[0:00] Good evening. We're going to be looking at the book of 1 John again this evening. We're getting a good dose today of the incarnation and substitutionary work and mediatory work of Jesus Christ on our behalf.
[0:24] And maybe that's a fitting way for us to finish out the year. So I'm going to pray that God would be with us, and then we'll get started.
[0:36] Lord, we come to you so thankful that you've given us the opportunity to stand in your presence, that we can come before you with our praise and our adoration.
[0:49] And we know that it's not in our merit or in our strength or in our deserving, but in your incredible mercy. And we're thankful for that. I pray that you would be with us.
[1:02] We want to be transformed by your word. We want to leave your worship and this day of praising you and hearing from you transformed, changed, be more like our Savior.
[1:17] I pray that you would do that in your name. Amen. Amen. Well, a number of months ago, I preached on 1 John 1, the first four verses.
[1:27] So I want to review with you just briefly what we looked at there and then go on to the passage for this evening, which will be verse 5 of chapter 1 through verse 2 of chapter 2 of 1 John.
[1:41] So, the first four verses of John 1, we saw that John is writing to deal with a great and sober reality that confronts mankind, and that's the reality of alienation from God.
[1:56] And you see that in verse 3. It's latent in verse 3 of 1 John 1. And we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.
[2:14] And the example I gave you at that time was the example of how you could imagine if you had become a rebel, along with others, against your proper sovereign. And as a result, were alienated from Him, had no access to Him under His wrath.
[2:30] And then imagine that He made terms of peace at His own cost with you and brought you back into fellowship with Him. And you could be with Him and you could know His presence and rejoice in relationship with Him.
[2:46] And then imagine that He sent you out as a herald, as an ambassador to your fellow rebels to proclaim. These are the same terms of peace that I'm going to give to these others as well.
[2:58] And I say all that to say that a person wouldn't come saying, we're coming to you so that you can have fellowship with us and with God, unless that fellowship was lacking, unless that fellowship was broken.
[3:11] And so that's the reality that we're confronted with. And then the second thing we saw in 1 John 1, 1-4, is that the Incarnation was necessary for us to be reconciled to God.
[3:25] And John makes an emphasis of Jesus incarnate there in verse 1. Verse 2, That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which you have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched, this we have proclaimed concerning the word of life, the life appeared, we have seen it and testified it.
[3:45] And so John's saying that it was necessary that Jesus come incarnate in order to work redemption. He couldn't just be off in the heavens.
[3:56] It was necessary for Him to participate with us in our humanity and be made like His brothers in every way so that He could stand in our place, so that He could obey in our place, and offer sacrifice in our place.
[4:09] So that's the substance of the first four verses of John 1. As I was going through that this week, preparing to preach, I was reminded of 2 Corinthians 5.
[4:22] You could turn there, 2 Corinthians 5, verses 17-21, and you'll see how parallel this is. It serves as a reminder that this is the position that the apostles were speaking from, and then it's ours as well as people who have known Jesus.
[4:47] This is 2 Corinthians 5, verses 17-21. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come. All this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.
[5:08] And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are, therefore, Christ's ambassadors. As though God were making His appeal to us, we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.
[5:18] So there's that ambassadorial role. And then note this exchange in verse 21. God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.
[5:33] It was necessary that Jesus come and stand in our place. So He came, and He was a man like us, and He lived like us, except that He was perfect, and He died in our place.
[5:45] So that was what we talked about in the first four verses of 1 John. And now we're going to go on, beginning in verse 5 of 1 John, and then going on to verse 2 of chapter 2.
[5:57] This is the message that we have heard from Him and declare to you, God is light.
[6:09] In Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him, yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son purifies us from all sin.
[6:27] If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
[6:38] If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar, and His word has no place in our lives. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
[6:55] He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins, but also for the sins of the whole world. So I have three points that I want to draw to our attention, three things that I want us to see this evening.
[7:09] The first is the dilemma of God's righteousness and our sinfulness as regards our ability to have fellowship with God. And then I want us to see Jesus as our propitiation and advocate before the Father.
[7:24] And then I want us to talk about this phrase, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. So those are the three topics we'll be addressing this evening. So in verse 5, John is now getting into the meat, the substance of his epistle.
[7:41] And I'd like us to start out just by going verse by verse through what I read and see what's the logic, what's the flow of John's argument here.
[7:54] So in verse 5, this is the message we have heard from him and declared to you, God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. So that's the statement of what God's like.
[8:06] He's pure. He's sinless. He is without any sort of corruption or wrongness in him. And I'm thinking that as much as that is a challenge to us because we're sinners, we wouldn't want a different kind of God.
[8:23] We wouldn't want a God who was really just fine with evil or was willing to overlook evil. You know, if you were playing in a sport, if you were a basketball player or playing in a football game or a soccer match and you had a referee who sometimes he called foul, sometimes he didn't.
[8:41] He was capricious. Even if repeatedly the calls went in your favor, you probably would begin to lose respect for that referee.
[8:52] You would feel like it wasn't, you couldn't even feel pleased in your success in the game because you would feel like, well, it's, I mean, it was handed to me because it was uneven. It was unfair. It wasn't equitable.
[9:05] If it was, if the calls were going against you, of course, you would begin to grumble and complain because we wouldn't want a referee who was capricious and uneven, who sometimes overlooked something, other times didn't overlook something.
[9:25] We would feel like it ruined the game. God is the judge of the universe. Can you imagine a universe ruled by a God who is capricious, who sometimes overlooked sin, sometimes punished sin?
[9:45] It would be an unimaginably horrible universe to live in. It would be unsustainable. So, all that to say, God is holy and that holiness is good even when it pinches us.
[10:01] It's good. Moving on to verse 6, John is setting up a dilemma here. If we claim to have fellowship with him, with God, and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.
[10:16] So, that's the dilemma. God's holy. One of the issues that arises from that is that we can't claim to have fellowship with him and yet be sinners.
[10:28] And, of course, we know that that's the conundrum in which we live. Then in verse 7, if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus' son purifies us from all sin.
[10:44] And so there we have some relief from the tension. Well, there are two things. Obviously, we want to walk in the light so that we don't have broken fellowship with God. And then, we have this first pointing toward something else, something other than just God's good.
[11:02] If you want to have fellowship with him, you need to be good too. We have John's first indication of something that helps move us in that direction. We have that the blood of Jesus' son purifies us from all sin.
[11:20] and this is one of John's ways as he writes as he moves forward and then he reaches backward and he moves forward and reaches backward. So we'll see that as we go through the passage.
[11:31] So this is one of these examples where John's reached forward now to something new and then he's going to reach back then in verse 7.
[11:41] I'm sorry, in verse 8, if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So now we've pulled back toward this problem.
[11:54] The reality is that we can't claim to be without sin. And then reaching forward again in verse 9, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
[12:08] And then reaching backward again, if we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. So, John's setting up, he's getting ready to roll out to us his solution to this dilemma, but he's setting it up, he's drawing it to our attention, he's making it very explicit, this tension, this difficulty that exists between a holy God and sinners.
[12:38] sinners. And the tension exists not just for people who haven't heard of God or who have never known any of God's laws, who have never had any interest in obeying God, the tension exists with us too.
[12:56] Because we too are sinners, we repent of our sin, and yet the next day, the next hour, the next minute, we sin. And so there's this tension here, there's this unavoidable dilemma that sits upon all mankind.
[13:18] And so John, he's wanting us to feel the weight of that difficulty. You know, if you were given a difficult problem, say a difficult math problem, or a logistical challenge to solve, or a logical puzzle to figure out, it might be difficult, it might be challenging, and you'd think it through, and you'd use your mind, you'd come up with a solution, you'd devise this or that strategy to solve the problem.
[13:45] And it might be challenging. You say, okay, this is a difficult challenge in front of me, but I figured it out. What John's trying to, what John is setting before us here is a challenge so involved, so tangled, so without solution within this world, within our ability, that it becomes evident to us that the only way that we can return to fellowship with God is through his, through God's intervention, through something that comes from outside this world to work to redeem us.
[14:25] So John's amplifying the dilemma that all mankind faces in order to bring forward the solution. Now as I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about the problem of sin, I wondered whether we feel the weight of our sin in our daily experience.
[14:45] Are we keenly enough aware of it? Am I? Do I find myself really deeply weighed down by my sin?
[14:56] Does it sit on my conscience like a nightmare? Or am I too flippant about it? Do I too easily, you know, I'm a sinner, we're all sinners. Do I feel the weight of my sin?
[15:07] I'm thinking of what Paul said in Romans 7 verses 21 to 24. Paul says, so I find this law at work.
[15:24] When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. From my inner being I delight in God's law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.
[15:40] What a wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Of course, Paul goes on to give the solution as will John, but I want to draw to our attention.
[15:52] Do we feel that tension in our lives? Do we feel that inner turmoil that Paul's expressing over our sin? Or are we too glib about it?
[16:05] I think, I know in my own life, in my own heart, all too often, I write it off, it's just life in a fallen world, do I feel the burden of my sin?
[16:18] We won't understand the tremendous magnanimity of God in sending Jesus until we feel the burden of our sin. I wonder if we see the ugliness of sin, if we see the ugliness of our sin, not sin just in the generic sense, but the ugliness of our own sin when we turn away from God's ways, when we live in ways that are different than what God has called us to.
[16:41] And I want to draw your attention to Isaiah 1 in this regard. Isaiah is about to upbraid the people, he's going to confront them with their sin, their rebellion against God.
[16:59] I'll start, I think, in verse 4 once I find it. I'll start in verse 4 just because this addresses the people of Israel and hear how he speaks of them.
[17:28] And this could be an apt description of all mankind. And then in verses 5 and 6, note how sin is ugly, how sin disfigures. Ah, sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption.
[17:46] They have forsaken the Lord, they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him. Now, Israel was in a peculiar state of rebelling against God in those days, but is that not a nap description of me when I disobey God?
[18:02] when I know what his righteous law requires? When I do something else? Then I stand right where they stand. Then, listen to what sin does to those who sin.
[18:19] why should you be beaten anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? Your whole head is injured, your whole heart afflicted. From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness, only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with oil.
[18:37] You can imagine seeing someone just covered with festering sores from the sole of their foot to the top of their head and there's been no treatment for it.
[18:48] There's been nothing to bring healing. There's infection and unsoundness and uncleanness and Isaiah is telling the people of Israel sin is ugly.
[19:00] Do I see my sin that way? Do I take it as seriously as I should? The Bible gives other images for what sin is like. Sin is like a dog going back to its vomit.
[19:12] Sin is like the rags of uncleanness. Sin is like a nest of snakes writhing together. It's hideous.
[19:24] Do I see it that way? Do I feel the weight of my sin? And then one other way that the Bible talks about sin, sin is ridiculous.
[19:36] Sin is insane. Sin is futile. And I wonder do I see the futility of my sin when I'm in the midst of it? Do I recognize it for being as absurd as it is?
[19:48] You can turn to Jeremiah 8 and verse 4. You can find a lot of descriptions like this at the beginning of Jeremiah. Jeremiah often will challenge the people with what you're doing, this kind of sin, it's absurd, it doesn't make any sense.
[20:06] He tells them, I brought you into this land, I gave you good laws that were helpful, and what did you do? You ran off after people who make you pass your children through the fire. It doesn't make any sense.
[20:18] He's saying sin is insane. You see that in chapter 8 verse 4 of Jeremiah. Say to them, this is what the Lord says, when men fall down, do they not get up? When a man turns away, does he not return?
[20:33] You can imagine, suppose you saw someone walking along and they stumbled over something and fell, and you would expect them, you know, they'd get back up and brush their clothes off, maybe look around to see if anyone saw them fall, and go on their way.
[20:50] But Jeremiah says, sin isn't like that. Sin is like this person fell down, they just flop around down the ground. Sin is like, when a man turns away, does he not return?
[21:04] Can you imagine seeing someone, they're walking somewhere along a path, they're walking along the Appalachian Trail, and maybe there's a dense wood over here, and a precipice over here, and they're walking along, and they're disturbed with something, they just walk off until they run into a tree.
[21:18] They see, they see, I'm going off the path, and they just, they take no corrective measure, they don't steer back onto the road, they just, you know, they start heading toward the cliff, and they see, oh, there's a cliff there, and they just, right over.
[21:30] Can you imagine, you'd say this is ridiculous. Can you imagine if you're driving in your car, and there are those grooves cut into the yellow lines in the middle, and you start, you're hitting these things, and you think, oh, I'm veering off the road into the oncoming traffic.
[21:46] What would you do? You'd take corrective, but no, sin is like just continue to veer. It's insane. I'm bringing those things to your attention to say, sin is ugly.
[22:02] Sin is inane. Sin is a high-handed rebellion against our God. And John is wanting us to see, before he brings forth God's great solution to the problem of sin and the breaking of fellowship that resulted from our sin, John's wanting to draw to our attention, this is the state of mankind.
[22:30] It's my state, and it's yours. So, you can imagine, if we were aware of our sin, not just the theological construct that sin exists, not just the fact that, yes, all mankind are sinners, but adequately and thoroughly aware of our own sin.
[22:55] Can you imagine if you saw the screen behind me starting to come down, and you thought, oh, I wonder, maybe you have a PowerPoint presentation or something, I don't know, and the projector came on and video began to play, and you thought, oh, I recognize that place, why, that's me there.
[23:14] And you saw the beginning with Monday morning, last Monday morning, we were going to get a review of every wrong thing that you did.
[23:27] from Monday morning till the moment that you came into church today. I can imagine, I can imagine thinking something like running my mind over the past week, did I do anything really terribly and egregiously bad, or is it possible that I'll get out of here just with everyone kind of cringing and thinking, oh, we know now for sure he's a sinner like the rest of us.
[24:02] Or was there anything that I really, like, I'm looking for the exit, can I get out of here without anyone seeing me? So that would be difficult, it would be painful, none of us, I think, could endure that.
[24:15] Can you imagine then if, in addition to just your wrong behavior, in some way was made manifest on the screen, every corrupt thought of your mind, every wrong imagination, every illicit desire that passed through your mind, it would be more than any of us could bear.
[24:45] That's what our sin is like. That's what our sin is. And that's the problem that we're confronted with. And there's no way, there's no way out for us.
[24:56] And we need to feel the weight of it. We need to know the weight of it. And I find my own heart convicted as I was working through this second half of 1 John 1.
[25:10] Do I take this reality of sin, this dilemma of sin, adequately, seriously? Or have I become so accustomed to, you know, we're sinners, Christ came to die in our place, I'm thankful for that.
[25:23] And I don't take it seriously enough. Well, that's the reality of sin. And then John goes on, I'm going to read again the first two verses of 1 John 2.
[25:42] These are such gracious and life-giving words.
[25:53] My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin, but if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
[26:05] He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins, but also for the sins of the whole world. I want us to note there at the beginning of the first part of verse 1, it's a reality that I think we can all associate with, all of us who know God.
[26:25] We desire not to sin. Right? When you see your sin, oh, it's ugly, I want to turn away from it, and you know the reality of sin, the fact that we do sin, we sin in ways of which we're aware, we sin in ways of which we're not aware, we sin sometimes in conscience, sometimes we sin against our consciences knowing that what we've done is wrong.
[26:57] But then, look in the second part of verse 1, where John brings forth the solution. if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.
[27:14] He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins, but for the sins of the world. And I want you to notice then first that we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense. Jesus is our advocate.
[27:27] That's what we need. If we were to look back in Zechariah 3, we would see a sort of courtroom scene. This is the first several verses of Zechariah 3.
[27:50] Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, the Lord rebuke you Satan, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you.
[28:02] Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire? Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, take off his filthy clothes.
[28:14] Then he said to Joshua, see, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you. Then I said, put a clean turbot on his head. So they put a clean turbot on his head and clothed him while the angel of the Lord stood by.
[28:26] That's an Old courtroom kind of scene. In this case, the priest at that time of Israel, he stands there representing the people and he's guilty as charged.
[28:40] He's filthy. He's dirty. And that's where we stand as sinners before God. And we have this great advocate with the Father.
[28:53] We have Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Jesus Christ who stood in our place and who can say to the Father in the face of our sin, I died for him.
[29:08] I paid the penalty for that sin. Not just the abstract idea of sin. He bore my sin and your sin so that when we stand before the Almighty Judge of good deeds and bad, we can stand declared righteous because our advocate paid in our place.
[29:30] We see that in Isaiah 53 verse 6, All we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
[29:43] So he stands before the Father and he says, I paid the full penalty for that sin. Without that advocate, we have no recourse.
[29:55] Without that advocate, we have no root out of the conundrum that John was setting up for us in his first chapter, because we're sinners, and we can't have fellowship with a pure God unless we're made pure.
[30:11] We could look at Romans 8, verses 3 and 4, just to see a New Testament statement of the same thing. This is Romans 8, verses 3 and 4.
[30:23] Romans 8, verses 3 and 4. Romans 8, verses 3 and 4. For what the law was powerless to do and that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering, and so he condemned sin and sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the sinful nature, but according to the spirit.
[30:49] In other words, the righteousness that we need was achieved by this advocate who stands in our place and pleads, our righteousness. And then John describes Jesus as a propitiation.
[31:06] The word for propitiation in Greek is an uncommon word. It's used three times in the New Testament, twice by John and once in the book of Romans.
[31:19] It's used in the Septuagint numerous times. It's the Greek Old Testament to describe an atoning sacrifice. The idea is that a propitiation turns away just wrath.
[31:40] It appeases just wrath. Take a look at Hebrews 10 with me for a moment. Hebrews 10 verses 11 and 12.
[31:52] As I read this, consider the only adequate propitiation, the only thing that can really turn away the wrath of God is the sacrifice brought by our Savior.
[32:16] Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties again and again. He offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sin, he sat down at the right hand of God.
[32:34] By saying that he sat down, of course, John is indicating that his work was complete. These priests, they brought sacrifice after sacrifice that were just sort of an intermediary work that could never take away sin.
[32:52] There's only one thing that can just fully turn aside the wrath of God for our sin.
[33:03] And that's the work of our Savior. That's the work of our propitiation. Jesus. So, that's Jesus, our advocate, and our propitiation.
[33:14] And then, a third point, this is closely connected to the first two. I want us to talk about Jesus Christ, the righteous. If we were reading this in Greek, we would see that all three words are in the same case.
[33:29] It's as though, it's what people call on grammar, apposition. it's like you could draw an equal sign between them. The words are Jesun, Christon, Decaion.
[33:42] Notice that they all ended with that sound at the end. That's because they're all in the same case. It's as if to say Jesus. It's the personal name of the man who is the incarnate God.
[33:56] Christon, Greek word for the Messiah, the anointed one. And then Decaion, the righteous. This is Jesus Christ, the righteous. And so I want to draw to your attention that first, this is a human righteousness.
[34:13] That's evident for one thing in the fact that it's the righteousness of Jesus. Jesus was the name of this child who was born.
[34:25] His parents called him Jesus. And when he was out playing in the yard and it was time for dinner, they would call him by the name Jesus. Come in, it's time to eat when he was given a chore.
[34:37] Jesus, I'd like you to, that was his name. He was this man, Jesus Christ. See, human righteousness was wrought in Nazareth and the surrounding areas in the life of a good, young, righteous man.
[34:57] And then it was an earned righteousness. Jesus always had the righteousness of divinity. He was always very God of very God. He didn't, he didn't, he wasn't morally neutral or some such thing before he became incarnate.
[35:15] He was God and he had the righteousness of divinity, but he earned for us the righteousness of a human being. He didn't just come in, you know, in some old Greek plays, there'd be a problem come up and then they'd lower a character who represented a God down from up above on pulleys and things, maybe sitting in a chair.
[35:38] It was called a deus ex machina, a God from the machine. And then it became kind of a trope in plays, you know, you've got some kind of involved problem and then something sort of comes out of nowhere, solves the problem, goes away, it's the God from the machine, and everyone goes home happy.
[35:53] Jesus didn't just come down like that, just right here, solves the problem, gone again. He earned obedience, he earned obedience as a child growing up, obeying his parents, he always thought, right thoughts, every imagination of his mind all the time was correct.
[36:14] He learned to understand the scriptures by reading them and studying them. He had to learn how, can you imagine, he had to learn how to read, how to sound out Hebrew or Aramaic words, and read them and understand them, and connect them with other passages.
[36:31] And he grew in wisdom and stature in favor with God of man. He was building up day after day in his life the righteousness that would stand in our place. Hebrews chapter 5 verses 7 and 9 have remarkable words.
[36:50] These words first struck me a few years ago, and when I read them, you know you have this happen to you when you're reading the scripture. You read something and you think, I've read that a thousand times, but it didn't hit me like this.
[37:02] And I was just astonished. During the days of Jesus' life on earth, this is Hebrews 5 verses 7 to 9, during the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.
[37:19] Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for those who obey him.
[37:32] Jesus, through the hard, disciplined, careful, faithful, righteous life that he lived, earned our salvation.
[37:49] This is Jesus Christ, the righteous. He's so righteous as a man in his unblemished, perfect righteousness.
[38:06] Never a wrong thought, never a wrong deed, never a wrong imagination, never a wrong intention, nothing impeachable in him at all. Not only that, but always the right thing. That he brings to us a righteousness that is seamless with the righteousness of divinity.
[38:30] as Pastor Jeff Thomas likes to say, the world has seen a man as righteous as God himself.
[38:40] That's Jesus Christ, the righteous. I mentioned the screen coming down before, and if we had to see your life or mine on that screen, it would be perfectly dreadful.
[38:54] I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear it to have you see my life, and I don't think that I could bear to see yours either, or any of us.
[39:06] There's one man who, rather than it being a source of dread, and, you know, like, you don't want to turn away, like, I don't even want to see what's being portrayed there, even if it's someone else.
[39:21] There's one man who, it wouldn't just not be an embarrassment, it would be a glory. It would be a rejoicing, because you wouldn't just see that he always kept away from sin.
[39:37] You wouldn't just see that point after point when he was tempted, he always obeyed. You wouldn't just see that he managed not to be stained with sin.
[39:49] You would see that at every point, on every level of what it means to be a human being, his behavior, his thoughts, his intentions, his love over the Father, at every single point, it wouldn't just be, it wouldn't just be, he passed the test, he was good enough, he was absolutely perfect, you would go from one scene to the next, rejoicing, because you were seeing the perfect man, living the way that a human being ought to live.
[40:20] it would be, we could spend the rest of our lives just watching, just rejoicing in it.
[40:33] That's our glorious, righteous Savior. That's the advocate we need, that's the propitiation we need for our sin.
[40:47] that's our beautiful Jesus. I end with these words from a familiar hymn, ye who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate, mark the sacrifice appointed, see who bears the awful load, tis the word, the Lord's anointed, son of man.
[41:17] son of God. Here we have a firm foundation, here a refuge for the lost. Christ, the rock of our salvation, his the name of which we boast, lamb of God for sinners wounded, sacrifice to cancel guilt, none shall ever be confounded, who on him their hope have built.
[41:41] If you know him, rejoice in him, if you know him, see his beauty, and for the love of that, turn away from sin, and if you don't know him, know him, seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him, while he's near, let the wicked man forsake his wicked way, let the evil man forsake his evil thoughts, let him turn to the Lord, for he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
[42:11] Lord, we thank you for your great kindness to us, we don't even know the extent of our sin and our need, even when we dwell on it, even when we think on it, even when we concentrate our minds on it, we don't know.
[42:40] and we can't imagine, Lord, the incredible cost at which we've been redeemed, but we thank you, we praise you, help us, Lord, transform us, give us the power to walk in newness of life and to delight in the fellowship that we have with one another and with the Father, in your name, Amen.
[43:10] the song, Amen. That's in 257.
[44:08] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? Why don't we sing that together before the benediction?
[44:45] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? Why don't we sing that together before the benediction?
[44:57] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? Why don't we sing that together before the benediction?
[45:09] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? Why don't we sing that together before the benediction?
[45:21] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? Why don't we sing that together before the benediction?
[45:33] Why don't we sing that together before the benediction? That Soho and Ae I pray you're the one who's inside of the day of business.
[46:10] His name is from the�iens and theÚist который runs from the North ما.
[46:21] Amen. Amen.
[47:21] Amen. Amen.
[48:21] Amen.