Interesting that John should
mention the two things that we have in common, because I've
often said that the gospel that I preach and the wife that I
have gets me into places I would never be allowed otherwise. They
put up with me because of the gospel I preach and the wife
that I take with me in as many places as I can. If you open
your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 15, We have one more thing in common
too, John. We're both graduates of the Cabell County Board of
Education's school system. We went to rival high schools. Neither one exists anymore. They
combined them into one. I think he graduated one year
behind me. You were from Milton in 74, weren't
you? And I graduated from Barbersville in 73. Now Paul says in 1 Corinthians
15, Moreover, brethren, I preach unto you the gospel, which I
preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein
ye stand, by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what
I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I
delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how
that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according
to the Scriptures. Now, Paul is winding up this letter. He's hitting the home stretch.
He's had a lot to say to this church. And one thing you'll
want to notice about the apostles writing to the churches, they
did not, despite all their troubles, and they had some serious troubles,
they never put a question mark that is a serious question mark
about whether or not they were a church. Now the closest that
such a serious question mark was ever made is the churches
in Galatia, because the problems that they were facing struck
right at the heart of the gospel. There were those in that group
of churches who while they preached that Christ was necessary to
salvation, they did not believe he was sufficient. And on that
difference hangs the whole gospel. That's why there's other Jesuses
and other gospels which really aren't the Jesus we know. And
Paul says it's not really a gospel. The word gospel means good news,
and these other good news messages really aren't good news, because
anything that depends on you is not good news. No matter what
message is preached, and I don't care who preaches it, no matter
what message is preached, if in the end the success of it
depends on something you do, that's not good news. And why
is that? Because you can't do anything. The Lord Jesus Christ stood at
the tomb of Lazarus, and it wouldn't have mattered how sweet the words
of the Lord were, how full of promise they were, if he said
to Lazarus, I'll raise you from the dead if you'll just, and
it wouldn't have mattered what he said after that, it would
have become bad news, wouldn't it? Lazarus would stay in the
tomb. The only good news that can ever
come to Lazarus, dead in the tomb, is Lazarus come forth. You say, well, that gave Lazarus
something to do. But there's a mystery in the
declarations and exhortations of the gospel. When God preaches
the gospel, the commands he gives carries with them the power to
do them. The Lord Jesus Christ commanded Lazarus to do something
he could not do, yet in the command of it came the power to do it.
He said, Lazarus, come forth, and lo and behold, such was the
power of the command. Lazarus came forth. Moreover, brethren, I declare
unto you the gospel. Now, notice this, that the gospel
is the moreover. I remember that I felt this way
and nearly everyone in Christendom thinks that the gospel is something
you start with and then you go on to something else. The gospel
to them, and most of the time it's another gospel they're talking
about, but what they call the gospel is merely the sales pitch
they use to get people to make a profession of some sort or
another and join their church. So it is to them the initial
message, and really it's only initial. It's just a start, and
then it's moreover. Here's the rest. Now that you're
a Christian, what should you do? And so they preach the gospel
to those they call sinners, and once they get them in the net,
so to speak, they think, well, we don't have to preach the gospel
to them anymore. We go on to something else. We go on to things which are
higher than the gospel. I mean, nobody willingly goes
to a lower place, so it must be they think they're going to
a higher place. And it'll be anything from how
you ought to live, or how you can live a more so-called abundant
life, or this kind of stuff. But Paul has finished with 14
chapters in which he does talk about the gospel. In fact, very
early on, he lays out doctrines of the gospel. But after correcting
all the practical problems of the church, that they were having,
at least the big ones that the news had reached him about, being
divided over this preacher or that preacher, confusion about
the exercise of gifts, all this kind of stuff, he gets to the
end of all that and he says, now moreover, moreover, we begin
with the gospel, brethren, and we end with it. The gospel is
the message that wakes the dead and feeds the living. It is the message with which
we begin and with which we end, and it is everything in between. It is the moreover. We have that vision, that symbolic
vision of heaven given in the book of Revelation. And you talk
about coming to the end, there you are. And what are they saying?
Worthy art thou, for thou hast redeemed us by thy blood out
of every kindred, tongue, tribe, and nation, and made us a kingdom
and priests unto our God. Isn't that amazing? When they get to heaven, even
there, the people of God have not moved on from the gospel.
They're still enamored of it. They're still talking about it,
singing about it. Moreover, brethren, to whom do
we preach the gospel? Brethren. Nobody else wants to hear it.
I know we preach it to the world at large, don't we? We preach
the gospel to every creature. We preach it to Jew, to Gentile,
bond-free, Civilized, uncivilized, educated, uneducated. We even
preach it to Iowans. When I went out to Iowa, one
of the brethren there said, this isn't the edge of the world, but you
can see it from here. So when we preach the gospel
of Northwest Iowa, we have just gone to the ends of the earth,
just about. We preach it. And I'll tell you
who will listen to it is brethren. And once those who, at least
to our ability to discern, once those who are outside the scope
of brethren hear the gospel and believe it, we don't quit preaching
it to them. Say, all right, you're one of the brethren. We don't
need to tell you the gospel anymore. You already know it. We tell
it to people because they do know it, and they delight to
hear it. Moreover, brethren, I declare
unto you the gospel. That was the important thing
to Paul. Now, notice what the gospel is not. Because people
confuse things with the gospel that are really not the gospel.
He said, the gospel which I preach to you. Preaching is not the
gospel. Now, it's a good thing if you
hear the gospel preached to you, because how can you believe if
you never heard it? You can't believe what you don't know,
and you can't know what somebody hadn't told you. But hearing
the gospel doesn't save you. The act of preaching is not the
act of saving. The act of hearing someone preach, that doesn't necessarily save
you. Lots of people hear gospel preaching. Let us never, let
us never mistake listening to the gospel. with the gospel itself. I know that sounds like a fine
line, but sometimes we've got to draw one because we're so
easily deceived and misled. Don't think that just because
you sit here in a seat and listen to a faithful man preach the
gospel that you've ever experienced the gospel. Because the preaching is not
the gospel. It says, which I preached in
you, which you also received. There's the gospel, receiving
it. No, receiving it is not the gospel. Now, it's a good thing if you
receive it, because apart from receiving it, you'll never be
saved. But our message is not if you believe or if you receive. The message is not what men do.
The gospel is not about what men must do. It's about what
God has done. It says, which you received and
wherein you stand, or as one translation puts it, I kind of
like this, on which you have taken your stand. And we'll get
to that. But you taking your stand on
the gospel is not the gospel. Our message is not take your
stand. Our message is not about all
those who have taken their stand. on the gospel. He says, by which also ye are
saved. That's true. If you're saved,
you're saved by this message, the gospel. But our gospel is not a declaration
of going around telling people they're saved. We don't have that right. We
don't have the right to tell a man he's saved. We don't have
the right to tell a man he's lost. We let the gospel do that. Now, if a man comes up and says,
well, I don't believe there's a God at all. And we say, well, then
you're lost. We're not really the one telling him he's lost.
The gospel's telling him he's lost. We're just pointing it
out to him. But it's not our job. We can't
convince a man he's lost. And we have no right to try to
convince him he's saved. That's not our business. That's
a work of God. To tell people they're saved,
that's not the gospel. In fact, it may be a very anti-gospel
thing. It may be an anti-gospel thing
because if you go around telling people they're saved when they're
lost, you've cried peace, peace when there is no peace, and you've
made them twofold a child of hell. By which also you are saved if
you keep in memory or keep in mind what I preached to you.
Good thing to keep it in mind, be a comfort to your soul. But keeping this in mind is not
what the gospel is. You see, one of these days you
live long enough, you won't be able to keep anything in mind.
You won't know who you are, let alone who Christ is. Our consciousness as we presently
experience it is dependent on proper operation of the brain. And even now we've got trouble
with that, don't we? You let something happen to that,
you let a disease creep in there, you won't know who your mom and
dad or your wife or your kids are. You won't know who you yourself
is. So if I ask you, do you remember
the gospel, and you'll just lay there, and the machine will go
beep, beep, and that's all there will be to you. But the thief
on the cross understood more than many people do about the
gospel. He said, Lord, remember me. We
may not remember him, and you live long enough, that time will
come. So my memory's not the gospel. Paul goes on in verse 3 and says,
For I delivered to you, first of all, that which I also received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Now, he starts out by saying,
I'm going to declare the gospel, and he says, so here it is. I
delivered it, and now I'm delivering it again. I had a job. I worked it several
times during summers. and between college years, and
I helped a fellow that delivered milk and bread to stores out
in the rural area of West Virginia. And we delivered bread every
time we went out there. Heiner's bread, Johnson's dairy
milk, and I think we had some hostess
cakes, but the main thing was the bread and the milk, and that's
all we ever delivered. Every time we went out there,
we delivered that. And we could say, we delivered it to you,
we're delivering it to you, and we're going to deliver it to
you. And that's the preacher. He doesn't go back to his study
and bake up something new. He may bake up something fresh,
but not something new. We don't want stale gospel, but
we still want gospel. We need gospel. So Paul says,
I declare unto you, or I am declaring to you, and I delivered it to
you. It's the same thing I said long ago. John was teaching there
in Galatians. He said, if any man comes to
you preaching any other gospel than the one you first heard,
the one we first preached to you, let him be accursed. Here's
the Apostle Paul, probably more intelligent than anybody in this
room. Remarkable intellect that man had. And in 30 years of preaching
the gospel, he couldn't come up with anything other than what
he started with. And if his mind, powerful as
it was, could not find some new thing to deliver to the churches,
dare we look for anything new? And here it is. Now, the gospel
can be preached several ways. It can be preached theologically.
And it does so if you look back here 1 Corinthians chapter 1. Let me show you a theological
description of the gospel. Or maybe we'll call it a doctrinal
description of the gospel. Verse 30, But of him, that is, of God,
of his will and of his power, are ye in Christ That is the
state of salvation, right there. That's how you describe it, in
Christ. That's why, in some sense, all of God's elect have always
been saved. Because they've always been in
Christ. God never considered them anyplace else. I know that
because we have to think in a sequence of events, that we'll talk about
what God did as though it happened in a sequence. God looked on
all the world and it was full of sin. And then God chose. And we have to do it that way
because we can't think any other way than in a sequence. But God
exists outside of time. There is no such thing as sequence
with Him. It was all everything at once. And even that betrays
the fact we can't talk about God right because I said once.
And there is no once with God. But nonetheless, In Christ, there's
a good statement of what it is to be in a state of salvation,
to be in Christ. It's by God's will and power.
We're in Christ Jesus, who of God, once again, he throws us
back, and here's a doctrinal statement now. It's of God that Christ had been made unto us
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
So here we've got a doctrinal description of the gospel. It's
of God. It's in Christ, and by very silence, it tells
us it's not about us. You know that phrase, people
say, why does it always have to be about you? And that's religion. And people want it to be about
them. And so if you want to make church, come up with a message
that's about people. And it almost doesn't matter
what you say about them, as long as you make it about them, they'll
come and listen to it. But this isn't about us, is it?
Except as passive observers, who of God is made unto us. God did something with Christ
that had an effect on us. It didn't say God did something
And now it's up to you to apply it to yourself. It says God designed
it, God made it happen, and God applied it. And it was wisdom
from God. Now normally we look at these
four things here. He's made unto us wisdom and
righteousness and sanctification and redemption. And it would
be fine to take it just that way. But at least some Looking
at this in the original languages, say what it means is Christ is
made unto us wisdom from God, to wit. He is our righteousness,
sanctification, and redemption. See, the gospel is wisdom. Everything else is foolishness.
And here's the wisdom of it, that everything that is demanded
of us in the law is given to us in the gospel. Remember, I
started out and I said something about it, anytime you leave something
up to men, it's no longer good news. Well, that's the wisdom
of the gospel. It doesn't leave anything up
to us. The law is called weak. For what the law could not do,
says Paul in Romans 8. God did through his son. What
could the law not do? The law can't save anybody. Now
there's some things the law can do and it does them very well,
but it can't save. And why can't it save? It says,
for what the law could not do in that it was weak in the flesh.
Now how is the law weak in the flesh? Because the law depends
upon our flesh. The law depends upon our natural
abilities and demands that we perform it. Well, once again, we can use
Lazarus as an example. Anything that depended on dead
Lazarus's flesh was foolishness, wasn't it? But God's gospel is wisdom. I
can't produce righteousness, can you? I've tried. And what I prove is exactly what
Paul said, the law is weak through my flesh. And every time I try
to prove myself righteous, I prove myself wicked. Sanctification or holiness, the
word means to be set apart. Every time I have tried to set
myself apart from the general riffraff of the world and prove
to God that there's something special about me that should
cause Him to want me, I have proved Once again, that the law
cannot sanctify me because it depends on me to make the difference. Paul said, who makes you different?
Who sets you apart? Who makes you holy? And what
is that holiness? What is it that distinguishes
God's people from the rest of the world? Is it their faith? No. It is Christ. What distinguished the Jews from
the Egyptians on the night of Passover? Was it Abraham? The Lord says,
I'm going to pass through Egypt and kill the firstborn of every
house. He didn't say, I'm going to kill the firstborn of every
Egyptian household. He said, I'm going to kill the firstborn
of every house. Jewish houses as well as Egyptian And he didn't
say, and when I see a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
I'll pass over you. What did he say? When I see the
blood. That was the separation between the lost and the saved
that night. He didn't say, when I look in
the houses and see someone who put the blood on the door. He
said, when I see the blood. The interesting thing is, just
consider this, the ones who were saved from death that night were
not the ones who put the blood on the door. The firstborn didn't
apply the blood. The father of the household did,
acting as the priest. The father was a picture of Christ
that night, and he put the blood on the door as Christ put the
blood on the cross. And God came through. in just
judgment, and he swept through Egypt, and he killed the firstborn
in every house. He did. But some of those firstborn had
been substituted for by a lamb, and it was not they who made
the substitution. They didn't make that lamb into
an offering. The Father did. Christ is that
which divides me from the world of the lost, and He is my redemption. Have you ever tried to come up
with something to buy your soul with? Don't say no, because that
will make you into a liar. We all have. Lord, if you'll
save me, I'll do such and such. It's written in our natural cells
to do that. What shall a man give to redeem
his soul, seeing that it's precious? It's expensive. It costs a lot
to redeem a soul. You don't have enough. In fact,
here's what the Scriptures tell us. Everything we give in order
to redeem our soul only increases our debt. Paul said, those things
that I once counted gained. And if any of you ever did accounting,
you can understand what Paul's saying here. So what I counted
gain, what I put in the asset column, I learned was actually
a liability. Me being a Jew wasn't helping,
it was hurting. My circumcision didn't help me.
It caused me trouble because I trusted in it. Me being a Pharisee, that didn't
get me closer to God. It got me farther away. Everything
I did to redeem myself only increased my debt. Now, one reason I'm
the chief of sinners is because he was piling up so much debt
all the time, thinking he was getting ahead. What is my redemption? Yehu is my redemption. It's Christ. Well, that's a theological description
of the gospel. Now, I've got to move it along
here. I haven't even got out of my introduction yet, so don't worry. I might
even want to try to finish. Exhortational, shall we call
it. That's when we call on people to believe. We generally give
them a doctrinal description and we call on them to believe.
What must I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and thou shalt be saved. And then there's historical descriptions
of the gospel, which Paul gives back here in chapter 15. It's
not as though he gives the entire history of it, for the history
of the gospel begins before there was history, and it'll go on
when history's all over. But he goes to the central event
of the gospel. We have a gospel which is firmly
rooted in time and space, and firmly rooted in eternity, where
there is neither time nor space. He says, Christ died for our sins, according
to the scriptures. Now, I tend to think theologically. That's just the way I look at
things. I always organize my understanding in a system. We
must be careful that we never get so abstract in our understanding
of the gospel that we forget about the very real world, shall
we call it, time and space event that happened about 2,000 years
ago. God, as one writer put it, he invaded our planet. He came
here and He died, a real man dying a real death. He died because it is written,
it is appointed unto man once to die. But why is it appointed
unto man to die? Because all men sin. Yet this
man never sinned. Why did he die? Christ died for
our sins. They weren't His. He never did
them. They were charged to Him, but He didn't do it. Historically
speaking, Christ never sinned. And yet God laid our sins upon
Him, laid the sins of His people upon Him, counted Him responsible for them,
and exacted from Him the due penalty. of all the sins that
he bore. Now, I've said that, and I really
don't know what I just said. You say, what do you mean? Oh, I know what the words mean.
But you know, when the high priest once a year went into the most
holy place, any Jew that could read and get a hold of a copy
of the Scriptures could tell you what happened. But there's
only one man that really knew what went on back there. And
brethren, there's only one man in all the universe who knows
what it was to bear the sin of God's people. Because there's
only one that went into the most holy place not made with hands,
the Lord Jesus Christ. And it wouldn't matter how solemnly
I tried to describe that to you, I'm sure that I could not begin
to tell you the tortures that fell on our Lord's soul. And
because we really can't enter into that, God designed a form
of death to give us a glimpse. I cannot imagine what it must
be to be crucified. I can imagine it. That's as far
as I go. I've never been crucified. Can you imagine what that was
like? I mean, it was designed not only to exact justice upon
the evildoer, but to so terrify everybody that saw it, they'd
never think of crossing Rome. It was designed to make the process
of dying as painful and as long as could be. Our Lord hung on
the cross for six hours. Normally, they hung there for
days. And normally, you didn't die
because you bled to death. Sometimes they'd hang them by
ropes. You'd die from exhaustion. And finally, you could no longer
hold yourself up and take a breath. You'd suffocate, so to speak,
as you hung there. Our Lord died, those with the medical knowledge
that look at the events, they claim He died of heart congestion. That that was
the immediate cause of death. We know what He died of. He died
of sin. He died on the judgment of God. But that horrible crucifixion
gives us just a little glimpse of what was going on when God
made his soul an offering for sin. Those lambs, their bodies that
would be killed, they'd be laid on that altar and then just burned
up. Our Lord's soul was burned up
by God. He died for our sins according
to the scriptures. Someone once told me that the
gospel is not about anything like particular redemption or
election or anything like that. But right here it says, He died
for our sins. That's the gospel. I said, no, it doesn't say He
died for our sins. It says He died for our sins according to
the scriptures. And what does that mean? Well, not only according
to the promises of the scriptures, but according to all those illustrations
given in the Old Testament law. And that tells us all about how
he died as a substitute, and he died as a substitute for a
particular people, because that high priest, when he went and
offered those lambs, he went in with Israel's names on his
breastplate and on his hands and on his forehead. And he confessed
the sins of Israel upon the sacrifice, not everybody else's. And when
our Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, it was for our sins
he died. Who? These brethren? Moreover
brethren, I tell you the gospel. Now there's some more brethren
out there. I don't know who they are, but this I know. They'll
hear the gospel. They'll believe it. They'll receive
it. They'll take the stand on it. And it'll be because Christ
died for them according to the Scriptures. And when it says
He died according to the Scriptures, it means He died successfully. At the end of all this, the Lord
said, it is finished, meaning it is accomplished. You may just
comment, whoever considered death an accomplishment? Moses and Elijah spoke to the
Lord about the death he should accomplish at Jerusalem. We never accomplish death. Men
who die apart from Christ are never done dying. They die eternally. Christ died and came to the end
of death. How do we know? He was buried
and rose again. That's how we know. That high
priest would go there into that holy place one time a year with
the blood of that sacrifice, and he would offer it. And I'm
told that they actually would have bells on the fringe of his
robe, because if he wasn't accepted, he'd die. If his work there in
the most holy place was not accepted, fire would come out from the
Lord and he'd die. And the only way they knew that he was alive
was those bells kept ringing. And while this is never written
in the law as a command, they said they would actually tie
a rope around his ankle. Because if he wasn't accepted, they had
to have a way to drag him out. I never heard of a high priest
being destroyed that way. The process was he'd go in, and
if he went in with a proper sacrifice, he would come back out and bless
the people. And our Lord Jesus Christ went
in, and evidently he did what was right back there, because
he came back out and he blessed the people with the gospel. He came out and said, go in all
the world and tell the good news, because I've got people from
every kindred, tongue, tribe, and nation. I died, but I'm back. It says that the Lord Jesus Christ
will appear again, not to suffer, but to bring salvation. Indeed,
He did. He came once through the womb of His mother, and He
came to suffer. And He suffered, and He came
to the end of suffering. Then he appeared again, not to
suffer again, not to be re-offered again, but to bring salvation. And he'd bring it. He brought
it to some of you. He brought it to me. I didn't
go get it. He brought it. Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you
the good news. Jesus Christ died. He died for
our sins. Oh, you've got a bunch of them,
don't you? And they bother you, and well, they should. But as
much as your sins grieve you, they never need cause you fear. Never. Why? If Christ died for them, you
never will. If God judged Christ for your
sins, he'll never judge you. Because Christ actually came
to the end of the suffering due unto the sins that he bore. That's
all he could say. It's done. It's finished. I've reached the end. And then he came out of that
grave and he pronounced blessings. upon all the house of God's Israel. And they are saved. Blessed be
His name.