All right, let's go. Greetings, my Sovereign Grace Fellowship churches. I'm happy to be speaking to you online here remotely. I was actually anticipating this Sunday being at Sovereign Grace Community Church in Sarnia, but because of the COVID crisis, of course, not able to do that. So I say greetings to hopefully more than the Sovereign Grace Community Church will see this. And I'll give the opportunity, hopefully, to put it up online on the Sovereign Grace Fellowship website so other churches can take advantage of these messages where I want to speak to the churches. Prefer, of course, to visit you in person, but not able to do that. So I hope God is blessing you and keeping you in these very interesting and unusual days. I wanted to think about what I would speak to the different churches in our wonderful fellowship. And I think I would say I'm going to keep this pretty simple. I want to speak about the gospel, the gospel itself, that which keeps us bound together, what unifies us. And I would say it is the gospel of Jesus Christ itself. So I want to speak a couple of messages here regarding the gospel. The first one I've entitled, The Gospel, Covering the Bases, Its Importance and Its Content. The second one is entitled, The Gospel, Its Daily Relevance. In order to, I use the term covering the bases because I'm using a little illustration which I will talk about a little bit later, but a baseball illustration. Major League Baseball was supposed to start up about three weeks ago, but of course everything is shut down. But it's an illustration that I'm going to use just to help us put some mental images to help you maybe remember the gospel when you're trying to present it to somebody. Because there's conveniently four bases, and I will talk about that in a few minutes. But before I get into the actual gospel presentation and some other things in defining the gospel, I want to lead in here with a trick question. A couple trick questions, actually, just to get us thinking. In order to be saved, to be a Christian, to be born again, is it enough to believe certain doctrines, such as if you believe that God exists, is that enough for your eternal salvation? If you believe that in the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost, you believe that sincerely, are you saved? So I'm just trying to make you think, make us think here for a minute, how much is necessary to be believed in order to be a Christian? And I'm not gonna play God here in terms of knowing people's hearts, cuz God knows the hearts and all the things that attend that particular confession. But if those things were the only things you believed, I'd say no, you're not a Christian. Another question, put it this way. If someone says, I know that you are, if he's speaking about Jesus, I know that you are the Holy One of God. If you can say that honestly, are you a Christian? I would say, no, you're not, because some of us probably recognize who said that. It was actually a demon that said that in Mark chapter one, speaking through a person that was possessed. That person wasn't saved, and yet that person knew, had the knowledge that Jesus was the Holy One of God. Okay, I'll put another way to you. Here's another example. If someone says to you, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, is that person a Christian? Well, trick question. I told you this would be a trick question. The answer is yes and no. It depends on what they meant by that. For instance, a Jehovah's Witness could very well say to you, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. But his or her understanding of the Son of God, small s there, would be that he is the first created being of God, the first born, the first created being of God. If you have that diminished view of the Lord Jesus, and you are called to trust in a creature and not the Creator, then I would say, no, you're not a Christian. On the other hand, If you believe that when you say Jesus Christ is the Son of God, you understand the Son of God, capital S, as the Christ, the second person of the Trinity. As I believe the Ethiopian eunuch made that confession, as you read about it in some manuscripts, he actually made that confession in Acts chapter eight. He said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. But not only that, it wasn't just that isolated confession. If you remember the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, he was reading Isaiah the prophet, chapter 53, when he was riding through the desert. Philip came up to him and said, and sat beside him, I take it, came up, and he explained to him the Ethiopian Unicatic question, who is the prophet talking about? And Philip explained to him, and from that passage it says he preached to him Jesus. He was as a lamb before his shearers is dumb, and so on. So his understanding of what the Son of God was there was in the context of a gospel context of Christ dying and the identity of who Christ was, the sin bearer. So I would say, yes, the Ethiopian eunuch definitely was saved by that confession. So it's important for us to grasp and understand the meaning of terms and what you mean by a term, or what others mean by terms, and to put them into a biblical context. So I think this is why the apostles oftentimes used the expression, the gospel. because they weren't calling upon people to believe an isolated truth here and there. They were calling upon people to believe a grouping of truth, a package of truth put together that is summarized in that word, the gospel. So that, in a sense, is going to be my main point today. is the gospel is a package of important truths that must be believed together. Now we might think of how did the Old Testament saints, what did they believe? Well, of course, they didn't have as much revelation as we have in the New Testament. They lived before the time of Christ. But the believers there in the Old Testament were saved. Abraham was saved because he believed God. It was accounted to him for righteousness. What did he believe? He believed in God existed. He believed in God's promises. He believed that God would make a provision for his sin. We see that even when he made the sacrifice of Isaac, and he said, God will provide when a lamb was in the thicket. God will provide. He had an understanding. All of them, I think, had an understanding that sin needed to be atoned for. There needed to be a sacrifice. So they didn't have the full picture, but they believed what was given to them. And God accounted it to them for righteousness. Now in the New Testament, we have a full revelation. We look back, we know what the story is of Christ. So there's a verse in Luke that says, to whom much is given, much is required. I think God requires of us now to believe the full gospel. Not just a promise of something coming, but the full gospel because it has been revealed. That's why Paul could say to the Philippian jailer, you must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. It's very specific now. There's no vagueness to it. So this is my main point. The gospel is a package of important truths that must be believed if one is to be saved. a Christian, not isolated truths here and there. So how am I going to prove this to you? And that's what I want to spend some time doing. I want to define the gospel and in that do a little accounting of how many times they use the term in the New Testament. I want to underscore the centrality of this term gospel in the New Testament. And then I want to present the gospel. What actually is it? And there's many ways to present the gospel. I'm going to present it in a certain way, and I'll give some qualifications as I move into that. So the term gospel, it's the term in the Greek euangelizo, is the verb form, and it's used 54 times in the New Testament, and it means to announce good news. The noun form is euangelion, and it's used 77 times in the New Testament. it means good message or good news. So altogether, this term, verb and noun form put together, the gospel, it's used 131 times in our New Testament. That's a lot of times. It's an important term. It's an important concept. The Apostle Paul used it 83 times. 63% of the times that it's used in the New Testament, it's used by the Apostle Paul. So it was obviously very important to him. And of course, when the it is synonymous with, not just good news in general, it's synonymous with the good news concerning Jesus Christ. So then secondly then, how important was it in the preaching of the apostles, who give us the foundation of the church, the foundation of what we're supposed to believe. Christ Jesus is the cornerstone. The apostles are in the foundation in terms of giving to the churches what they're supposed to believe. And of course, a lot of their teaching is recorded for us in the New Testament. Well, it was very important. And I want to make a little distinction here before I look at a few passages. Is all the truths revealed to us in the Bible equally important, or is some of it more important than others? And I would say some aspects of the Bible truth is more important. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and it's profitable. So it's all important. We have a wonderful revelation of God. But there are some parts that are more important than other parts. And I trust as I go on with this, you will see that that is the case. The gospel parts are the more important part. It is the central part of what the Bible is trying to teach us. Paul often begins his letters by emphasizing that which is most important, the Gospel. In 1 Thessalonians 1, in verse 10, it doesn't take him long before he says, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. It doesn't take him long, and he gets right into this central core aspect of the Gospel. We see it in Romans 1. Right in verse 1, he says that he has set apart for the Gospel of God. He longed to preach it. He was not ashamed of it. So in verses 15 and 16 you see these ideas that he believed it is the power of God unto salvation, the gospel is. We see it in Galatians chapter 1 where he says, He's declaring that the gospel is the key thing, because if anyone preaches any other gospel other than that which you have received, let him be accursed. That's strong language. The gospel was the critical key thing he wanted the Galatian Christians to hold on to and believe and not give up on. We see it also in Philippians 1. It seems that Paul cannot stop talking about it. In chapter one, he uses the term gospel six times in one chapter. He talks there about the fellowship of the gospel, the defense of the gospel, the advance of the gospel, living worthy of the gospel, the faith of the gospel. He just goes on and on and on. So it's critically important in the mind of that apostle and the other apostles as well. Now the other apostles don't use that term as often as Paul does, but Peter uses it in his first epistle. Those who have preached the gospel to you, he says in verse 12. And later in chapter 1 he says, this is the word by which by the gospel was preached to you. And then in his last chapter, he says in chapter 4, that will be what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel. So even with Peter, it's a really, really important concept, and he uses the term, but not quite as often. Now, before I move on to presenting the gospel, I'm going to wrap up with this classic statement about the importance of the gospel. So if you have your Bibles, open them to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. and I want to read the first five verses. And here I'm saying classic because when many of us think about, well, where is the gospel nicely and briefly given to us in our Bibles? And a lot of us will immediately think of 1 Corinthians 15. So listen here as the Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians. He says this, Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you, here it is, as of first importance, as of first importance what I also received and then he gives a little gospel presentation in a nutshell. What is it? That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas then to the twelve. So this then is the classic statement, and he reminds them of its importance, and that was what he preached to them. They stand on that, and he even uses this term, being saved by it. And I'll speak more about that in my next message. But it's very clear here, he uses the term first importance. So am I exaggerating when I assert that all the Bible is important, but the gospel is the most important part of the truths? in the Bible. What is the key thing then in our Sovereign Grace Fellowship churches? I would say the key thing is that we have the gospel, we believe the gospel, we proclaim the gospel, we hold on to the gospel. That is the most important thing. And that is the thing that is actually uniting us together and keeping us united together. Now I'm going to take some time now and make a presentation of the gospel. Because sometimes we talk about the gospel, but what exactly is it? What are the component parts of the gospel? And there's many ways, of course, to present the gospel. And I'm going to make some qualifying statements here before I actually get into presenting the gospel, my understanding of it, or presenting it the way I wish to present it. You could use my presentation as a bit of a model. Maybe the way I use the bases and the four bases in the baseball illustration might help you to remember these four main components. There are four typical heads or components that are often used in the presentation of the gospel. Some of you may have read the book by Greg Gilbert called, What is the Gospel? And he uses those four heads. First head of the gospel, first point is God. Next thing you look at is man. Third thing is Christ. And the last thing is repentance and faith. Those are the four kind of like key components to kind of put our minds around to help us to see the flow of the gospel. What are the component parts of this message? So baseball conveniently has four bases. So I'm going to use baseball as an illustration to just help us to remember what these component parts of the gospel message actually are. God, of course, is going to be first base. Second base, we'll look at man. Third base is Christ. Home plate is eternal salvation. When you get to home plate, then you are saved. But in order to get there, you have to comprehend and understand some things. You have to get in the game. You have to get on base. You have to round the bases and see these different things and then find your way, by the grace of God, to home plate. The gospel can be presented in 60 seconds. You can tell somebody and read this little portion in 1 Corinthians 15, particularly verses 3 to 5. You are presenting the gospel when you are presenting that. And call people to repentance and faith. In 60 seconds you can do that. Or you can spend an entire day and break all these components open and explain them more as you present, as you preach the gospel, as you share the gospel. I'm going to try to present these essential components in maybe about 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes time. It is important, though, when you present the gospel, is to use scripture, of course, because God uses scripture. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. God has this amazing way. He says in James, you are begotten by the word of truth. God has an amazing way to bring life to the soul. through the presentation of the truth of his word. The other thing that we need to keep in mind when you're presenting the gospel is it needs to be adapted to your audience. I say that, for instance, because, for instance, the Apostle Paul, if he preached the gospel to the Jews, he might skip on first base. Is he going to have to tell the Jews about God and the nature of God? No, he's not really going to have to say much there. He can go on to speak about man at second base, maybe not even spend too much time there, but spend most of his time trying to help people to understand Christ at third base. Who is this person? But if he was speaking to a Gentile audience like he did in Acts chapter 17, the Greeks on Mars Hill, he would have to start at the beginning. He said, God who made heaven and earth, and in him we live and move and have our being. He'd have to back up and explain things because of his particular audience and their level of understanding. I read a book not that long ago. called The 3D Gospel by Jason Georges. And it was a book to help missionaries going into different cultures, how they should present the gospel. Because each culture has their certain mindset or worldview or paradigm in which they think things through. In our North American culture, a lot of us think of things in terms of guilt and innocence are the big paradigm. We feel guilty. We want to be innocent. In some of the Asian cultures, it's shame and honor are the big items that really govern the way they think and look at the world. I want to have honor. I want to avoid shame. The gospel addresses that. The gospel certainly addresses guilt and innocence. In some of our indigenous cultures in the world, it's fear power is the paradigm that they're thinking through. They are afraid of the spirit world and how that might affect them. And they want power over those things that are trying to have power over them. So does the gospel address the fear power paradigm? Absolutely it does. So the gospel addresses all of these issues, but it's helpful sometimes if you know your audience, how you might bring the gospel to adapt and make it as pertinent as possible to your audience. So the last thing I want to say then before I actually get into presenting the gospel is, of course, it's very dependent on the ministry of the Holy Spirit. As you present the gospel to someone, you need to have a bathe in prayer so that the Holy Spirit would help you to present the gospel accurately and be true to the gospel and the message, but also pray for your hearers because they need the Holy Spirit to bring understanding and bring faith to their hearts And that is critical. It's not just, if it was so easy to just declare it, you know, then most of the world would be believing it. But we know that it is a spiritual thing that happens. God must work and bring people out of their deadness and into life in Christ Jesus. So, to present the gospel then, let me move into this now. First base is God. Let's say you've come to the plate, you've gotten a hit, you're running to first base. Well, first of all, you have to believe that God exists. You can't even touch that first base unless you believe that God exists. That is very important. And some people will argue, well, Hebrews 11.6, of course, says, without faith, it is impossible to please him. How do you know that God exists? Well, I'll put it to you this way. How do you know? I read a book not that long ago. I've been doing more reading these days. It's a fiction novel called Without Warning by Joel C. Rosenberg. Some of you may have heard of him as an author. He had a character in the book who was a journalist. His name was J.B. Collins, and the book was written from a first-person perspective. J.B. Collins was, in a sense, person that he was writing through, and he was a very interesting character, and it was wonderful. So where did this character come from? Did this character just come out of the blue, J.B. Collins? No, he was created in the mind of the author. The character had a creator, and that was the author, J.B. Collins. When you look at a painting, does it just get there, or is there an artist who made it? When you look at a building, did it get there by itself or did it have an architect, an engineer, and builders that put it together? And so the argument, I think, is pretty plain. Creation requires a creator. You look at the beauty and the wonder of our creation. How could it not have had an intelligent, all-powerful creator? And the Apostle Paul uses this sort of idea in Romans chapter 1, that it should be obvious. He says, for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, he says. Nobody can reasonably or logically say I don't have enough evidence to believe in God. It's impossible. The Apostle Paul does not grant that as an argument to anybody. It says everybody is without excuse. God exists. He is the great creator. He's also the sovereign ruler of heaven and earth. We see that throughout the scriptures. We see that he has many attributes. The theologians sometimes separate his attributes into the non-communicable attributes and the communicable attributes. The non-communical attributes of God are those attributes that he alone possesses, and he doesn't share those attributes with us, mankind. Such as things like his omnipresence, he's everywhere at the same time. His self-sufficiency, his omniscience, he knows everything. His omnipotence, he is all-powerful. Those are attributes that just belong to him, but he does have those attributes. He doesn't share them with us. Then there's other attributes of God which he does share with us, such things as his holiness. He is holy, he is absolutely morally pure, is often the first thing we think about when we think about his holiness, and he calls for us to be that way as well, and we are, by his grace, capable of being holy. He is just. He is righteous. He is good. He is good to all, Psalm 145. His tender mercies are over all his works. He's merciful. He's gracious. He is love. God is love, 1 John. He is also triune. This might not be obvious, of course. Creation doesn't tell us this. The scriptures tell us this. But it tells us this early on, even in the creation of man. God says, let us make man in our image. Us, right there, the plural form of the word is used to give us a hint, even early on in the scriptures, that God is a plurality of persons. And throughout the scriptures, we see the plurality in so many places. We see it in Psalm 2. We see it in John 1.1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And then verse 14, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. We see the Trinitarian nature of God in the baptismal expression. Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The name singular, three persons. So the scriptures are very clear if you But it takes grace, of course, to see it, that God is a triune God. That's not something you and I could figure out. It is something that is necessarily revealed to us. God is also a sustainer. He upholds all things. In Him we live and move and have our being. One of the things that we should say when we're describing God to people at some point, and most of us would bring this out, is God is also judge. If he sets up, if he has a moral universe, and he does, he sets up what's right and wrong, then he is of necessity going to judge right and wrong. And the scriptures are very clear that he is that and he will do that. In Acts 17.31, he says that he has, God has fixed the day on which he will judge the world in righteousness. Hebrews 9.27. It is appointed unto man once to die, after this, the judgment. Which of us living in our society here, what would we think of a society where people were allowed to do anything they wanted to do and there was no accountability, there was no civil authorities to bring criminals to justice? What would we think of that? We would think that that was terrible, because all of us naturally expect there's to be an accountability for people's crimes and sins and accounting for even in our human society. How much more should we expect a final accounting by the judge of all the earth being God? So this is first base then. I'm just describing some of the attributes of God. You don't have to describe all of them when you are presenting the gospel to people. You have to present it based on the audience that you're speaking to. I want to close before I move on to second base here, just with the idea that God is a glorious, beautiful being. We live in a day now where the coronavirus is spreading throughout the whole world, has been spreading, and there's a lot of grief and pain and death as a result of it, and it's a sad thing. And some people may be blaming God for it, and that's too bad, because God is good. The fact that you have bad things that happen in the world is because the world is fallen. It's in sin, and it's the outworking of this fallenness, which I'll speak about next, that we are experiencing bad things in the world. God himself is absolutely good and glorious. and we should want to know him. So do you want to get to first base? I hope you do. And I hope you want to move on. But you have to believe some of these things about God for sure. Second base then, as you're making your way around the bases trying to get home, is what about man? Man is on second base. What is his nature? What is her nature? Well, man was the ultimate, the pinnacle of God's creation, and we read about that in Genesis chapter 1. The last thing that God created was man, and he said he made man in his image. Man can reason like God reasons. Man has a will to perform like God has a will, can perform things, do things, take action. And God also has emotions, and he made us. with emotions. But man, in chapter 3 of Genesis, has fallen into sin. They disobeyed God, Adam and Eve, and because of that, cast the whole world into a state of sin and a curse. We can read about that in Genesis 3, in Romans 5, and Romans 3.23. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. There's no exception in terms of who comes into the world as a sinner. We all come in the world as a sinner. There's only one exception, and that, of course, is Christ Jesus. He came into the world not as a sinner. He did not inherit a sin nature. So the world is fallen, but it's also condemned because the fallenness represents a rebellion against the Maker, the Creator God. Romans 5.16 says, the judgment following one trespass of Adam and Eve brought condemnation, under judgment. Man is also impotent, depraved, not capable of rescuing himself out of his state of condemnation, out of his state of sin. We see that, for instance, in Psalm 53, 2-3. He looked out on the earth to see if there were any that did understand. And they had all gone astray, everyone. There's no one that seeks after God naturally. We're all in a state of depravity. And, of course, Paul speaks about that in Ephesians 2, that we are, in our natural selves, dead in trespasses and sins, a dead person. has no power to get himself out of that condition. He's dead, she's dead in trespasses and sins. But also, humanity is deceived. I'm talking about the natural man. We all come into the world as a natural man, and the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked who can know it. We like to think in our minds that we're not far from God, but we are deceived. We are in rebellion against God. We are far from this moral, beautifully perfect, holy God. We are far separated from Him, even though we can deceive ourselves and think that God must think we're wonderful. Which leads me to the last point in describing the nature of man is we tend to be proud. And I think recently, in my home church of Pilgrim Baptist Fellowship, our lead pastor, Hagop Chobanian, has been preaching through the book of Daniel. It's interesting, in Daniel chapter 2, where Daniel reveals a dream to this mighty king, Nebuchadnezzar. And Nebuchadnezzar says in the end of chapter 2, truly your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. Which is an amazing statement for a heathen king to make. He admits it. But right in the next chapter, he has this huge golden image built of himself and makes everybody else to bow down to it. Like what happened? Did he forget about this God of gods? His pride got to him. He wanted people to think he was great and mighty. And God had to humble him, and we read about that in chapter 4, where he brought him down to the level of the beasts of the field, so that by the end of chapter 4, this now is his confession. He exalts God, and he ends it by saying, all those who walk in pride, God is able to abase and bring low. So man is naturally proud and it takes God to work to show him his pride, to humble him and bring him to a place where he can understand himself. and recognize how great and glorious God is, and He's the one that deserves praise. So this is the nature of man. But because of these things, there is a separation between God and man. There is an enmity, as Paul writes about in Romans, between God and man. Human beings don't come into the world friends with God. They come into the world at enmity with God, and it takes God to reveal this to them. People need to understand that. that there's a separation and enmity. And there's also a debt that he owes to God, like he's a sinner. Sin creates a debt with God that needs to be paid off. And how can it be paid off? I'll give an example here, an illustration. My wife was born in the States. She's an American. and she has relatives and family in the States, so we've often gone to the States on vacations, and we've traveled to the States for different things. And I kind of vaguely remember that this happened to me one time. I forgot to get U.S. currency when I went down to the States one time. I just had Canadian currency in my pocket, in my wallet. So I went down to the States. I think I was pulling into a gas station, filling up and wanted to go in and buy something. And what I did is I went and put Canadian cash on the counter. And guess what happened in the United States? They don't accept Canadian currency. It was useless. I needed American currency. Well, we do not have any currency in and of ourselves that God can receive. All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. They are of no value to God to pay off the sin debt that we owe. God must create a currency that he will accept. And we'll see that next when I talk about Christ. It is the currency of Christ only that he will accept to pay off the debt that we owe. So here we have third base then. There is God on first base, this glorious being. There is man fallen and in his sin on second base. And there is a great chasm between the two. There is a problem. There is a rift. He's under condemnation. He's under judgment. He is bound, if he stays like that, to go to everlasting separation and everlasting hell separated from God. Can he just run to home plate from second plate, second base? Can he just go run right over the pitcher's mound and run straight home? No, he can't, because you're running outside of the baseline. The umpires would call you out. You can't do that. You have to go to third base. You have to touch every base. You have to cover every base, such as my sermon title, Covering the Bases. Covering the Bases is used as a as a defensive thing. The defensive players on the field have to make sure all the bases are covered. They're defending them. But we could also use it as a person who's on offense, running the bases. He has to cover all the bases. He can't miss any bases. If you don't tag a base, you are out. You will not make it to home plate safely. So yes, Jesus Christ is the person at third base. There is one mediator between God and man. There's one person that God has assigned to take care of our predicament, and that is Jesus Christ. And he's at third base. What do we discover about him? Well, many passages of scripture can deal with this. One of the famous ones was John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that's Jesus Christ, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Make it to home plight, but you need to go through Christ and believe in him. The Trinity, of course, took action. salvation. And the God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost were all active in salvation. And it was something that was planned. Jesus Christ was that seed of Eve that was planned that would crush the serpent's head. Jesus Christ is that seed of Abraham that would be a blessing to all the nations of the world. Jesus Christ is the seed of David who would reign on his throne forever. And Jesus Christ ends up being that seed of the woman Mary as well. In the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, Galatians 4.4. Christ is the absolutely unique person. As I was saying, he has the currency that nobody else has. He has the righteousness that nobody else has. He has a nature, and this is, in fact, he has two natures. He is one person who is fully God and fully man. He's absolutely unique. Nobody else in the history of humanity in the world has that essence to him. Fully God, fully man in one person, which makes him absolutely ideal to bridge the gap and be the mediator between man and God, because he is both man and God. There is no one more, there's no one so perfectly suited to bring man back to God as Jesus Christ himself. And he did it, of course, by paying for sins and living out a righteous life. as well. He is the acceptable sacrifice for sins. He is perfect. All the effort that God made to say that the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament had to be without blemish. Why so much repetition? It's because he was teaching them that This ultimate sacrifice, we cannot sacrifice ourselves to God and pay the debt because we are blemished, we have sin. It has to be a perfect, sinless sacrifice, which was Christ. So John the Baptist says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He was without sin, and God accepted his sacrifice for sin. He is a substitutionary sacrifice, and we see that in different places in the scripture. We see it very powerfully in Isaiah chapter 53. You want to see substitutionary atonement, just read Isaiah 53. Read it over and over again. He bore our sins over and over. It's repeated there in many beautiful ways. But we see it in 1 Peter 3.18, for Christ also once suffered for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. Christ died and rose again. He was delivered up for our offenses, raised again for our justification. Job once asked, how can a man be justified with God, made right with God? And that's a question that people, God puts it on people's hearts to still ask that question. It's a very valid question, and maybe a little story will help us to understand what that idea of justification means. The story is told of a man in England who put his Rolls-Royce on a boat and went across to the continent of Europe to go on a holiday. While he was driving around Europe, something happened to the motor of his car. He cabled the Rolls-Royce people back in England and he asked, I'm having trouble with my car. What do you suggest I do? Well, the Rolls-Royce people flew a mechanic over. The mechanic repaired his car and flew back to England and left the man to continue his holiday. As you can imagine, the fellow was wondering, how much is this going to cost me? So when he got back to England, he wrote the people a letter and he asked how much he owed them. He received a letter back from the Rolls-Royce office that read, dear sir, there is no record anywhere in our files that anything ever went wrong with a Rolls-Royce. That, my friend, is justification. That is justification. In God's record book, if you believe in Christ, he has absolutely no record of any of your sins ever, past, present, or future. They're completely wiped clean under the blood of Christ. That is what justification is, and it's a transaction that God executes to wipe your record clean upon your repentance and faith. For God made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Wrapping up then, I want to bring us then to home plate. We've seen something about God at first base, about the nature of man at second base, and how there's a huge gulf and separation. We've seen something about third base now, the beautiful third base that people must go through. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. Is it enough to have head knowledge of God and man and Christ? It's not enough. We need to do something with these truths that have been presented to us. Greg Gilbert brings it out in his book very wonderfully. If you want to read it, What is the Gospel? But he says the fourth thing that people have to do is repent and believe in Christ. Acts 17.30, now God commands all men everywhere to repent. I'm going to do a little quotation here from the London Baptist Confession of Faith. Bear with me. But here's how it defines what repentance is. Repentance is an evangelical grace whereby a person, being by the Holy Spirit made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin, does, by faith in Christ, humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it, and self-abhorrency praying for pardon and strength of grace with a purpose and endeavor by supplies of the spirit to walk before God unto all pleasing in all things. It's more than head knowledge. It actually moves people to take action and go in a different path. True repentance is nicely demonstrated for us in the story of the prodigal son in Luke chapter 15. Now, Some would say that the parables often have one main point, and that might be true, but some of these parables are so rich, they have several points. The prodigal son, what do you think of when you think of that story? Do you not think of the extravagance and wonderfulness of the father who bestows his love on the son that comes back? Is that not a big focus in the parable? But we also think of the waywardness of this one son, and we also think of the self-righteousness of the older son. So some parables, I think, can rightly teach us a number of beautiful things. But when we think of this prodigal son, what does his repentance look like? At least four things I want us to take note here. First of all, he came to his senses. When he went and spent his inheritance and spent it all on Bad living, bad decisions, and he was in the field with the pigs, wishing he could eat the pigs' food. He was desperate. It said he came to his senses when he came to himself. Then he said he made a plan. I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him. Then he took action. He arose and came to his father. And then he confessed his sins honestly. Father, I have sinned against heaven and earth and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants. So he took at least these four steps, but I think it helps to highlight for us what the repentance looks like. It wasn't enough that he thought just in his mind Oh yeah, I've been bad, you know, I've got a plan. No, he took the plan, he had to execute it. He actually went home. He stopped living out there where they're feeding the pigs. He went home and lived under the rule, the loving benevolent rule of his wonderful father. And that's what people have to do in order to come to Christ and come to God, they need to repent and turn from their sins and acknowledge that God is good and come and trust God and live under His rule in their lives. And that's good too because one of the essence of sin is to live independent from God. The youngest son wanted to go live independently from his father's love and rule. And that's a big definition of sin. We want to live independent from God when really we should be living in utter dependence and joyful dependence on a loving God and living in His house and close to Him. That should be our desire. And then it's not only repentance, of course, it's faith in Christ, which is critical. The Apostle Paul preached in Acts 20, repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Some of you may have heard the story about Charles Blondin. And he was an exhibitionist back in the 1800s. I believe he was a Frenchman. But he came over to Canada. And he was a daredevil, and he decided to do a stunt. He was going to set up a tightrope over the gorge of Niagara Falls, which he did. This is not a fictitious story. This actually happened. You can read about it. So he set up this tightrope over the gorge of Niagara Falls, about 160 feet above the water. 1,100 feet across is this tightrope, and he walks across it. It says, the history shows that he walked across it about 300 times in his lifetime. So this wasn't just, he was very competent tightrope walker. 300 times, and he did various stunts on this tightrope. Said that one time he stopped in the middle and put down a little stove and he cooked an egg on the stove and ate his egg in the middle of this tightrope. So he was an exhibitionist indeed. One time he walked backward across the tightrope. And then when he got to the other side, he got a wheelbarrow and he blindfolded himself and he walked back across with a wheelbarrow blindfolded. Now here's where you have to use your imagination a little bit. I don't know in any record where I could say that this was absolutely true, that this actually happened, but let's use our imagination and pretend that this happened for the sake of the illustration. When he comes back, He turns to the people, and he's got his wheelbarrow. He takes his blindfold off, and he says, do any of you believe that I could put a person in this wheelbarrow and wheel them safely across to the other side? And the people said, oh, yeah, yeah, you can do that. We just saw you go over with the wheelbarrow. Then he said, OK, do I have a volunteer? And of course, nobody volunteered to go sit in that wheelbarrow and be wheeled across the gorge of Niagara Falls. But that's the kind of faith that Christians need, that people need if they're going to be saved. It's not just a head faith. You actually have to trust Christ. Let's say Christ now is that man pushing you across the precipice and wheeling you across there, trying to bring you safely into eternity. We have to actually trust Christ to do that. It's faith in Christ. It's a radical faith. It's not just a simple head knowledge. If it was so simple, most of the world would be believing in Him. People have to exercise faith in Christ, which is radical. It often involves being shamed by your family, being ostracized by others. It requires something. That's why Jesus talked about, if anybody come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me. It calls for a radical commitment to Christ. This is what faith in Christ involves. So there we have the four bases. Are you putting your faith in Christ? Have you put your faith in Christ? Have you repented of your sin? Have you seen your need of Christ? And whoever comes to me, he says, I will in no wise cast out. If you trust Christ, he will save your soul eternally. So this then is the gospel covering the bases, its importance, and its content. The gospel is a package of important truths which must be believed together as tied together truth if one is to be saved. So if you want to be saved, you must get in the game, and you must run the bases, and you must touch every base, God, man, Christ, and get home by repentance and faith. This is what binds our Sovereign Grace Fellowship churches together. Pray by the grace of God, we will keep believing it, we will preach it, we will share it, we will not let it go, we will not lose it. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for all that you've done for us in Christ Jesus. We thank you for the gospel message. May each of us believe it with all our hearts, for you've given it to us and it is the power of God unto salvation. We thank you so much. Bless us now in Jesus' name, amen.