If not, we're going to be taking a couple of verses from a couple of different places in the scriptures tonight. And I would invite you first to turn with me to Isaiah chapter 59. Isaiah chapter 59. I was trying to recall if it was seven years or eight years ago, but on a Friday night of this annual revival effort that we have. It was after service and we had been in service for a good little while. I think it was dark outside by the time we had ended service that night. And we were about ready to leave. And Sister Haley had brought a friend with her that evening who had been spending time with her throughout the week. And they had been talking about salvation and what it would take to be saved. We were about to leave and I had walked down the aisle here and had met her back there by the water fountain. And she had her hand buried in her, or her face rather, buried in her hands. And she said, I can't get saved. And it was a kind of profound statement that she made. And of course, I knew, we who were around her knew that she could. be saved, but in that moment she had lost hope, she had lost just a belief in that it was even possible for her to rid herself of the conviction of her sins. She said, I can't get saved. What she didn't realize in that moment is how close she was to finding herself in a place where she could truly call on the name of the Lord to be saved. We went on a little while that evening. We had came up and had prayed and we prayed a few different times and before long she had stopped praying and I looked over at her and she looked over at me and she had one of those no doubt about it smiles on her face where she had found peace in her soul that God had done in her heart in which she had been saved by the Lord's marvelous grace. That thought, though, has always been with me of, I can't get saved. She had tried every way that she could, had done everything that she knew how, and found herself wanting. But then, when she let God do it, she got saved. So tonight I want to talk about why you can't be saved and why you can be saved. Isaiah 59 verse 2. We're just going to read one verse here. It says, But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you that He will not hear. I want to make it very clear this evening, if you are lost and separated from God, the reason you can't be saved this evening is because of your sins. What prevents you from your need to trust in the Lord? What prevents you from your need to repent before the Lord? Your not doing so is because of your sin. It is your transgressions that have separated you from God, and as a result of that, your sin-filled heart continues in its rebellion to God, failing to surrender over to Him in belief and in trust that you might be saved. It is your sins tonight that has caused this great problem in you, wherein you cannot find peace, as you would set a design in your heart to try to find it. It is sin that is the great problem of humanity. You have this challenge tonight in which what has been placed upon you, what has been heaped upon your head since the day you were born, is this sinful flesh that even now you find yourself filled with sin and guilty before a holy God. In the book of Romans, in just one paragraph in the book of Romans, I want you to listen to the words Paul uses to describe our sin problem. He says that we are ungodly. He says that we are sinners. He says that we are enemies of God. Your sin has created a divide between you and God that is so far apart that try as you might, according to your best desires, you cannot span it. And what we have seen time and time again is sinners try their best upon their own design to come up with some ability or some system to try to span that gap. to span that gulf wherein they might come to a place where they would satisfy their own desire for salvation according to their own means. Did you hear all those there's in that? What takes place in our hearts is because we have this sin problem, and because we have this pride problem, And those two become at odds with one another where our pride will not let us confess our sins before the Lord. And that pride just continues then this cycle of sin in which we will not fully repent before the Lord and trust upon His name for salvation. There is a sin problem tonight, lost friend, that is going on in your heart. I was going to say this later, but I'm going to go ahead and say it now. You will not get saved. You will not trust in the Lord. You will not believe upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ until you believe for yourself that you are a sinner. You must believe that you are a sinner in need of salvation. And I'm afraid what takes place in the hearts of these who are found in unbelief so often is they are trying to somehow sugarcoat to themselves that their sin problem is not as bad as it really is. I was going to say as they think it really is, but as it really is. I want you to know this evening, lost friend, your sin problem is far worse than you think it is. You stand this evening guilty. Your hands are covered in blood. Your sins this evening and your failure to repent has so blasphemed against the nature of God in whose image you have been created that you stand as writhed and as troubled with sin as the most guilty among this whole world. And if we were to search your heart tonight and see the evidence of that, because often times we look around and we see these young children and we say, well, how can those things be true? Surely not. Surely this sin problem is not nearly as gross as we think it might be. Jesus said very plainly that none is good. He said, but the Father. There is none good. Paul said it this way. He said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and he went on to say that there is none righteous, not even one. All of us have this same problem in the flesh wherein we are guilty of sin. Now you might scratch your head and wonder and say, well, Derek, if we all have this common problem, why is it so urgent? Why is it so necessary that lost souls come to an understanding of this sin? I heard a preacher one time, he was asked, why is it that you deal with sin so much in your preaching? And I always thought his response was so spot on. And he said, because I want people to love God more. Our sin, it inhibits us in ways that we cannot even begin to conceive even after you've been saved. Your tendency in this flesh to fall into those things that transgress the command of God. What takes place in that and our failure to recognize it just in our day-to-day lives. It is something that is dark and black against the white washing of the blood of Christ that has been applied to our hearts. And we constantly are dealing with this blackness of sin when we cry out that the power of God will be demonstrated amongst us, but what we're failing to see is His righteousness being expressed in our lives. We're going to get to that in a second. But we must come to grips with the reality and the prevalence of sin and the stain that it causes. We are obviously in a day and age where our culture, we look at it and we wring our hands as we see its moral rot and its moral decay, and we look at it and we wonder what's the state of the future and these sorts of things, and it causes us grave worry. Oftentimes what we fail to do, though, individually, and I'm talking to the saved when I say this, is fail to realize the decay in our own lives. The sliding away in our own lives. Our tendency to grow cold and indifferent and comfortable with a slow fade away. I think it was Casting Crowns who came out with that song a few years ago that talked about how people never stumble in a day. It's a slow fade. It's like the frog that's placed in the pot. You place a frog in a pot of boiling water and that frog will get out of that pot just as quicker than you can get the lid back on it. But if you place a frog in a pot of water that's at room temperature, and you slowly turn up the heat, that frog will boil itself to death, not knowing that the temperature around it is increasing. And so are we, in this world amongst us, not recognizing that what's taking place is that our lights, these globes of ours, begin to get this soot upon them. And so we have even now in this flesh, where Brian talked about it the other night, how we're still waiting for the redemption fully of these bodies. So while we struggle here, we must recognize our struggle with sin. We sing that song, Holy Manna. It says, will you join to help us while we struggle hard with sin? I am guessing that many of you this week, as we have now been in service for five nights straight, you have found yourself dealing and struggling with just the things of life, with the things that come up, and sometimes it feels like it's just all out to attack you, or you find yourself getting carried away in something that just seems like it's pleasant for a moment because of the stresses of life, or whatever the sorts of things that you're going through, and you just feel that to mature. slowly being turned up. I pray that God would awaken us this evening to the reality of this struggle of the flesh, that we might be able to cry out to the lost that are among us, that there is a hope in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So tonight, I want to set firm this evening, lost friend, that your struggle and finding the Lord is your sin. Well, there's hope. If we ended just there, we'd be awful pitiful tonight. But there is hope. I want you to turn with me to 2 Corinthians 5. John MacArthur said about this verse that we're going to read tonight, and he was referring to the Greek words when he said this, he said that this verse contained the 15 words of hope. You'll note that it's 25 words in the King James Version, but I think he said accurately regarding what we're going to read tonight. 2 Corinthians 5, verse 21. says, "'For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.'" I'm not sure there is a more poignant expression of the gospel in one verse in all of the Scriptures. "'For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Herein tonight, dear sinner, is the reason why you can be saved. For God has made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us. We could spend all week preaching this one verse, and I want to be careful tonight to not get bogged down too much, because, lost friend, I pray that you would grant your attention just for a little while, but I do want to demonstrate a few things within this verse to you this evening to try to help awaken you to what has been accomplished on your behalf that you can be saved. The reason why salvation, why this free offer of grace is extended to you even now tonight, is because of what has transpired that Paul has captured in this one verse. God made Him. It says, He hath made Him. That first He is referring to God. That second Him is referring to Jesus Christ. God has made His Son sin. Now, there's a problem within that statement that I want to make sure we address right up front. God did not make Jesus a sinner. God doesn't deal in making sinners. He deals in redeeming sinners. God does not deal in making sinners. So hear well that this was not that Jesus Christ became a sinner. Jesus was treated as a sinner by a holy God. What took place on that tree, what took place in the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus began to feel the wrath of God poured out upon Him for sin, is that there was a transaction that took place in which all of the sins of the whole world Past, present, future, the whole world, all of those sins were placed upon the credit of Jesus Christ. They were charged to His account and God treated Him as a sinner there upon that tree. He made Him to be sin. Who knew no sin. We need to consider this reality a little bit. I want you to know first of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He knew no sin. And I want you to know this evening that Scripture, we can point to some individual verses this evening that declare that as such, but I want you to know that He was always righteous. Before the beginning of the world, from Genesis to Revelation, Jesus Christ stands as the righteous Redeemer. It tells us that He was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Before the world was, Jesus stood as our spotless and without blemish Lamb sacrificed before a holy God. He has always been the righteous Redeemer. And if you go to the book of Revelation, you will see there that there was One who prevailed to open the book. The Lion of the tribe of Judah prevailed in His righteousness that He could deal with the book. We have this precious Redeemer from Old Testament to New, from Genesis to Revelation, across all of eternity. Even tonight, He still stands as the righteous Redeemer. He still stands able to say because of His perfect and spotless life, I believe in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, that He has always and is even today, holy and completely righteous. Now I mentioned this lamb slain before the foundation of the world. What I think is so remarkable about that statement is we can understand it so well in the present tense. We can understand it now as we look back upon the Passover, as we look back upon John's interactions with him when he said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We can understand it now in its proper context. But Jesus stood as a lamb slain during Abraham's day. He stood as a lamb slain during Noah's day. He stood as a lamb slain during Adam's day. He has always been the righteous redeemer. But he had to be slain. We oftentimes, and I am perhaps guilty of this, and when we get around Easter, or we observe the Lord's Supper in particular, and we will begin to really consider what took place upon the cross, what took place as Jesus endured all of the punishment, all of the brutality of the Roman scourging that he underwent. We look to all that took place and it will cause us sometimes to even find ourselves wrenched over the physical pain that he endured and we will Think about the crown of thorns that was plated and jammed down upon His brow. Consider what it was when He was lifted up on the cross. We look to all the physical pain and we think just within that was the wrath of God. And we fail to realize that the wrath of God that was poured out upon Jesus Christ, it was not merely this physical torment that he endured, although certainly it was carried out in a way in which it was undoubtedly and without question an outpouring. But the outpouring began even before that, didn't it? When Jesus prayed in a garden asking His disciples to wait here while I go a little further to pray. And as He began to pray, the torment of what He would endure as the wrath of God was poured out upon Him became so severe that He began to bleed through His skin. as the wrath of God for your sins and for mine was poured out upon Him." Isn't that what Jesus dealt with in His prayer in the garden? Crying out, Father, that be Thy will, let this cup pass from me. Returning again, And again, to pray those same words before declaring, nevertheless, not as I will, but thou will be done. And in doing so, he became fully submissive, surrendering himself to endure the wrath of God for sins. This evening, the reason why you can be saved is because your sins have been heaped upon the head of Jesus Christ, and He was crushed for your iniquities. Turn back over to Isaiah real quick. I just want to read one verse here. Isaiah 53, familiar to probably everyone. Isaiah 53 verse 6 says this, says, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. Listen to this last part of this verse. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. This evening, it is your sins that were deserving of the wrath of God. Yet there has been a substitute who stepped into the place where you deserve to stand and bore the wrath of God for your sins. They have been heaped upon his head. One time when I was a young preacher, There was a song that I heard sung that talked about sins being cast into the sea of forgetfulness. And I remember calling my pastor one night at a time and I said, brother, I'm looking for this verse and I just can't find it. And he kind of chuckled and he said, well, it's not in there. I thought, well, it's in the psalm. Let me say this real quick. Be careful about getting your doctrines from songs. Just be careful of that. But anyway, even if I had found that verse, if that verse existed, I think it would have only told us in part the reality of what took place. God did not simply... I want to be careful because it's going to get ahead of us a little bit. But your sins have been dealt with in a way that they can be forgiven. Not just simply because they've been forgotten by the Lord or He has chosen not to hold them to your accounts anymore. Your sins can be forgiven because Jesus Christ has paid the price for every one of them. You can be set free tonight of your sins because Jesus has already endured the punishment of them. And there's a lot more we'll say about that in just a second. But I want you to know this evening, Jesus is the reason in Him enduring the cross that God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin. That is the reason this evening why you can be saved. But it is better still than just that. Because the nature of this transaction is not just that your sins have been placed on the account of Jesus, but in salvation, the righteousness of Jesus Christ is applied to your account. And you are treated as righteous. Just as our sins were charged to the account of Christ and He was treated as a sinner, so is His righteousness in salvation imputed to us. It's charged to our account, credited I should say, to our account, and we are treated before the Lord as righteous. Now, I'm going to try my best here, and I'm going to fail, but I'm going to try my best to tell you of the incredible nature of that, and the impact of that, and the reality of that, and how it transcends just this common nature so often that we think of salvation as just finding forgiveness. My friend, we've not been just merely forgiven. We have been declared righteous. We stand before God, free of debt of our sin. We've not just merely found our record clean, but He has declared us to be righteous. And that's what this last part here says. It says that we might be made the righteousness of God and Him. This is the fullness of the imputing. Now you probably have heard that word sometimes about the imputation of what takes place in salvation, of Jesus' righteousness being imputed to us. We hear these words sometimes and I'm afraid that we hear these biblical words and because we are oftentimes spoon-fed in the rest of our lives, we kind of clam up at them. We hear words like propitiation and justification, and that Jesus' righteousness has been imputed to us, and it kind of causes us to say, I've lost it. I don't know what the preacher means anymore. There's a reality, though, in the nature of salvation. that though we might try to apply big words to it, that the reality is if you've been saved by God's grace, you already understand the extraordinary nature of it. If you've been saved by God's grace for longer than a minute, you understand the peace that is found only in God. You understand how this burden that you had felt of the weight of your sins that just had become insufferable upon you, and suddenly, in a moment, that weight is brought off of you and you feel suddenly that peace and the glory that joy unspeakable that Brother Brian has talked about so often this week. You feel that enter into your soul and in a moment you understand the full reality of what this verse is talking about. As you are treated as righteous. That's what justification is all about. That's what propitiation is all about, that Jesus has satisfied the wrath of God for you, and that in salvation and in the justification that is provided by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you have a right standing before God and a right relationship with Him because of what Jesus has done. Faith Church probably knows what I'll say next. It's all about Jesus. Every part of it. Every bit of it. Of what He has done to atone for our sins. What He has done to provide for us a covering for our sins. What He has done to bring us into reconciliation with God. The world doesn't understand reconciliation as much as it used to. I can tell you when I first understood it, at least in a mind sense, was when I was in 6th grade. I was in Mrs. Lewis's class and they were teaching us to reconcile a checkbook. I'm guessing though they don't teach that in school anymore. They were teaching us what that meant. It meant that those debits and those credits, they had to be brought into agreement. Here in this fifth chapter of 2 Corinthians, you see Paul is talking about how we are ambassadors. Those who have been saved by God's grace, we are ambassadors for Christ and of our need to proclaim this message of reconciliation before the world. That's what the message of the gospel is. It's how we can be reconciled unto God. But there's a nature here, these debits and these credits of this sin problem of ours, that we cannot on our own be made right with God. And so Paul here, wisely and by the inspiration of God, as he has charged us that we are ambassadors for Christ, he then says, for He has made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Here's how the reconciliation is made. It is made through Jesus Christ. There's a ton of Scriptures here we can begin to look at. I want to be careful though as we continue. I want you to understand these things in the most simplistic of ways. Because the nature of the Gospel, what I love about the Gospel, is it's not some complicated formula to try to work out. Last night, Sister Francie testified of how she was saved as a six-year-old. Salvation, the message of the Gospel, it's not a complicated one. Jesus Christ died for your sins. He was buried, and He was resurrected on the third day, And He stands on the right hand of God making intercession for you that you can be saved. And He has died for the sins of the whole world. So repent and believe. This is the message of the Gospel. But while the message of the Gospel is simple in its ability to be understood, it's simple in its context, it's simple in its nature, and while we as preachers, we as God's people, we as theologians, each of us desiring to understand God's Word more and more, we can begin to understand the realities of this as much as we can hear. But for you, lost friend, The challenge of the Gospel is not in understanding it. The challenge of the Gospel is you surrendering yourself to it. You will not be saved until you surrender before an Almighty God. The nature of repentance is that you who have held claim on your life all these years would let go of that claim and surrender it to God. I think I said it a couple weeks ago here at Faith, that this idea that, and I was talking to my sister about this last night, that she was reflecting upon when she was lost and seeking the Lord, this idea that somehow we can try to reach an agreement with God where we're able to keep a fingertip on the world. We're able to keep a fingertip on our claim of life. I want you to know, lost friend, you're going to have to fully surrender before the Lord. You're reaching back, desiring to lay hold. Your failure to repent, your sins that keep you looking back are causing you to remain lost even now. You know what Jesus said about this? He said, Remember Lot's wife. Remember Lot's wife. They count in scripture. how those angels had came and delivered Lot and his family from Sodom before God brought judgment upon it. And as they were leaving the city, Lot's wife, she just took a glance back. And in that moment, the wrath of God was poured out upon her too as she became a pillar of salt. Sinner friend, you cannot find salvation while trying to maintain your grip you're going to have to fully surrender to the Lord. I heard an old preacher say at one time, and he had a way with words and how he would express them. He was talking to a lost sinner on the altar, and the sinner was seeking the Lord. He wasn't looking up when he did this, but he said, the Lord is reaching down His hand for you. but you have to let go and grab a hold. But the fear of giving up and forsaking your pride oftentimes limits you from being able to reach out and grab a hold of that hand of salvation. Tonight, the hand of salvation is extended to you. God is able to save you, and He is able to save you right now. The question is, will you reach out and find Him? I want to read you just a couple of verses very quickly, and we'll try to close. 1 John 2, I just want to read two verses here. It says, My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he himself is the propitiation, there's that big word, for our sins and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world. Remember when I said the reason why you can't be saved is because of your sin? The reason you can be saved is because you, if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. But I want to close with this. We read the poor part of Isaiah 59 and 2. I want to read the good part of Isaiah chapter 59. It's in verse 1. It says, Behold, The Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear." The nature of the prophecy wasn't talking about salvation as we would know it today, but I do want you to know it's talking about redemption. You can be saved. God's hand is not shortened as somehow it's grown short that it can't reach out and grab you. He's not somehow had his ear so heavy that he cannot hear your prayers. I'm convinced this evening that God still hears and answers prayer. I'm convinced that even now that those that would call upon him, he turns his ear to and he's inclined to them and he desires to hear from them. He has given His only Son that all who would believe in Him would not perish, but they would have eternal life and trusting in the name of Jesus Christ. My friend this evening, you don't have to stay lost. You don't have to. to remain separated from God. You don't have to remain in that sin-filled state in which you feel the heaviness of sin upon you. Can I tell you something about the nature of that real quick? We talk about the word conviction. And the nature of conviction in that, it just brings about an awful feeling. But the reason why conviction brings about that awful feeling is because it is the Holy Spirit of God doing a work in your heart wherein you are being convinced of your sins. And the more that you are convinced of your sins, the more that burden increases, the more you feel the reality of your separation before God, the worse and worse it feels. And it begins to cause you to mourn and grieve of your lost condition. In that moment, my friend, I want you to know that God is able to save you. The wrath of God for those sins has already been poured out on another. The work has been accomplished to save you. The question is, will you run to Jesus? Will you come to the One who can save you? The One who stands ready and able to rescue you from this state in which you have found yourself. Olivia, that evening, she said she couldn't be saved. And it wasn't but a few minutes later that she was. I think a lot of times that's the nature of salvation. It is when we get to that place of desperation, that place where we've found the end of ourselves and we're convinced that we cannot do it. And we're right. And in that moment, when there is full surrendering over to the Lord all at once, and in that moment, He saves completely, and He saves absolutely. Isn't that wonderful? I learned something today. I hadn't paid attention to this, but you probably know that part in the scriptures where Jesus is baptized and there's the Spirit of God ascends upon him as a dove. And there's a voice from heaven that says, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. I never fully realized the nature of that word well, but it meant that God was completely pleased with his son. That work of Jesus Christ and His righteousness, God has accepted it as full payment for sin. The work has been accomplished on your behalf that you can be saved. Sinner friend, don't put off salvation when it is available to you tonight. Brother Jeff, let's get a song. Sinner friend, I want to encourage you tonight. We have heard about the glory of God the last four nights. And you have heard as a result of that the saints of God praise and glorify the name of the Lord. And I want you to know we have been doing the exact thing that you should expect us to do when we hear the nature of the messages that we've heard. In those messages, my friend, the nature, the expectation that should be upon you is that as you see God glorified, you are made to be drawn humbler, humbler, I don't know if that's a word, more and more humbler. Still used it. You need to repent and trust in the name of the Lord. This evening, as we stand, as we get a song, Lost friend, as that conviction would weigh upon you, as you know the guilt and shame of your sins, make your way to the cross of Christ. Fill your way to Him while He can be found. Seek Him while He is near. He will draw near unto you. We have, Romans 8 tells us, a God who is near. He is not far from any one of us. So seek the Lord while He may be found. This altar is open. Come and seek the Lord.