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Please open your Bibles to Matthew's
Gospel, chapter 1, verse 21. I did not change again, Mel. I send him scriptures to read,
and then I come back and say, no, read these. But we will be
using 1 John 3, 5. This morning I want us to, I want us to have some good news,
some really good news. And I left this passage because,
and called and gave him something else because I thought, oh man,
they're not going to think this is good news. And then this morning, when I
opened up my computer, I read this quote by a gentleman
of the past, William Gurnall, who said this, the Christian
is to proclaim and initiate an irreconcilable war against his
choice sins. Those nearest his heart must
be trampled under his feet." You say, I don't get it. We're talking about war and you're
talking about good news. There's no way to have good news. You don't need good news. unless you've had bad news. We've watched, she's not able
to be with us here today, but we have several who over the
years have struggled with cancer and some are now with the Lord
and the good news there is, of course, that no matter whether
we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. But we can also appreciate that
Corky is very excited because the doctor has said, you're cancer
free. Now I rejoiced in that and we
all rejoiced in that, but it did not mean to us what it meant
to her because we didn't have cancer. I didn't need any good news about
cancer. I didn't have cancer. And Jesus is not good news if you don't have a sin problem. The angel made no bones about
it. The whole Bible makes no bones
about it. And in announcing to Joseph that his bride-to-be is
going to birth a son, you shall call his name Jesus for he shall
save his people from their sin. That's the best news that's ever
been announced. So we are going to look at good
news. It is a war zone, but it's good news. Father, minister to
our hearts through the Word of God and by the Spirit of God
open our minds and hearts to receive the Word of God, and
we bless you for it. In Jesus' name, amen. And again, I want to give this
quote. The Christian is to proclaim and initiate an irreconcilable
war against his choice sins. Those nearest his heart must
now be trampled under his feet. Paul, in writing to the Philippians,
did not want them to forget the deep revelation about their own
sin problem, what they were like, who they were like, their characteristics
before they were saved. They were dead in sin, living
according to the course of this world, living after the flesh,
under the thumb of the devil, and children of wrath, even as
others. The Holy Spirit confronts the
lost with an awakening to their sin problem. When the
Holy Spirit has come, He will show them their sin. This is
the essence of John 16, verse 7 through 11. He will convict
them of their sin. No one is saved who has skipped
or missed dealing with their sin. Odell sent a prayer request and
I had to get some clarification before we could send it out so
I've not sent it to you yet. I was sharing this with the men
yesterday and the essence of it was he just was reporting
what had happened. So here's this guy there, a Hmong
guy there in Thailand and some other guys and they decide that
he needs to be saved and so they lead him through a prayer and
they pronounce him saved. And then a few weeks later they
said would you come back and help us get this guy interested
in attending church and reading the Bible. And then first of all to their
credit I mean they did have a little session where they went into
his room where he had all of his trinkets that he used in
the worship of his Buddhism and they destroyed all that. So I
said, Odell, does that mean that he was repenting? He said, no,
not necessarily. Many times over there he said
that they've gone to the shaman and didn't get what they want
and so they turned to Christianity because they will no longer have
to pay the shaman for all these trinkets. But then, if that doesn't
work, they'll go back. That's wanting something for
themselves, and so Odell is hoping to have an opportunity to give
the gospel to this fellow, to help him to understand his sin,
and then you won't have to be begging him to be a part of a
local church, or to be in the Word of God. We love him because
he first loved us. Jesus came to save his people
from their sin. He appeared to take away our
sins. He came into the world to save
sinners. We have to face that. And so
we have to face up to how bad sin is. And a godly man of years
ago has put it in the strongest words that I've ever read. so
far as just trying to paint a picture for us. Thomas Guthrie wrote,
who is the painted temptress that steals our virtue? Who is
the murderess that destroys our life? Who is this sorceress that
first deceives and then damns our souls? Who with icy breath
blights the fair blossoms of youth? Who breaks the hearts
of parents? Who brings old men gray hairs
with sorrow to the grave? Who changes gentle children into
snakes and tender mothers into monsters and their fathers into
worse than herods and murderers of their own innocence? Who casts
the apple of discord on household hearts? Who lights the torch
of war and bears it blazing over trembling lands? Who by division
in the church rends Christ's seamless road? Who is this Delilah
that sings the Nazarite to sleep and delivers up the strength
of God into the hands of the uncircumcised? who with smiles
on her face, honeyed flattery on her tongue, stands in the
door to offer the sacred rites of hospitality, and when suspicion
sleeps, treacherously pierces our temples with a nail. What
fair seductress is this who is seated on a rock by a deadly
pool, who smiles to deceive, sings to lure, kisses to betray,
and flings her arm around the neck to leap with us into perdition? Who turns a soft and gentlest
heart to stone? Who hurls reason from her lofty
throne and impels sinners mad as a gathering swine down the
precipice into the lake of fire? Who? Sin. Sin. These things being so, we have
to ask ourselves, why do we love sin? Why do we joke about sin? Why do we joke about others who
are being slain by sin? God does not laugh and make jokes
about sin. Let's be honest. There is pleasure
in sin. The Bible tells us that. You
know the rest of that verse? For a season. It's a short season. And God's word does not hide
the reality that Jesus came to earth to save his people from
their sin. That's what he came for. It made the angels happy. They were not diverted in their
praise. Nothing else got their attention. They didn't get bored
with that message. Glory in the highest. A Savior
is born. You say, wait a minute. Don't you understand it's now
January? I know. But you see, the truth
of a Savior from sin is 24-7, every day of the year. And you know, in the light of
these realities, just, oh by the way, in December is probably
one of the hardest months to focus on the horror of sin and
the beauty of the Savior. Strange, isn't it? No one was
going around experiencing a deepening war
with their sin. by which they expressed hatred
of sin and rejection of sin and fleeing from sin and a fresh
glorying in the cross. You could have walked up and
down the aisles of all the shopping malls and all the grocery stores
and that was not on the hearts and lips of people. And you could
have walked out of the church services after the grandest choirs
had just sang and people were thrilled and they did not walk
out. freshly astonished at the horror of sin and the glory of
the Savior. The amazing wonder and beauty
and power of Jesus Christ is not only to forgive us of our
sins, but to free us from the slavery of sin. I've used portions of this illustration
many times, but it was Bill Sloan who used to faithfully be in
our midst before going home to the Lord. He called me one day
and said, and some of you would be amazed that he would ask me
to do this. You know how technically advanced I am. But he said, would
you record the A&E account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis? Well, there was a slight window
of time in which I knew how to operate that piece of equipment
in our house, and it just, he hit the jackpot. I said, yes,
Bill, I can do that. I didn't know what the seeking
of the USS Indianapolis was all about, and so I decided while
recording it, I would sit down and watch. If you've ever seen
that film or some other version of it or heard one of the survivors
of that tell their story, Suppose the only clip I saw was this
old man weeping and simultaneously, tears going
down his cheek, and simultaneously he says, that seaplane was the
most beautiful sight I've ever seen in my life. And that's all I've seen. I didn't
see anything before and I had to get up and leave and didn't
see anything after. I'm thinking, I've seen a seaplane. I was not that
impressed. I surely wouldn't be weeping about it. That seaplane was beautiful to
him because for him it was salvation from the ocean. He'd seen already
900 of his comrades went to a watery grave when the ship sunk. And over the next three or four
days, about 400 of the remaining 900 who were initially alive
had sunk into the ocean or had been eaten by the sharks, going
crazy as they inadvertently took on salt water. It was a horrifying,
horrible four days of existence. All hope was gone, and suddenly
there's a seaplane. And he starts rescuing, and he
radios, and more people come to bring about the delivery of
about 400 men who were just a hair's breadth. All hope was gone. It was a horrible experience. You see, he was not reading about
it in a book. He was not telling of something
he heard. He was recounting 50 years later
the moment in time of his hopelessness, his helplessness, the horror
of the plight he was in. And there was a seaplane. No one rejoices in the birth
of Christ while at the same time hiding, toning down, refusing
to own the filthy ugliness and horror of sin. Jesus came to save his people
from their sin. What is sin? There are a number
of good definitions. The simplest one is 1 John 3,
4. Sin is the transgression of the law. It's a breaking of the
law of God. God has written down His holy
and just and righteous law. And when God saves a person,
God gives that saved sinner a new heart with God's law written
on his heart. The newborn Christian now has
power and desire to obey the Lord, to love the Lord. Jesus says, if you love me, keep
my commandments. I've sometimes asked people,
how do you spell law? Or give me a synonym for law
in the context of Christianity. And it's been very rare that
anyone would say a synonym is love. But it is. If you love me, keep my commandments. The Old and New Testament has
written down a number of laws and commandments, but they are
summed up by Jesus in Matthew 22, 37 through 40. Love God with
all your heart, mind, soul, and spirit. And then secondly, love
your neighbor as yourself. The Ten Commandments put the
first four about loving God, no other gods, no idols, no images,
no vain use of God's name, and give God time. Any intimate relationship
requires time. I'm married all the time, but
every marriage requires some intimate, special, alone, not
shared with anybody else, time. And in the context of biblical
Christianity, while it is so very importantly true that there
is that personal, intimate walk with the Lord and we spend time
in His Word and prayer, we also do it in concert with the body
because when he saves us Jesus who is the head places us in
a local assembly of believers and we are members one of another
we give the Lord time by giving each other time as we get we
do two things at once there we're gathering we're assembling ourselves
we don't go to church we are the church we are assembled together
to worship the Lord in corporate worship and to worship him and
to experience the edifying the building up of the Saints this
is not an option in biblical Christianity core and central
of what it means even in the Old Testament in Isaiah 5080,
he pointed out that the whole purpose of the Sabbath principle
in Scripture was to delight oneself in the Lord. We're exhorted in
Hebrews 10 not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together.
For many people today, if they were as faithful in assembling
for the worship of God and the edifying of the saints, if they
had that same level of faithfulness to their job, they wouldn't have
a job. Couldn't keep a job. Certainly couldn't keep a marriage. Well, you know, I don't want
to be tied down. I like to go here, and I go here,
and I go here, and I go there, and I just don't want to be committed. It'd be very easy to just float
around and, I like this and I don't like this, or you won't believe
what they did or what they didn't do, I didn't like this, and have
no commitment. All love has to do with looking
to Jesus and to his word and saying, Not my will but yours
be done. What are you trying to tell me?
What is your word revealing to me? All sin is a violation of
love. Nor the gods. If I have other
gods, if I have idols, it's a violation of love. Whatever the sin is,
it's a violation of loving God. If I don't give God time, one
of the things that will happen is I will begin to love the world
more and more. In fact, one of the things that
we're warned about in the last days, in the last days, the love
of many will grow cold. Very easy to happen. There's
so many things vying for our attention. Eve only had one tree to tempt
her. I'm not minimizing her spiritual
battle there, but everywhere we turn, there's an invitation. Come here. Look at this. Go there. You can't even do your
legitimate work that you're trying to do on the computer. On the
side, there's all this stuff that's saying, come here. and
pastors and youth people and everyday folks in the church
go over there and they get addicted and there's a thousand things
out there trying to lure us away in that kind of world all the
more needful and necessary to be found faithful in not only
personal worship with God but in corporate worship with saints
and not where we just merely meet together but we actually
minister one to another. Every sin is also an expression
of rebellion. I'll do what I want to do, I
don't care what your Bible says. Every sin is a profound ingratitude. All that we have has been given
to us by God. And we're going to show gratitude
by embracing sin that defiles us, thus expression of rebellion. We need to remind ourselves that
sin is humanly incurable. Can the Ethiopian change his
skin or the leopard his spots? Rhetorical question. The answer
is no. Sin defiles. It's rebellion. It's ingratitude.
It's incurable. God hates it. But in spite of the initial pleasure
of sin, sin is hard work. Ever considered that? Psalm 714, behold, he travails
in pain with iniquity. Proverbs 13, 15, the way of the
transgressors is hard. You remember when the Sodomites
of Sodom came to the house of Lot because of the two beautiful
angelic creatures there and when they saw those magnificent creatures
they wanted to come in and to molest them in their vile perverted
ways. The Bible says that divine judgment
from God came and struck these perverse Sodomites with blindness. So what happened next? Oh, God's really got our attention. We better get out of here. No,
they didn't fall on the ground. They didn't crawl around. They
didn't run away crying for mercy. They tried to beat the door down
and get in the house any way they could. What a picture of
the slavery of lust. They were driven by their lust. Their lust demanded to be fed. Lust demands to be fed, whether
it's sexual lust or the lust to have my own way. It has been called that the essence
of sin is the grinding, binding, blinding, Slavery. Picture the strong man, Samson. He's been blinded. They've got
him bound. And they got it tied to this
thing where he's having to walk in circles to grind the grain.
Blinding, binding, grinding. slavery of sin many are driven for stuff and
blinded to their soul this is not just ancient history Jesus
warned about it and he said the last days will be like the days
of Noah and Lot Will people be buying and selling
and eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage and do
not know until it's too late. You see, many of the things that
we are bound in and grinding in and blinded by, they don't
look bad to us. Isn't there a country song that
said something about years ago, how can something so beautiful
be bad or something like that? Whether it's a country song or
not, I mean, that's life, isn't it? How can this be bad? It feels so good. It happened in Noah's day. It's
common today. The only free person is the one who has had his sin
covered with the blood of Jesus and is free and empowered by
the indwelling Holy Spirit to do what is right. The lost sinner
is not free. The lost sinner in the pulpit
is not free. The lost sinner in the pew, teaching,
deacon, active member, never miss a Sunday, or those who flither
around, whatever. There are lots of lost people
who are not connected with the church this morning. And there are obviously lots
of people who are not going to have anything to do with those
hypocrites, just as bound as they can be. The sinner walks
in his daily conduct in accordance with the prince of the power
of the air. Again, Ephesians 2. He walks
in his daily context of his life according to his own lust. Satan is in control, but if the
Son makes you free, you're free. Not just from the consequences,
but from the grinding, blinding, binding power. I'm not saying,
no, you don't have sinlessness in this life, but you do sin
less because you're now and you now have a new passion,
you have a new love. But of all the horrible results
of sin, there is nothing worse than this. You are under the wrath of holy
God. If you're here today outside
of Christ, you're under the wrath of Holy God. You may be a nice
person, but if you're outside of Christ, you're under the wrath
of God. Spurgeon said, man is hanging
over the mouth of hell by a solitary plank, and the plank is rotten. That's the ultimate horror of
sin. The beauty of the birth of Jesus
Christ is that he came to save his people from their sin, to
take them off that rotten plank. No one can experience or understand
the beauty of Christ's birth without seeing, owning the filthiness,
the unattractiveness of sin, their sin. You start seeing it as a pickpin.
Here are these survivors 50 years later. They never forgot the
horror as they lived in the beauty and the wonder of deliverance
from it. They never forgot gratitude for that which was used to deliver
them from that watery grave. And you know what? Those survivors,
I don't know if they're still doing it, I suppose they are,
many of them have now passed on, but they got together. It's not a church, but they had
a common experience of being delivered from a most
atrocious, a most fearful, a most horrific situation. horrible, horrifying. And they
would gather on a regular basis and there's a wall with the names
of all those comrades who lost their lives and they'd recount
those who have since died and they'd look into each other's
faces and they had a special care for each other all because
they were freed from the same horrific death. Some by a seaplane,
others by ship. One of the guys that I saw who
was rescued by the ship, when he was telling, tears just like
the other guy. And he said, and they were not
standing together, they were not sitting together, they were
interviewed separately. And when he got to that point, he as well,
tears started coming down his cheek. And he said, that was
the most beautiful ship I have ever seen in my life. My friends, and to my own heart,
as we go into this year, God only knows what all we're going
to be facing. We need to put our eyes on Jesus. We need to look into his holy
face. We need to go back January, February, March, April, all the
rest of them, and go back to Matthew and Luke 1 and 2 and
be astounded. Wow. Jesus came to set me free
from my sin. I need to ask myself this morning,
am I a disciple of Jesus Christ? Or am I still a lover of the
pigpen? That world out there is a pigpen.
It's our mission field. We don't look down our noses
at it. But it's not where you find life. I think it was Moody or someone
in his time. It wasn't Moody, but it was someone
in his era. I was talking to this fellow
and he was a shoe cobbler. But someone said, what is your
line of business, sir? He said, well, my line of business
is to serve Jesus Christ. I cobble shoes to pay expenses. You go out there into that world,
if you're not careful, That job, that career will consume you,
and Jesus will get leftovers. Let us never forget, you're blessed,
and you should be the best employee, the best employer. You should
do your very best, but you should never forget, that's just to
pay expenses, and that's just to facilitate someone going to
the mission field. Your business is to live and give the gospel. This is a faithful saying worthy
of all acceptation. Jesus came into the world to
save sinners of whom I'm chief. You may be here as a Christian
this morning and the Holy Spirit has used these scriptures to
awaken you to some sin that you've been making an excuse for and
you've been focusing on the pleasure of it. And you now see that it's
so horrible. It is so wicked. It is so horrific.
It is the very thing that sent Christ to the cross. And maybe
right now the Lord would lead you in experience like he led
King David. He was not above it. You're not.
I'm not. It can be that or something else. At the moment it was pleasurable, but oh, the horrible fruit from
it. Doesn't matter what it is, but
oh, the glory of the gospel. Come repenting. Come to the cross and be forgiven
and be restored. That is profound good news. Jesus came to save his people
from their sin, from their sinning, and he keeps on saving us. You're
saved, you're being saved, and you shall be saved. Hallelujah, what a Savior. Bradley, I'm not sure what you've
picked out, but I'd like to ask that we sing 323 as we close. Let's pray and we'll
trust the Lord together. Let's obey the Lord as we're
saying 323. Father, we stand before you today
and we rejoice at this good news in a world where sin seems to
be winning. Sin is lost. Satan is lost. And
may this be the day of first-time defeat and ongoing defeat of
sin, self, and Satan as we rejoice in Jesus, as we come to him,
as we bow to him, as we yield to him, as we cry out, Lord God,
be merciful to me, a sinner. As we deny ourselves, take up
our identification with Christ, our cross, take up our cross
and follow Jesus. We thank you for the privilege
Father, help us not to curse the darkness in which we live,
but to ask, Lord, how can I be a light? The darkness will always
be darkness. But, oh Father, may we be vigilant
that there be no darkness in the light of the Gospels clouding
the message through our lives. May our lives demonstrate Your
holiness, Your purity, Your love, Your mercy, and Your grace. In
this we pray and give thanks in Jesus' name, Amen.
Salvation from the Slavery of Sin
The christian is to proclaim and initiate an irreconcilable war against his choice sins. Those nearest his heart must now be trampled under his feet.
| Sermon ID | 110172049154 |
| Duration | 39:32 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - AM |
| Bible Text | Matthew 1:21 |
| Language | English |
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