Welcome to Reign of Grace. This
program is brought to you by Reign of Grace Media Ministries,
an outreach ministry of Eager Avenue Grace Church in Albany,
Georgia. It is our pleasure and privilege
to present to you the gospel message of the sovereign grace
and glory of God in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that today's program
will be a blessing to you. Thank you for listening. And
now for today's program. Welcome to our program today.
I'm glad you could join us. If you'd like to follow along
in your Bibles, I'm going to pick up where I left off last
week in the book of John, chapter four, and mainly focusing on
verse 34. And the title of the message
is The Finished Work of Christ. This is part two. And this is
where, as I mentioned last week, and if you didn't hear last week's
message, please listen to it. You can go to our website, you
can order it, you can download it, whatever. listen to the message
part one but this is where christ was dealing with the disciples
teaching them concerning the spiritual food that he himself
would fulfill in himself talking about the finished work that
he would do, and he says it this way in verse 34 of John 4, he
says, Jesus saith unto them, his disciples, my meat is to
do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work. So this is the work that Christ
came to do as the surety, the substitute, the redeemer of his
people. He was sent forth by the Father
in the fullness of the time, Galatians 4.4 says. God sent
forth His Son, made of a woman, that's His humanity, His sinless
humanity. God sent forth His Son, that's
His deity, and then made of a woman, that's His humanity. God manifest
in the flesh, made under the law, that's the covenant obligations. that were put upon him before
the foundation of the world in the everlasting covenant of grace,
all salvation conditioned on him, he had to fulfill the law
in its precept and its penalty to redeem them that were under
the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. That's
the work that he was sent to do. The disciples had gone, as
Christ had been speaking to a woman at a well here, Jacob's Well
in Samaria, and he'd revealed himself to her as the water of
life, the disciples had gone in to buy food. And when they
brought back the food, they asked him if he wanted to eat. And
this is when he said, he told them that this food, that his
meat was to do the will of him that sent me. And they said,
well, has he already eaten? They had their mind on physical
things, but Christ was dealing in spiritual things. And over
here in verse, let's read this verse 35 of John 4. Say not ye
there are yet four months and then cometh harvest. Behold I
say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields for they
are white already to harvest. The Messiah's here. You don't
have to wait. The fields are ready to harvest.
God's gonna be calling his people out of the Jews and his people
out of the Gentile nations, his elect. And he says in verse 36,
and he that reapeth receiveth wages and gathereth fruit unto
life eternal, that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may
rejoice together. Now again, when he talks about
wages here, he's not talking about that we earn salvation
by our labors. If that were the case, this would
be a contradiction of the whole Bible. And it can't be. What he's talking about is that,
it's kind of like this, and I made this statement last week. If God were to leave the choice
of salvation up to us in our natural state, fallen in Adam,
spiritually dead in trespasses and sins, depraved, If he just
left it up to us, our own wills, our own decision, none of us
would cooperate. None of us would believe. The
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,
neither can he know them, they're spiritually discerned. Who is
the natural man? That's you and me as we're born
naturally into this world, again, fallen in Adam, spiritually dead
in trespasses and sins. That's the natural man. By nature,
none of us want salvation God's way. We want it our way. We want salvation in a way that'll
give us some room to glory. And therefore, that's why all
these false gospels, they'll make salvation conditioned on
you, the sinner, at some point, to some degree, at some stage.
Either you're saved by works or you're saved by grace and
you keep it by works or whatever, Or you're saved by grace, you're
kept by grace, but you earn your rewards in heaven. See, that
gives man room to glory. The Bible says that's not gonna
happen. He that glorieth, let him glory in this. You see, that
God, it's all of God, glory in the Lord. And Paul wrote, God
forbid that I should glory save in the cross. That's the finished
work of Christ that we're talking about. I glory, I boast, but
not in me. God forbid that I should boast
except in one thing, the glorious person and the finished work
of Christ. But what he's saying here in verse 36, he's saying
that God has a people out there. He chose them before the foundation
of the world. Their names were written in the
Lamb's book of life. Christ has come, he's going to
save them by his death on the cross, the blood of Jesus Christ,
cleansing them from all sins. And God's sending you out as
laborers and you're gonna see sinners come to Christ because
God's gonna do the work. You're the instrument, you're
like John the Baptist, you're the signpost, behold the Lamb
of God. But you can't save them, you
can't give them life, but God can and does. And so he says
in verse 37, and herein is that saying, through one soweth and
another reapeth, I sent you to reap that whereon you bestow
no labor. Other men labored and you are
entered into their labors. And what I believe he's talking
about there is the Old Testament saints. And I took you back to
Isaiah 46. Now what we're talking about
is the finished work of Christ. That's his meat, that's his fulfillment. That's what fulfilled him as
God manifest in the flesh. I'm here to do the will of my
father and to finish his work. And what is that work that he
came to finish? Well, if you look back at Isaiah
46, in verse 12 and 13, this is where I concluded last week.
God says, hearken unto me, you stout hearted that are far from
righteousness, And that describes all of us by nature. Stout-hearted
means proud, unbending. Again, if God left it up to us,
we wouldn't come His way because it humbles us. And we're too
proud. That's why He has to give us
the gift of humility by the power of the Spirit. That are far from
righteousness. That's us by nature. There's
none righteous, no, not one. We're far from it. our best attempts
to make ourselves righteous in God's sight are futile, we won't
make it. And so he says in verse 13 of
Isaiah 46, I bring near my righteousness, that's God's righteousness and
it shall not be far off, it's not going to be something that
we have to reach for as if we have to attain it Romans 5 speaks
of the gift of righteousness. And it's a gift that God gives
through Jesus Christ. And it's not something you have
to attain. See, most people in religion, they think, well, heaven
or nirvana or whatever they see as being the eternal bliss is
something they have to reach out for and attain by their works
or their choices. Now let me tell you something,
our works and our choices have a lot to do with our life here
on earth and what we do. But we're not saved by our works
and we're not saved by our choices. We're saved by God's work and
God's choice. His election of grace through
the blood of Christ, the work of Christ. And so he says, I
bring near my righteousness, it shall not be far off, and
my salvation shall not tarry, and I will place salvation in
Zion, Zion is an emblem of the church, the true church, for
Israel, spiritual Israel, my glory, God's glory. Now that's
speaking of salvation by the sovereign free grace of God that
comes to his people, sinners, through the blood and the righteousness
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when Christ said in verse
34 of John chapter 4, my meat is to do the will of Him that
sent me. Well, what is His will? Well, He showed us right there.
He said it's His will to bring near His righteousness, which
won't be far off. to place salvation in Zion for
Israel, my glory, and he says, and to finish his work. And what
is his work? Well, his work is the work of
establishing a righteousness that answers the demands of God's
law and justice. See, when you understand this
issue of righteousness and how important it is, The Holy Spirit
gives God's people a hunger and a thirst for it. I mentioned
that last week in Matthew chapter five and verse six. Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall
be filled. Well, that's not just wishing,
hungering, and thirsting after salvation, because everybody
does that. Everybody wants to live forever.
That's their desire. but they don't hunger and thirst
after righteousness because they don't know what righteousness
is. Romans chapter 10, Paul speaks of the Jews who were seeking
righteousness, in Romans 9 and 10, seeking righteousness by
works of the law. And he said this, he said in
Romans 10, they're ignorant of God's righteousness and going
about to establish a righteousness of their own. And my friend,
I'm telling you, if you're trying to work your way to God, to work
your way into righteousness, to get to heaven, that means
you're ignorant of God's righteousness. Because God's righteousness can
only be found in the perfection of the law and justice of God
that can only be found in Christ. And those who truly hunger and
thirst after righteousness, they can only be fulfilled. That hunger
can only be filled and that thirst can only be quenched by looking
unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. And that's what
Christ said there. My meat is to do the will of
my Father who sent me and to finish His work. Well, let me
show you another passage in the Old Testament. in Jeremiah chapter
23, where it speaks of the finished work of Christ. And Jeremiah,
you know, he prophesied in the days of Judah, leading up to
their captivity in Babylon. And Jeremiah's message to the
people was that they might as well submit to God's punishment,
because they deserved it. But he said there is hope. But
their hope was not in themselves. Their hope is in the one that
God promised to send, the Messiah. And that's what these verses
in Jeremiah 23 mean in verse five. Look at Jeremiah 23 in
verse five. He says, behold, the days come,
saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch. Now remember what Isaiah said.
He spoke this years before Jeremiah. He said, God said, I will bring
near my righteousness. Well, God's gonna raise up unto
David a righteous branch. That has to do with the humanity
of Christ, which would come through the line of David, which was
the tribe of Judah, the kingly tribe. Christ was born of that
tribe in his humanity, his sinless humanity. So he's called a righteous
branch. And it says, and a king shall
reign and prosper and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. Now this is the will of the Father
and the finished work of Christ, executing judgment and justice
in the earth. Now how's that going to happen?
Well, it happened on the cross. Jesus Christ, the second person
of the Trinity, was chosen by the Father to be the Redeemer
of His people. God chose a people, He wrote
their names in the Lamb's Book of Life, the Lamb which was slain,
that's Christ coming to be slain, and He made Him the surety of
His people. All of their sins, which they
hadn't even committed yet, were imputed, charged, committed to
Christ in a legal way. And he became responsible as
their surety to pay their debt. And sent him into the world,
he had to be their substitute. He had to take their place to
pay their debt. And that's why he had to become
incarnate. The word made flesh dwelt among
us. That's the righteous branch here,
made of the seed of David according to the flesh, Romans 1 tells
us. So to do the work of the surety, he had to be made the
substitute. He had to be God manifest in
the flesh. God with us. Because God cannot
die. And the wages of sin is death.
The judgment and the justice that he's talking about here
is the death of Christ to satisfy God's justice for the sins of
his people. He paid the debt. And so he had
to be God-man, substitute. And in that capacity, he was
made under the law to redeem them that were under the law.
He had to go to the cross and die for their sins. He became
obedient even unto death, the death of the cross. That's why
he died. It pleased the Lord to bruise
him. This is God's work. This was what God had determined
before the foundation of the world that Christ would do. This was no plan B. This was
no backup plan. This was not saying that God
failed in the Old Testament so he had to come up with another
way in the New Testament. This was God's work before the foundation
of the world. Paul described it to Timothy
in 2 Timothy 1 as a salvation that was given us in Christ Jesus
before the world began. Think about that. So he had to
be our substitute. And in order to be our substitute
and to do the work that the Father sent him to do, he had to die. He had to satisfy the justice
of God to put away our sins. And that's what it means when
he says he shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. And in his death comes forth
the very righteousness of God. God's righteousness, satisfaction
to law and justice that would justify His people. They're justified. They're made right with God.
They're forgiven of all their sins. They're made right with
God, declared righteous in His sight, based upon Christ's righteousness
imputed to them. Blessed is the man to whom the
Lord imputeth righteousness without works, Romans 4 saying. That's
the issue. I need, in order for me to be
saved, in order for me to be accepted with God, in order for
me to have eternal life, I need a righteousness that equals and
answers the demands of God's law and justice. I cannot work
it. You cannot either. There's none
righteous, no not one. Where are we gonna find that?
Only in the person and work of Christ. Nowhere else. You can do the best you can.
You can try as hard as you can. You can be as sincere. You can
get baptized a thousand times. You can join a thousand churches.
You can try to be the best person that you could ever be, but you
will always fall short of the perfection of righteousness that
can only be found in Christ. That's why He is our all in all.
That's why salvation is by grace. And look at Jeremiah 23 in verse
six. Now, as the result of Christ executing judgment and justice
in the earth, doing the will of the Father, finishing His
work, it says in verse six, in His days, Judah shall be saved
and Israel shall dwell safely. Now, what's odd about this is
this. Judah and Israel, that was the
divided kingdom, the divided after Solomon. The Northern kingdom
was Israel, consisted of 10 tribes. The Southern kingdom was Judah,
consisted of two tribes, the tribe of Judah and the tribe
of Benjamin. And by this time, by Jeremiah's
time, the Northern kingdom had been totally destroyed and scattered
throughout the world by the Assyrian empire. And what he's talking
about here is not a physical union of Judah and Israel, not
a physical return to the land, though they were returned, in
Judah they were returned from Babylon, and not a future return
to the land of Israel. He's talking about a spiritual
union of a spiritual people called Israel, spiritual Israel, And
I'm not gonna go into all the scriptures I preached on that,
who is the true Israel. It's the spiritual people of
God, God's elect, justified before God based upon the righteousness
of Christ, redeemed by His blood, regenerated and called out by
His Spirit, believers, both Jew and Gentile. And that's why the
passage that I quote all the time, Romans 1, 16 and 17, when
Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it
is the power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first, to the Greek
also, that's the Gentile. It came through the Jews because
Christ came through the Jews. And the message was revealed
first to Abraham's seed. But it went out to the Gentiles
because God has an elect chosen people out of every tribe, kindred,
tongue, and nation, and that's spiritual Israel. They're the
Israel of God. How do you know? And he says,
well, look here. He says in verse six, and this is his name whereby
he shall be called the Lord our righteousness. The Lord our righteousness. In other words, Christ is our
righteousness. And that's plain there. That's
the prophecy. God had a people in the Old Testament,
mostly made up of elect Jews who believed the gospel, looked
forward to the coming of the Messiah as the Lord their righteousness,
but there were a few Gentiles also. And then God has a people
in the New Testament. They're called spiritual Israel.
Remember in the book of Romans chapter two, is an interesting
verse where, in verse 28, you remember, if you look at that,
Romans 2, 28 and 29, where Paul wrote, for he is not a Jew, which
is one outwardly. Now the word Jew was an abbreviated
form of Judah. And Judah means one who praises
God, that's what it means. And he says, for he is not a
Jew, which is one outwardly, Neither is that circumcision
which is outward in the flesh." In other words, it's not physical
circumcision. He says in verse 29, but he is a Jew which is
one inwardly and circumcision is that of the heart. The heart
in the Spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is that not of men
but of God. Spiritual circumcision makes
one a spiritual Jew. Well, what is that spiritual
circumcision? It's the new birth. It's the cutting away of the
flesh spiritually, which means you're brought to faith in Christ
and repentance of dead works and idolatry. You submit to Christ
as the Lord your righteousness. Paul wrote in Philippians 3 and
verse 3, he says, we are the circumcision. talking to Jews
and Gentiles who are believers, not physically. He said, we worship
God in the spirit and we rejoice in Christ Jesus. And that word
rejoice there means to glory. We glory in Christ Jesus and
have no confidence in the flesh. When he wrote in Galatians 6
and verse 14, he said, God forbid that I should glory save in the
cross of Christ Jesus. God forbid that I should glory
save in the cross by which I condemn the world and the world condemns
me. And he says, for in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision availeth anything but a new creature or a new creation,
a born again person. Now, am I a spiritual Jew? A
spiritual Israelite? Are you? Do you rest in Christ
as the Lord your righteousness? Well, let me show you one more
in the Old Testament, the preparation of this. Christ doing the finished
work. And it's in Daniel 9, verse 24. Now, I'm not gonna go into all
the numbers that Daniel mentions here, the 70 weeks. He says in
verse 24, the 70 weeks are determined upon thy people and upon the
holy city. Now, he's talking about the time
period, and these are weeks of years, and he's talking about
the time period between their return from Babylon After Jeremiah,
they returned from Babylon and to the time of the Messiah, the
Lord Jesus Christ. And then he begins to describe
the Messiah's finished work. He says, to finish the transgression. And that means to restrain it,
to bring it to an end. the transgression. Some theologians
believe that he's talking about Adam's fall here. In other words,
the original sin that brought the whole human race into a state
of sin and death, Christ finished it. He took it upon himself,
it was imputed to him. And then it says, to make an
end of sins or to seal them up. And what it is, think about it this way. If you
stand before God at the judgment and sin is imputed to you, charged
to you, you will be condemned forever. Eternal death. God's judgment, God's wrath is
upon all sinners to whom God imputes sin. Well, Christ, in
His finished work, He took care of that for His people. He made
an end of sins. He sealed them up to where they
cannot be charged to us. Why? Because they were charged
to Him as the surety of the covenant. He took my sins upon Himself. He was bruised for our iniquities. You see, that's what the Bible
says. The Bible says in Romans 8, verse
33, I believe, it says, who shall lay anything to the charge of
God's elect? It is God that justifies. Now,
upon what basis? Who can condemn us? It's Christ
that died. Yea, rather He's risen again.
And so He finished, made an end of sins. He made reconciliation
for iniquity. and he brought in everlasting
righteousness, sealed up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint
the most holy. Christ finished the work. He
made an end of it all. He brought in an everlasting
righteousness, and that's what he was telling his disciples.
This is my meat to do the Father's will and to finish his work.
Hope you'll join us next week for another message from God's
word. We are glad you could join us
for another edition of Reign of Grace. This program is brought
to you by Reign of Grace Media Ministries, an outreach ministry
of Eager Avenue Grace Church in Albany, Georgia. To receive
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at 1102 Eager Drive, Albany, Georgia. Contact us by phone at 229-432-6969
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today and may the Lord be with you.