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“The Glory of the Cross” ConclusionTranscript of message from TV Broadcast 895 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text -- Brother Phil Enlow: My only hope is the meaning of that cross. He took my sins upon Him. When He went there, He died because I had sinned and I was guilty before a holy God. That’s all I need to know. He did it, not because…not to sort of help me, give me leg up so that I could get a hold of that tree and pull myself up to salvation! No! He did it because I was helpless! Not only was I helpless, I was blind to my helplessness. Oh, He opened my eyes and He showed me what He did through His Son for me. That’s the hope that just drove Paul. I glory in the cross! You can have all that stuff that we used to do in the Jew’s religion. Yeah, there was a point to some of it at the time for those who had their hearts toward God, who were doing it in faith. Yes, it had a meaning at one time! But all of that is culminated in Christ. We used to sacrifice lambs for sin. But the blood of animals could never ever take away sin! God had a lamb that He sent to be the one sacrifice for sins forever. That’s the one I glory in. That’s the one I need. That’s the one I need to put my hope and my trust in. ( congregational amens ). Oh Praise God! You know, you think about the condition…you can see a pretty good illustration of it, I think in John chapter 8. Jesus was…well I was gonna say, He was speaking to, I guess speaking with is more of a way to put it. There were a crowd of Jews. I think this was in the temple area. But in any case, He would say something and they would ask Him a question…anyway there was a lot of give and take going on with some of the Jews and He was trying to express the message that His Father had given Him and who He was and how much they needed to be in a position to hear what He had to say. And so in verse 30, the culmination of this particular conversation at this point, at least, it says this, “Even as he spoke, many put their faith in him.” (NIV). Now if you put a period at that point in this story, it sounds great! It wasn’t just one or two, this was many…they put their faith in Him…come forward, sign on the dotted line, we welcome you in, brother, sister. But oh, that’s not the end of the story here. Listen to where it goes here. It says, “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said…” Now this was the ones…now He’s not talking to the crowd. Now He’s talking to the ones who said, I believe in You. “…If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.” Right there there’s an implication that they might not have been real. But if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What they needed was a faith that was so fixed in Him that they would be willing to listen to everything that He said, take it to heart and that truth would then be the means of their being set free. This was not a salvation thing so much as it was a pathway to salvation. This was a matter of receiving Him, why? Because He was God’s messenger! He had the words of God. If you don’t receive the One that God sent, how can you have God’s message? And that was…this is really saying the same thing that John said in chapter 1. As many as received Him…well they had to receive Him as God’s messenger, the One who had the words that they needed. Once they received Him, then they had access to the message, then through the message, they had access to salvation. That’s what he’s saying here, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Well, they didn’t react too well to that, did they? They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendents and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” You can see this religious pride begin to kick in. You know we’ve all got that, don’t we, in one way or another? We’ve got a sense of self-righteousness, self-goodness, something…some kind of human pride in what we are or what we think we are, and God’s Word has to penetrate that and destroy that so that we can have what is real. He doesn’t grind us into the ground so He can grind us in the ground and leave us there. Thank God! But oh, this religious pride…it was like wait a minute now, I liked what you were saying up to this point but…this isn’t quite right here. Now what do you mean? We’re Abraham’s descendents! Surely that counts for something. It certainly did in their minds. Everybody’s got something in their life that they think that counts, that somehow gives them some sort of advantage when it comes to God. Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” All their religious heritage meant nothing as long as they were living as men in this world, unredeemed by the power of God, everybody is here. This goes back to the same issue that Paul had to come to a knowledge of, the fact that he was a sinner and a helpless sinner. The very best that he could do was way short of anything that would be acceptable to God. No matter what he did. And if there was anybody in the history of the world who could have attained to God’s favor by what he did, it surely would have been Saul. He testifies that according to the Jews religion I was blameless…the righteousness of the law I was blameless. No one could point to me and say you didn’t keep this law, you didn’t do this, look at you. Outwardly he did everything he was supposed to do. But the knowledge of what he really was on the inside. You could do everything on the outside, it doesn’t change what’s in here. Only God can change this. Only God can set this free. So these people had no clue. They began to like what He said, maybe accept that He was a prophet, or had something that could contribute to their life, but when he started putting the finger on their need, whoa, they start back-pedaling real quick. Oh God, help us not to back-pedal when light comes. It’s God’s mercy. It’s God’s love. So Jesus begins to put the finger and say anyone who sins is a slave to sin. That’s the kind of slavery I’m talking about. It’s just not being a slave to some man somewhere. This is the kind of slavery that will destroy you in the end, because in here self rules and out of that flows everything that is wrong. You can paper it over and cover it up, but it’s still there. “Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you are Abraham’s descendants.” So now Jesus acknowledges, yes, you actually were descended from Abraham. If we got your genealogy out, we could look back and trace your parents, and their parents, and their parents and it would go right back to Abraham. But listen to this. Let’s go on. It says, “I know you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.” So now Jesus is getting to their true ancestry. Let’s find out who their real father is. So immediately they said, “Abraham is our father.” See they were thinking in terms of their physical descent, weren’t they? Abraham is our father. Jesus said, “If you were Abraham’s children…then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.” Now this could go off in another subject and I’m not interested in doing that. But look at what Jesus is saying. Your trust, your hope is in something that is natural. You’re depending on the fact…you’re glorying in the fact that you were descended physically from Abraham. You think that gives you an inside track with God. It doesn’t. ‘Cause God’s not interested in who your physical parents are, He’s interested in who your spiritual father is and you’ve got a problem there. If you were Abraham’s children…He’s saying pretty plainly, you’re not Abraham’s children. If you were Abraham’s children, you’d do what he did. It says, “We are not illegitimate children, they protested. The only Father we have is God himself.” Now they’re gonna go all the way to the throne and claim God is their father. “Jesus said to them, If God were your Father, you would love me…” See you’re talking about a spiritual relationship here. Who is your father spiritually? “…For I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own, but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say.” You want to know why the world’s in the condition it’s in? So many are unable--unable to hear, because they’ve been fathered by something else. “…You are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning….” I’ll tell you, people glory in healings and miracles, and if somebody’s raised from the dead, my God, the millennium has come, almost. This is the miracle right here. Salvation is the greatest miracle that is possible to occur. Even the devil can perform some of that stuff. You’re just fixing a broken body for a while, or maybe even one that’s actually stopped breathing. Suppose God does raise somebody from the dead, they are gonna die again. What’s that? But oh, for us to come to a place where we are set free from the captivity to sin that has beset the human race and we come back into relationship with our creator, and we’re given the hope of eternal life! Oh my God, that’s worth glorying in! ( congregational amens ). There’s no religious ritual, there’s no thing we can do, in the sense of performing some service to God to earn our way, there’s nothing we can do except to cling to the hope that God has set before us…that He took our sins and placed them on His Son and punished Him in our place! Oh Praise God! I was just thinking as we sang, it just kind of struck me in a fresh way…we sang, “Love so amazing, love so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.” I mean think about the implications of what really happened there. It’s so… it’s taught and believed so many times so cheaply. My God, it just gets under my skin when I hear all this emphasis on…God wants to bless you, God wants to make your life sweet and pretty, and make you prosperous and all that stuff. Oh God, what a self-centered flesh-driven message that is. Yes God can bless! Yes He can help us with the issues of life. Thank God He does, but oh that’s not what it’s about. It’s about our lives belonging to Him! ( congregational amens ). We don’t mind Him giving up Heaven. We don’t mind Him giving up all…everything to open Heaven’s door for us, but oh, we want to reserve the right to live our own lives. Oh God, think about what the cross meant. What did it mean to Him? Did He give sort of most of it, and reserve a little bit? No! He gave everything to open Heaven’s door for us. Praise God! I’ll tell you, somebody who did that, He’s not going to do a half-hearted job of taking us all the way home. That’s what Paul says in Romans chapter 8. “He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (KJV). You think anything’s gonna be able to separate us from the love of God when we put our faith in Him, we’ve lifted up the cross as the center of our hope and our affection? Oh thank God for the cross this morning, because there God did for me and for you what we could not do for ourselves. ( congregational amens ). And all He asks of us is that we get down off our high horse and humble ourselves and surrender our lives. Has He not earned them? Has He not won them rightfully? Does He not have the rightful claim to everything that we have and are? Or will He take that and abuse it? No! Look at the love that drove Him there. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t anything of the kind! It was the love of God poured out through what He did on the cross. Can we not trust such love? Can we not just say thank you Lord, my life is yours? How dare I, in the face of the knowledge of what you did for me at the cross, how dare I live my own life! Oh God, I know there’s stuff wrong with me and I know you’re still working on me, but my fundamental direction in life has got to be, oh God, help me. God, I am yours, I’m not my own, I’m bought with a price! That price is the blood of the Son of God. Oh, how dare I go on as I am? But just bow the knee and say thank you Lord, I surrender. We started the service “I Surrender All.” That’s exactly what it costs, because there’s nothing we can do so far as our salvation is concerned, but He’s done everything I need. So my place is to surrender to that, and say Lord, I put my entire trust in what you did for me there on that cross, that day. It was enough. Do you begin to get a little sense of why Paul gloried in that and why he was so angry when people would try to introduce all this other garbage into the gospel? The gospel is simple. Christ died for my sins. If I’m willing to turn from my sin and put my hope and trust in him, my life is no longer my own, but it’s His to change, to fix, to do whatever is needed to get me ready to live with Him forever. He has opened the door. I didn’t even know the door was there, but He opened my eyes to what life was all about, and He showed me His Son. He showed me why His Son had to die. And He showed me it just wasn’t some general oh, He died for our sins. He died for me--He died for me. If that reality has never gripped your soul, it needs to…‘cause the moment it does and you turn your heart to Him and say oh God, I surrender. I put my hope in you. You are my Lord, you’re my hope. He will come into your life. He will give you the hope that He has promised. He will give you the life that He has promised. Praise God! You know we were talking before the service, the Gospel is not a complicated thing. It doesn’t take some emotional thing. It doesn’t take necessarily an experience like Paul had. But the fundamentals are the same. We’ve got to know who He is. We’ve got to know why He died, and we’ve got to face the fact that He died because of us, that we are responsible, our sins were there. But then we can look beyond that to see the hope of the fact that our sins were put away by Him! They are…you know we sing the song sometime…“my sins are gone!” That’s the glorious hope that when we do put our trust in Him, He puts our sins away and remembers them no more against us forever. ( congregational amens ). It’s by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. That’s the hope of the cross this morning! Praise God! What are you glorying in? What’s got your life…your attention and your life lifted back to the cross, because that’s our hope today? Oh praise God, my life belongs to Him. It’s in His hands, and He’s gonna…and it’s in a safe place, and He’s gonna finish what He started. Praise God, that’ll lift you out of anything, if you really get to see what the cross means. Oh, it isn’t just this sense of our unworthiness but it’s a sense of His love! ( congregational amens ). His grace that is so greater than the greatest mountain of sins you could ever imagine in your life. His grace is greater than that. His power to save you is greater than your sin could ever be. Praise God! I don’t know what else to say. Perhaps there’s someone who can…if the Lord will give something else to…but you could right where your sitting if God is touching your heart…you know the question was posed, is God calling you? This is how He calls. It doesn’t require some magic outward thing necessarily, it just requires God talking to you, personally, one-on-one in your heart, and convicting you, and saying this is My time for you. You put your faith in Me, you surrender your life to Me and I will save you for time and eternity. That’s a transaction that can happen right in your heart, right where you’re at right now. If God is calling you, open your heart--open your heart and give it to Him because it belongs to Him. He’s purchased it…at the price of the blood of the Son of God. Praise God! -- Brother Ron Peters: Praise God! I appreciate always these services when we talk about Christ…like that hymn, “I Love To Tell The Story.” I do, I love it, because it gives such hope, it gives such release in our spirit. I think we’re gonna have a word of prayer here, but before we do…before Chip or before Phil got up, I thought of this scripture over in John 4 where Jesus was talking to the woman at the well. And in verse 10, in chapter 4, He says, “If you knew the gift of God…” (NIV). And I don’t know it just hit me like somebody punching me right in the chest. He didn’t say if you knew what the gift of God was. He said if you knew the gift of God. It was like God said, Christ is my gift. Christ was a gift to a dying, lost world that had no other hope to ever spend eternity with God, except through Him. ( congregational amens ). And it’s like Phil brought out, you know the blood of animals they can’t take care of this. It took God Himself coming down to this earth in human flesh and dying for us because He is so powerful, He can do that. He is so…He is God! I mean, He created everything and it took Him to come back down and redeem it--redeem His creation, and He did that for us willingly. He didn’t have to. I mean He’s God. You know I watched…Felipe came over to the house Thursday night and we watched “The Canvas.” I know a lot of you saw it. We didn’t get a chance to get here and see it, but Andy Stanley was talking about God…he was talking about the cross. And that cross…what Christ did on the cross was an exclamation point to His creation. That was the…I mean that was, that was…who else would come down and die for somebody? I mean die for somebody period, but die for somebody that absolutely is in rebellion against Him, that hates Him. Who would die for somebody like that? God would…because that’s love and God is here this morning because He is reaching out in love to somebody. God is calling somebody. I don’t know who you are. It could be a lot of who-you-ares, but God is calling us to Himself and like the song we just sang said, if you’ll open up your heart and yield to the Holy Spirit, you’ll have that everlasting joy. ( congregational amens ). It is here this morning--it is here this morning, beloved. |
