Would you open your Bibles to
the book of Galatians chapter 4? And let's seek the Lord's blessing
as we get into this. Lord Jesus, I don't know of any other time
when we feel more our sense of need than we open up your book
and do what we can to preach from it. and to hear from it. And if we had to depend on us
for this, Lord, we would be in despair for sure. For how long
did we read this book without knowing what it meant? And it
was not until you were pleased to teach us what's in it that
we had any understanding. And we believe the same is true
tonight, Lord, and without your guidance, without your help,
we'll certainly wander and go astray. But we've gathered here
this evening in the name of your son, in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ. And according to the promise
given, we believe that he is here among us, that his spirit
dwells in us and among us. We need to take these things
and show them to us. So Lord, take away from our minds
every distracting thought. every care, anything, Lord, that
might prevent us from focusing for a while on the Lord Jesus
Christ. It's in his name we pray it.
Amen. When we come to this time of
year, we cannot avoid, or need we even try to avoid, the subject
of our Lord's entry into this world. That our Lord came here
taking on himself the form of a servant and was found in the
likeness of sinful flesh. And I'm sure that we all know
there's a whole lot about the way the world celebrates this
event that has nothing at all to do with the event. And even
when the world says, well, let's get back to the true meaning
of Christmas, generally speaking, they don't know what that is
either. It is only those who know Christ
that really know the significance of what went on in Bethlehem
a couple thousand years ago. I don't say that to exalt us.
If we know anything, it's because God has been pleased to show
us what He hasn't shown other people. We are as blind as anybody
else is. We're just as deaf. We're just
as rebellious and hard in our hearts. If you'll recall, after
our Lord Jesus Christ came to the world, did all the things
that He did, died on the cross and rose from the dead, they
still didn't know what was going on. His disciples didn't know
what was going on. And He said to them, How foolish
and slow of heart you are to believe all that the prophets
have written. Everything he did had already
been recorded and they had read it and they had learned it as
children in the synagogues in which they grew up. They had
heard him expound on many of those things. They had seen him
do things that you and I have never witnessed. And yet they
weren't able to put it together. So we should not expect that
the world is going to be able to understand anything. But we
have been given an understanding, at least a measure of it, enough
of an understanding of what went on that we may look to Christ,
that we look to Him as our Savior. We don't pretend to understand
everything there is about the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But we do know this, they gave Him the name Jesus because He
would save His people from their sins. We understand a little
bit about what sin means. We understand a little bit about
what God does about sin. And we understand something of
what God did about our sin in the person of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And what little we understand of it has been used of God to
move us to call upon Him and find His salvation. You and I cannot boast of any
superiority in ourselves, but we will gladly boast of a superiority
in that one in whom we trust. There is no Savior like the Savior
we believe in. There is no God like the God
we worship. And there is no event to be compared
with the event that is celebrated at this time of year. Now, Paul, who was the apostle
to us Gentiles, and I would suspect probably everybody here is mostly
Gentile, if not altogether Gentile. But he was the apostle of the
Gentiles, and he was gifted of God to know and understand the
way Gentiles think. And to organize the truth of
God in a kind of systematic and logical flow, which is natural
to us. And so when he talks about the
Lord's entry into the world, he is not so much taken up with
the actual historical events of it. I don't recall Paul ever
talking about shepherds or angels or magi. He doesn't record the
history of it as such. Rather, he puts it this way,
beginning in verse 4 of Galatians 4, But when the fullness of the
time was come, God sent forth His Son, made, or born of a woman,
born under the law, to redeem them that were under the law,
that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons,
God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts,
crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore, thou art no more a
servant, but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ."
Now, we know, I imagine you all are well aware, that the issue
in Galatians was not over the doctrine of the birth of the
Lord Jesus Christ. Rather, in the city of Galatia,
or the region there of Galatia, there had been those who had
crept in unawares into the church. And they were full of themselves
and full of their own righteousness and envious of the following
that gospel preachers had. And in order to exalt themselves
and to carve out a religious world for themselves on which
they could put their name, they introduced legalism. I say introduced it, brethren.
Legalism is written in every one of us. We are well acquainted
with it. But they introduced it into the
gospel. Remember in Galatia, they did
not say that you don't need Christ. They were simply saying Christ
is not all you need. There are both of those aspects
of the Gospel. Simply this, you need Christ,
and secondly, Christ is all you need. And if you take any one
of those away, you don't have the Gospel anymore. But in the
subtlety of Satan, coming as an angel of light, speaking through
his ministers of righteousness, he said to these people, you
need something more than what the Lord Jesus Christ is. Normally
we might come up against an error like that with all kinds of theology
about how the old covenant law has passed away and that's fine. That's one way to come at this.
Here's the interesting thing though, Paul didn't take that
particular course right here. In order to
overthrow the legalistic doctrine that was being introduced to
this church. He takes us back to the birth
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now let us first note this, and
I've got six or seven things I want to draw out of here and
I'll try very hard not to take too long. Six or seven things,
vital issues of the gospel that Paul brings out here in these
few verses, which make what you and I believe so glorious and
so wonderful, we would be shocked like Paul
to find ourselves so easily turned back to weak and beggarly things
such as the law set forth. And there's your little something
to chew on. The law was a wonderful thing. The law came with much
glory, didn't it? Remember, the one who wrote the gospel
also wrote the law. It came with great glory. And
up to that time, there had been nothing like it. And yet, in
comparison to the gospel, It is called weak and beggarly. Now the first thing to note,
and when Paul gives his description about the Lord Jesus Christ coming
into the world, the first thing to notice is this, that the apostle
does not separate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ from everything
else that happened with regard to him. It says, when the time
was fully come, at the assigned time, God sent His Son to the
world, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those
that were under the law. He did not isolate that event,
wondrous and glorious as it was. He did not look at that as an
event in and of itself to talk about and just leave it there.
And in so doing, He acts just like the prophets. The prophets
of old, when they spoke of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ,
they did say, Behold, a virgin shall conceive. But they didn't
act as though that were the end of it. They didn't act as though
that that were an event in and of itself. Rather, at all times,
and of course I'm relying on my memory which can get sketchy,
but so far as I know in the scriptures it never mentions our Lord coming
into this world without saying something about why He came. It says He'll come as a root
out of a dry ground, but it doesn't just stop there. It talks about
He came in as a root out of dry ground. Why? That our sins might
be laid on Him. That the will of Jehovah might
prosper in His hands. I suppose one of the reasons
that the world is so ready to celebrate the events we do at
Christmas time is because then they can isolate this one little
portion of the Lord's life and the Lord's coming. Just isolate
that and there's nothing dangerous in it. There's nothing in that
that points to them and says something about their sin. There's
nothing in the Christmas story to make anybody feel uneasy. But Paul and the apostles and
the prophets always told the whole thing. They looked at the
birth, life, death, exaltation, and return of the Lord Jesus
Christ, they looked at it as a singular event. And we should, even if we sometimes
can only emphasize one aspect of all of that at a time, we
should always have it firmly connected to every other aspect
of our Lord's coming. Now, secondly, this scripture
that we read teaches us that the Lord's coming into this world
was not an accident, it was not a venture, but it was a pre-planned
and carefully scheduled arrival. What are the first words of verse
four? When the fullness of time had
come. How long had it been since this
coming was first spoken of? Well, depending on how you take
Bible chronology, it had been at least 4,000 years. Now that's a long time. It's
longer than anybody lives. It's longer than anybody ever
lived. And in those intervening 4,000 years from when the first
promise had been spoken until it actually came to pass, there
had been a lot of times when the promise had all but been
lost. So few people knew anything about
it. And there were times when it
seemed as though it could not possibly come to pass. And yet,
here it came. Right on time. You know, no matter what happens,
it always happens right on time. My father had that attitude.
I always liked it. He just figured everything happened when it was
supposed to happen. Now, I tend to want, you know, as soon as
I think a thing should happen, I want it to happen right then.
I'm not a very patient individual. But God had determined a time
when He would send His Son into the world and His Son wouldn't
come till then and He wouldn't carry a moment later. As soon
as it was the right time, the Lord Jesus Christ came. This
time was determined before the world began In fact, we believe
that every event in history was determined and scheduled before
the first moment of time ever passed. It was all written in
God's book. From the first promise of Christ's
coming in Genesis 3 and throughout the remainder of the Old Testament,
God progressively revealed the purpose, the time, the place,
and circumstances that would bring his son into the world.
Kept narrowing it down. At first, all he said was, the
seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent.
That's all we knew. But throughout the Old Testament
time period, he kept focusing it. The interesting thing is,
the very last time he spoke on this issue was 400 years before
it happened. The last prophet to mention the
coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, until it happened, he spoke 400
years. Now we're in what? 2012. Imagine
this. You'd never heard a thing from
God since 1611. I guess it's still 2011, isn't
it? I said 2012. See, I'm not even willing to wait for that
to get here. 400 years, not a word. But when the
time came that God knew, that God had determined, when that
came, Christ came. He comes to crush the head of
the serpent. He's going to be born in Bethlehem. At the time
revealed, the Daniel. And He will arrive when Israel
is at its spiritual lowest, that He might be a root out of dry
ground. Let's learn something from this.
Everything happens on God's timetable. It may seem to us that it would
have been good for the Son of God to arrive immediately after
Adam fell, but God was pleased to wait 4,000 years. For what
purpose did God wait all this time? I don't know. I don't know
why He waited 4,000 years or some say it was 10,000 or whatever. But I do know this, and we can
be assured of this, since it was God's time, It was the best
time for Him to send His Son into the world. Thirdly, we learn from this scripture
that this entire matter of our salvation, including this very
point, is the work of God. God sent His Son. To our shame, we didn't ask for
Him. And when He came, we did not
receive Him. He came unwanted and unasked
for. Though the world was made by
Him, the world didn't know Him. Though He came into that which
was His own, His own wouldn't have Him. And they showed their
contempt of Him in every way they could in a final climax
of crucifying Him. Here is the hallmark of the gospel
of grace. Every bit of it is God's doing. It doesn't say when the time
was fully come, we asked Jesus to come into the world. It says
God sent him. Were God to wait for us to ask
before he takes action, no action would ever be taken. Were He to wait for us to welcome
Him before He comes, there would never be an arrival. God sent
His Son into the world because the world would never invite
Him. And so does God continue to work
today. He is unasked for, unwanted,
and uninvited. But that didn't stop him in Bethlehem
2,000 years ago. And it won't stop him today.
You and I are here this evening, not because we asked Jesus to
come into our hearts. We are here because God sent
him. It says he has sent the spirit
of his son into our hearts. We didn't ask him to. He came. He didn't knock. Oh, he may have,
but that's when he was just toying with us. Kind of like when he
wrestled with Jacob. You say, why did he wrestle with
him all night long? I don't know. When the time was
fully come, he reached up and grabbed him by the leg and the
fight was over. And he could have done it any time. The Lord
God can invade the hearts of His people at any moment that
He wants to. In fact, not only can He invade
at any moment He wants to, He does. And an invasion it is. Because by our nature, we put
up every obstacle we can. Really, when we talk about irresistible
grace, that's a little bit of a misnomer. We resist it, for
sure. We just lose. That's all. But the Lord God did not wait
for the world to invite Christ, and He doesn't wait for people
to invite Him now. At the time set by God in eternity,
He sends His Son into our hearts, He comes in unwanted and uninvited. And just as He did 2,000 years
ago when Christ comes into our hearts, and I'm using that phrase,
I realize strictly speaking it's not a biblical phrase, but you
know what I mean. When he comes into our hearts, he first reveals
himself as the prophet to correct our error. Secondly, he reveals
himself as the priest to atone for our sins. And thirdly, he
sets himself on the throne of our hearts and establishes himself
as king over us. And then, and only then, do we
bow and say, I'm so glad you came. Nobody ever opened the door for
Jesus. He knocks it down. Nobody ever got out of the throne. He pulls them out. Everything
God does to save us, He does against our will, without our
permission. And then when He's done, we say,
thank you, Lord, for saving my soul. God sent His Son into the world,
and I thank Him that He's still doing it. He's still doing it. Fourth, we learn from this account
given by Paul, we learn the nature of our Lord, for it says He's
born of a woman. The word used here, King James
says made, which is a perfectly acceptable translation, so is
born. Actually, Our word genetics is
related to this word. And normally speaking, this word
would be used to describe the existence of something according
to its very nature and essence. And when it says he's born or
made of a woman, it's telling us that he is essentially human. Now here's something that there's
simply no way you're ever going to understand it. Here is a truth
which we believe and yet we must swallow it whole. There's no
way to break it down into smaller points in order that our minds
can get a grasp on it. Great is the mystery of godliness.
God was manifest in the flesh. You know, in every story, every
fictional story, there is something in that story that you're just
going to have to accept it as truth. or none of the rest of
the story is going to make any sense. Most of you that know
me know that I like Star Trek. I was there when the first episode
aired in 1966. And I have watched probably every episode
of all five series, if it's fallen from it, watched all the movies,
and read a good many of the books. And here's one thing I learned
about that. If I'm going to enjoy that, I can't sit there and argue
about whether faster than light travel is possible. If I'm going
to enjoy those stories and enter into those stories, I cannot
debate in my mind whether or not it's possible that life dwells
on other planets. Just got to accept it. Now, the
story of the Lord Jesus Christ is not fiction, yet it has in
it that which is beyond our minds to grasp or receive if we're
going to say I've got to make that intellectually acceptable
before I receive it. And here is the mystery of all
mysteries. The infinite became finite. The
uncreated became created. The creator created himself.
No other way to put it. He whom the heavens cannot contain was wrapped in swaddling clothes
and laid in a manger. In fact, I can get it more surprising
than that, if you will. At one point in time, the living
God was one cell. One cell. With a certain number of chromosomes.
Same number that you and I have. And he developed for about nine
months in the womb of a sinful woman. And though he was born of this
woman, he was not stained by her sin. And yet though he is
the son of God, he is no less human on account of it. Born of a woman. In every other religion that
I know of, we find that men are trying to
become God. This is the only religion I know
of where God became a man. So fully a man that no one had
a clue he was God. So fully a man that not even
those that believed him understood that he was God. So fully a man that you and I,
2,000 years removed, say in our confessions, he is God and he
is man. And when we're done, we don't
have a clue what it is we just said. But he is a man. Now, I'll tell
you one benefit that comes from this. And there's a lot of them,
but I'll tell you one comes from this. We don't have to sit here
and try to figure out what the infinite must be like. Our God,
as the infinite God, dwells in a light to which no man can approach,
can't approach. He's unknown and unknowable.
Did you hear that? God, in His absolute essence,
or whatever you want to call it, He is unknown and unknowable. The very reason that He wrapped
Himself, and I don't even know that that's an adequate way to
describe it. He didn't just wrap Himself in humanity, He became
a human. He did this that He might fellowship
with us, and us with Him. That we might know Him. We can't
know God, but we can know a man. And therefore, God became a man. Partly, that he might enter into
a relationship with us. Human. He became a man. Because he comes to save, and
if you're going to rescue anybody, and by the way, that's what the
word save means. It means rescue. Isn't it amazing
that people can make a virtue out of getting saved? Any of
you ever almost drowned in the pool and the lifeguard had to
drag you out? How many of you went and bragged about it afterward?
I got rescued today, put a gold star up by my name. Most of us
hope nobody finds out about it. Not many people saw it. It's
embarrassing to be in such trouble that somebody's got to come pull
you out. Everybody else got out of the
pool okay. Lifeguard had to jump in for
you. But if a lifeguard's going to do you any good, he can't
stand on the side of the pool and say, you come over here, I'll
pull you out. Well, if I could get on the side of the pool,
I wouldn't need him to pull me out. He's got to come to right where
I am. And where was I? I'm human. And if God's going to save me,
he's going to have to come to where I am. He's going to have
to come and immerse himself in humanity. He's going to have
to jump in all the way. Fifth, the reason He was born a human
is given. He is born under the law. The
law was given to reveal sin and to reveal God's attitude toward
our sin. And this law is for humans. God
never said to the animals, Thou shalt not kill. He never warned
them about who they should worship. I suppose God has laws for animals
to run by or to live by, but I think they're just kind of
encoded in their DNA, and it's not a moral issue with them.
But God gave us a law. It's a law for humans. If Christ is going to save us,
he must not only immerse himself in our humanity, He must come
here and experience everything it means to be human, which includes
he must become under the law. Now I want you to imagine how
condescending this is on the part of the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the one who wrote the law. This is the one whose finger
inscribed the law on tablets of stone. Now if you get a pet,
and you let a pet into your house, you'll write some laws for that
pet. I say write them, you teach some laws to that pet. Because
that pet's not going to have all the privileges you have.
And if that pet doesn't do what you say, you usually give him
a hard time some way or another. Until he toes the mark, toes
the line. And nobody ever thinks to subject
himself to the law that he makes for his pets. But that's exactly what God did. He subjected himself to the law
that he wrote for us. He humbled himself and that amazes
me. The only one who has a right
for any pride and that's God. He humbles Himself. We who have
no good reason for pride and lots of reasons for humility, we exalt ourselves in pride all
the time. We defend our glory all the time,
but He who had the glory, covered the glory, Just as when our Lord
took off His robe and girded Himself with a towel and went
around and washed the feet of His disciples. Oh, what a picture
of what He did for us. For He who was the glorious Ruler
of everything laid it aside. He took on the form of a servant. A servant of the law. And it was in this condition,
as a human being, under the responsibilities of the law, that he was able
to do his grand work of redemption. Now Jesus Christ did not come
into the world to give us one day out of the year to treat
each other nice. He did not come into the world
to live under the law so that we could all give each
other a warm fuzzy every once in a while. He came here and
subjected himself to that miserable condition that in such a condition
he might be our substitute and do for us what we would not and
could not do for ourselves. The Lord Jesus Christ lived under
the demands of the law and fulfilled them perfectly. The Bible says
that He did no sin. He Himself claimed that He always
did the things which pleased the Father. And even the Father
Himself declared this fact when He said, This is My beloved Son
in whom I'm well pleased. Never did God say that about
anybody before then. And He's not said it about anybody
since. Yes, I know that God is pleased with us. Why? Because of Christ. You know, we believe a doctrine
called unconditional election. And we say that God chose us
not because of any good thing He saw in us. And it's a good
thing He chose us that way. There wasn't any good to see.
But He also calls Christ His elect. That was no unconditional
election. He said, Behold mine elect in
whom my soul delights. Why did he choose the Lord Jesus?
Because he finds in Christ Jesus everything that his soul delights
in. This is the only one whom God
can find any reason to be pleased. If we give a definition of the
word grace, we often say unmerited favor. But strictly speaking,
the Greek word normally translated grace means nothing more than
this, favor. It says nothing about really
why the favor was given. One of the most startling scriptures
is when it speaks of the Lord that He grew in wisdom and in
stature and in favor with God and man. And that word translated
favor is the word grace. You say, well, we always think
of grace as something given to us in order to save it. And that's
true. That's true. And you say, well,
why would Christ need grace? All that word means is as He
grew, the Father was, so to speak, more and more pleased with Him.
Now when we get to the gospel and start talking about grace
in terms of the gospel, Paul added an adjective to it once
or twice, and then we just kind of assume that adjective ever
since then. He says we're justified freely
by His grace. And we start talking about free
grace. But the grace Christ had wasn't free grace, it was earned.
He earned the Father's favor. The Father should love Him, because
He's lovable. Why does the Father love us?
Well, that's unexplainable. And I'll tell you why He has
grace on us. Because it says that from Christ's
abundance, and that word means to overflow, we have all received
grace upon grace. Here's the picture I get. The
Lord Jesus Christ was worthy of the grace of God. So worthy
that like an artesian well, it just bubbles up and overflows. There's this super abundance
of God's favor and we're on the outside and it just flows over
us. It's not just that He gives us
grace for Christ's sake. He gives to us the grace He bestows
upon Christ. For Christ as a man has so much
grace, it's more than one man needs. And He bestows it upon
all His people. He loves me with the love, wherewith
He loved Christ. He has graced me with the grace,
wherewith He has graced Christ. But under the law, He did everything that was necessary
to obtain a righteous standing in the sight of God. But that's
not enough to redeem us. The word redemption comes to
us from the world of economics. Strictly speaking, it applies
to slaves and not just any kind of slave, not the kind of slave
that's captured in war or just captured in the sort of slavery
that this country experienced up until the Civil War. This
is a slavery, the kind of slavery where a man gets in debt and
he can't pay his debts, so his debtor says you're going to work
for me and you're not going to do anything else until the debt
is paid. Quite often men would get in
debt higher than their ability to pay, and therefore they were
for their entire lives subject to bondage. And they, and all
that was theirs, the stuff and the people, became the property
of their lender forever, unless there were one of sufficient
means to pay that debt. Such a one could go to the lender
and say, how much does he owe? Well, he owes X dollars. Well,
here's a check for X dollars. And he would pay for, he would
redeem that man in debt. But there was even more to that
redemption than that. Because not only must the debt
be paid to the man, then someone must go to that man to finish
out redemption and take off the shackles and tell him that he's
free. Now you know there's a lot of
people that set forth the gospel as though God offers us money
with which we go and pay our sin debt. They say it's a blank
check. You just fill in your name. Brethren,
that's not how it works. A redeemer doesn't give money
to the indebted man to go pay his bill. He goes to the lender
and pays it directly. Therefore, it is written, Christ
offered himself to God. This whole silliness about, well,
Christ died for you, but you got accepted. I keep telling
people, and they don't seem to understand it, most of them,
Christ never offered himself to you. Christ has never been
offered to you to receive or reject. The blood of Christ has
never been proffered to you as though you would know what to
do with it if you got it. It was offered to God as a payment. And whether or not it will be
accepted is a matter for God and not for anybody else. And
if He accepts it, brethren, the one for whom He accepted it is
free. It may be a while before the
shackles actually come off. It may be a matter of time before
someone can get to that man and say, do you realize a Redeemer
has come and paid your debt? Here, let me get those off of
you. Now you get your stuff, you get your wife, you get your
kids, you get out of here, you don't belong here anymore. You're
no longer under this man. Christ redeemed us from the curse
of the law. from the bondage of the law by
becoming a curse for us. Christ offered himself up to
God as a spotless sacrifice, as a redeeming payment so as
to release his people from their obligation to pay their debt. Well, God will forgive you for
your past sins, but you better straighten up. If I could straighten
up, I could probably fix the past too. Peter wrote that Christ died
the unrighteous one, excuse me, Christ died the righteous one
for the unrighteous ones in order to bring us to God. That's the
glorious doctrine of substitution. And the seventh point we understand
in this or see in this theology of Christmas is the result of
Christ's redeeming work. Those for whom He died are made
sons rather than slaves. Paul wrote down here in verse
7, Therefore thou art no more a servant, no more a slave, but
a son. And if a son, then an heir. Now, here we find that the redeeming
work that Christ did actually accomplished more than law would require. If a redeemer paid a man's debt,
all that the creditor or the lender was required to do was
let the slave go. That's all. Take off the shackles,
give him back his stuff, give him back his family, and
show him the gate. That's all the lender had to
do. He owed him no more. But Paul did not say, you are
no longer slaves, but free men. That would have been true, but
that's not all there is to it. Because you know what? Free man
still got to earn his own way. A free man might be indebted
again. A lot of us, you know, a lot of
people. We get indebted and become enslaved to credit companies.
Finally get that thing paid off, and what do we do? We're free
men. We go out and run it up again. And brethren, if all that
happened was that Christ came, paid our debt, and they showed
us the gate and said, now you're free men, we would go out and
run up another debt, and we'd be back inside the gate, back
inside the shackles before the sun set. But you can't do that to a son.
I don't care how big a debt he runs up, he's a son. Now how is it then that when
Christ, the Redeemer, pays the debt, that it does more than
simply free us from the obligation to pay it ourselves? It's tied up in this, who it
is that paid it. If the Son shall make you free,
you will be free indeed. Free without the possibility
of ever being enslaved again. If the Son shall set you free,
now if your Uncle Bob sets you free, you might be in trouble again. But if the son of the lender
sets you free, you will never be enslaved again. In fact, you
become a son. And not only are you released
from your debt, you become an heir. That's what the Bible means
when it says adoption. You're not talking about going
down to the orphanage and finding a sweet little baby and say,
okay, I'll have that one as my child. Adoption normally happens
in adulthood. And somebody would bring someone
into their family, generally speaking, someone who had pleased
them in some way, but whatever, they were brought into the family
that they might share in the inheritance. It was a legal standing. And he says, your sons, your
name is in the will. And while we hope you do things
that bring honor to the family, Even if you run up more debt,
the inheritance is yours. You're a son of the Father. Christ, the freeborn Son of God,
was born of a woman and made under the law so that we slave-born
children of wrath might become sons of God through Him. The
Son of God became a slave of the law in order that we slaves
of the law might become sons of God. Thus is brought to pass
the saying, if the Son shall make you free, you are free indeed. So when in Bethlehem the Lord
Jesus was sent into the world and actually became a human being,
pretty much the same way you and I did, and didn't just wrap himself
in humanity, but was immersed in it and became human. It was
that you and I, who had no claim on anything but hell, might lay claim to all spiritual
blessings in the heavenly places that rightly belong to the Lord
Jesus Christ. But God in rich mercy wrote us
into the will. And here's the thing, the lawyer
can read the will. The lawyer can run, you know,
probate the will, but he can't change it. And the law, for all
its glory, for all its power, cannot change the will. We are sons. We are heirs. Amen.