It's good to see you tonight. It's good to be in the house of the Lord. I enjoyed the singing. And I want to thank you so much for the invitation to come and preach the Bible. And I pray that God's Word would be a great blessing this evening. You would turn in your Bibles to Titus 2. And I was excited Jack claimed me as his pastor. I'm thankful for that. It's been many years ago now, and I just thank God for what he's done in his ministry and in his family. It's thrilling to see God work in such a mighty way. Titus chapter 2 and verse 12. teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works. These things speak and exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no man despise Thee. He is our Redeemer. And we are the redeemed. Our text clearly reveals that God's purpose of grace in the redemption of His people is a purpose that is completely successful. It's quite obvious that this work of redemption actually and literally changes those who He gave His life for. Redemption is accomplished, successful work. All who Christ redeemed will in time be liberated from the bondage of sin and satan, set free by the precious blood of God our Savior. Christ redempted work for us on the cross, is in time applied through regeneration and its result, saving faith. Those who are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, once they're brought out of darkness into His marvelous light, will indeed serve Him. with a sincere desire to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. If you are redeemed, your aim, your desire, your longing is to honor the One who gave everything to redeem you, who gave Himself. And we do that by each and every day living for Him, and looking for Him to come again, zealously, fervently, earnestly, proving our faith by good works. That is the work of the redeemed. Now, the definition is in order. To redeem simply means to buy. or to obtain something by paying a proper price for it, which is commonly referred to in Scripture as a ransom. The ransom given to effect the purchase is a precise amount and is always in Scripture for a particular thing or person. Redemption in the Scriptures often depicts a ransom price being paid to buy back a slave in order to liberate him, or to pay the price for a prisoner to be set free. The idea in our text is that Jesus Christ paid the ransom price with His own blood. for His people to be set free from the bondage of sin, from the tyranny of Satan, from the condemnation of the law. Now the Greek word here is loutro. Translated, redeemed in our text, it means the releasing of a captive by the receipt of a ransom. And I, for one, am so thankful tonight that the blood of Jesus Christ has set me free. That He has liberated me from the darkness, the depravity, the degradation that I was once in. He saved me by His grace. Now first, we want to look at the character of Christ, our Redeemer. Our Redeemer is identified in our text as the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. He is not an ordinary Redeemer. He is extraordinary. Jesus Christ is the eternally and only begotten Son of God, equal with the Father. eternal, infinite, glorious. He is the one that when He came on the scene, the prophets in the Old Testament said, Thus saith the Lord. But when Jesus, who is the Word of God, came, He said, But I say unto you. And He declared Himself over and over and over again as the great I AM. I AM. the Way, the Truth and the Life. I am the Resurrection and the Life. I am the Good Shepherd. I am the Bread of Life. I am the Water of Life. How thankful I am tonight that I have been redeemed by God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, in the covenant of redemption, which was framed in the solitude of eternity. It was decreed that God must take upon Himself the nature of man in order to redeem a definite number of Adam's fallen race. God our Savior, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Sacred Trinity agreed to leave the glories of heaven, the adoration of the angelic host, to be born of a virgin, to live a perfect life, and then to offer Himself, His merits, His blood, to redeem all that the Father gave Him. Isn't that amazing? that God planned everything out and that Jesus Christ agreed to be our Redeemer. To be the one who would take our place on the cross and suffer our punishment and our penalty in order to set us free. Our Redeemer God our Savior is the only person qualified to pay the ransom price that justice requires. It had to be God manifested in the flesh. It had to be the One who is described as the express image of God. The Word of God. The Word who communicates all the glory, the excellency, the power, the majesty of God. He is the Word. And the Word was made flesh. And we beheld His glory as of the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. This is our Redeemer. God manifests in the flesh. Come to communicate God's grace and glory and power to unworthy sinners. He is the great God and our Savior. As God, He became a man. I don't understand all the mystery of Godliness and of the hypostatic union, but I believe it with all my heart. Because the Bible states in Philippians chapter 2, a miraculous, glorious truth. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. My heart is humbled to think that our Redeemer, our great God and Savior, loved me so much that He left the glories of heaven knowing with every step that He took, He would be one step closer to the degradation the suffering, the soul suffering that he would die and offer his life and shed his precious blood for a poor sinner named Tom Ross. Our Redeemer is infinitely gracious and loving, and compassionate, and holy, and harmless, and undefiled, without sin, without guile. Not one time during his entire earthly soldier did he ever even have the thought of sin, never spoke a word of sin, never did a deed of sin. He was able to say with all assurance, I always do those things. which pleads Him. This is a character of our Redeemer. He is our great God and Savior. Next, I'd like to look at the cause of our redemption. I said that Jesus Christ is the only person qualified in all of history to be a Redeemer. None of us here have what it takes to redeem someone from the ravages of sin, from the bondage of iniquity. Jesus Christ, God becoming a man, dying in the stead of men, was the only one who offered up a perfect, a holy sacrifice for our sins. He's the only one qualified. No one else could accomplish this work. The liberation of God's elect could not be bought by ordinary means of silver and gold. The blood of bulls and goats could not redeem those who were enslaved by sin and condemned by the law. See, all the blood slain, all the animals slain, all the blood that flowed on Jewish altars in the Old Testament under the Old Covenant, not all of that blood put together couldn't put away or take away even one sin. All it could do was cover it. But when Jesus Christ came on the scene, John the Baptist proclaimed with all confidence, Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. What a revolutionary, a radical statement. This perfect Lamb, this sacrifice fulfills all the Old Testament types and shadows. He's the one that will put away, take away your sin. It's a wondrous thing to know that Jesus put away our sins. Peter spoke of it, of this extraordinary work He said, for as much as you know you're not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold. We don't think of silver and gold as something corruptible. We think of it as something pretty valuable. In comparison to the blood of Jesus Christ, there is no comparison. His work, His life is of inestimable value. You cannot even begin to imagine how valuable the work of Jesus Christ is. I think we will get a glimpse of it when we get to glory and we see all the redeemed dressed in spotless white and we hear the Savior say, Behold I and all that Thou hast given Me. They're all here. They're all redeemed. They're all arrayed in the garments of salvation. We've been redeemed. It says, "...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 manifested these last times." We're redeemed by the work of our great Savior. The writer of Hebrews says it this way, Hebrews 9 and verse 12, neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood. He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. He obtained it. It's eternal. The price of our redemption, the ransom paid to satisfy all of the claims, all of the demands of God's inflexible justice required a payment that only the impeccable Christ could pay. He gave Himself, His person, His merits, His obedience, His righteousness. He gave His perfect body, His precious blood. And He offered Himself up by the eternal Spirit as a sacrifice that the Father accepted. I love what John Gill said. He said, "...Who gave Himself for us, not another or another's, but Himself." Not merely His own things, but His own self. Not men or angels, but Himself. All that belongs to Him, all that is near and dear, His name, fame, credit, and life itself. His reputation, His height, His strength, His service, all the comforts of life. His whole manhood, soul and body, and that as in union with His divine Person, which He gave into the hands of men and of justice and to death itself, to be a ransom price for His people and for propitiation and sacrifice for their sins, to be paid and offered in their stead and in their room. not for all mankind, but for many, for us, for all the elect of God and who are represented when he gave himself or died for them as ungodly sinners and enemies. This was a free and voluntary gift and is an unspeakable one. Who can say all that is contained in this work? It is an instance of the great love, the love that passeth knowledge. Consider all that our great God and Savior was willing to do. to pay your sin and to secure your redemption. He was willing to become a servant to liberate you from the slavery of sin. He was willing to take all of your suffering and pain and eternal punishment in order to secure your forgiveness and your freedom from the condemnation of the law. You see, I had a mountain of sins that were against me. And Jesus Christ agreed to come and to live among men, to have insults hurled at Him, to be hated, to be despised, to be mocked, to be beaten beyond recognition, to have his beard plucked, and then to be nailed to a tree of cursing, and then take his place between two thieves suspended between heaven and earth to bear the sins of all that the Father gave him. and my sins, which I don't even know the number of them. He took each and every single one of my sins and my depravity and my blasphemies and my wicked thoughts and He was punished. Wave upon wave upon wave of the wrath of God washed over Him. And for me, He thirsted. For me, He said, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? That would have been my eternal cry. But He took all of my sin. He bore all my sin in His Body on the tree. Is that really Him? Do you understand tonight? Have you experienced the power of the work of Jesus Christ? Has God opened your blinded eyes to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and in His finished work? Have you been brought to an end of yourself to see that Jesus died in your place, in your stead, so that you could be set free, forgiven, justified, cleansed, This is our Redeemer. This is His great work. He said Himself, even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give His life a ransom for many. When He instituted the Lord's Supper, He said, for this is My blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remissions. remission of sins. When you understand the magnitude of the cost of your redemption, He gave Himself. God our Savior gave Himself that He might redeem us from all iniquity. all lawlessness, all transgression, all of sin's dead. That's the negative. The positive and purifying unto Himself, a peculiar. This is the great work of our Redeemer. And when you understand the magnitude of the cost of redemption, you have to come to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not shed His blood or give Himself in vain. He died for His people, and every drop of blood was accounted for. Now freed from sin, I walk at large, my Savior's blood my full discharge. At His dear feet my soul I lay, a sinner saved. Last one. And I mean that. Some preachers say, this is my last point, and they go on for like 10 more points. They're not telling the truth when they do that. I got a nickname for them. I call them Pharaoh. because they won't let the people go. This is my last point. And I'm going to let you go for the next go-round here. In our text, it reveals the change brought about in our redemption. This is our identity. When He redeems somebody, He changes them. He cleanses them. He forgives them. You see, His work secures a changing position and standing before God. We were debtors to the law. We were condemned. enslaved by our lusts and our sins as the ungodly. We were unrighteous, unholy, corrupt, putrid, a cinch in the nostrils of God, without hope, without God. We drank iniquity like water. We were likened to beggars on the dung heap of our own sin. Yet the moment that God granted us repentance and saving faith, we were and forever are completely, entirely free from the condemnation How glorious is that? Oh, how worthy I was of the sword of God's justice to come down upon my sinful head. But Jesus took all that I owed the law. He put my sins away. He was punished in my stead. There is therefore now no condemnation. to them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. He secured forgiveness for all our sins. What a glorious thing to experience the power of forgiveness. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven." Jesus secured that. We're justified from all things. We've been declared righteous in the sight of God. He took all of our sins and in exchange, He gave us His righteousness. Not any ordinary righteousness. The righteousness of God was imputed to us, charged to our account. Now we can say, I'm accepted in the Beloved. I am complete in Him. I am resting tonight in the finished work of Jesus Christ. I am depending entirely upon His death, His burial, His resurrection. It has secured the fullness of God's salvation for a poor, unworthy sinner that could not even help himself. He changed my position. Now the Father looks at me and the righteousness of the Son. That's not all. Our nature was changed. And our condition was changed. He died to redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. And I'm so grateful that God didn't just save me from my sins and the condemnation that I deserve. He didn't just save me from hell. He saved me so that I could serve Him. The truth of Romans 6 finally came true in my life. I have never been able to bring forth any fruit unto God, but when He gave me the grace to obey from the heart the truth of the Gospel and the doctrine that He has revealed for the first time in my life, I knew what Christian liberty was. The freedom to bring forth fruit unto God by the work and the power of the Spirit working in me. Think about this. When the Israelites were redeemed by the blood of the Passover lamb, from the hard bondage of Egypt and from the tyranny of Pharaoh, did they want to stay in Egypt? Did they remain there as captives? No, they were liberated. They crossed over the Red Sea dry shod and they witnessed the destruction of their enemies. So it is with you, dear child of God. You've been bought with a price. You've been set free. All of your enemies have been defeated. We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. When a prisoner is redeemed, does he stay in the prison cell? Weighed down with the burdens of his debts, fearing his condemnation. No. He said, free. The shackles are off, the prison doors are open, and now he has access, he has freedom. Now what if someone, what if a prisoner was there awaiting execution? And someone said, I'll take his place. Now, this is impossible with men that work this way. But it's not impossible with God. Because this is precisely what Jesus Christ agreed to do for me. He came to where I was, paid the full price, took my place, opened up the door, set me free. And while I'm being set free, He says, by the way, I have taken care of everything for time and eternity. These old prison rags that you've been wearing, now you have the garments of salvation, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I've even written you into My will. You're an heir of God and a joint heir with Jesus Christ. Boy, if that doesn't motivate you, Do you want to be zealous of good works? The redeeming work of Jesus Christ? We're a peculiar people. A special treasure bought with the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ. We're His jewels, His beloved. It's a redeeming love that will never let us fail. We're lost, but we're secure forever. Our union with Jesus Christ ought to motivate us to love and serve Him all the days of our lives. As we sang in Psalms time, the hour of redeeming, the greatness of His finished work, did you feel your heart being humbled? That God, in the person of Jesus Christ, would set you free? We ought to be amazed. It ought to work on us so deeply. We would be willing to give up anything to serve you and do what we should do. Because we've been redeemed, my brother. What no job could your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost within you, which you have of God, and you're not your own, for you're bought with the price. Therefore, glorify God in your body and your spirit. Tonight, as a redeeming, may God give us to be zealous, earnest, boiling over with a desire to honor and glorify the one who gave everything to us. And may God give us grace. As the redeemed, let the redeemed, the Lord say so. This ought to thrill your heart so much that everywhere you go, everybody you see, I've been routine. Let me tell you about the work of my great Savior. God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, rescued me from sins, degradation. He's forgiven me. And I can show you how. God bless you.