Now to 1 Peter 1. And we'll read from verses 15-25. 1 Peter 1, beginning at verse 15. Hear the Word of God as it comes to us this morning. But as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation, because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy. And if ye call on the Father, who without respect to persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear. Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead and gave him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God. Seen ye have purified your souls and obeyed the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart, fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is that flower of grass, the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." Dear congregation, perhaps you recall in Proverbs 30 that the wise man speaks of four small creatures, one of them being a coning. And he says there that Coney is wise because it takes its refuge in the rocks. Coney is an animal that has no self-defense. It's a feeble animal. And the only safety it has is to stay near the rock. And so when a hawk comes, it just darts into the rock. And one time I was in Australia. And we came around the corner in the road, boys and girls, and there was a big pile of rocks there, and all these little conies, they told me, were sitting on rocks everywhere. And I just reached for my camera, and just reaching for my camera, just that little danger sign, all the conies went into the rock. They're gone. Before I could take a picture. And I thought, that's the way Christians ought to be with Jesus Christ. He's the rock of salvation. And we have to take refuge in Him moment by moment and never stray so far away from the rock that the enemies of the soul can attack us and reach us before we burrow ourselves into the rocks. Well, this morning we want to take refuge to the rock of our salvation, the very center of that salvation. which is the precious blood of Jesus Christ. That's our text. You can read it in 1 Peter 1. I'll read verses 18 and 19, but really I want to just focus on these two words this morning, precious and blood. For as much as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold, from your vain conversation, received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot." So with God's help, our theme is simply precious blood. We'll look at the centrality of that blood, the cost of that blood, and then at the tables we hope to look at the capability of that blood, precious blood, its centrality, its cost, its capability. If something is very valuable, it's precious. If something is precious, it's valuable. The word precious is used 75 times in the Bible. It speaks of human life as precious. How precious is our life. How terrible it would be if one of you had lost one of your children this week. One of the captains sent to seize Elijah said, O man of God, I pray thee, let my life and the life of these fifty thy servants be precious in thy sight. The blood and the death of saints is called precious. Precious shall their blood be in God's sight. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. Psalm 49 says, The redemption of the soul is precious. Proverbs 3 says, Wisdom is precious. More precious than rubies. Psalm 139 says, The very thoughts of God and the loving kindnesses of our God are precious. Peter speaks of our faith being precious and the promises of God being precious. But most of all, the Bible speaks of Christ being precious. It says His sympathy is precious. To those who believe, He is precious. He is precious as the cornerstone, the rock of our salvation. But in our text this morning, it's really the apex of all these references to the word precious in the Bible. Precious blood. The precious blood of Christ. Nothing more valuable, nothing more precious in all the world than His blood. Now the Bible speaks of blood 450 times. Blood is precious. It's the most valuable thing in our bodies. Blood is essential to life. Our bodies can be perfectly framed, but if drained of blood, we cannot live. And so spiritually, the blood of Jesus Christ received by faith gives us spiritual life. In God's eyes, you see, blood is sacred. Hebrews 9 tells us that God cannot be approached without blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. And that's really the whole message of the Bible, isn't it? The primary message of the Scriptures. When Adam and Eve fell, God said He'd send the seed of a woman. And God determined to shed blood, to clothe Adam and Eve and cover their nakedness. In the very next chapter, he shows that he's pleased with Abel's sacrifice and not with Cain's because Abel comes with a bloody sacrifice and Cain comes with the unbloody fruits of the field. A few chapters later, when Noah comes from the ark, the first thing he does is to offer bloody sacrifices of thanksgiving. A few chapters later, Abraham slaughters animals, cuts them in two, and lays them in two paths so that God can walk between the carcasses, sealing His covenant with Abraham with blood. Then a few chapters later, Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain, and a ram takes Isaac's place on the altar, and blood is shed. Genesis is a blood-filled book, but so is Exodus. God commands the Israelites to sprinkle their door frames with the blood of a lamb so he might pass by their homes without killing their firstborn. Again, life is preserved through the blood of a substitute pointing to the Messiah to come. Fifty days later, that is reinforced when Israel reaches Sinai. God gives His law out of the covenant of grace to show His people how they should live. And then to ratify the covenant after the law giving, He sprinkles the people with blood. Behold the blood of the covenant, Exodus 24 says. And the people respond, all that the Lord has said to us, we will do and be obedient. You see, the foundation and power of God's covenant is in sacrificial blood. That's why blood was central to worship all throughout the Old Testament. Everything about worship was bloody. If you were an Old Testament Israelite, and you brought your family to worship, the first thing you'd see as you approached the temple the brazen altar, dripping with blood. You had to bring animals, yourself, whether poor or rich, to that altar. You had to be received through blood. And the priest would then take that and go into the holy place. Once a year into the Holy of Holies, the high priest would go, always with blood, blood, blood, everywhere. In fact, a high priest couldn't even walk into the Holy of Holies. Facing the altar, he had to go in backwards, sprinkling blood. So every step he took, he'd be walking in blood. And then he had to sprinkle it seven times on the altar. Then turn around, sprinkle it seven more times for the people. A number of foolness. Everything had to be bathed in blood. Sin demands death. The wages of sin is death. Sin commands blood. shall it ever be forgiven. And so wherever you look in the Old Testament, be it at the birth of a child, be it in the circumcision of the male child, be it at a high festival of celebration in Israel, be it in the deepest repentance of the soul, the way to life and fellowship with God is through blood. Substitutionary blood. Now, fast forward to the New Testament. When John spoke of Jesus on the opening pages, he said, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. How? Through blood. Through dying. Through his bloody substitutionary death. The blood of Jesus is a synonym for his suffering and obedience that satisfied the justice of God. No, we must not think of this blood as something crass or crude. But it's an expression in the Bible. The blood of Christ is an expression that symbolizes the whole Gospel. It means that Jesus dies in the place of a sinner, so the sinner can go free. And the sinner can receive the obedience of Jesus. Jesus takes the death, takes the blood, and offers the blood himself. So Jesus repeatedly taught, didn't he, that his blood must be believingly and experientially received if we are to be saved. Sometimes his statements are very blunt about it. He says, except you drink my blood, you have no life in you. Again, He that drinketh my blood hath everlasting life. Again, my blood is drink indeed. Again, He that drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in Him. You see, that's the symbolism in the Lord's Supper. When you take the cup in your hand, this cup is the New Testament in my blood, shed for you and for many for the remission of all their sins. As you drink that wine, You think blood. This represents the blood, his suffering for me, that I may drink wine to the joy of my soul as he substitutes for me. But it's all throughout the New Testament, not just Jesus. Paul's epistles underscore the centrality of Christ's blood. Paul speaks of being justified in his blood, of having faith in his blood, of the blood of the cross, of redemption through his blood, of drawing nigh to God by the blood of Christ. Think of the book of Hebrews. The whole book is filled with expressions about the centrality of blood. It tells us that Jesus' blood is sufficient once for all. It tells us we may come to church now without bringing animal sacrifices, because His blood has done everything we need to have done for us. All the bloody streams of blood, the blood of bulls and goats and turtle doves for 4,000 years are gone away through the blood of Jesus Christ. How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? So Hebrews tells us the blood of Jesus speaks better things than the blood of Abel. And then we come finally to Peter. in our text and throughout his epistles. He speaks of blood everywhere as well. He speaks of the elect who are elect unto obedience in the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. And then down to the very last book of the Bible. The Apostle John is speaking about blood. He sees even blood in heaven. The Lamb slain on the throne. And he hears the elders singing, Thou art worthy, Thou who was slain and has redeemed us by Thy blood. As he watches the redeemed come into heaven, The question is asked, who are these? And the answer is, these are they who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. From the beginning of Genesis, to the end of Revelation, from the closing of the gates of Eden, to the opening of the gates of the heavenly Zion, blood is everywhere in the Scriptures. Uniting all of the Bible around this one theme, precious blood. Dear child of God, you are saved by only one thing, the precious blood of Jesus Christ. His substitutionary blood gloriously restores what sin destroyed. Through the second Adam, His blood undoes what the first Adam's sin undid. And so He reconciles sinners to God. I read recently of a man in Germany who was building a church building and he was up on the steeple and suddenly he slipped and fell to a certain death. But it just so happened that there were some sheep going through beneath that building at that moment. And he landed directly on a sheep and it broke his fall just enough that he could survive. The sheep of course died. And the man was so grateful that he cut into the stone over the doors of the church a carving of the Lamb that saved his life. Through his blood. And you see a dear child of God, that's what you do at the Lord's Supper this morning. You are falling into perdition. And God brought you to faith and salvation. through the precious blood of Jesus. He broke your fall. At the Lord's table, you carve into your life, as it were, a memorial of gratitude of the Lamb of God. And you gaze upon Him and you confess all praise and thanksgiving be to Him for His precious blood. My dear friend, if you come to the Lord's table on any other foundation, you're coming the wrong way. But if you come confessing, I have no righteousness to offer Jesus Christ, it's all by the blood of Christ, you come and you will be well received by Jesus Christ. But as you come, centered on that blood, Please do not forget, that's my second thought, the cost of this blood. The cost of what is behind the wine and the bread. What a cost. All things valuable in life have so much cost behind them. You often don't realize it, do you? If you're a young man or a young woman and you're getting married, Well, you just think, don't you? Well, it's pretty easy to put on a wedding. Not a big deal. Well, we have a son engaged now. And his fiancee said to me the other day, this is a lot of work. This takes a lot of time. This costs a lot to have a wedding. Well, to have Jesus marry a bride like you It costs him far more. It costs him his own blood. It's his blood that the Bible ultimately is speaking about. The precious blood of the Lamb without blemish and without spot. And he came to give it, particularly at the end of his life, in the three places, boys and girls, you know them, they all begin with G, right? Three places where he really suffered. Gethsemane, Gabbatha, and Golgotha. Gethsemane the guard. He sweat as it were, gray drops of blood. Agonized. He was overwhelmed. He was encircled with grief. He was so amazed. It's like the authors of the Gospels are trying to vie with one another to get vocabulary to stammer the extent of the agony of the sweating, bloodied Savior. who cries out in that garden, my soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." He bloodied himself there for you, dear child of God. For your sin. And then from there he went to Gabbatha. Pilate's judgment hall. There they bloodied him. They crowned him with thorns. They pierced his skull. When we were in Israel a few years ago, our tour guide let us cut a little snippet of a thorn bush branch. Because he said to us, that's really the very kind of thorn that they made a signet of and then they put it on Jesus' head and they smashed it down, remember, on his skull. So this little circle of the thorns in it. So I put it in my wife's knapsack, but it kept pricking through the knapsack. You just touch it with the end of the finger. You get blood on your finger. And we actually had to throw it away before we got home. It was getting in the way. Imagine all the blood that fell over his face as he smashed it down. And then they put him up against a pillar. They took a mop-like thing with oxtail bone type things in it, a scourge, and they scourged his back and little rivulets of blood with every blow would descend down his back. The Romans said you could do that no more than 40 times because people would die from it. Jesus nearly died there. on his back, bloodied on his brow. And then he went to Golgotha, carrying the cross beam. The nails pounded into his hands and feet, more blood. The cross lifted, put into the ground, the flesh tearing, more blood. And then the greatest agony of all, six hours of bleeding, dripping blood. all the while crying out, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? And no eye of pity looking on. His soul, as it were, bloodied with the sorrow of the forsakenness of God, the forsakenness of His disciples, the forsakenness of all comfort. Abandoned. Rejected by heaven and earth and hell. All for Your sins, dear child of God. Every nail in his body is your sin and my sin. Every thorn on his crown is your sin and my sin. Every blood drop necessitated by your sin is my sin. Oh, the costly price of the blood, the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Dear child of God, when you come to the table this morning, meditate on that, the centrality of the blood and the cost of the blood. And my dear friend, if you're not acquainted with this precious Savior, if you don't hate sin, and love Him, you're not welcome at the table. But you are welcome to consider His blood, to consider what your sins deserve, and to cry out to God for mercy. Please don't come to this table of the Lord on anything, any other ground than the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Your righteousness, your religion will never make ends meet for God. God is holy. You need the precious blood of Jesus Christ. May that blood, that Savior, be exceedingly precious to us at the table of the Lord this morning. Amen.