at freedom,
freedom with such an unburdened heart, resting in the Lord Jesus
Christ, never attempting to add to or compliment what he did
by what we do, but giving to you only praise and worship and
thankfulness from our heart, even the grace you've given us
to do that, acknowledging that we only give to you what you've
first given to us. Help us, Lord, we pray. Give
us this faith that sees Christ and so loves as he loved, not
for what we can get, but because he's worthy of it all. In Jesus'
name we pray. Amen.