Let's read first of all from the prophecy of Isaiah, just as we did this morning, and this time from chapter 63. Isaiah chapter 63. And we will read from verse seven. I will mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord. And if you focus on that word loving kindness there, that's the word mercy or love, God's covenant love. So I will mention that. I will think upon it and focus on it. And the praises of the Lord. according to all that the Lord has bestowed on us, and the great goodness towards the house of Israel, which he has bestowed on them according to his mercies, according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. For he said, Surely they are my people, children who will not lie. So he became their Savior. In all their affliction he was afflicted. and the angel of his presence saves them. Now that's a reference to Christ. The angel there is put with a capital A, because he went with them in the wilderness. In his love and in his pity, he redeemed them and he bore them and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. So he turned himself against them as an enemy and he fought against them. Then he remembered the days of old. Moses and his people, saying, Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of his flock? Where is he who put the Holy Spirit within them, who led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious arm, dividing the water before them, to make for himself an everlasting name, who led them through the deep as a horse in the wilderness that they might not stumble? As a beast goes down into the valley, and the Spirit of the Lord causes him to rest, so you lead your people to make yourself a glorious name. And before we turn to God's Word, let's just call on his name together in prayer. Eternal God, we praise you for your Word, and we ask tonight that we would see Christ. That is our greatest need. to have fellowship with the Father and fellowship with the Son. There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved except His glorious name. And as we look at Him, we pray that we would know that He has been saving souls since the beginning, that He has always been the Redeemer. and that the whole work of salvation has been done because of His glory, because of His might, because He had accomplished it. He could cry out on the cross, It is finished. It is accomplished. And we pray that if we are found in Him tonight, that we would glorify Him for that. that we wouldn't just give it a passing thought, but that it would be the theme of our life, that it would be our pulse, that it would fill our very heart and soul. What a glorious thing that he took on the whole kingdom of darkness and destroyed it, that he took all of our sins and bore them in his body on the tree, and that now, seated at your right hand, even at this moment, He upholds us by the word of His power, and He knows us by name. O Lord, may we see Him then, glorify His name tonight, and draw us all to Himself. In His glorious name we pray, Amen. Let's turn to John's Gospel again then, and chapter So the same chapter we saw this morning, and we'll read from verse 28. And when she had said these things, she went her way and secretly called Mary, her sister, saying, The teacher has come and is calling for you. As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to him. Now, Jesus had not yet come into the town. but was in the place where Martha met him. Then the Jews who were with her in the house and comforting her, when they saw that Mary rose up quickly and went out, followed her, saying, She is going to the tomb to weep there. Then when Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. And he said, Where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, See how he loved him. And some of them said, Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept this man from dying? Then Jesus again groaning and himself came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, Take away the stone. Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to him, Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days. But Jesus said to her, Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place. where the dead man was laying. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me. And I know that you always hear me, but because of the people who are standing by, I said this, that they may believe that you sent me. Now, when he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes. and his face was wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, Loose him and let him go." So we continue our consideration tonight of the raising of Lazarus in this wonderful passage of John's Gospel. We saw this morning that this miracle is a sign and that's the word that John uses for the miracles in his Gospel. We saw that he chose seven of them and they are pictures of how Christ works to save us. So you can look through the gospel and you can see these. It's like walking through a gallery and you see these pictures and each one shows a different way in which Christ saves our soul. He produces wine from water. He heals the nobleman's son. He gives strength to the man at the pool of Bethesda who had been infirm for 38 years. He feeds over 10,000 people with bread. The feeding of the 5,000 was 5,000 men, counting the men inclusively. So to add women and children to that, it would probably double. And he fed them with just a couple of loaves and a couple of fish. He raised Lazarus. He walked on water in this gospel. So he does all these miracles But he's not just showing how powerful he is, he's showing us tonight how he restores our soul. We're born fallen, and we need restored. We need life, we need wine in the soul, or we need strength in our souls. We're infirm, or we're blind, and we need to be made to see. Here we see the crowning sign, the crowning miracle in this gospel, encapsulates all the rest. Because if you put the rest together, they're all processes of sin that come from the fall, these weaknesses. But when they're all worked through us, how does it end for us all? We have to die. We're degenerating and that will comes to us all. Unless the Lord returns, Paul tells us that those who are alive when the Lord returns will be caught up together with him to meet him in the air. But this miracle shows us that he's building up the revelation of himself to come to this chapter, and what he's saying is, this is the last enemy, as Paul calls it. This is the last enemy. And it's the most powerful of the enemies. Even Christians who are saved, and right before God, even this will come to Christians. That's how powerful this enemy is. So that's the signs. this experience was appointed by God for his glory. That's what we saw. That he's doing this not because he's against Mary and Mark and Lazarus, but because he wants to reveal himself to them. He wants to show his grace and his power and his resurrecting life to them. So these things in our lives are appointed by God and they're for his glory. We saw secondly that We pray to God and we long for him and search for him in these situations, but he doesn't always come at once. He waited because he loved them and didn't come and save Lazarus. He allowed him to die. So we saw that we have to wait for God. And that's not always easy. It's often perplexing. And we often don't know the answer at the time. It might be months in the meeting. It might be years until we understand what God was doing in any given situation. and lastly we saw that he is the resurrection and the life. Not at the end of time, but now. He is the I AM, he is present now, the Trinity in their glory, in their holiness. They burn in love and in holiness and glory and all life comes from them. Even now we are being sustained by the three persons of the Trinity and Jesus Christ is the second person of that Trinity. So let's bring these things to a close tonight, and we saw Martha this morning, so let's look through the eyes of Mary and we'll see what happens in this sign. You'll see in the verses that we read, beginning at verse 28, that Mary finds out that Christ has arrived. He's been speaking to Martha, but Martha runs back to the house and says in verse 28, the Teacher has come and is calling for you. And we see, as I described this morning, the closeness between Mary and the Lord, because as soon as she hears that He's there, verse 29, she rises quickly and comes to Him. So, although Mary is deeply distressed and in agony in her soul, as soon as she hears that this person that she loves, the Lord Jesus Christ, who she comes to know and love and trust, She doesn't understand what's going on, but as soon as she hears that he's there, she runs to him. And she says in verse 32, when she came to where Jesus was, she saw him. She fell down at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. She runs to him and she falls at his feet. That's significant. I'll just reinforce what we saw this morning. that any time Mary appears in the Gospels, she's always at Christ's feet. You can check that for yourself and see if I'm telling the truth there, but I assure you that I am. That's a good exercise for you to do and put parts of the Gospels together. You notice any time Mary appears, three or four times she appears in the Gospels, she's always at his feet. When we meet her, he's in the family house. and Mary, remember, sat listening at his feet. So when everything's well, and Christ is preaching and giving a talk in her living room, she's sitting at his feet listening. When she's in distress here, she runs. Instinctively, she falls at his feet. And in chapter 12, her famous act, when Christ was having a meal with the disciples, with Simon the leper, with Lazarus, She comes in without saying anything. She comes down behind him at the table, because the Jewish men would lean. Lying down at the table, they didn't sit like we did, they leaned on the table with their legs facing out. And Mary went down at his feet and poured a $20,000 bottle of expensive Indian ointment on his feet and on his head. She's always at his feet. the lesson speaks for itself. I hope as a Christian, as you're listening to that, that speaks to you. That's where we always ought to be, at his feet. No matter how busy we are, we always ought to be at the feet of the one who we call Lord. It's not enough to casually call him Lord. It's one thing to call your president Mr. President. It's one thing to call a Prime Minister a Prime Minister, or even a King. to call him your majesty, or her majesty for a queen, but when we talk about Christ, he's the king over all other kings, he rules the universe, he is the highest of the highest, and the only appropriate place for us all to be is at his feet. That's the place to be when we're joyful, and that's the place to go when we have no answers and we're perplexed. It's good to have Christians who will support us and comfort us and we can advise and counsel one another. But when the words of man fail and there are no clear answers and our soul is in darkness and in trial and in distress, run to Jesus Christ and pour out your complaint and your soul before him and he will hear from on high. So she comes and she clings to his feet and says, If you had been here, my brother would not have died. So we always ought to be at the feet of Christ. But let's see three things very briefly tonight. I just want to bring these out for you. All three of them are connected to Christ. They're focused on Christ. The first thing is that Christ is moved with care and love and compassion for us. as believers. If we've come to believe in him, you need to know tonight that Christ is not far away, Christ is not distant and uninvolved, but he has a deep care, compassion and love towards you personally. That's what we see here, brought out gloriously by the Holy Spirit by recording this the way he does, because he focuses in on Christ's reaction to the situation. We see in verse 33, that when he saw her weeping, so when she said it she was obviously crying strongly as she explained it to him, probably wailing, Lord if you'd been here my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. Not unaffected, and he didn't just groan in the spirit and he wasn't just troubled, but the Holy Spirit is going out of his way to make it obvious to us Christ's reaction to this. He groaned in his spirit and he was troubled. And this trouble is a deep trouble. This is the trouble in chapter 12 as he's looking at the cross when he says publicly in the temple, chapter 12 verse 27, he says, Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour, but for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name." When Jesus viewed the cross immediately before him that week, his soul, John says, was troubled. And he uses the exact same word for Christ being troubled when he saw Mary crying. We're also told in the upper room that when he spoke of Judas betraying him, his soul was deeply troubled." Same word, same word. In chapter 5, when the man is healed at the pool of Bethesda, I don't know if you remember what the chapter says about that, but let me just briefly tell you that what was going on there was they used to take sick people to that pool and there was a local myth that that that pool would come up and bubble. It would be stirred, it would be like a whirlpool. And the local myth was that it was an angel coming down every day and stirring the pool and giving it healing properties, and that if you took your infirm relative to that pool and dipped them in the pool, then they would be healed. And Christ said to the man, do you want to be healed? And he said, but Lord, when When the pool is stirred, there's no one to carry me to it. So he believed that. He believed that if you dip yourself in the pool when it's stirred, then you'll be healed. Now, what John says is that every day that that pool was being stirred like a whirlpool. And that word is the same word that we have here, troubled. So let's put all that together. When he was speaking of one of the ministers in the apostles, Judas, who was a minister, when he was speaking about that minister betraying him and selling him to death, his soul was troubled. When he viewed the cross, his soul was troubled. And the pool in chapter 5 was stirred like a whirlpool, and it was troubled. And John tells us here that when he saw Mary weeping, his soul was troubled. It was stirred. It was moved. He could feel empathy and compassion towards what was going on. It's not just that his soul was stirred, but we see in verse 35 of our chapter that he wept. He wept. Where have you laid him? They said, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. He wept. This weeping is different than their weeping in this chapter. It's a different word. It says here that they're wailing like the Jewish women would wail at funerals. This weeping here for Christ is a deep, intense, painful weeping. This is the weeping it speaks of in the letter to the Hebrews when it says that Jesus offered up prayers with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death. Hebrews 5 verse 7, In the days of his flesh he offered up prayers and supplication, listen to this, with vehement cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and was heard because of his godly fear. Yet he learned obedience by the things that he suffered. When Christ was in the garden, before the cross, and he said, Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from me. And being in agony, it says he prayed again and fell down on his face to cry to God. Then that's the word for crying that we have here. This is deep. It's real. It's not a light that we would say, isn't that lovely, that there's a tear in his eye. It's not like that at all. Christ feels this. And what does he feel? He's looking not only at the effects of sin, that a man has died, but he's looking at the consequences of it on the family. He looks at people he loves deeply disturbed and grieving and in pain. And as a human being, he's moved to empathize with them. There's a likeness of feeling. He's compassionate towards that. Christ is God. He is God, but He continues as man, and He is experiencing this as man through His person. Yes, He is the Son of God, but He feels. He feels. He is able to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. That passage says that. I read from Hebrews. Hebrews. Do you know that passage? We do not have a high priest who is unable to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. So he is then able to comfort those who are in distress. Why? Because he experienced it. He experienced it. There isn't anything that you've ever felt that he didn't feel. None of these feelings are entirely unique to you. And we do forget that. And I'm speaking from personal experience. I will forget when I feel certain things, I will forget that he actually knows exactly how it feels and exactly what it's like. And Satan will try and make you see God as very distant, very different from you. He is, he's high, he's lofty, he's holy. We are to fall before such a being, but remarkably This is the testimony of Scripture. He's that way, but he is tender and compassionate to us. And especially in Christ, God is moved with compassion. God is love. God exists in a relationship. And we must defend the character of God, yes. He doesn't have the passions that we have. They don't move in the same way that ours do, unpredictably. to speak of God as far away and cold and mechanical and unable to feel is wrong. He doesn't have human feelings, he doesn't have human passions, but it's impossible to conceive of a phrase like, God is love, and then say in the next sentence that he cannot feel. Of course he feels. He loves his son with an everlasting love. There is perfect love between father, son and spirit. experience that love. And looking upon Mary, this divine person is moved and he weeps for her. He weeps for her. He remembers the distressed friend. He remembers the pain and the isolation that he experienced. So, what are you carrying What are you carrying at the moment? All our lives are different, but we will all be carrying something from the past, or presently, or there will be something coming in the future. What are you carrying? You feel as though you must carry this alone. You feel as though this is too much to bear. You feel as though this is too painful. and too much for a person like you to carry. It is too much for people like us to carry, but you're not to carry it alone. Don't let the devil drive you from a real view of Christ, because you need to know tonight that even in glory at the moment, Jesus still remembers how it all feels. Do you think he's forgotten? Do you think he's forgotten? He watched his father, Joseph, his adopted father, die. By the time the Gospels narrate, there is only Mary, the brothers and the sisters. Joseph isn't there. So at some point, as a youth, Jesus experienced that. He was in the wilderness without food for forty days, tempted by the devil and the kingdom of darkness, alone with with his mind weakened by hunger and assaulted by the devil. He was isolated. He was a man of sorrows. Most of the people that he interacted with didn't understand him. And the church hated him. The religious authorities in Jerusalem wanted him dead. And one of the men he chose to be a minister sold them and betrayed him. And the cross itself. Jesus on the cross experienced absolute forsakenness from God, and he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He experienced a darkness that can only be compared to hell itself. He experienced the wrath of God, the curse of God, on my behalf and your behalf if we He experienced that. He knows what it's like to be distressed, forsaken, and to feel as though the thing that's weighing down upon him is about to smash him, and break him, and unravel him. He knows what it feels like. Why have you forsaken me? He knows, tonight, how you feel. No matter what the situation is, He knows, and He loves, and He cherishes you. in that, whether it's in tribulation, in distresses, in persecution, in famine, in nakedness, in peril, in sword, whether death or life, angels, principalities or powers, things present, things to come, any other created thing, none of these can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, your Lord. If you are a child of God, In all those distresses and tribulations and all of those obstacles, there is a chain, a link between your soul and Him that cannot be broken. A link of love. A chain of love. And it cannot be severed. You cannot be separated from Him. So, He is moved with compassion and you cannot be separated from His love. This is the person here. in verse 35, who weeps for Mary. So he weeps, but secondly, he says something similar to what we looked at this morning in verse 40 in saying that this would be for the glory of God. What time did we start the service? I'm just checking. 6 o'clock, ok, you can let me know if there are problems. In verse 39 and 40, Jesus, in verse 38, you see that again, he comes groaning in himself again to the tomb. So he's still feeling it. He comes to the tomb, and there's a stone against the tomb, and there's a crowd there, and there's silence. And they think he's just there to pay respects with men. He said something unthinkable. Imagine you were in this situation at a funeral, and this is what was said. This is not what they were expecting to hear. Take away the stone. People probably didn't know how to react to that request. But Martha, she's a strong character. Mary doesn't say anything. You see the personalities coming through. Martha speaks and says, Lord, this doesn't make sense. By this time, There was a stench and he's been dead four days. She can't understand why he would ask for the stone to be rolled away. There's no benefit to it. But Jesus says to her, this woman who'd said earlier on that he was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, that she didn't know the implications of that. She believed it, and we believe it, and even tonight we don't know the full implications of it. We believe these things, but we don't realise how much more we could have from Christ if we worked out the full implications of what we believe. He believed he was the Christ, the Son of God. But he says to her in verse 40, Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God? And I spoke this morning about how God will always guard his own glory and it's all for his glory. But he's not saying here that God will always guard his glory. He's saying that in what he's just about to do, God's going to reveal an aspect of His glory. And as I've mentioned a couple of times, we see that coming out in this Gospel. In John chapter 2, the first miracle that I mentioned, the first sign in John chapter 2, when He turns the water into wine at a wedding to show the glory and the life and the riches of His kingdom, John tells us these beginnings of signs, the first one he did, he did in Cana of Galilee, and he manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him. So do you see that? As soon as he does a sign, John says, look, God's manifesting his glory. So the Gospel is a wedding feast. It's a wedding feast. The Bible begins with a wedding in the Garden of Eden, and it ends in a wedding. with the bride being given to Christ in Revelation 20-22. John starts his gospel with a wedding. It's interesting this, he doesn't start his gospel by showing Christ feeling an effect of sin, an ailment. He doesn't heal someone, but he shows us the glorious feast of the gospel, that we all have a wedding to look forward to, where there will be wine, where there will be the glory and the joy of a wedding with a bride and a bridegroom, all rejoicing as one in happiness. And Christ says, that's the kind of thing I give. That's my glory. I am God. And in God there is happiness. In God there is fullness of joy. God is perfectly in joy tonight, perfectly happy. He is at perfect peace in himself. He's the happiest being that there is. And he reveals that in John chapter 2, that the thing he gives, it's like a wedding. It's like how we feel at a wedding. So he begins that, but these signs all go through and come to chapter 11. But there's more and more of this glory being revealed. More and more of it. There's a wedding, there's healings. He walks on the sea. He multiplies the bread. He makes a man see who wasn't even born with eyes that worked. that here he's showing the greatest part of his glory for us. The greatest part of his glory, and what's that? That he has power over death. And that's the big problem. The problem isn't the infirmity, or the eyes, or even the sin at the moment temporarily in our soul. The problem is what that sin is going to do to us. The problem will be when we die, if God leaves us in that sinful condition and removes his calming grace from us, that's the problem. If he leaves man to himself and his sin, in real death, that's our problem, that's what we all face. Uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, yes, but this is the preaching of the gospel, we have to speak about this. This is a gospel that deals with this. We curse on a saviour who dies, we have to speak about death. We have to stare it in the face. We have to look into our own souls, and we have to know that the fact is that it is there. It's just somewhere down the line, and we don't know how far. The culture today will hide that from you. The culture today will—the American culture, the British culture, whichever culture it is in the Western world—will want you to make a joke of your life, want you to enjoy yourself, and to never think about that. put death in its movies, it will put death in its computer games, and all these things in its video games. But it won't give you a real sense at all of the horror of this. Only the Bible will. Satan will make sure that this society lasts at death and finds it funny and has its funerals where everyone will wear pink and celebrate the life. And it will get us to turn away from what Jesus says here, stares a covenant family in the face. He comes and says, I can deal with this. You will see the glory of God, and this is my glory. Not just that I can raise someone who's just died, like Jairus' daughter. Not that I can raise the widow of Nain, her son. If you remember, Jesus was walking outside a town and the coffin was going past. He hadn't been buried yet. He just died. Jesus raised him on the spot. But this is his glory, not someone who's just died, but someone who he waited on purpose to allow the process to really take hold. This person's been in the tomb four days. The destruction has already set in. Which doctor or scientist can reverse that? Nobody. That's the end of man. He said it to Adam, told Adam what would happen. eat of this and dying thou shalt die." Jesus comes here as the new Adam and he says, living thou shalt live. I can reverse this because I'm the God who made life. This is his glory. He stands against death, sin and all of its effects, whether it's a young baby, whether it's a toddler, a teenager or an older person. Whoever this power takes hold of at whatever stage in life, Jesus says that ultimately, after what he's done on the cross, it has no ultimate power over us. It has no power. It will run its course. It will run its course. But the glory of Christ is that he's removed its sting. That for the Christian, if we trust in him, if we're atoned for our sin and washed clean, then we pass through that experience. and are immediately translated into glory and made perfect in holiness. We behold our Father, we behold the Son on the throne, we behold the glory of heaven and await a new heavens and a new earth. It doesn't have the power it used to have, that's what awaits us. This is His glory, to deal with death. The glory that was revealed on the cross, Him dealing with death. This is the glory of His love, of His mercy and of His grace. And is that not His greatest glory? Is that not His greatest glory, friends? What is the most wonderful thing about God? What is it? It's His mercy and His love. Not in spite of the rest of His person, His righteousness and holiness and these things. that he doesn't have to love us. That's what's glorious about it. He's not compelled in that sense to love us. He loves us because of who he is and because he wants to. But that's the glory of it. It's undeserved. Paul says in the New Testament that he does all this and saves us and redeems us in Ephesians to the praise of the glory of his grace. This is wonderful. This is the God we deal with. This is the Christ we deal with. Take away the stone. Why Amarthasis? Did I not say, if you believe in me you'll see the glory of God? She's about to see it. She's about to see the glory of God revealed. This power over death. His loving redemptive work. He now has the keys of hate and death. He opens and no man shuts. He shuts and no man opens. He's the head of the world. He's the head of the cosmos. He's the head of heaven. and hell. He's king of it all, and he has the keys, and these are the keys of death and haze. It's up to him. Death can't come any further than he allows it. It's up to him who will go to everlasting destruction and who will go to everlasting life, if you believe, Martha. It's up to him. He has the authority. So, remember, friends, that this Christ wept He feels compassion. He cries out with strong crying and tears. He feels, he knows. And he walks to this tomb after weeping and he says, if you believe, you will see my glory. I am conquering death. I am in control of death. It has no dominion over the Christian anymore. What a glorious thing. Death defeated. What a glorious thing. Lastly, let's see this. that the sign is fulfilled, and he carries it out. He prays at the end of verse 41, Father I thank you that you have heard me. I know you always hear me, but because of the people standing by I said this, that they may believe that you sent me. So he could have done this silently, but he's saying there, he did it out loud, so that it could be recorded. We only have this because he said it out loud. And he stands at the tomb. When he had said these things, verse 43, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he who died came out bound hand and foot with grave clothes. And his face was wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, Loose him and let him go. Lazarus, come forth. Let's end with this. Jesus does hear the greatest of the seven sounds. The crowning beauty of his ministry before he goes to the cross. The close of his public ministry, he ends it by showing, I am about to deal with death. And this power that he has, what he does here for Lazarus, is just a seed. It's just a seed that shows us what has not only happened in our own souls, if we're in Christ, but what will happen at the end of time. We wonder what to think about the end of time and what to expect, but there's testimony here that implores us to believe and to trust what will happen on that last day. For here he is, he raises one, Lazarus. Someone once said that the reason he said Lazarus, come forth, is because if he just said come forth, then maybe there would have been thousands who obeyed the command of their God. but he says here, Lazarus, come forth. In this gospel, in a chapter I referred to earlier, chapter 5, Christ says that the day is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear from the graves will rise, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt. All authority has been given to me, Christ says. So he is the one, based on this, who will raise everyone from the dead. But just to keep this applicable to us right now, just notice again the beauty of the fact that he says Lazarus come forth. He's spoken to Martha earlier, he's spoken to Mary and now he speaks to Lazarus. Christ knows people individually. He doesn't just speak to the masses. He doesn't speak to the nation of America, the United States. He doesn't speak to just the congregation in State College. We can't hide in here. This is the last place we want to hide. He knows us. All of us. That's a liberating thing. We don't want to hide from him. We need to be found by him. We need to be exposed. And it's better that he knows us. He says, Lazarus, come forth. Does he speak to you? Does he know you like that? Does he speak? Does he say, James, Samuel, Clare? Does he speak to you? It's not enough to sit here and say, I'm a Reformed Christian. You're not a Reformed Christian. You are an individual with a name and the law of God is there. and you see you're failing, and Christ is there to be your Savior. You can't go to heaven by being reformed. Impossible. Impossible! It's better to be correct in the things of Scripture. Of course, of course. But you know what I'm saying. He knows you, and your sin needs to be dealt with. Not your ecclesiology. He knows you. Do you know Him? Is this personal for you, friend? Do you come here and does Christ actually speak to you? Or do you come to socialize with everyone else? Not good. Not good enough. That should be somewhere on the list, but it should not be the priority. We need Christ. We need Christ personally or we'll stand on that day and He'll say, I do not know where you're from. We'll stand before him on that day and all that will matter will be if we have his righteousness and if we know him and if we love him. That's what's going to matter. He calls here Lazarus, the one he loves. I'll raise you from the dead. And he calls your name. And you can be sure tonight that he doesn't address the congregation generally and that you're an insignificant person who he doesn't care about. It's not that way, friend. He knows your name right now. His word addresses you, and it's you personally that he will save. You personally he'll raise from the dead. You personally will dwell in his kingdom. Revelation tells us, book of Revelation, that we will all be given a name on a stone that only we know and that only he knows. We'll be given a special name and only Christ will know it. That's what lovers do. You give each other a locket or a necklace or a letter and it's just between you. Christ says, I'll give you a name and it will just be between us. Personal. Individual. That's who Christ is. He calls you to himself in that way. Let me just close with this. He tells Lazarus, come forth. And he who died came forth. bound hand and foot with grave clothes, and he says at the end, loose him and let him go. And that's what's happened to us. Loose him. Loose him. We were bound. John's definitely referring to this. This isn't e-spiritualizing. It's biblical terminology to call the sinner bound. This word, loo-o, or loose, is used even of being freed, set free by the gospel. Loose him. And there's a picture of him coming out of the grave, but he's bound and he says, loose him. And that's what's happened to us. We're loosed from death. The bond has been broken. The chains have been smashed and they fall to the ground. And we have the liberty of Christ. We're free, free from condemnation, free from sin and all these things. And at the end, Christ will raise the dead. He'll raise the dead. And what a day that will be. Be loosed. Come forth. And those who hear by the power of God, an almighty power, will take everyone who's ever lived and bring them forth, remake them. He can do that. He did it with Adam. Where did man come from? If God can't make people, where did Adam come from? He just made them. And we will come forth at the sound of the trumpet, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all come forth on the last day. And for those who are in Christ, the song over us will be, O grave, where is your victory? And we will have eternal life, never to die again. never to experience the sickness that Lazarus had ever again, but those who aren't in Christ raised to everlasting contempt. How solemn it is for us that we deal with a judge. We deal with a judge and he enforces me, he compels me, he constrains me to preach the gospel, not because I find it comfortable, but because we all need to face the truth, I need to face the truth about myself as well. That will happen. And all around this city and all around this state, they will all come forth. They will all come forth. And everything will stop. Everything will stop. And the Lord Jesus Christ will judge us all. We must all appear before the judgmency. of Christ. Will it be life, friend, or will it be destruction? Come to Christ. Make your calling and election sure. Love Him. He's the only one that can save you from that inevitability. He's the only one. Tonight, in your room, look at God. Stop looking at the world. The world gets enough of your attention and enough of mine. Let's look at God. He made us. He gives us the Bible. He builds a church for us to come to. He deserves our time and He deserves us to take this seriously. Let's look at Him and ask ourselves if we have been freed from death. This family, I'm just saying this in closing, This family said, I know there are people in this congregation hurting, and we spoke a little about that this morning, having to wait for God. But just look at this family. Christ didn't answer them straight away, and they experienced pain. They had to wait. Christ didn't come quickly. But see how it ended? See how it ended? The thing they got in the end was greater. than if Christ had answered straight away. If he had answered straight away, Lazarus would have been healed, but instead they saw him risen from the dead. He does that to us. He does, in the end, exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think. So, friends, I pray that you would trust in the Lord and take these things with you. May God bless have these thoughts on his word.