Now, there's nothing more important
in this world than the gospel. Now, that's just one of those
statements you can make, and it's absolutely true. This gospel
is the good news of God's grace in Christ, and it is the only
means by which sinners like you and me can be saved. And the
gospel is the fullest revelation of God to be found in this life. You will never know God any better
than this, to know him through the gospel. In the gospel, all
of his attributes shine most clearly, most radiantly. Now, in the gospel, there are
three main points, and we're going to try to get through all
of them this morning. First of all, in the preaching
of the gospel, there is a declaration of the problem. our depravity. In the gospel there's a declaration
of the remedy, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And in the gospel
there is a declaration of the solution. You say, aren't the
solution and the remedy the same thing? Sort of, but not exactly. Solution actually means to join
things together. And so what we're saying here
is we have a problem, our depravity, we have a remedy Jesus Christ
in His righteousness. How does His righteousness come
in contact with us in our depravity and save us? That's the solution.
So let's look at each of those three points. Now here's the
problem. Our depravity. The scriptures, the only source
of spiritual truth in this world, the scriptures teach us that
man, not you and me, when we hear the gospel, let's hear it
personally. Let's not just talk about man, we're talking about
you and me. Man, you and me, according to
the scriptures, is totally depraved. Now, that truth is a stumbling
block to many. Pride will reject that and say,
well, yeah, I've done bad things, but I'm not totally bad. And
pride must be confronted by grace, only grace. can break pride. Judgment never does it. You notice
that in the scripture. Judgment never brings a man to
repentance. Grace does. The kindness of God,
the goodness of God, says Paul, leads you to repentance. Pride
rejects the scripture's testimony about what we are. And ignorance
Makes people misunderstand that when we speak of total depravity,
we're talking about what a man is in the sight of God. You know,
in the sight of one another, we make distinctions among men,
among people. We say this man's a good man,
this man's a bad man. And for this life, that's suitable.
That's why we have courts to determine whether or not someone
has acted good or acted bad. And we deal with men according
to their relative goodness or badness in our sight. But when
the scriptures speak of what man is, it's speaking of what
man, what you and I are in God's sight. And that's a whole different
matter. It says here in verse 19, that
whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law,
so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable,
made guilty in the sight of God. And it says here at the end of
verse 22, there is no difference. Among people there is no difference.
We are all alike in the sight of God. And it doesn't matter
whether a person is the most virtuous in the sight of men. He is as evil in the sight of
God as that man who is the most evil in the sight of men. So
people err in understanding their sinfulness because they just
look out there and say, Some people that are bad and some
people that are good and all of them in between. And I may
not be the best, but I'm not the worst either. Well, maybe
on a human level, that's true. But men will not judge you. God
will. And he says that we are all totally
depraved. Man's depravity is total. Every
faculty of humanity is corrupt, making it impossible for a man
to do anything righteous in the sight of God. In fact, it's impossible
that a man in his natural state can even positively respond to
God in his mercy. So depraved, says the scriptures,
we fail under the law, and left ourselves, we'll fail under the
gospel too. Now, I'm not just making that up. That's not just
Joe Terrell theology. It's right here in the scriptures,
verse 10. There is no one righteous, not even one. That's pretty pointed. Man's actions are one and all
corrupt. Whenever we speak of righteousness,
there's generally some law in mind because righteousness is
determined by conformity to a law. It says there's none righteous.
That means nobody has met the standards of the law. Now, man
is unrighteous in all his obvious transgressions against God. Now,
everybody would admit to having broken God's law at one point
or another. But the scriptures teach us that
to offend in one point of the law is to be guilty of the whole
law. You see, the law, while it is
expressed in ten commandments, it is a singular thing. It's
not the laws, it's the law of God. And to break it at any point
is to be guilty of the whole thing. Now, the truth of the
matter is, every one of us is guilty on every point of the
law. Because the scriptures teach
us to be guilty of breaking the law, you don't have to actually
do anything, you have only to desire it. All of us were born
with a false god in mind, and we broke all the laws concerning
the worship of God. You might say, well, I've never
stolen. Ah, but you probably wanted to. It may be that in
the final analysis, you decided you weren't going to take that
thing that was laying right out there where you could get a hold
of it. But the impulse was there. See, our Lord illustrated it
with regard to that one commandment concerning adultery, because
that just kind of exploded the righteousness of those men that
stood around him. But our Lord said this to them
who would trust in their own supposed purity. He said, if
a man looks on a woman, with lust in his heart, he has already
committed adultery. And there is not a fellow over
15 that can pass that. Now, our Lord just used that
one example because it's so easy to prove. You could go through
the whole list of the laws, it's the same way. Your child may
have grown up and may have never disobeyed you, but I guarantee
you want him to. Nobody here has honored their
mother and father from their hearts with perfection. I shall
not covet. We all covet. I shall not kill. Why never kill anybody? Yeah,
because you knew you couldn't get away with it, or you knew
your conscience would bother you. But we've all had hate in
our heart, which is simply murder in seed. May not have ever borne
the fruit, but the seed was there. We're all guilty of breaking
the law. All man's works are unrighteous because they're done
by an unrighteous person. Adam's fall made us all sinners
and therefore everything we do is sinful. The only way I can
illustrate that is this. If you went to a restaurant and
they brought you out food, you look at it and you might think,
that looks pretty good. I think that's suitable food
to eat. But what if you were to go back in there where the
cook is? And he's there cooking the food and he's got a cold.
And he sneezes and wipes his nose and keeps right on cooking.
Right then, your food becomes foul. in your eyes. It doesn't
matter how good he cooked it, it doesn't matter how wonderful
the recipe was, the fact that an unclean man cooked it made
it unclean food in your sight. And our righteousness, no matter
how good it may look on the outside to us, no matter how good a recipe,
the law that it comes from, our righteousnesses are done by an
unrighteous person and that makes them filthy rags, unsuitable,
unclean in the sight of God. None understand. Now, we're looking
at these three aspects of man to show that he's totally depraved.
In his actions, he's depraved. There's no one righteous. In
his understanding, in his mind, he's depraved, where it says
here in verse 11, there is no one who understands. Man is depraved. In his mind, he doesn't understand
the things of God. He cannot understand the things
of God, says the Scripture, because they're spiritually discerned.
And natural man is not a spiritual creature. Man doesn't understand
God. In Jeremiah 9, verse 23, it says,
don't let the strong man glory in his strength, don't let the
wise man glory in his wisdom, don't let the rich man glory
in his riches, but let him that glories, glory in this. He knows
me. He understands me. that I work
kindness and righteousness and justice in the earth, for in
these things I delight." Men don't understand God. They don't
really know what He's about. They don't know the essential
characteristics of His nature of justice and righteousness
and kindness. They don't realize that God delights
in mercy. The gods that men invent, and
some of them are given the name Jesus, and they're called by
the same name we call our God, but they're different gods. They
have different characteristics. And the gods that men invent,
they're either without mercy or without justice. You can count
on it. Without mercy, mean, legalistic,
destroying gods. And preachers use them, use the
gods of their imagination, such a god, to beat the people down.
Or there are gods without justice. It's like old doting grandfather
who cannot bear to deal with the misbehavior of his grandchildren.
God says, I'm a God of kindness and righteousness and justice. I work these things in the earth.
I delight in men. And he brings all three of those
characteristics together in the Lord Jesus Christ, actually.
Man doesn't understand God. He doesn't understand himself.
He perceives righteousness in himself when there is none. He
doesn't understand the way of salvation, just as we were reading
back there in Jeremiah, when it says, don't let the wise man
glory in his wisdom, or the rich man in his riches, or the strong
man in his strength. Why does he have to say those
things? Because men by nature do trust those things and glory
in those things. Let a man get rich, he thinks
all is well. He's like that man whose barns
were full. And he says, sits down in the evening, they brought
the harvest in and you know, there's farmers out there now
bringing in the harvest and the grain bins are getting full.
Imagine if one of them gets a full grain bin and he goes to his
house and he gets in his recliner and he says, my soul, take thy
ease. Your barns are full. The grain
bins full. Everything's OK. That's nonsense. You can't get to heaven in bushels
of corn. You can't find the favor of God with grain or with money. You can't even get the favor
of God with the money you put in the offering plate, let alone
the stuff you keep. Strong man? Powerful man? A mighty man? A man who rules
countries? He starts to think, I'm something.
God says, you're nothing. Wisdom? Man gets a little bit
smart, thinks he understands it all. He doesn't understand
anything. Men trust in those things, proving they do not understand. And then thirdly, man is depraved
in his heart, for it says there's none who seek God. Of all the
things we ought to seek, God is chief, and men don't seek
Him. They don't desire God. They may
like His blessings, but they're really not interested in Him.
Man is quite happy enough with the things of this world until
he gets too old to enjoy them, but he's happy with them, satisfied
with them, doesn't seek the Lord. So man is totally depraved in
all his faculties, and he's universally depraved. For it says there's
no one righteous, no one who understands, and no one who seeks.
The Scriptures, in giving its verdict, passes it upon everyone
without exception. The most moral man is not righteous. The most well-instructed churchgoer
does not understand. And the most pious religionist
isn't seeking God. Total and universal depravity. That's the Scriptures' assessment
of man. But what's the remedy? Jesus
Christ. That's the remedy. If the problem
is that we are not righteous, do not understand, and do not
seek God, then the remedy must be someone who is righteous,
who does understand, and who has sought God. After all, the
remedy for poverty is money, wealth. I mean, that makes sense
to everybody. The remedy for disease is health. Then the remedy
for our depravity is Christ's perfection. The remedy for failure
is success, and Christ has succeeded in all those areas in which you
and I miserably failed. He is righteous in all that He
does. We've all had to confront religious people in our lives.
We've been religious people, judgmental and accusing. We've
all had to confront them and have them accuse us of things.
Our Lord Jesus Christ stood in the presence of the most self-righteous
religionists that have ever walked the face of the earth, and He
said to them, Who of you can charge me with doing anything
wrong without sin? He said, just show me one time
that I have broken the law. They couldn't do it. They could
not come up. And these are people that they
wanted desperately to find something wrong with him. They're like
the politicians of our day that, you know, they don't really have
anything positive to say. So they go out and try to dig
up dirt on the other guy to put him down. They were threatened
by Christ. They wanted him out of the way because he was taking
the allegiance of the people away from them. So if they could
have found something, if there had been something to find. They
would have found it. I would not. dare to come up
to religious, righteous people and say, well, which one of you
can convict me of doing anything wrong? Because I figure they
should come up with a lot of stuff if they started looking,
and I don't want them looking. But our Lord, he could say, who
of you, who of you can bring a legitimate charge against me
regarding anything I have done? Totally righteous. We're totally
depraved. He's totally righteous. In order
that Christ might be righteous, he was made subject to the law.
In Galatians chapter 4, it says that at the right time, God sent
his Son into the world, born of a woman, made under the law. Now, why was he made under the
law? In order to be our Savior, he must be righteous. And in
order to be declared righteous, he must come under the jurisdiction
of the law that sets forth the standard of righteousness. If
it was not enough that he merely become a human being, he must
become one who is subject to the law in all its commandments,
in all its blessings, in all its curses. He must become liable
to the law if he is going to be declared righteous. Now, in
every stage of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, he was perfectly
righteous. Have you ever meditated on this?
Have you ever just stopped and thought about the life of our
Lord Jesus Christ and how that at every point, he did exactly
what should be done? I feel pretty good about myself
if I get even close to doing something good during the week.
If I come up with one thing that, yeah, that was probably the right
thing to do there. Most of the time, my actions,
and this is as true of you as of me, they're kind of a mixture
of, well, it was kind of right, it was better than some of the
other things I could have done, but really, looking back, it would
have been better if I had done this. That's the best we can
come up with. Everything our Lord did was exactly
the right thing to do as an infant. He was the perfect infant, as
a boy. And this boggles my mind to think
of that little boy, running around Joseph and Mary's house, perfect
little boy, in subjection to his parents, as a young man. You know, all of us in our teenage
years probably gave a significant amount of grief to our parents. And we get paid back, don't we?
Because we go out and have kids and we find out what we did to
our parents. Our Lord Jesus went through His teenage years and
never gave His parents good cause for grief. They may have become
grieved over some things He did because they didn't understand
what He was doing. But when they understood what He was doing,
they weren't grieved anymore. Perfect teenager. Perfect young
man. A perfect grown man, always doing
what pleased his Heavenly Father. There is no one, no one else,
of whom that may be said. No one else who has come even
close. Every one of us has lives full of good cause for guilt. Our Lord Jesus Christ, His slave,
was clean before God and before men. You can go right down to
the Ten Commandments. I shall have no other God before
me. There was no other God in the sight of our Lord Jesus Christ.
No idols. Our Lord Jesus Christ was the
only one who could use the name of God and bring it honor. Even when I'm preaching and refer
to God, I never give God's name the honor that it actually deserves.
But our Lord Jesus Christ, He could pray, My Father. And when
He did so, He understood what that meant. and gave His Father
glory in all that that name means. When He calls Him God, even when
He said, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? He thoroughly
glorified the name of the God on whom He called. Nobody else
could do that. He not only kept the Sabbath,
He is God's true Sabbath. He didn't simply refrain His
hand from stealing, He gave. He did not simply withhold his
lips from lying. Grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ. He not only refrained his thoughts
and his body from sexual immorality, he restored the fall. Now, there's
just something. How many, and we find it particularly
with the case of the women that he confronted, they had been
abused and misused and they had allowed it to happen. And he
lifted them up. He restored them. No covetousness
in him. He always submitted to God's
providence. He was glad to have whatever
his father was pleased to give. Oh, I wish I could even come
close to that. Just be happy with whatever God
gives. He taught us that a man's life is not made up of his possessions,
and we hear that, and we say it's true, and go out and try
to get as many possessions as we can. He knew it, and he lived
by it, and he said, foxes have their holes. I don't have a place
to sleep, but I'm happy. I don't have a pillow to lay
on, but I'm perfectly content. And don't begrudge you your pillow.
That's our Lord. He didn't kill. He gave life. He was not disobedient to any
authority, but was submissive, righteous. in every way. Not the Pharisees, not Satan,
not his father, not God himself could find anything wrong with
the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, God said, this is my
beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And our Lord added something
to all that righteousness. He put love over all of it. You
know that I tend to visualize things to understand them. And
this picture just went through my mind. You got this stack of
pancakes, 10 pancakes, good pancakes. But how would you like to just
try to eat 10 pancakes? You want to pour that syrup all
over it, make it taste good. Have you ever noticed how most
righteous people, and I put that word righteous in quotes, Religiously
righteous people, they're really kind of difficult to get along
with and hold themselves aloof and above everyone else. There
is no love in their righteousness. And therefore, you have to say,
well, yeah, he's an honest man, but. All right, well, he's never
lied, but then he's never said anything nice either. Our Lord
not only obeyed the outward form of the law. But he poured love
over everything that he did. Even his rebukes were full of
love. Our Lord, in condemning the unrighteous,
yet cared for them. Most of the so-called righteous
people of our day, ourselves included, when we turn around
and condemn someone, we generally don't care that they've just
been condemned. Our Lord did. I find this amazing. Our Lord looked at Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, where he knew he would be crucified. Jerusalem, the
capital city of everyone that was opposed to him. And he said,
Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who killed the prophets. How
I would have gathered you as a hen does gather her chicks,
but you would not. And you know what? He would have
gathered them. He would have. He bore no ill
will to anyone. That's a righteous man. And he
understood. We don't understand. He understands
everything. He understands us. That's a scary thought at first,
but then when you figure this, that he understood what we are
better than we understand it. And yet he gave his life a ransom
for many. All of us here who are believers,
we do have some understanding. We understand some of what we
are. And sometimes that scares us. We begin to think, how could
God ever love someone like me? How could it be that I could
ever be the beneficiary of such wonderful blessings as is in
the gospel? I am such a wrench. Here's the wonderful truth. When
Christ saved you, you already knew that. He already knew everything
about you. He understood you fully. And
despite of what you are and what you have done, child of God,
Christ died for you. This is a faithful saying and
worthy to be accepted by all. Jesus Christ came into the world
to save what? Sinners, of whom I am the chief. Paul, you persecuted the church. And you think God would save
you? Yeah, He knew what I was even before I knew what I was,
and He still showed great mercy to me. Jesus Christ understands
God. He is God. Jesus Christ understands
the way to God because He is the way to God. And our Lord
is perfectly and totally righteous in this. He seeks God. As a human
being, He sought God always. Even in the last hours of his
natural life, where do we find him? In Gethsemane. Bowed down
with sorrow so much, he said, my soul is exceeding sorrowful,
even to the point of death. What's he doing? He's seeking
God. Seeking his will. And submitting to it. Every believer
has sought the Lord, but there's not a believer in the world who
would like to try to get to heaven on his own seeking. Thank God
somebody sought God. for me. So there's the problem,
our depravity. There's the remedy, Jesus Christ
and all his glorious righteousness. Now what's the solution? That
is, how does his righteousness remedy my depravity? Verse 21, But now, this day of
salvation, the time of God's acceptance, now a righteousness
from God Apart from the law has been made known to which the
law and prophets testify. Through the law, we're required
to give a righteousness to God. But now in the gospel, we find
that there is a righteousness which comes from God. That makes
a big difference. The system of righteousness to
God failed because I'm unrighteous. Here's a righteousness that comes
from Him, and what righteousness is that? This righteousness from
God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There
is no difference for all sin, Jew and Gentile alike, bond and
free, young and old, good and bad, all of us have sinned, and
we all fall short of the glory of God. And all are justified
freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ
Jesus. So now we see there is this righteousness
that comes from God. It is received through faith
in the Lord Jesus Christ. But that presents a problem. I'm a sinner. God knows it. How can He ever save me? So He
gives you a righteousness. Yeah, OK, He gives me a righteousness.
How did He get it to give it to me? is none other than the
righteousness of Jesus Christ. But how was that righteousness
transferred from Jesus Christ to me? How did Christ's total
perfection become mine? Verse 25, God presented him,
Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in
his blood. He did this to demonstrate his
justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed
beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his
justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who
justifies those who have faith in Jesus. Here is the simple
truth of how the total perfection of Jesus Christ became the remedy
for the total depravity of me. God took my depravity and put
it on Christ. Christ willingly accepted it. And he took the total perfection
of Christ and put it on me. And then he punished Jesus Christ
for my depravity just as though it was he who had actually done
it and been guilty of it. And he blesses me for Christ's
perfections as though I myself had done them. Now that is the long and the
short of the gospel of Jesus Christ. God did this. It says in verse
25, God presented him. I can't make Jesus Christ my
Savior. It's not in my authority to do
that. And also, there's no need for me to do it. God already
did. God presented him. God examined him. In fact, we
can back up. God sent him for this purpose. God sent him to be the savior
of his people, to save sinners, to save those that have been
given to him. God sent him for that purpose. God examined him
throughout his life to see to it that he was suitable to be
a savior. Not just anybody can do this
work. It'll have to be accepted, says the Lord in the book of
Leviticus. It must be perfect for a sacrifice to be acceptable
to God. It's got to be absolutely perfect. Those lands, they had to be examined,
they had to be shown that they were without spot, without blemish. And so our Lord Jesus Christ
was examined and there was no spot or blemish in Him. So therefore
He's examined and then God set Him forth. God actually sacrificed
Him. Understand this, that what happened
to our Lord Jesus Christ that accrues to the salvation of our
souls was not accomplished by man. No Roman cross could ever
exact from any man what God required in payment for sin. Death was required. Absolute death. Eternal death. That cross was a good example
of all that was going on. For the cross represents not
only that someone's life is snuffed out, it represents a curse, and
Christ came under the curse. God did that. God presented him
as a sacrifice. A sacrifice of atonement. I read
somewhere that that word atonement was made up by one of the original
translators of the English Bible, William Tyndale. He could not
find an English word that would grasp the meaning of the Greek
word written there. So he made one up. At-one-ment. That's what it is. At-one-ment. The sacrifice of
Jesus Christ. He was cut off from God that
we might be at one with Him. God put our sin on him and cut
him off. My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me? In order that he might take the
righteousness of Jesus Christ, all those perfections, charge
them to us and be at one with us on account of that righteousness.
It was an atonement in blood. I read that actually this would
read better if it said, God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement
in his blood through faith. Nothing but blood could accomplish
this. Blood, the token of life, blood shed, blood poured out
to indicate the payment is made. And this benefit is applied to
us through faith. It's applied to us in God's purpose.
But through faith, the blood is applied to our conscience.
And we are justified in the sight of God, even in our own minds.
You know, I know I'm a sinner. I know I'm a great sinner. I
know that I am worthy of God's everlasting judgment. And yet,
my conscience is clear before God. And I stand justified in
His presence. Even in my own mind. Why? Through faith, I see the blood
that has washed away all my sins. God did all this to justify himself
in justifying me. God can't just go around willy-nilly
and say, you're righteous. I accept you. Honest. He's not going to say anything
that's untrue. If he's going to call me righteous and treat
me as righteous, I must actually be righteous. And the way he
accomplished that was to punish my sins in Christ and give me
the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well then, verse
27, where then is boasting? It's excluded. This system of salvation Where
sinners, totally depraved sinners, are counted righteous in the
sight of God because of what Christ has done? That excludes
any boasting, whatever. We can't boast anything. We've
got nothing to brag about in ourselves. It's excluded. On
what principle? On that of observing the law?
No, the law breeds pride. A man does something a little
bit right in the law and he begins to become proud of himself. If
he does something and God were to bless him because of what
he did, that man would be proud of what he had earned. So any kind of salvation that
is dependent on what you do to gain God's blessing, that will
produce boasting, which is obviously not the gospel. The principle
that eliminates boasting is this, that these things are received
by faith by simply trusting God for them. You see, there's no
merit in that. There's no glory in that for
me. Me believing God, that doesn't... I've got no reason to brag about
doing that. I ought to believe God. God's true. For we maintain,
verse 28, that a man is justified by faith apart from observing
the law. Here's the problem. Total depravity. Every one of us has got it. Here's
the remedy. The total perfection of Jesus
Christ. Here's the solution. God made him who had no sin to
be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of
God in him. Do you believe God? Well, I haven't
seen my sin enough. How much do you got to see it?
How depraved you have to be in your own mind to know that you're
depraved in the sight of God to the point of your own soul's
destruction. But I'm not sure if Christ died for me. Let me
ask you this question. In your heart, can you see Christ
crucified as a sufficient remedy for sin? You know, the scriptures never
do tell us to look at the cross of Christ to see that it is for
us. It simply tells us to look at
the cross of Christ and understand its sufficiency to put away sin
and to trust the Christ who is crucified. Don't burden yourself with unnecessary
mental wranglings. Just trust Christ. Say, but I
don't understand all of it. That's OK. He does. He understands
it all. When you go to the doctor and
he tells you, you've got this, and he hauls out a word about
that long, you don't say, well, I can't get well until I understand
what that word means and all its significance and come to
a full medical understanding of my condition. Isn't it enough
for you that the doctor says you've got this? And when he
prescribes something, do you say, well, you know, I looked
at the chemical name. That's a pretty big chemical
name. I need to go to pharmacy school and learn about how this
drug works. and come to a full understanding
of how this drug is going to cure me before I can take it.
What do you do? You say, well, thank you, doc.
You go to the pharmacy, you get your medicine, you take it, and
you get better. You don't have to understand everything about
the gospel to be saved by it. You need only to trust God and
trust His Son. God give us all grace to do so.
The Apostle Peter said, to whom coming? indicating that this
coming to the Lord Jesus Christ is not a one time deal. The life
of faith is a life of coming to Jesus Christ at all times
and in all circumstances. Such a message as I have just
preached, you might think, well, that's well suited to the unbelieving
to get them to come to Christ. I want you to know something.
It's well suited to me. I need to come to Christ because,
you see, Though my sins are all washed away, I continue to do
them and they stick to my conscience. And it is so easy to try to turn
back to that old way of the law to put away the sense of guilt. I must realize, we must all realize,
at all times, we come to Christ as a remedy for our sin. As a
remedy for the dullness of our minds and understanding. As a
remedy for the dullness of our hearts. in coming to God and
seeking Him. So believe that this song is
as much for you as it is for anybody else. Come to Christ
this day.