Jim Styles - God's Wonderful Plan Of Redemption - Class 4 - The Power of Faith

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Good morning, everyone. All right, the power of faith, working through love. It’s fun to end up a study on God’s plan of redemption with this subject because this is really the aim of the whole subject. This is not a first principle that is supposed to be just an academic one where you study the Bible and Bible market and write in all your notes and walk away and wow, I understand the atonement. This is really a subject that is supposed to really, of all the first principles, this is the one that is supposed to really change the way that we live.

2. 0:34

   This was the mechanism that God chose when you go back and look at it. This was His mechanism that He chose and His wisdom to find the best way to take erring human people and turn their lives around so that they would choose to do His will and not our own. This was His choice by His design. And when the creator of all mankind, the one who has been with us from the beginning and understood all the mistakes that we make and knows our nature, when He designs the plan this way, you know, it’s got to be good. And so this is really as far as like the studies that we do in our life.

3. 1:11

   I found this to be one of the most effective things for changing the way that I live, looking at the power of faith in action. So you start looking at, if faith is so powerful, what happened with the law? It’s always good to look at that for a minute at least, so that you can contrast the difference between following work of law versus living by faith in Jesus Christ.

4. 1:34

   So what went wrong with the law and the warning about this? The reason you want to look at it today is because anytime a religious community has been around for a while, or anytime you can go back into your family and say, well, yeah, my dad was a Christadelphian and my grandpa was a Christadelphian.

5. 1:51

   Or anytime you can come to an area where Christadelphians and maybe in Victoria, I don’t know how. How long have the Christadelphians been in Victoria? Anybody know 1888? So you know, you’re looking at what, 130 years or so? So you know, people who the Christian community has been here for a long time. And anytime that happens in an ecclesia, in an ecclesial area where your family’s been in the truth for a long time, the ecclesia’s been in existence for a long time. For some reason, over time, and also as a function of size, our community tends to develop into more of a ritualistic community the longer we’ve been in existence and also the bigger we become.

6. 2:31

   And if you think about that, there’s really two functions. I just watch this happen in terms of size of our meetings. You travel around the world and you look at what’s happened in that area and you go back and you say, all right, the ecclesia has been in existence for a long time.

7. 2:43

   Or other times it’s because it grew really fast and became huge. And while things have changed and so size and time seem to have a big impact on how we function as a group. And our natural tendency over time and over growth and size is that we will do what the Jews did and we will develop Judaism. That is the natural tendency of the human spirit is to as, as size increases and as time goes on, we develop a Judaistic approach.

8. 3:12

   And we don’t want to do that in our community. You know, we don’t want to lapse into that. It’s almost by default, it seems to happen the bigger we get and the longer we’ve been around. You go back and look at what went wrong with the law and you can see like in in the case of Amos, where Amos would sort of like tell us specifically what was going on amongst the Jews that were following the law.

9. 3:29

   They had their law for years now. The size of the community was huge, but it just became a bunch of rituals, procedures that they went through. So that one generation understands it. Their children grow up and they see us going through the procedures and then their children grow up and see them going through the procedures. And over time what happens is the procedures become more important than what they were supposed to teach. And you can see this so clearly with the Jews. So God would say it in Amos 5 and verse 21. I hate, I despise your feast days. You’re not doing them the way you were supposed to. And I do not savor your sacred assemblies. Though you offer me burnt offerings and Your grain offerings, I will not accept them, nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings.

10. 4:14

    Take away from me the noise of your song, for I will not hear the melody of your string instruments. But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Did you offer me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness? 40 years. So House of Israel you also carried sucketh your king, and Chillon your idols, and the star of your gods, which you made for yourselves. Therefore I will send you into captivity beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts. See, this is what happened to this community, size and time. It has now affected them, and they’d lost track of justice and mercy and kindness.

11. 4:55

    Instead, what they did is emphasize the sacred days, the offerings, and so on, and lost track of what it was supposed to mean. See what happens There was there was really nothing wrong with the law itself. That’s why Paul would say that the law was just and holy and good in Romans 7. There’s nothing wrong with the law. The problem when the apostle Paul goes after the law, he’s always dealing with it from the perspective of how the Jews were doing it, not so much the actual intent that God had of giving them the law.

12. 5:26

    The problem is that people tend to take laws and turn them into ritualistic systems and think that the system itself will save them and misunderstand that all of those procedural things that they go through, we’re supposed to help them understand justice and mercy and truth and faith. That’s what it was supposed to do. And instead, they lost track of that and just emphasized the rituals then, as Paul would say in in his letter to the Hebrews, that the rituals don’t affect your conscience, not necessarily now they might to some, but to a large part of the group over time, the rituals don’t affect their conscience. And what we want to be careful of this morning is that when we come to break bread Sunday morning after Sunday morning, some of you have done it for 10 years, 20 years, 40 years. Some people here may have done it for 50 years. You come and you take bread and wine. What can happen over time and over the size of a community as it grows, is that we can turn the rituals of our community into just that, a bunch of rituals that have lost their meaning.

13. 6:32

    We can take a case of where a young person decides and chooses to be baptized and we get all excited on the day of their baptism and they go down into the waters of baptism and they come out of those waters washed pure. And then we sort of lose track of them as to like, well, now they’re safe, right? And we lose track of the fact that, wow, that’s just the beginning of the of the war against sin. And now every day becomes a war against sin. And it isn’t just the act of the baptism. It’s important that as that is, it’s, it’s a whole life. Then it’s going to flow after that. Or we can take the bread and the wine this morning, brethren and sisters, and we could come here and we can do it as a ritualistic procedure, take the bread and the wine like the Jews did in their sacrifices.

14. 7:13

    And just feel like, oh, I feel better now. I took the bread and the wine. I’m right with God and God’s forgiven me all my sins and go away. And this afternoon we can go do things which are totally ungodly and we don’t want to become a Christadelphian like that. And that’s the warning that that we have with the way the Jews used the law. So what can happen then over time is that when you’re going through ritualistic procedures and have your laws, you can develop an attitude of thinking that I can earn my salvation. God wants me to do these things.

15. 7:43

    He wants me to get baptized. He wants me to take the bread and the wine. He wants me to do the Bible rings, Robert Roberts plan and we can check them all off. He wants me to attend Bible class during the week. He wants me to do all these things. And we make our list of all the things and we think that’s what God wants, and we lose track of the fact that, wait a minute though, that isn’t what God wants.

16. 8:05

    What He wants is for those things to then influence our life to where we learn to live like Him and do His will and not our own. That’s the goal that we’re after over here. Not all the procedures. The procedures are designed by God to help us get to that end point. And we don’t want to become a group that emphasizes the procedures and loses track of the end result of where we’re actually headed.

17. 8:31

    You see that a lot of times in laws, what they can do is they just become unintended limits. We can just set up thinking, well, I did my 3 Bible readings, we checked them off, I’m done for the day. And we decide that’s it for me because that’s all that’s really required. And then we lose track of personal study, individual research that we do, you know, and, and, and studies that we do it in our that we should be doing in our Bible and trying to understand so that the laws and the rituals end up becoming limits. They weren’t intended that way, but that’s what happens to a group of people overtime.

18. 9:01

    The laws just become limits. I did what it was required, right? And I didn’t do anything else. And sometimes when you hear those laws, our minds are so good at trying to find ways around them. And that’s, this is what we’ll do. We’ll find a way around the law. And I’ve watched this in school and teaching high school for 36 years.

19. 9:18

    I watched announcements being made over the PA system and the, the principal would assign a new rule for the school. And I just watched the kids as they heard the new rule. And a bunch of them would be sitting there thinking, oh, I know how we can get around that. And that was that was what happened when the, when on the very moment that the rule was announced, their brains were thinking about how we’re going to get around that one now. And this is the way we are as a group. This is what we come from.

20. 9:43

    And God’s tried to change that in us. He’s just, he’s trying to change that concept. He doesn’t want those things to become limits. He wants them to become springboards so that we will live for him every day. 24/7 365 You look at how Jesus and looking at what happened with the law. I find this one fun to look at because it helps us realize how Christ viewed the law. And you know here they are complaining about him going through the green fields and he says to them at that point, have you not read in Matthew 12 at verse 3 what David did when he was hungry?

21. 10:17

    He and those who were with him, how he entered the House of God. He ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat nor those who were with him, but only for the priest. David broke the law. This is what you know, and this is Christ’s use of the law. This is what we guess maybe in the Old Testament. It’s so fun to watch our New Testament expositors because they help us understand what the Old Testament was supposed to mean.

22. 10:45

    Or he says in verse 5, have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priest and the temple profaned the Sabbath? They broke the Sabbath rules on the Sabbath. Those priests did, and yet they’re blameless. How does it hold them accountable for breaking that law? Here they went, and they broke one of the ritual procedures, as David did in this case of eating the showbread, and yet they were held blameless.

23. 11:12

    Yet I say to you that in this place there is one greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. Now you see what Christ is getting at There is the fact that when there were rules under the law, there were times when there were conflicting rules.

24. 11:32

    And what our brains tend to do when we have conflicting rules and procedures is we tend to hold up the one that fits what we’re trying to accomplish at the time. And sometimes what we do then is we mistreat our brethren and sisters because we hold up some rule that we have and fail to realize that really the highest rule was to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That was the highest on those two. The whole law hangs.

25. 12:03

    So when it came time to making a decision between what do we do? Follow the rule about about the showbread, the rule that we have, or when you love your neighbor as yourself and people are starving. What’s more important that we feed starving people or we follow this rule about the showbread? Let’s see.

26. 12:21

    This is what happens when, when you start looking at the rules, you have to rank the rules and find out which ones are more important. And what Christ says at the end there is that if you understood that, then when you went with your animal and you brought your animal to the high priest and you went through this ritualistic procedure of laying your hands on the animal and killing the animal and offering it up, you would have realized that when you go through that procedure and you’re asking for God to extend mercy to you for your mistakes, you should have walked out of that temple after that sacrifice, realizing that the goal of that was to teach me to extend mercy to other people. He desires mercy and not sacrifice. And unfortunately, our natural tendency is to emphasize the procedures and miss the point.

27. 13:14

    It’s sad, but this, this is human nature. This is what we’re dealing with. And we at least have to understand that that that’s where we’re coming from. And you can see that in Christ’s use of the Sabbath law here with the priests and also going through and, and David with the showbread. So here the, you know, don’t bother these disciples for going through and, and getting some grain on the Sabbath. So he says to them in Matthew 23, this is Jesus at the end in Matthew 23 becomes very hard on them. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites in verse 23, or you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law. Well, you see what they did.

28. 13:52

    They took the rules of the law, took the ones that they found were like easy for them to do and actually brought them something in. And they emphasized those little tiny things and put them way up high. And then they took the stuff that was hard to do and they put it way down there and said, well, that stuff doesn’t really matter, does it? The ones that were tough to do and the ones that would cost them something.

29. 14:12

    You neglected justice and mercy and faith. You missed those things in the law. Did you ever notice in the law as you’re reading through it, how it doesn’t really say much about faith, does it? As you’re reading through the law, you ever noticed that about reading the laws? It says, you know, you do this, you do this, you do this, you does them, she’ll live by them, as Paul would say. You know, you do this, you do this. And then what if somebody breaks a law? If you break a law, you deserve this. But where’s mercy?

30. 14:42

    Where’s faith? See, what God was expecting is that when you live under law and you realize how often you fail and how much you need mercy, he expected that we would do the same thing to other people. So when the law said, when you break this rule, that here is what you deserve, and somebody comes to us and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have done that. That what?

31. 15:08

    If you were in their shoes, what would you be hoping for? You’d be hoping that someone would extend mercy. That’s what you’d hope. And then therefore, we should have done the same thing with those people. See, This is why when they brought the woman to Jesus who was caught in adultery, legally by law, she’s caught in adultery. All those people are there.

32. 15:26

    If Christ was just following the legality of the law, he should have supported those who picked up stones and threw a matter. That’s what the law said. You deserve to die. But where was mercy? Where’s the mercy for those people? He understood that there was mercy involved. And Bible characters following the law realized that, that there was plenty of room for mercy because they understood that’s what they had hoped for themselves. This is what it was supposed to do. This is why Joseph, you know, when he takes Mary on and then takes her as a spouse, he’s a just and a good man. He doesn’t put her away and have her stone when she’s pregnant. He doesn’t do that because he understood the concept of mercy. And we don’t want to be one of those law people that just reads the rules and follows the rules and misunderstands the fact that, wow, we were supposed to learn justice and mercy as you were going through that.

33. 16:18

    And don’t just rank the laws that are easy for ourselves to follow. So you watch what the Jews did with the laws. They ended up turning it into a system whereby they could follow these procedures and end up feeling in the end, oh, I’m pretty good. I followed, you know, 9 out of 10 that I was aiming for today.

34. 16:33

    And that’s pretty good. And and that what they would do then is feel that, wow, before God. You see, I did a pretty good day today and I’m, I’m doing better, aren’t we? My life and the truth is progressing. See, I’m doing better as time goes on. And then we would think that we could present our life to God and let wow, I’ve really done something that I sort of deserve eternal life.

35. 16:54

    See, I’ve earned it now. I’ve followed it by law. And, and, and Paul is so hard on that, that philosophy of life. And he just, there’s, there’s no way you can do that. And he acknowledges that. Look at hit the Jews in Romans 10, after going through his exposition of salvation by faith and pointing out to them in Chapter 9 about God’s election that it was God’s choice as to who he picks out of all the 7 billion people on this planet. And God picked Israel for a while now he’s picked Gentiles. He can pick who he wants to save and out of the different communities.

36. 17:29

    That’s God’s right at his prerogative because He is the Potter and we are the clay. But he goes on to show them in Romans 10 that the Jews and all of their energy and all of their effort and all of their sincerity because they were sincere, many of them. And Paul knew this because that’s the way he had been. But in all of that they were ignorant, ignorant of the key concept of God’s righteousness.

37. 17:55

    So he said in Romans 10 that verse one, brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. He wants them saved. He doesn’t want them cut off and branches broken off at this point. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God. They’re really into their religion, but not according to knowledge.

38. 18:14

    For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. They didn’t understand a righteousness that is imputed by faith. Never. That just never came into their way of old thinking at all because they were going through all the procedures. He says in verse four that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

39. 18:42

    See that word end? There isn’t end. It’s not termination like, it’s like that’s the goal. Christ was the aim of the law for everyone who believes. That’s what you should have been seeing. So that when you offered your animal sacrifice or all the procedural things that you went through, you would see in going through those procedures. The idea that I’m, I can never earn my way. I can never keep all this.

40. 19:05

    I’m a Sinner, I need help. I must depend on the Messiah who’s coming and I’ll have faith in him and I’ll look up to him in faith and really want his life and God will forgive me because I will die to sin with him. And that’s what the goal of the law was.

41. 19:19

    That’s what he was after. For in Hebrews 10, Paul says that the law was just a shadow of the good things to come and not the very image. It wasn’t the image. It was just trying to show them in two-dimensional shadows. They they could build a three-dimensional picture of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ.

42. 19:38

    That was the goal of the law. That was its aim and not the very image of those things. And it can never, with these same sacrifices which they offer continually, year by year, make those who approach perfect. It never could. It was never intended to make them perfect. Never intended. That’s not what God had in mind for then would they not have ceased to be offered?

43. 20:01

    If that were the case, if it really had worked that way, then it would have been a point at which you could cease offering those sacrifices. For the worshippers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. If that’s really what was going on in the law. You offered your sacrifice and now there’s atonement made for you, and you’re clean and all of this, then you’d have no more consciousness of sins. Why, on the Day of Atonement were they all brought up again Every year?

44. 20:26

    And then the next year they were all brought up again. And year after year, under the Law, all the sins of the people were put on the goat, on the live goat in this case, and they led away. Why did they keep reminding you about all these sins? Because there never was a forgiveness and a cleansing of the conscience of those sins under the law. By law, it was only designed by faith, so that if people looked through that law and saw Jesus Christ and realize that through their commitment of dying with the animal to sin, that you join Christ and you’re found in him.

45. 20:59

    To those people, they were forgiven in the forbearance of God, but not by going through a ritualistic procedure of law as in Paul. He got that really well in those sacrifices. He says in verse 3, there’s a reminder of sins every year because on the Day of Atonement they were all brought up again. So he says it was not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.

46. 21:23

    They never were supposed to. They were supposed to be a shadow to teach us about the reality. So in Galatians 2, when he’s dealing with this, and really Galatians is fun to look at because you get like a condensed version of Romans in a really short form. So if you don’t have time to go through Romans someday, you just go to Galatians and you can get it in six chapters instead of 12 or so. So he says in Galatians 2, that we who are Jews by nature and not sinners of the Gentiles in verse 15, knowing that a man is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.

47. 21:59

    Even we have believed in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. For by works of the law, no flesh will be justified. Nobody, not even Jesus Christ. And some of us here would think that we, we grew up thinking that, oh, Christ earned his salvation. He kept the law perfectly.

48. 22:21

    He was perfectly obedient to his God. And in the end, what did that law do? They cursed him. Because by works of the law, no flesh was ever designed to be justified. That’s not what God had intended. The, the plan all along was to be saved by faith. Saved by faith. That was God’s plan and it was there from the beginning to the end.

49. 22:43

    So Paul would say it in verse 19 that I, through the law, died to the law, that I might live to God. I’ve been crucified with Christ. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. See, this is how he understood the idea that you die with Christ, with the animal.

50. 22:57

    Paul got it in the end, and he saw it in the animal, in the sacrifice, in baptism in Romans 6. And he sees it as the prospect that every day we pick up our cross daily, and we follow him. I’ve been crucified with Christ. No longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

51. 23:21

    I do not set aside the grace of God. No way. Or if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain. He died so that we could be saved by faith. Or as Paul goes on in chapter 3 when he’s talking about that chapter of faith and what God had accomplished by faith that the law could never do. He mentions that as many in verse 10, as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse, for it is written. Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. You make one mistake under the law. The law curses you and all the curses of the law come upon you for your one mistake.

52. 24:00

    See how God set that up? We would look at that and say, well, that’s not fair. How can all that come on you for one thing? But he wanted people to realize that this isn’t what saves you. All this law is going to do is curse you, and you better look at something beyond this law.

53. 24:15

    You better see beyond the shadows if you’re ever going to be saved so that in verse 11, but that no one is justified by the law. No one in the sight of God is evident for the just shall live by faith. See Paul quotes that three times. He quotes it in Galatians. He quotes it in Romans and he quotes it in Hebrews. If you’re ever wondering whether Paul wrote Hebrews that’s that’s one of those little side issues that just shows you this is Paul.

54. 24:39

    You can see his writings all over that book because he used that passage to show them that this is what God had intended all along, that you get out-of-the-box, you don’t go by law, you don’t just think I’m going to stay in Jerusalem. You leave, you give up, you follow what God says in faith, and He will grant you life. And they had witnessed that.

55. 24:58

    The Jewish community all knew that in the days of Jeremiah and Habakkuk. And now Jesus Christ comes along and he fulfills that. And it’s it’s fullness that God’s just one, as he quotes it in Hebrews 10, that his just one will live by faith. So that’s the point. Yet the law is not a faith. He says you, when you follow laws, you’re not following faith, you’re just doing them.

56. 25:20

    You’re going through the motions so many times you do them and I do them, but you’re really not living by faith. So the law cursed everyone and the law never could grant eternal life to anyone. It was not designed to do that. The law came after the promises. It came after the oath.

57. 25:37

    It was never designed to, to, for anybody to earn their salvation. So the law itself was really extremely limited. If you ever look into it, you’ll see that as you’re going through the procedures of the law, if you ever thought the law was going to save you, we’re in real trouble. Because even in Leviticus and dealing with the sin offering and then the guilt offering, he talks in verse 1 of chapter 4 of Leviticus, the Lord spoke to Moses saying speak to the children of Israel saying if a person sins unintentionally, Oh, you see that word there unintentionally against any of the commandments of the Lord and anything which ought not to be done and does one of them.

58. 26:14

    If the anointed priest sins bringing guilt on the people, then let him offer to the Lord for his sin which he has sinned a young bull without blemish as a sin offering. So under the law, the legalistic system of law, this only covered sins that you did by mistake unintentionally. What about adultery? What about murder?

59. 26:36

    What about premeditated things that we thought about and then that that they were never even covered under the law? You know, on the Day of Atonement, you could pile them all up there, but none of these animals sacrifices. That’s why David realized right away. He said, for what I’ve done, He said, I realized there’s no sacrifice he could offer for that under the law.

60. 26:53

    There was no forgiveness for that by by law. But what God was trying to teach them is that something better is coming. There are going to be better things. This is why when Peter went out preaching and Paul when they would talk to the Jews and they would explain to them like in Acts 13.

61. 27:09

    Therefore in verse 38, let it be known to you brethren, that through this man is preached to you the forgiveness of sins and by him everyone who believes is justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses. This is this is all-encompassing. He forgives all our sins, and the law was never designed to do that because God inherently put in the law all kinds of weaknesses so that nobody should have walked away thinking that they would be saved by law. So instead you have the power of faith in Jesus Christ of what it can do for us.

62. 27:47

    It can change your life and God can righteously forgive your sins. So Paul says in Romans 3 after going through all of those cases of the the Gentiles in chapter 1 and their failure to attain to the righteousness of God and then the Jews and their failure in chapter 2 to attain to the righteousness of God, He says there that that by none of them were able to make it. No, not one.

63. 28:09

    But we know He says in verse 19 of chapter 3 that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law that every mouth may be stopped. This is what the law was supposed to do. Every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God. The law was never supposed to help you become like a better person who can go to God and say, look at how good I am and now you can save me. It was never designed that way.

64. 28:37

    God designed the law so that sin would become exceedingly sinful and that everyone would recognize what a failure we are. And we would all then turn to God and, and, and appeal to Him and his kindness and His mercy by the faith of Jesus Christ that he would turn us into a different person.

65. 28:57

    He would help us overcome our weaknesses and he would forgive us of our mistakes. So Paul would say, therefore, by deeds of the law, here we go again. No flesh will be justified in his sight. He kept trying to get that across to those Judaizers. For by the law is the knowledge of sin.

66. 29:14

    That’s what it was supposed to do, make sin become exceedingly sinful. But now he says the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed. Oh, this is different. This is now a righteousness of God that isn’t by law. Oh no, This one is being witnessed by the law, so that the law was always telling you about it. The law witnessed to it and so did the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe, for there is no difference. This is now something that you can go broad right across the spectrum of mankind to everyone who believes, everyone who believes, not just the Jews, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

67. 29:58

    So being justified then freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, all recognize that you can’t ever do anything to earn this salvation. This is a gift, He calls it. It is the gift of God. God loves you as a Father. He’s chosen you and He offers you a gift. This is coming from him down, not something that we earn from the bottom up.

68. 30:24

    It’s a gift that he gives us by his grace through the redemption that’s in Christ Jesus to whom God set forward as a propitiation. You, you look up that word and I know it has connections to the in the Old Testament in the Septuagint to the mercy seat, but to the to the Gentile community, what they used that word for in their community was that it was a gift that generates peace.

69. 30:47

    It was an an offering you’d make to somebody and you give them a gift so we can have peace between the two of us. And this is coming from God down. This is what He did, He, and it’s by His blood, through faith to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed. He had passed over them, realizing that He could forgive them through the faith that they had in Jesus Christ, not by law, but through faith in Christ, and to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has the faith of Jesus. This is what God can do.

70. 31:25

    When you have the faith of Jesus, trusting and believing in God and everything that He does in our lives, everything that He does in our lives, then God can look at us and He can forgive us because we hate sin like He hates it. We’ve joined his family and joined his team, and so he forgives us by his kindness and His grace.

71. 31:46

    What a gift. So where’s boasting them? Who’s going to get up in front of God and say, well, look at what I’ve done, You know, look at how good I am living now. It’s excluded. And by what law of works? No, but by the law of faith. People who live by faith realize that there’s no way they could ever go to God and say, look at how good I am now. And therefore we conclude, and he says it again, that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. So you could go back like in Romans 4, he’ll go back and look at Abraham, and that’s what he does. He goes back and says, here’s how it started. Here’s what God did with Abraham when he chose a family. He chose one man and then use that man to develop a nation. All right, And what was God doing? He was trying to build on a man who had the faith of Jesus Christ.

72. 32:31

    And so Abraham believed, he believed he had the faith. So that’s all that word believed is. It’s the, it’s like the verb of faith. And it’s the same really in the Greek. It’s just the verb version of it. So Abraham had the faith. He believed in the Lord and God told him that one who will come from your own body will be your heir. He believed that.

73. 32:49

    He believed God would do what was impossible for him to do. This is where faith leads US, brothers and sisters, to believe in the impossible, that God’s going to do something and change our lives in a way that we could never do. So count the stars and so will your descendants be yes, yes, no descendant at this point, nobody in this case.

74. 33:08

    And and he believed he said, oh God, you’re going to do this and constantly believe. Even when he was going to OfferUp Isaac, his son, he still believed that God was going to make his descendants as the stars of heaven. He was convinced. Paul says in Romans, in Hebrews 11, In his own mind, over those three days of walking up there, he was convinced about resurrection from the dead.

75. 33:30

    He knew God would have to resurrect Isaac if Abraham had actually killed him. And God’s teaching him about how he’s going to save the race. God is going to have his son die and he is going to resurrect his son. And people learn that from the experience of Abraham. And so Abraham believed the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness. This was the really the beginning of the Jewish story here.

76. 33:52

    And what does it start on a man who believes God and righteousness is imputed to him. And Paul says, I remember, was he circumcised yet or wasn’t he? Oh no, he wasn’t circumcised. Don’t ever think circumcision is important. Abraham was counted righteous before God, before he was ever circumcised. So as Paul says in Romans 4 then that he believed in hope against all hope.

77. 34:16

    Abraham believed in hope. And that’s just what we’re being asked to do. Now. When you look at somebody asked me yesterday, how in the world did things go wrong? How come in our community we have so much trouble understanding the truth of what God has done in his son? And I really believe that if you go back and look at what happens in our community is that it’s pretty simple. It’s not that we build the false teachings from the Bible, we build them from Christianity.

78. 34:39

    When you look at our problems we have in the atonement, they always come from the fact that somebody is taking their religion from what they have heard in Christianity Today. This is generally what occurs. So when you look at and you go to the churches today and you listen to like what they would say about Jesus on the cross. So you go back and look at the people who are alive at Christ time.

79. 35:01

    What the people did, what the Jews did is they thought he was a blasphemer. They thought he deserved death. They thought he should be punished and have a violent death. And you hear all these kind of concepts coming up about how they felt he should be treated. So they judged Christ as a criminal who deserves to die a judicial violent death. This is what they thought.

80. 35:23

    This is the Jewish community at this time. So they punished Jesus with crucifixion. They thought that they were treating him as God would have punished a terrible Sinner. They thought they were doing God’s work at this point. And what happened then is that Christianity has built their whole philosophy of substitution from the viewpoint of the people who crucified Jesus Christ.

81. 35:46

    That’s sad. That’s really sad. You’re going to take your religion from the people who killed Messiah and look at what God was doing and think that’s what he intended. Oh no, that isn’t what God was doing at all. So they, they built their viewpoint thinking that God put Jesus through the punishment that sinners deserve so that sinners won’t have to be punished. There’s our substitute right there. And they present Jesus as an innocent victim who died only for us in obedience to God.

82. 36:14

    That’s how they see it. You know, he should have never had to go through this and he was just doing it for us and he was totally innocent. And this is how they see Christ today. You know, and look at as of the people there were were crucifying him as a criminal. But when you look at it from the perspective of Abraham and Isaac, of God in Christ going up together, and you see what God was really doing is that what happens is that, you know, God in Christ, they look on the cross as the complete destruction of sin that he put to death.

83. 36:44

    Him who had the power of death, that is the devil, as Paul would say it. God and Christ were committed to showing the world that sin must die. This is what they were doing. And they finished the moral battle of sin that Jesus was fighting every day. He’d started at his baptism when he went down into the waters of baptism and told John that we’ve got to do this to fulfill all righteousness. And so they did this by killing the cause of sin, the devil and the body of Jesus, and they judge the devil and human nature.

84. 37:13

    That’s what God and Christ were doing. They condemned it to death and killed it. This was God’s declaration of righteousness and it showed us how to live. This is what God was after. This was the real meaning of the cross. This is what animal sacrifice was supposed to do. This is what the serpent on the pole in the wilderness was supposed to teach people so that Christ would say, and I, if I am lifted up, will draw all men to myself if they had understood where it was heading. So what’s happened then is that the Christadelphians have for years we have held on to this idea and it’s a critical, fundamental one, that Christ was our representative. He is not our substitute.

85. 37:52

    And for the younger ones, if you’re wondering like, why do we do this? Why do we emphasize it? This is what makes the difference in your life. This is what changes how you live when you see Him as your representative, that He went through this for us on our behalf as an example that we would follow in His steps.

86. 38:09

    Those who believe in substitution, they see that Jesus died in my place is my substitute. That’s what they would teach, that he took my place and He suffered the punishment I deserve. I should have been up there on that cross. That should have been me up there, and I should have had that violent death. And now because Christ has done that, they say what a wonderful act of love.

87. 38:27

    Now I can escape the punishment that I deserve because all my sins, the past, the present, and the future, they’ve all been born away by Jesus Christ. That’s our churches, brother and sisters. That’s not us. You know, if that kind of stuff is in the back of our head somewhere, thinking that this is part of the truth, we’ve got to squeeze it out. This is what causes our problem of understanding the atonement. We’ve got some of these ideas stuck in the corners of our brains and we try to somehow fit them into our understanding of the atonement, and they’re not right. They’re not biblical at all.

88. 39:00

    You look at the words that are used there, substitute punishment. You deserve, you know, and you can escape punishment. I mean, this is not biblical terminology at all. But instead what you find then the truth is that Jesus Christ died to redeem himself first as our representative, as one of us. He was one of our race. He took on the nature of this, the children of Adam, and Jesus wasn’t suffering anybody’s punishment. Oh no.

89. 39:26

    Where do you ever find that in the Bible? Where does it say that our punishment was put on Him? He was. We willingly died to show us that sin must be conquered. This was a positive teaching enforcement. This was not about punishment. God wasn’t trying to kick people over the head all the time and how He wants to punish them. He was trying to teach us what we must do to be saved. What do we do to be saved?

90. 39:51

    We join with Christ and His death to sin and we live a life like Him. This is what God’s been trying to teach people for years, that sin has to be fought, Amalek’s got to be destroyed. God will continue the war with Amalek from generation to generation. And this is what he was trying to illustrate all the way through the Bible. And when you see it that way, as Christ was showing us, how do we get back to the Father?

91. 40:15

    We’ve all fallen from God, How do we get back? And John 12, he says on my, I’m on my way back to the Father, that’s where I’m going. And he knew that the cross was the only way to get there. And so he says, look at that’s how I’m getting there and that’s the way all of you will get there too. Take up your cross daily and follow me. So therefore, what ends up happening is we don’t escape punishment.

92. 40:37

    That isn’t what happens. Instead, what we do now is we follow Christ’s example and we put sin to death. We work on the devil and us our evil desires and we live for God. We conform our will to God’s will because God will forgive our sins, because we agree with Christ’s life and we try to follow him.

93. 40:56

    This now gives God a righteous basis to forgive us. Substitution, doesn’t you know how? How in the world can a righteous God forgive me of all my mistakes because somebody else got punished for them? Where’s the righteousness of God in that? But when God turns us into someone who really hates sin, like he hates sin, and you’ve joined him in the war against Analect and you’ve joined his side and you want to fight it even though we fail, that’s what you really want.

94. 41:26

    Then he can look at that person and see in that person, wow, that’s that’s what I’m all about. This is how my family members live. This is how angels Live Today and say, hey, come on into my family and I’ll forgive you of your mistakes because He can righteously forgive us now for what Christ has done.

95. 41:42

    When we identify with Jesus Christ and are found in him. So faith sees Jesus Christ as our representative. So what God’s redemptive plan dealt with in Jesus Christ and in us, when you look at the whole process is he dealt with the mistakes that we make our personal sins so that now he has a righteous way to forgive our sins.

96. 42:03

    And he did it by taking us through the life of Jesus Christ of a man who fought this nature. They he fought the devil that was in him. Those evil desires, what Paul called those deceitful lusts, He fought them and fought them and hated them and, and it despise those things. And when God motivates us to do that too, because we joined with Christ in a death like his, that’s the basis upon which he forgives our sins. You don’t want to ever leave that out. So you’ll find in the New Testament, if you look at how the New Testament writers use the crucifixion of Christ or the circumcision, that they, they, they understood that all these things were pointing at the same direction. For example, when the apostle Paul writes to the Romans in chapter 8 and verses one to four, look at how he uses this passage and this this concept about God killing sin in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to motivate us to change how we live.

97. 42:57

    He says there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Those who are in Christ Jesus, he explains, are those who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. This really isn’t just about our baptism. This is about actually walking in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.

98. 43:22

    For what the law could not do, and that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and on account of sin, He condemned sin in the flesh. Now look at what Paul says here. He did it so that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in US who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. You see how they link the crucifixion of Christ, the condemnation of sin, with the fact that now we will change how we live.

99. 43:57

    That the righteous requirement of the law, the law had required us to learn to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and now we can actually do that. That might be fulfilled in us because we don’t walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Or as Paul would write to the Corinthians in 2nd Corinthians 5 at verse 17 and explain that therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

100. 44:26

     We’re a new creature. God is recreating us after the image of Christ. The old things have passed away and behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us.

101. 45:02

     We implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God, for He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. And you can see how Paul uses this to show that. Look at how God was in Christ reconciling the world so that he wouldn’t have to impute our trespasses to us and that the goal of this is that we would change how we live so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

102. 45:34

     He’s find us in the Old Testament as well. When you look at how Isaiah uses this in it and a chapter that we read a lot at the at the memorial service Speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ and Isaiah 53 at verse three that he is despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him.

103. 45:54

     He was despised and we did not esteem him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, that we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by His stripes we are healed.

104. 46:16

     All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before it. Shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. And he did all of that, brothers and sisters, for us, for our transgressions bruised, for our iniquities, so that the chastisement of our peace.

105. 46:48

     See, this was the word that’s even used there in the Hebrew. For chastisement is a word that’s used for instruction. This is a teaching mechanism to teach us how to live so that we can have peace with God, and by His stripes we are healed. Or the apostle Paul in referring to this in Hebrews chapter 2 in verses 14 to 18. This one’s out of the RSV.

106. 47:10

     He said that since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is the devil. So he did that in himself, so that in verse 15 he could deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.

107. 47:32

     And for surely it is not with angels that he’s concerned, but with the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.

108. 47:57

     Or as Paul goes on to explain it in Hebrew seven, that Jesus is so much, He is such a better covenant, a surety of a better covenant for us, but he can do so much more for us than the law could ever do. So he says in verse 22, by so much more, Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant.

109. 48:17

     Also, there were many priests because they were prevented by death from continuing. But he, because he continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore, he is able to save those to the uttermost, to those who come to God through him. Since he is always alive, he lives always to make intercession for them. For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens, who does not need daily as those high priests to OfferUp sacrifices, first for his own sins and then for the peoples. For he did this once for all when he offered up himself. See, as Paul points out, Christ doesn’t need to go back and do this again and again.

110. 49:05

     He offered for himself and for us in one sacrifice that was good for all. The real work of condemning sin. And now his condemnation of sin is available to all those who are in Him. See, our world today, when you look at the the reason this is so hard and difficult for us to understand is that this world today runs on the carrot and stick motivation. It starts out in our educational systems. A lot of times as parents, we do this in raising our children. We use this approach to motivate people and really it’s based on works and everybody is really comfortable with it because this is what we’re used to.

111. 49:44

     We start out telling people that if you do good, we will give you this, and if you don’t do good, we will punish you. And that’s basically what you’ve grown up with from a young child, both in your family and also in your educational system and even in our world today and in our careers, in our job market. This is what they use to motivate people. But God really uses a different strategy. What He does is he gives us grace as a gift of love, and then He asks us to respond to His kindness. That’s a different strategy than the people of this world. God’s doing this for a reason because He’s going to give out eternal life to us and in the end, He’s never going to take it back.

112. 50:24

     So he has to find out whether or not we really want to live as members of His family. So he basically invites us in by grace, and then he waits to see how we will respond as far as our life right now and living in His family. So Paul would say in Ephesians 2 at verse 4.

113. 50:43

     But God who is rich in mercy, because of his great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of his grace and His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. See, God has done this for us now. He has made us alive together with Christ. By grace we have been saved.

114. 51:21

     It’s something which we currently have now. And He gives us this gift of grace just as an act of kindness, and he’s waiting to see how are we going to respond. So that in Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 8, Paul would say, for grace, by grace you have been saved through faith and not of yourselves. It is the gift of God and not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

115. 51:55

     See, this is God’s mechanism of saving us. He wants to make sure that none of us ever think we deserved it or we earned it. So He gives us salvation and redemption by his grace. It’s his gift lest anyone should boast. And what he’s hoping in verse 10 there is that we are his workmanship.

116. 52:14

     We’ve been created in Christ Jesus for good works, and he’s hoping that we will respond to his love and His kindness by walking in them. So don’t ever turn back to being justified by law. Don’t ever go back to thinking that we’re somehow going to earn our salvation in Christ Jesus. It isn’t going to happen. Brothers and sisters, God never intended us to weigh up the sins that we commit versus the good things that we do and see whether the good outweighs the bad. That isn’t how God saves his family members. So as Paul would write to the Galatians in chapter 5 at verse one, stand fast therefore, and the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.

117. 52:58

     Indeed, I, Paul, say to you that if you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing. And I testify again to every man who becomes circumcised that he has a debtor to keep the whole law. You have become estranged from Christ, you who attempt to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace. Because as Paul’s made it very clear in chapter 3 that by works of law no flesh will be justified. We will never be able to show God how good we are or explain to Him why we are worth saving.

118. 53:30

     It’s all on the basis of God’s gift, His kindness, and His ability to bring us into His family because He has elected us. What a wonderful privilege that we have. So how do we know if we are living by law or by faith? Which one do we live by? Well, you can look at your own life and figure out do you depend on the rituals to save you?

119. 53:52

     Is that what we’re doing? Are we going through ritualistic procedures and thinking that somehow if we get better and better at them that then we are worth saving? Do we serve one another through love? Is love what motivates us? Is that what our approach to our families and our ecclesia? Is the love of God really in our hearts and minds so that we want to extend this to other people?

120. 54:15

     Do we judge ourselves or do we judge each other? Where do we spend most of our time judging, looking at others and making judgments about them? Or are we judging ourselves and trying to work on ourselves to live more and more like Christ Jesus? And do we stress a ritual more than the principles it’s supposed to teach?

121. 54:33

     That’s really easy to do. You can, we can go around and, and really we can elevate rituals. We can impress everyone with why they’re important and we can stress them and stress them to the point that we totally misunderstand what that ritual was supposed to teach. We don’t want to become like the Jews and do that today, brothers and sisters. And when we do our Bible readings at home, are we doing our Bible readings just so we can check them off a list? You know, are we reading them so that we can look for principles, look for ideas that are there?

122. 55:02

     What is God trying to say to us today about how we can change, how we can find answers to questions that we have about how to live in Christ Jesus? The Bible reading should be something which really change our lives and give us the answers that we need. When we talk to God in prayer and when we go to meeting, do we go to meeting because we have to go or because we want to go? These are just some of the things that you can look through in your own life, brothers and sisters, to try to figure out, are you living by law or are we living by faith? When we live by faith, we want to go to meeting. We want to hear what God has to say, and we want to have opportunities to serve one another in love. That’s where we do it.

123. 55:46

     See, faith has so much more important. Faith has so much more power than law will ever have. It has the power to change how we live. In Hebrews 11 and verse one, Paul said that faith is the substance of things hoped for. It’s the evidence or the conviction of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony. But then in verse 6, he goes on to it. But without faith it is impossible to please him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. And so in Hebrews 11, what you’ll see is a whole list of people the apostle Paul lines up for us. People who lived by faith and God did in their lives by faith what they would never have accomplished by works of law. And then he goes on to show in Hebrews 11 that these people, they didn’t just do some act of faith and then they later on, they sort of like slacked off.

124. 56:42

     These people continued their faith until they died. It was consistent to the end. This was the endurance that Paul would talk about it in Hebrews 10 when he’s trying to stress to these Jews that they had need of endurance. The apostle Paul and when he when he writes to the Philippians and just in in closing today, you know, he he reminds us about the the power of the righteousness of God that is by faith as opposed to following things by law.

125. 57:10

     And he he mentions like in his own life how this changed the way he lives and all the things that he lists in Philippians chapter 3 at the beginning of the chapter, all things that Paul could have take pride in. He said all those things in verse 7 that were gain to me. These I’ve counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish. That I may, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.

126. 57:52

     See, this is the righteousness that believes that God will do in us the impossible, and change our lives into the image of Jesus Christ. So Paul says that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death, that if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

127. 58:16

     And the word he uses there in the Greek is a special word for out resurrection. He he intends to be resurrected for to immortality, not just to be raised from the dead, but raised and given immortality. But see how he can form, how he links this new life that he has to the idea that he knows Christ in verse 10, the power of his resurrection.

128. 58:38

     Because we now walk after the resurrected man and that God will resurrect his children and the fellowship of his sufferings. He understands that we will also share the sufferings of Christ. That God is putting us through the same chastening and discipline program that He did his own Son, so that we will learn obedience by the things that we suffer and being conformed to his death, His death to sin. That’s Paul’s goal, to be with Christ and to share with him, to be crucified with Christ and join him in his death to sin. See, Paul had experienced the power of faith. And this is the faith that motivated him to join Jesus Christ and to give his life to Christ for the rest of his life. So as we leave leave this weekend, let’s give thanks to God for his kindness, his gift of kindness, that it was all about God, who as a loving Father wants us to join his family.

129. 59:34

     And he’s gone through all this effort to change our lives and redeem us from sin. So let’s respond to God’s gift by walking with Him. He wants a response from us. This is how he does it. He gives us his gift. And then he says, please respond. Please do something different and walk with me.

130. 59:51

     That’s what he’s after. Let’s serve in the ecclesia, in our in our family, serve in love. This is the aim of the law that the that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in US who walk according to the Spirit. And so we treat people with love and kindness and mercy. And let’s read our Bibles daily so that we can join Christ in his victory over sin.

131. 1:00:14

     This is how we find out about it. This is how we get reminded about it. We talk to God in prayer and we listen to Him in our Bible readings. And attend meetings so that we can help each other. You can’t do this. You can’t live this life when you stay away from everybody.

132. 1:00:28

     It’s not a life of isolation. This is a life where we serve one another and love. We practice to join the angels who serve in God’s family and work together every day. We have to be coming here to in order to fulfill this and be involved with people. And let’s witness to our friends about God’s power to change our lives and what God has done for us. We’re, we’re not becoming better people because of my efforts. Let’s remind them when they talk to us about our kids and about our family and about things that we do, that it’s all about what God has done in our life because he wants us to make a choice. He wants us to choose.

133. 1:01:03

     Are we going to go after the will of the flesh and just satisfy our desires and have some fun for a while? Or are we going to live as God’s children? That’s what he’s after. And Christ has invited us to join his family forever. Brothers and sisters and young people, don’t miss out and thanks be to God for His indescribable gift.