It is good to be with you all. It's always exciting when folks who confess and profess the doctrines of God's free and sovereign grace can gather and enjoy fellowship one with the other. My mind always goes to those who do not have fellowship. those who do not have church fellowship on a regular basis, and there are many who count themselves among our number who do not have what we enjoy on a regular basis. Folks who live in states and in countries where they could drive all day and not be able to gather together with people of like faith and practice. And my heart always goes to them In times like this as I sit and enjoy fellowship with dozens and dozens and dozens of folk who are enjoying this fellowship with me my heart always goes to those who I know would would simply leap for joy and and have a heart overflowing if they could have what we possess here today. And so I thank God for this blessing that he's given us that we've been able to gather together. And I also am thankful that we're able to record these messages and these times so that we can, in our own small way, offer those Abroad and those who find themselves without fellowship as we have today that we might offer them just a little a little Encouragement along the way we might edify them as well as the Lord edifies us in his Word. I Want to turn your attention this afternoon to the second Corinthian letter 2nd Corinthians chapter 1 and We're going to consider a couple of verses 19 through 22 2nd Corinthians 1 19 through 22 The Word of the Living God 2nd Corinthians 1 19 through 22 For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, so Venus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no, but in Him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in Him. That is why it is through him that we utter our amen to God for his glory. And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us and who has also put his seal on us and given us his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee. And we trust the Lord to add his own blessings to the public reading of his infallible and holy word this afternoon for his glory and for our good. Amen. Amen. The title of my message this afternoon is The Promises of God Find Their Yes in Him. The Promises of God Find Their Yes in Him. Before we get into the message, introductory comments at this point are always expected, and I want to share some of those with you so that you have a context in which to hear me speak. I do count it an honor and a privilege to be able to preach the gospel of God's free and sovereign grace to you this afternoon. And I'd like to thank Pastor Scott for the invitation. And I'd also like to thank all of you for your support of this gospel endeavor as well. And I bring with me the thoughts and prayers of my own congregation. Horizons Baptist Church. We're located in Pikedon, Ohio, basically south central Ohio, just one county up right in the middle of the state. And that's where our church gathers for worship. We've sought the Lord's face continually for this Bible conference, and we've been praying that he would be pleased to open the windows of heaven and pour out wisdom and blessings through the preaching of his word. weekend, and we know and trust the Lord to perform His own will and way. And for the past 16 years, I've served as one of the pastors of the congregation where I preach and One thing I want to make abundantly clear, and that is many of you have been experienced attendees at sovereign grace Bible conferences. And so, you know, this isn't how we do things. And what I mean by that is that the Bible conferences put on by religious societies and those who have a different agenda will typically have a theme and the theme will be something on the lines of grow your church in three easy steps. Or, you know, carpet or tile. Find out tomorrow for $99 a head. And we're laughing, but you've all seen this stuff. Or we see the posters of people with grandiose titles. The Reverend Bishop Dr. Leroy blah, blah, blah, the third. D.D. T.H.D. M.Div. Fiddle D.D. welcomes you to an outpouring of the anointing of the Holy Ghost. Only $150 ahead. Everybody sign up and go, right? Now people say, well, why are you being so facetious? Did not the Old Testament prophets mock the false gods? Did they not put them to open shame? Didn't a certain prophet cry out to the prophets of Baal and say to them, is your god in the bathroom? Where is he? Maybe he's on vacation. Why isn't he doing what you thought he'd do? And you see, we mock. the false gods and the false notions because our Lord put them all to open shame on Calvary's hill. And so I want to put aside, I want us to divorce ourselves from the notion that this conference is about any of that stuff. We're not here to flaunt educational credentials. It doesn't matter where you went to school. If you do not believe the gospel of the saving of the soul, you're just a lost undone wretch. We're not here to brag about church property holdings. The bigger the church, the more they beg. So they can have a bigger church. So they can beg. So they can pay a bigger light bill. So they can beg. We're not here to teach you how to go back to your churches and build bigger, fancier facades for whitewashed sepulchers. That's not the point. We're not here to hawk the latest church growth strategies. If you come back with me next Sunday to my church, if we have 30, 35 people there this coming Sunday, we will leap for joy at the big crowd. And so you're not going to hear Go to this seminary and your church will grow. Or do these three things and God will move in this way in your church. You're not going to hear about, oh, if you build your church to look like this, it'll draw more people. That's not the point. It never has been the point of any good sovereign grace conference. We gather together to shout from the rooftops that the redeeming work is done. The redeeming work is done. All those other fads will come and go. All the other notions, all the trinkets and all the gimmicks and all the programs will come and they will go. Remember, seeker-sensitive was a big deal. If we just dress differently and throw out the organ and the piano and put in a rock band, then more people will come and hear what we have to say. Oh, but we can't say what we really ought to say because they won't stay. So let's change everything and let's not preach the gospel and we'll build big, big, huge churches and big followings. Well, beloved, there's no cause for a conference if that's all we're going to be talking about. There's no reason to gather together from all different parts of all different places just so we can pat one another on the back and just so we can say this is a cool program. Let's try this or Pastor Scott's got a cool brochure. We need to maybe do that one in our church. That's not the point of this. The point of gathering together, I like what John Gill says, he called pastors remembrancers. My task as a gospel preacher is to remind his people that everything you need is covered in the blood. Covered by the blood, covered through the blood. My job is to speak words of comfort and peace to you, to remind you that The Lord is on his throne that Christ ever liveth to make intercession for you and for me and praise the living God. We need not bother ourselves with the fads and silliness of man centered religion, and we ought to be bold enough to call it what it is. It's false gospel. It's not gospel. Man-centered religion is not gospel. You cannot believe just any old thing, call it gospel, and consider yourself a Christian. That, beloved, is nonsense. God does not save through a false gospel. And we ought to be bold enough to say it. So many, and this is to our shame, so many will not call out false gospels for what they are. They would rather defer the question. And yet the scripture says, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And if what you're hearing is not the word of God, how can faith come? We need not bother ourselves with all this. We need to expose it for what it is, mock it openly, and then concern ourselves with deepening our understanding of God's grace and mercy. That's why we gather together. The work is done. Now let's learn to love and learn to see him for who he is and learn to grow, the Bible says, in the grace and knowledge of the Lord. He doesn't love me more today than he did yesterday. He doesn't. There's no qualitative or quantitative difference in God's disposition toward me. I'm in Christ. I'm accepted in the Beloved. But there's nothing stopping me. from learning his word and enriching my own mind and my own heart with the realities of his grace and to develop a better understanding by his grace each time I hear the gospel proclaimed. That's why we gather, so we can learn of his word, feast upon his word, find rest for our souls and comfort and solace in knowing that he who beginneth a good work in you shall be faithful to complete it until the day of the Lord Jesus. Alright, so this afternoon I focus your attention now on Paul's foundational assertion. What I just read earlier in our scripture lesson, 2 Corinthians 1, 19-22. He says in verse 19, that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no, but in him it was always yes. And so I want you to understand that the second Corinthian letter and our overall context today of the message isn't going to focus on the content of the second Corinthian letter. The content Paul is getting ready to deal with is suffering in the Christian life. He's going to deal with his own credentials as an apostle of the Lord. He's going to deal with those kind of questions throughout this letter. But what I want us to see is Paul's understanding of who God is. And he begins, he introduces the second letter by saying this, Jesus is not wishy-washy. He's not yes and no. The gospel is not yes and no. There's no maybe gospels. There's no maybe God. There is a God of the amen. And the Bible says, for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, was not yes and no, but in him it is always yes. So unlike the vacillating and the changing sinners to whom Paul is addressing, because like it or not, beloved, we are not immutable. There are times where we change our minds. Why do we change our minds? Because we make an error. If you were driving here this afternoon, or this morning rather, and you didn't hit the right exit, you had to have a change of mind, a change of direction. You had to find another way to get here. Why? Because you messed up. You know, you turned left when you should have turned right, or maybe your tom-tom had a mind of its own and decided to take you out into the middle of a cornfield. Either way, mistakes lead to change. missteps lead to change but the Lord does not change he is immutable never changing always the same and so Paul begins 2nd Corinthians by saying this Everything I've told you about God is going to stand. God is the God of the amen. And how do we know this? Verse 20 says, For all the promises of God find their yes in Him. In who? In Jesus Christ. All of the promises of God find their yes in Him. And that's why we utter our amen to God for His glory, not our own glory, not our own abilities, not our own works, not our own righteousness, but our amen rests in the promises of God fulfilled in Jesus Christ. He is the amen. He is the Amen. Now, there is no shadow of turning in Him. We sang the song earlier. Thou changest not. Thy compassions they fail not. Praise the Lord. His mercies are new each day, but they spring from an unchanging, never-ending supply of who God is. He is the Lord, our God. And the Scriptures declare, He changeth not. So Paul builds gospel assurance on this foundation. Just as God is never changing, always the same, so too is the accomplishment of the gospel. To the child of God, reading 2 Corinthians 1 and 20, and let's just read it. For all the promises of God find their yes in Him. That is why it is through Him that we utter our amen to God for His glory. To a child of God reading that passage of Scripture, a blessing is sure to be found. We live in a day and age where even so-called grace preachers do all that they seemingly can to rob God's people of assurance and under the guise of very laudable descriptive terms hides an insidious rank heresy and deception Oh, it goes by many names. In the old days, it might have been called total surrender. Among the Nazarenes and Wesleyan holiness crowds, it's known as the second blessing. And amongst so-called reformed people, it's known primarily as lordship, salvation. This idea that you can somehow find assurance of what Christ completed by looking inward, into your own heart, into your own life, searching for tidbits and scraps and sinful crumbs on which you can build some sort of a scaffolding of assurance based upon your own religiosity or your own fervor. Well, let me tell you. There's plenty of fervor in this world. Your favorite ball team kicked the field goal right at the right time, and all these quiet Baptists start shouting amen, right? Real quick. We all look like we lose our dignity when our favorite team's coming back from behind. I watched the Super Bowl. I know what happened. Fervor, we can drum it up, right? But let me ask you, the high that those sports fans experienced in that moment of ecstasy when their team was coming back against all odds, they were shouting and they were screaming and they were loving life and everything about it was wonderful. Did that same level of fervor accompany them to work on Wednesday morning? Were they still acting the fool at 7.30 on a Wednesday morning? Were they still all goose pimply and excitable as they were maybe that Sunday night when all their favorite team was doing it? Uh-uh. Why? Because we can drum up fervor for any old thing. People even drum up fervor for religion. and sometimes wholesome things. I'll give you a great example. There are times where emotionalism is a beautiful thing in church. You hear a song that moves your heart. The truth of the scripture in a sermon moves your heart. And perhaps tears begin to well up in your eyes as you think about the amazing grace of God. But let me tell you, the moment you begin to look for those emotional experiences as evidence of God's truth, you become someone who is searching now for signs and wonders and not for the giver of those signs. Oh, let's follow Jesus for the fishes and the loaves, why don't we? And that's exactly what happens when we begin to navel gaze and look into ourselves for the assurance that only finds itself in the amen, in Christ alone. You want to know you're saved? Do you believe? Do you believe? Do you believe? Well, now, preacher, I don't feel it. You see, you're betraying your own misunderstanding of what the gospel is if your idea of gospel assurance rests in something in you. You don't understand that the gospel is an accomplished work if you're looking for assurance within. And now this preacher is accused right now by himself of getting ahead in his notes. So I need to get my nose back in here. All of the promises of God find their yes, not in works, not in who you are, not in who I am, but in Christ. This is not a hard truth for God's people, but this is an impossible truth to understand in the flesh. You won't do it. You can't do it. That's why it's an offensive thing. The gospel is an offense to those who aren't thirsty, to those who know. They just know they're not poor, needy sinners. The gospel is an offensive message. How dare you tell me that I'm lost and undone, that I can't please God. I know I'm better than the guy down the street. Don't you come preaching that stuff to me, preacher. I know I'm better than somebody out there. I gotta be. What are they doing? They're saying, no, thank you, Jesus. No, thank you, gospel. I've got this. What is that, beloved, but the deception of self-righteousness that bubbles up in us like a well that springs to the overflow? It is what we are. We believe the lie in the garden. Ye shall not surely die. You'll be like God. Go ahead. Have your bite of this. It's OK. Ooh. And then what do we do when we get caught? Do we still take the blame? No, the natural man shifts the blame. Now, Lord, you know that woman you gave me. You know, it's not even me, Lord. Really, it's kind of your fault. She tricked me up. And then, of course, the woman said, no, the serpent. The serpent beguiled me. You see, the natural man in that state won't hear the gospel. They won't accept the gospel. That's why it's a foolish folly to think that you can tweak your church services or your meetings to somehow become palpable and palatable to those who don't believe Christ. Oh, we'll trick them in. We'll play baseball on Saturdays and that'll show them how much we really think they're super swell. And then they'll come running, won't they? No, they won't. No, they won't. They won't do it. And we have to understand that the natural mind receiveth not the things of God. The Spirit of God has to, has to proclaim this gospel, has to go with this gospel in His demonstrative power to cause us to run to Christ in faith, His gift. It is Christ who has for all time satisfied the righteous requirements of the law on behalf of His people. It is Christ whose obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, has made us acceptable in the beloved. And it is through Christ that God is just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Him. So everything promised to God, to His people, has been secured solely by the perfect work of God the Son. Everything, all of God's promises rest in the amen work of Christ the Lord. And we're going to see quickly this afternoon, as I am going to be mindful of the time and the hour, that the gospel is the work of God alone, predicated on his own power and authority, secured by his own promises. It is the work that was promised by God, performed by God the Son, and is now proclaimed in power by God the Holy Spirit as he accompanies the preaching of his own word. Understand now, this is a Trinitarian understanding of the gospel. And we should be careful to have a well-developed understanding of who God is. God the Father promised a Savior. He promised a city whose builder and maker is God. God the Son came and performed that promise perfectly. And today it is through the power of the Holy Spirit that a wicked, wretched sinner like this old boy can stand in a pulpit and preach this gospel and it actually do something to affect somebody else. It's not my words. My feeble words can't change you. Your willpower, whatever that is, can't change you. But the Holy Spirit can go out hunting for God's people. And that's exactly what he does. He leaves the ninety and nine and he goes forth a hunting. And when he finds the Bible says in the 15th chapter of Luke, when he finds the sheep, he picks it up and throws it over his shoulders. You ever just think about that mental image? That's the Lord, the Great Shepherd of our soul, Jesus Christ the righteous, holding us up over his shoulders, both sets of feet, or hooves, in his hands, throwing us over his shoulder, walking us back. He's not tempting us back. He's not luring us back. He's picking us up and carrying us into the fold of safety. This is His work, beloved, His work. So quickly, I want to go through a couple of things just to introduce to you what the gospel is, what the gospel is not, and why it is that all of our assurance, all of our understanding of standing, all rest securely in the finished work of Christ and not in anything about us or anything about what we do. So the gospel was promised by God the Father. I'm going to read a lot of scripture. I'm going to be bouncing around a lot. Feel free to follow along as best you can. I am going to try to hurry along, though, so that we can get this whole gist in one message. The gospel is promised by God the Father. And we see one of the first gospel promises in the third chapter of Genesis, verse 15. In the middle of the curse, The middle of God pronouncing judgment upon mankind, He gives us the first gospel promise found in Scripture. In Genesis 3.15, He says this, We see in the Scriptures that there was coming, even through this great fall, an unfolding plan of God. This is why I'm of the opinion, and I believe this is settled by Scripture. There might be some who disagree, but there is room for some level of disagreement on this, I suppose. I'm not going to throw an egg at you if you disagree, but here's what I believe. I don't believe that Jesus was ever Plan B. I don't believe that redemption through his blood was ever plan B. I believe that God throughout all eternity had in mind redemption through the blood of Jesus. I believe he ordained every single event that happened throughout all of that period of time. If you want a theological term for this, are you ready? Superlapsarianism. How do you like that one? Supra, not infra. Now that'll get you in trouble on some forums online. I'll let that one sink in like, what in the world? You know, boy, don't we have a bad tendency of putting some big old 10 cent words on simple things. I believe God decreed all things. Nothing happens outside of his purview and will, not a thing. He does not wake up in the morning if he were to sleep. Our God does not slumber or sleep. He doesn't go over to the paper and read the headlines and say, wow, look what all happened while I was slumbering. No, he doesn't learn and he doesn't see new things coming at him. Everything that exists down to every level, whether it be real or fanciful, in every way, in every reality, God has decreed it all. There is nothing that escapes his notice. There's nothing that escapes his plan. Nothing happens, you know, as an indirect result of what God does. God is in control. We use the word sovereign to describe that and explain it. We believe God is in control. So God in the garden, in the middle of the great fall, he goes ahead and he announces in a prototypical way, in an early way, just a simple nugget of truth. He says, things are really bad. Things are gonna get bad for you guys. I mean, he tells man, hey, you're gonna sweat and work for every bite of food you eat. Woman, you're going to have great pain and childbearing. You're gonna be kicked out of the garden. You're going to die. And by the way, and remember now, who's he addressing this to in verse 15? He's speaking to the serpent. He looks right at the serpent and says, oh, but in the middle of this, let me just remind you what's gonna happen here. in my own good time, in my own good way. I'm going to put enmity between you and the woman. So whatever's going to happen, it's going to be a result of a woman giving birth. So we see already that the promise of God was going to include the woman giving birth. It's going to be some sort of progeny. It's going to be some sort of man. And it says between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head. You shall bruise his heel. Now, listen, if somebody somebody walks up to you and they've got a bloody nose and they say, man, I ran my nose right into his fist. We all know what happened there. Nobody runs their nose into someone else's fist. Well, this is God's way of telling the serpent. There is a promise here, a redemptive promise, and you think you've got something going right now, but all this is in accordance with my will and my way. This is the Proto-Evangelion. OK, another one of those 10 cent words. The gospel and one of its earliest promises found all the way back in Genesis. So the gospel is promised by God the Father in the garden. The gospel is promised to Abraham. Abraham was a pagan who worshiped false gods. Just an old pagan. We like to aggrandize the Old Testament saints because, you know, they went through some really cool exploits. But when God found Abraham, he was living in a foreign land. They had foreign gods. He was just an old pagan. And what does God say to him in Genesis 12? He says, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And he goes on to say that one of these days, all of the families of the earth shall be blessed in you. There's a promise of God. Hey, pagan, you're not a pagan anymore. You're working for me. Let's go. Over here now. And I'm going to bless people through you. This is my promise to you. This is what's going to happen. And so we see that Christ himself in the New Testament said this of Abraham. He said, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. What a testimony. Abraham rejoiced to see my day. Abraham, the Bible says, believed God. And it was accounted or credited unto him as righteousness. Abraham's faith, just his ability to believe, was not what saved him. No, it was the object of his faith. You see, faith in your faith, I hear people say, oh, I've got faith. I've got a strong faith. And I say, oh, so you have faith in faith. So you're an idolater. You worship your ability to believe what you think is true. That's not biblical faith. That's not the grounds of assurance. Our grounds of assurance is the proper object of faith. Abraham believed God. The object of the faith there was in the promise of God, not in Abraham's ability to super-duper pinky promise, swear, or believe. No, no, no. The assurance was in God, who doesn't change. And so God promised the gospel, the wonderful promise of that new reality of fellowship to the garden, even in the midst of the fall, to Abraham, And the scripture even tells us that Moses believed the promise. Moses, called by God to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt, served as a type of Christ in his own right. The scripture used that entire ordeal of the exodus of the people of God as a type and a shadow of what God would do for all of his people through the gospel. Moses, the Bible says in Deuteronomy 15 through 18, chapter 18, here's what Moses said of the one who would come. He said, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers. It is to him you shall listen. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him. So the prophet to come, this was Moses speaking about this prophet. He said the prophet to come, Christ the Lord, would speak God's word perfectly to his people. Now, I need you to just think about the significance here. Because how in the world could a mere man ever speak God's word perfectly? See, there's something here. You've got to catch the nuance here. Anytime the scripture uses words like shall or perfectly, understand that we're talking about concrete action steps in the context of a holy and righteous God. So if the scripture uses the term perfect, The scripture there, in many cases, especially if it's in reference to God, the scripture there is speaking of that which satisfies the righteous requirements of God. That's the definition of perfection in much of the New and Old Testament narrative. And so to say that a prophet speaks God's word perfectly is to say something more than what is written on the page. Christ alone perfectly satisfies God on all counts. The Bible says he was tempted as we are, yet without sin. And the Scripture says in the Gospels that Christ spoke with authority and not as the scribes. You know, people can speak God's Word and it can be a hollow shell. I think of a very liberal church service where nobody in there even understands the Gospel and it's a tragedy. And you go and they'll read from the Old Testament, they'll read from the New Testament, they'll read from the Prophets or the Psalms, they'll read from the Epistles, and then their priestess or whatever will get up to the platform and tell the whole bunch why it's all hogwash. And then they'll sing a song and go home. And that pretty much typifies the God-hating, liberal churchianity of our age, where you've got people who will read the Word, use the Word as window dressing for their very fine and lavish services in their very fine buildings, but there is no substance there, no faith there. It's hollow words. The Scripture says that's like the scribes. They had all the words right. Most of them memorized the entire Torah. They knew more Bible verses than anybody in this room will ever memorize their entire lives. And yet to what end? They trusted in their own righteousness. They didn't trust in the righteousness of another. They said, I'm good enough. Why? Because I give tithes of all that I possess. And I've memorized more Bible verses than you. Now I've sat in church services, where I'm from, and maybe it's like this around here, I'm not as certain, I can just speak to my own vicinity. In South Central Ohio, we are chewed up with the disease known as Wesleyan Arminianism. And it is a ravaging plague on our land. In my county, there's only about 18,000 people that live in my entire county. To put that in perspective, there's over 50,000 people that live in Hamilton, Ohio alone. And if you were to add Fairfield and some of the other areas, Butler County, for instance, would just tower over small little Pike County, Ohio. But in my small county, we have 85 or 86 buildings called churches. And in those 85 or 86 buildings, in about 84 of them, here is the typical gospel message. Jesus died for everyone His blood is there if you want it Take it or leave it. He's not going to force you to be his choose today Add your faith to his blood to get your salvation and when you before you leave Let me give you the big list of stuff You've got to keep doing in order to make sure this doesn't just go away so that you lose it tomorrow And now that's not how it said, but that's the implication. That's what passes as gospel preaching in my home county. And it's everywhere. See, people can speak God's word, you can read from God's word and not be speaking with any authority. It happens all the time in the hollow pulpits of the false religionists. When mockers mock God's word, quoting it in jest. You can speak God's word and not have authority. Yet Moses said of Christ, the one who would come, the prophet like him, he said, he will speak God's word perfectly. And the scripture says in the Romans, I'm sorry, Hebrews 11, 24 through 26, by faith, Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He continued the reproach of Christ. He considered rather the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. All of this Moses did, the Bible says, by faith. He had his eyes on the promise of God. God made a gospel promise, and Moses believed it. The prophets of the Old Testament wrote of this great promise, and we'll just touch just a couple. Isaiah 53 and 11. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. So through his sacrificial death, the coming Christ would establish a new and living way, a new covenant with his people based on his righteousness alone. How do we know that just from this one verse? The Bible says, by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many. to be accounted righteous. Our righteousness with God is through imputation. We've been credited with the very righteousness of our Savior, Jesus Christ. I know there's talk about this other than imputation mystery nonsense, but the scripture is clear. He will make many to be accounted righteous. This is the word of the Lord. Anybody preaching anything else is preaching heresy. This is God's word. He, and the Bible says, he shall bear their iniquities. So it's not that he's just going to forget about our sin, give us a mulligan and say, don't worry about it. That's not how you're just and the justifier of the ungodly. The sin that has to be dealt with. And Jesus Christ deals with our sin as he carries it by imputation. As our legal representative, he carries that sin. And now not only does he carry our sin, but he imputes his righteousness unto us. For he who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Praise the living God. So Isaiah 53 and 11 tells us that. Jeremiah 31, 33, yet another prophet speaking of the promise of the coming Messiah. He says, for this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. the promise all through the Old Testament. In the garden, to Abraham, to Moses, the prophets were all saying, this promise is coming. And when it gets here, listen, for the sake of sounding like a child at Christmas time, it's going to be great. It's going to be great. Oh, comfort yourselves with the true and living word of almighty God. Is it not great? Is it not great to know that your sins are blotted out? That times of refreshing can come from the presence of the Lord? That the day you thought you'd never make it through on your worst day, the Lord carried you through and here you sit? He screamed! His promises are true. And all through the Old Testament, we see of prophets longing to see the day of the Lord in the coming of Messiah. Praise God, a promise made in the Old Testament was a promise kept. One night in Bethlehem, as Christ the Lord was born of a virgin woman and placed in a manger, Christ had arrived, beloved. And now the whole thing begins to play out in flesh and blood time and history. This is something we've got to catch. The gospel, and this is point two, the gospel is promised by God the Father, and now we're here at point two. The gospel performed by God the Son. The Bible says in Matthew 121, she will bear a son, you shall call his name Jesus, and hear this, for he will save his people from their sins. Now we see the gospel in action is not something in us. It's not something that you drum up by your emotional experiences. It's not something that you say, Oh God, if I just am sincere enough, then I know I'll experience the gospel in my own heart. No, no, no, no, no. The gospel is a historic event that took place. Jesus Christ completed this work and it is historical. We're not talking about some mystical work that happens in your heart as you beg and plead for some cycle, you know, spiritual or some sort of ethereal experience. That's not the gospel. Now, mind you, wonderful, wonderful emotional things can happen as someone begins to believe the gospel, as the Spirit of God leads them to that truth. But none of those things are the gospel proper. The gospel must be understood as a completed event, wrought by Christ alone, or you're going to miss something major. You're going to miss something major. Listen, the Bible says in John 19 and 30, when Jesus had received the sour wine, he's on the cross now, he said, it is finished. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Many professing Christians do not know what the gospel truly entails. Because so many believe the false gospel of Arminianism, for example, including the belief that Christ died for everyone, the mere notion of an accomplished redemption, a saving work that actually saves anyone, is foreign to them. In fact, to speak about the gospel as a completed work, apart from any human effort, is offensive to most people that call themselves Christian. They'll look at you cross-eyed and say, well that means you can go and do anything you want and still be a Christian. And I immediately retort, no, it means I'm honest enough to say that I can't be good enough for God. Can you say that? Now, I was raised as a Pentecostal. I was even ordained as a Pentecostal, probably where my big mouth comes from. We love noise. I grew up with it. And when I discovered this gospel, when the Lord saved me, I thought, well, one thing I got out of the Pentecostals was the ability to have a little bit of pulse about me. Okay, I'm alive. The emotional side of things, that's great, because now I've got truth to buttress it. Before, I had all this emotional shallowness, and now there's actual girth and truth. And it's no wonder that that lame man went leaping and rejoicing. He encountered God. We encounter Him in the Gospel, beloved. And listen to me now. When you tell people the finished work of Christ, I grew up all my life going to church three, four times a week. Youth meetings, Bible studies. Song fest, revivals, those are fun. We're going to strap you in a church pew for 17 straight days and you're going to find religion. Because we said so, right? Now listen, I never once heard anybody preach on grace. We sang Amazing Grace and didn't know what grace was. We sang Jesus paid it all and didn't believe it. We never said finished work of Christ because there was no place in our theology for any notion that Jesus had already done all the work. But there was plenty of room at the table for you need to fill in the blank here. You better fill in the blank here. If you don't do fill in the blank here, then you're going to fill in the blank here. And so all we ever heard was what we needed to do to help an all-powerful yet impotent God get his will accomplished on earth. We even sang those goofy songs that said, the only Jesus people will ever see is the one in you. And in the shadow of the steeple, someone's dying. You know, Ray Bolts wrote all these guilt trip songs about how if you didn't witness to enough people that God was going to fail in the salvation of sinners. Why? Because they didn't believe in the finished work of Christ. There's no finished work of Christ in the false churches. They're going to say, Jesus did his part. Now you do your part. You see, they don't have a gospel promise. They've got something that says the gospel can happen within them if they do enough, but they do not possess a gospel promise of a finished work. And if they don't have that in their possession, beloved, I'm going to say this, and we need to swallow this pill and get off of this notion that we can play buddy-buddy with false religionists. If they do not possess the gospel, they do not know Christ. It should break our hearts that so many counted in our number, go around the country and say things like, well, they have a distorted understanding of the gospel, but the gospel nonetheless. And I'm thinking, you're going to send your kids to their church? Oh, you're not? Why not? So God saves his people and then slathers them on purpose in a bunch of error? That's what God does? Saves them by sovereign and free grace and then locks them in a trap of works, righteousness, false religion, and you're going to call that distortion something of a diet gospel? Oh, come on! I mean, it's like Elijah going up to the prophets of Baal and saying, hey guys, looks like we use the same kind of wood for our altars. Why don't we just get together for breakfast? What's the difference? What is the difference? You may as well hold hands with Baal if you're going to hold hands with some works religionist who dares to think his filthy rags are somehow making him save or keeping him safe. He has yet to realize what he is. And it is the gospel that shows us what we are, and what we are in Christ, more importantly. Praise the living God for the gospel, but let's stand up and be counted. Let's tell our friends and our neighbors, no, that's not okay. No, me and Jesus got our own thing going. We don't need anybody to tell us what it's all about. That's not even a theological statement. That was a country song by Tom T. Hall, and a lot of churches believe it. People's all, Booth, you're getting kind of crazy. Well, I'm trying to make a point. And sometimes if you get a little ludicrous, it's memorable. So listen now, and this is cogent stuff. I want to read this. What replaces the finished work of Christ among those who hold the false notions of the gospel? What do they have in its place? The gospel is distorted from the work of God, completed in Christ, to some cooperative effort exerted by a willing sinner in concert with the Holy Spirit, whose arrival, they would say, is ushered in by Calvary. So here's the deal. If you reject the finished work of Christ, then what you end up replacing Christ with is some mystical inward work. Because you don't have assurance that the finished work is finished. All you have now is, I knelt down at an altar of prayer and I felt the goosebumps running up my spine and I know that I know that I've been born again. I put those cigarettes down. Don't touch that demon liquor. Don't play the lotto. Am I off base anywhere yet? Anybody heard some of this before? This is the holy trinity of, I know I'm a Christian now because I don't drink the liquor, so I guess they never take communion. I mean, I'm being silly for a reason. I'm trying to shake us from our place of comfort just a little bit. Sometimes we need to see the absurdity of it all so that we know what we're looking at again, afresh and anew. We go down and we list all the sins that we don't think we commit anymore, leaving off, conveniently so, the sins that we know we commit each and every day. You ever notice that you never see a fat guy preaching on gluttony? You see, now, if James and I were preachers like that, I'd let him handle the gluttony sermon and I'd preach on cigarettes. All right. Oh, we're wretched sinners. but we like to think we're better than somebody next to us. Oh, I'm glad I don't sin the same sins they sin, and I'm glad the sins I sin aren't the public kind that everybody sees and knows. I don't say those magic buzzwords that get all these people thinking that I'm not a Christian. I'm good about the words I say, about the places I go, but boy, if they knew my heart and what I thought, they'd know me for what I really was. But see, all the church roles, you see all this church discipline stuff, too. All the stuff on those lists are always external stuff that, you know, they can really guard on, you know. Meanwhile, everybody in that church are a bunch of wicked vipers, self-righteous to the core. And what are we getting at here? They don't have a finished work. They're not resting in Christ. They're trying to rest on themselves. You got guys like John MacArthur. who will give you a list. Beloved, he has a list. It's online. A checklist for whether or not you are a Christian. And in the very list he says, following this list may or may not result in your salvation. So just as you think you've got some assurance, he says, you'll have a deeper love for God. What happens when I wake up in the morning? and I don't have that zippity-doo-dah feeling for God. I don't have ten units of love for the Lord. I only have eight and a half. Well, no, you'll have an intense desire to rid your life of sin. Well, who shall be able to deliver me from the body of this death? Every time I look inside, I see what Jesus came to save me from. But every time I look at the cross, I see the victor who has drank damnation dry on behalf of this old sinner. And I look to him and say, thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Checklists. Hogwash. You may or may not know you're saved by following these six easy steps. That's pragmatic nonsense straight from the pit of hell. How do you know you're saved? It's your yes and amen in Christ. I got a few more pages, but we're done. Listen to me in closing. Got to wrap it up all preacherly because that's our job. Beloved, hear me. This is all about knowing the object of faith. Is the object of your faith in your abilities? Is it in your abilities or is it in the finished work of Christ? If you're trusting in anything you do for assurance, anything you offer God in your own strength is going to fall miserably short. If your works could have saved you, the law would have saved us. Your works cannot save you. You're a filthy wretch, just like this filthy wretch that's talking to you. And we're all on the same level. We're all filthy wretches. But thanks be to God. Jesus went the way for poor, needy sinners. And there isn't one poor, needy sinner that will be left out. You know why? Because it's the elect who freely confess that they are poor and needy sinners. I am not a perfect man, but I long for the day when I'll be glorified. What's that going to be like? The Lord promised us this wonderful gospel reality in the pages of the Old Testament. He performed it in the work of Christ. We didn't get into the proclamation of the spirit and how he draws us. But aren't you glad that somewhere along the line, the Lord saw fit to draw you in? Aren't you glad? Aren't you thrilled to know that we're not going to get all yippity skippity because the demons are subject to us? But no, rather rejoice that your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. Praise the Lord. He has gone my way. This poor wretch trusts Christ alone by a faith that was not my own. And I know I'm unworthy. And you want to hear the secret? The scripture tells me that you're not worthy either. But can you confess that as the Spirit leads and guides you? Are you thirsty for what I'm talking about? The Bible says, come and drink. If you're thirsty for this, come and drink of the waters of life freely. That's electing grace. His people will hear his voice. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall they be removed from my hand. The Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one shall be able to take them out of my Father's hand. You tell me where the room for works and all that other stuff is and that. He's got a hold of us, beloved. And the yes and the amen is in Christ. Praise the Lord. Amen.