Four Spiritual Flaws: Flaw #4

Good morning, welcome.

Just before we jump into the teaching, I'd like to take a moment just to pray for a group of students and a few adults from Orchard Hill who have gone to Haiti to a church that we planted there about two years ago.

And this week we'll be putting on Kids Fest Haiti.

It's just one of those cool things where something that's experienced here every year, where people are invited from the community to come, is replicated at the church that we helped to plant in Haiti.

And so would you just join me in prayer?

Father, we thank you for just the students who are taking their break and adults taking time off work to go and help put on Kids Fest Haiti.

We thank you for the work that you have begun in Caracol.

And Lord, we pray this week that many people, just as happens here during the summer, would come for the camp and then the families would become exposed to the church and then drawn to you through that time together.

Lord, we pray for the students who've gone that this week would be a marker in their spiritual lives.

Father, we ask today as we're gathered here in Wexford and Butler in the strip district that you would draw each of us to yourself.

And Lord, we ask that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Today is traditionally called Palm Sunday because it's the day in which it's presumed that Jesus entered Jerusalem and people gathered and waved and maybe put palms on the road as a way to commemorate Jesus entering Jerusalem and then a week, within a week, he was crucified.

And during the season, we have been looking forward to this time.

It's a season that many people refer to as Lent.

And Lent is that time where for some people they decide to give up something as a spiritual discipline in preparation for Good Friday and Easter.

And we said this year, whether that's been your tradition or not your tradition, but maybe rather than giving up something like wine or chocolate or meat, then maybe if if this year, not that if you want to give those things up, go ahead and give them up, but maybe this year, what if we focused on these four spiritual flaws that we see in Exodus 32?

And we tried to give up some of these flaws in our own life.

Now, Exodus is a book that can basically be divided into two halves.

There's the first half of the book, which is where we get the Exodus.

The people are leaving Egypt.

And then in the second half of the book, chapter 20 through the end, is basically the people encamped around Mount Sinai and they're receiving the law from God.

This is where the Ten Commandments come, and then additional law.

And if we understand Exodus 32, I think we actually understand a lot of the second half of the book because what you have is you have people camping out for about six weeks receiving the law, and Exodus 32 is really the only action other than God giving the law to Moses that we see in the second half of the book of Exodus.

And so here's what we've seen.

We've seen that the people's first mistake was having a consumer mindset with God.

When Moses went up on the mountain and then he didn't come down for weeks, they started to say, What's happened to this Moses guy?

Where is God?

God's not doing anything.

Let's just do what we're going to do and forget this God thing.

And so we talked about what it would look like to give up a consumer mindset.

Then we talked about this idea of relying on secondhand faith.

In Exodus 20, we're told that the people said, Moses, you go up on the mountain, but don't make us deal with God.

You deal with God for us.

We don't want to deal with God directly.

And we talked about how we can fall into the habits of having secondhand faith and maybe what that would look like to give that up.

Then last week we learned about what it means to make idols in our own day and age, and we talked about what it might look like to give that up.

And today, as we come to the end of this series, I think we see a fourth flaw in this passage.

And this flaw is the flaw that I'm just simply going to name is ignoring the seriousness of sin.

And we see this because here the people took and made idols, and then when God deals with it, God deals with it in the most severe way.

In fact, he tells some of the Levites, the priests, to go through the camp and to put to death some people who had sinned against God in this way.

And when you and I hear that today, we have a lot of different reactions.

Some of us will hear that and we'll say, oh my goodness, that's the kind of God that I don't want to believe in.

I like a God of grace and mercy.

I prefer the New Testament God to this Old Testament God.

Have you ever heard somebody say that?

I don't like the Old Testament God because he's harsh and vindictive, but I like the New Testament God because he's gracious and kind, and that's the God that I want to worship.

In fact, for some of us, maybe this has been part of our journey away from church.

Is there was a God presented to us that we said was so harsh that we didn't want to worship any kind of a God like that, or our dissonance with the God that we read about in the Old Testament.

But, and I'll hopefully come back to that a little bit, but I hope that doesn't keep you from missing the big point here.

And that is when the people sinned, it was a big deal to God.

See, we live in an age in which to even say the word sin, even in a church context, makes people uncomfortable because nobody wants to tell anybody else that something's sinful.

And nobody wants to be offensive.

And so we live in a culture today where people basically try to ignore this kind of an idea and that God would take sin seriously.

And so if we think about sin at all, what many of us will do is we'll say, you know what?

Sin isn't a big deal.

Or if it's a big deal globally, it's not a big deal if I sin.

Or maybe we'll say, I don't like to think in those categories, those kinds of ways, or we'll say, I'm not sure sin is helpful for people's self-esteem or their way of thinking.

And yet, when we come to Exodus 32, we see that God takes sin seriously.

There's an article that was written by a man named Wilfred McCay, he's a professor, was appeared in an article or a periodical called The Hedgehog Review, which is not a faith-based periodical, it's an assessment of culture.

And he wrote an article about a year ago that uh was called The Strange Persistence of Guilt.

And in it, what he does is he basically says that we live in a world that tries to do everything it can to get us away from the ideas of guilt and moral culpability.

In other words, nobody wants to feel any guilt about anything.

And he said, and yet it's strange because guilt persists in our world.

In other words, people still feel guilty all the time.

And he said, what we've tried to do to deal with that, and this isn't really about the message, but his point, this is his bigger point than just guilt persists in our world, even though we've tried to get rid of it, is that we've tried to identify with victims.

In other words, what we do is we say, well, there's a victim group, and if I like kind of their cause or call out their oppressors, then I feel morally virtuous, and therefore I feel good, and that one of the reasons people are so adamant in political discourse or in social media about causes is because it makes them feel somehow morally good.

Well, what I want to do today is ask the question what do we do when we feel guilty?

Now I know some of you will say, Well, I don't feel guilty.

In fact, some of you would say, that's why I don't like coming to church.

I don't want to ever feel guilty.

So I avoid church as much as possible.

I get that.

But here's what I know even if you don't believe in the categories of God or sin or, or you say, I'm not really a person who believes all that, that there are still times when you blow it even by your own standards.

And so what do you do when you blow it even by your own standards?

Nobody else's standards, just your standards.

What do you do?

What do you do with that feeling of I shouldn't have done that?

You know, it's that moment where maybe you're a student and you say, I'm not the kind of student who cheats in school.

I don't need to, I have integrity.

And then you're on a test and it's really hard, and you look at your neighbor's paper and you say, Well, that was just an aberration.

I'm not that kind of person.

Or maybe you're you're doing a deal, and to get the deal done, you have to fudge the truth a little, and you say, Well, I'm not, I'm not the kind of person who fudges the truth a little to get a deal done, but you did.

Or maybe you misrepresent things to your boss in order to not have to deal with his or her disappointment.

And you say, Well, I'm not the kind of person who doesn't tell the truth, but you did.

Or maybe you have some thoughts, some dark thoughts about others, or maybe yourself.

Maybe somebody's hurt you and you want to hurt them back.

Maybe not even physically, but but you think about it and think about comments you could make that that would be devastating to them.

And then you think, I'm not that kind of person, and yet you find yourself doing that.

Wilfred McKay in his article talks about just how we get to that kind of culpability, and what he says is that we often may not find any kind of personal responsibility, but in our world today, we can see through the internet or TV or something, people suffering on the other side of the world.

And as much as we try to distance ourselves from it, we know that we could relieve some of that suffering.

He writes this Whatever donation I make to a charitable organization, it can never be as much as it could have, as I could have given.

And I can never diminish my carbon footprint enough, or give enough to the poor, or support medical research enough, or otherwise do the things that would render me morally blameless.

Colonialism, slavery, structured, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation, there's an endless list of items for which you and I cannot fail but take the rap, fail but to take the rap.

In other words, he said, even if you say, hey, look, I live up to my standards for myself, when you look at the broader world and you see some of the issues that exist, he says, even there you have to say, I could have done more.

And so there's this persistence, this strange persistence of guilt.

So what do you do with it?

What do I do with it?

Well, in Exodus 32, when the people had worshiped the golden calf, I think we can see kind of a couple reactions to a moral lapse, and then what we really need after the moral lapse.

So three reactions that maybe we might be prone to, and then what we really need.

The first reaction is to redefine the standard.

And I see this in Exodus 32 because Aaron, when he made the golden calf, what did he do?

He said, you know, I just took their golden stuff, I threw it in the fire, and now came this calf, and then we have this festival.

And if you go back and read it, it says that a festival to the Lord and to the calf at the same time.

Do you know what Aaron was doing?

He was saying, look, we worship the Lord.

We just added a golden calf that just happened to come out of the fire.

What could I do?

And what he's doing is he's redefining the standard to say, we didn't really worship some other God, we just added something.

And there was probably a redefinition of the standard around this revelry that took place there, where they said, Here's how we're going to live, here's what we're going to do, and oh, that's not so bad.

And here's how this works.

Maybe in your life, maybe in my life.

And that is we have a standard, here's a picture, and and so we draw some standards around ourselves.

Now, again, I'm not even saying that this has to be God or sin.

If you're a Christian, then there's a God standard, a sin standard, a biblical standard that helps define these lines.

But even if you don't believe any of that, you have a standard that you put around your life.

And what happens is when you violate it and feel guilty, is you expand your circle a lot of times if you redefine your standard.

You just simply say, you know what?

I'm gonna make my circle bigger.

And then you make it bigger again and again if you find that the new standard doesn't suit you.

And so soon you just have a bigger standard, a bigger circle that you draw around yourself.

Now, to be fair, there are times to rethink our standards.

Maybe some of our standards weren't rooted in eternal truth, but were just a whim.

But you see this all the time with people who start out saying, I would never do that, and then after some time they say, you know what?

That's okay.

I believe that's okay.

I believe that that will work for me.

And what's happening is we're redefining our standards to try to alleviate our sense of guilt.

Here's the second thing that we do, and that is we resolve to do better.

And the reason I say this is this is the approach that says, okay, I drank too much, I'm gonna stop drinking, and this time I mean it.

Or I yelled too much, and I'm not gonna yell anymore.

Okay, any of you ever do this?

And then you say, now I'm going to do better.

I resolve to do better.

And here's where I see this in this passage.

This isn't is not as obvious.

But in Exodus chapter 20, we get Moses being given the Ten Commandments, and then 21 and following all the way up to about 31, there are all these detailed laws about the priests and about the tabernacle and the temple and how everything should work in community life.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

And then in chapter 32, they fail.

They worship idols, they carry on in this revelrous kind of way.

And then in chapters 33 through the end of the book, they go back to the law and they meticulously keep the law.

In other words, what you have structurally is here's the law, here's my failure, now I'm going to do better.

And so, what some of us will do when it comes to our own guilt is we'll say, okay, I may have blown that, but now I'm going to try even harder to not blow it again.

Now, don't misunderstand me.

I'm not suggesting that resolve to do better is not a good thing.

A lot of us need resolve to do better, but what I'm saying is it won't take away the guilt.

Because what it does is it produces religion, it produces morality, it produces even civil goodness.

But it doesn't take away the guilt, and here's why it doesn't.

Because if you succeed, if you do really well at doing better and not doing it anymore, you'll either become kind of self-righteous because you'll say, I'm I'm one of those people who gets it on how to do it, or you will be still sweeping some other things under the rug.

Because you may do better in that one area, but you may not do better in every area.

And then when you fail, what happens is the guilt's even worse than before.

Because you say, This time I wasn't going to do that again.

This time I was going to do better.

It's a little bit like this if if the standard, God's standard, high standard, perfect standard, is saying you need to swim across the ocean.

Well, it doesn't matter how well you swim, sooner or later you need help.

And then you're put back in the water and you say, okay, this time I'm going to swim even farther.

I'm going to swim harder.

I'm going to, I'm resolved.

You may swim farther, but you still won't swim far enough.

And that is the issue and why this ultimately doesn't take away guilt.

Now, again, I'm not saying that we don't try harder, but what I'm saying is understand that it will not take away guilt.

It will actually produce more guilt.

Have any of you ever resolved to exercise more?

And you do the whole thing like, okay, five o'clock every morning, I'm getting out of bed.

Here goes my alarm.

And so your alarm goes off at five the first day, you spring out of bed, you go exercise.

Tuesday, you spring out of bed, you go exercise.

Wednesday, you drag a little.

Thursday, you're not so sure.

By Friday, you hit the snooze button.

You say, maybe, maybe on Saturday.

Now, here's what happens.

Some of you say, Oh no, no, I'm the person who always gets up at five, always gets it done.

Well, for those of us who don't, we look and say, self-righteous, you know, that kind of person.

And you then have pride because you look at other people who don't get it done and you're like, oh, well, what's your problem?

Now you may have other issues in your life.

Now, again, I'm not equating exercise with anything other than our desire to fulfill standards, but when you don't succeed, if you don't succeed, then what you end up doing is you end up saying, I'm just not one of those people who ever succeeds, and you feel even worse.

And that's what happens to us morally when we say, I resolve to do better.

Here's the third approach.

Some of us will request forgiveness.

Now, when I say that, you hear that and you say, Well, doesn't that kind of bring together the Christian ideal?

Here's what Exodus 32, verse 32 says.

Exodus 32:32

But now please forgive their sins, but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.

So what happens is Moses comes and he basically says, God, forgive them.

But I want you to notice something.

God doesn't forgive them at this moment.

And this is important.

Because at this moment, what you would expect maybe is you'd expect God to say, okay, okay, okay, I forgive.

But God doesn't forgive right then.

Now, there could be a couple of different explanations for this.

One could be that it was a cheap request for forgiveness.

And what I mean by this, and you know how this works, some of you might have people in your life who do this and they're like, hey, sorry.

Sorry about that.

You know, sorry.

And you know when they say sorry, it's just get off my back, like I'm gonna do what I want to do, even though I'm saying sorry.

It could be that, but it ultimately, even if the request is legitimate, which it is in Moses' case, God doesn't forgive simply by divine fiat.

And this leads us really into the what do we really need?

And here's the reason we need something more, and that is what you see in Exodus 32, is that there needed to be a payment.

There needed to be something done on behalf of those who had blown it.

And here's where we see this Exodus chapter 32, verse 30 says, the next day Moses said to the people, You've committed a great sin, but now I'll go up to the Lord.

Exodus 32:30

Perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.

Now, atonement's a word that's sometimes used in big theological books.

And it just simply means to make right between two parties.

And it's usually what somebody else does to make it right on our behalf.

And what happens in Exodus chapter 32 is he says, Let me make an atonement, and then in the parallel over in Leviticus chapter 9, we're told what the atonement actually is.

Exodus 32 · chapter mention Leviticus 9 · chapter mention

So now what we have is we have have a couple Old Testament books, parallel sections, and this is why you may not see this immediately in Exodus 32, but verse 6 of chapter 9 in Leviticus.

Then Moses said, This is what the Lord commanded you to do, so that the glory of the Lord may appear to you.

Now again, you have to go back.

I didn't take the time to read all the context.

Exodus 33, Moses was concerned after the people sinned that they couldn't continue their conquest without the glory of the Lord.

So he says, We have to get the glory of the Lord.

Here he says, Here's what we have to do to get the glory of the Lord.

Verse 7, Moses said to Aaron, Come to the altar and sacrifice your sin offering and your burnt offering and make atonement for yourself and for the people.

Sacrifice the offering that is for the people and make atonement for them as the Lord has commanded.

Now, this is where we get the Old Testament sacrificial system.

This is why God isn't a God of two different testaments.

But here, what you have is you have Moses saying the way that we deal with our guilt is not simply to ask for forgiveness, but it's to actually have somebody else pay the price.

And here's why this is important.

Because when there's an offense, somebody has to pay.

Otherwise, there's not mercy, there's just simply no justice.

But in the cross of Jesus Christ, which the Old Testament sacrifice system prefigures, what you have is you have justice and mercy coming together.

You have God saying, I will have a price paid, I won't just say whatever, and you have mercy coming together.

And this is why the atonement is so important.

Think of it this way: if you got behind financially and the only way to make your bills was to borrow money from an unsavory character.

So you borrowed a large sum of money.

Now, what would happen if you couldn't pay that?

Would you be able to go to them and say, you know, borrowing's just kind of a social construct?

Let's just widen the circle in our definition of what it means to borrow.

They would break your legs.

Would you go to them and say, you know what?

Loan me more money and I'm gonna do much better next time.

I I tell you what, next time I'll really do it.

Would you go to them and say, hey, look, just forgive me?

No, somebody has to pay.

And that's the point.

Of Exodus 32.

And here's where this ties into our guilt is we live in a culture today that tells us nobody has to pay, there are no standards.

Just be free of guilt.

And here's how Wilfred McKay again writes about this.

Notwithstanding all the claims about our living in a post-Christian world devoid of sensorious public morality, we live, in fact, in a world that carries around an enormous and growing burden of guilt and yearns and even demands sometimes to be free of it.

In other words, despite the fact that there's no consensus about morality.

And everybody says we shouldn't feel guilt.

He says we still feel guilt.

And you see it all the time in people's attempts to feel better about themselves in different ways.

And he says this, and this burden is always looking for an opportunity to discharge itself.

Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate how many of the deeds of individual men and women can be traced back to the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be right with the world.

Here's what he's saying.

A lot of what we do in this world, and he's talking about everybody, religious, irreligious, people who believe that they believe, people who don't.

Says what we do is we try to feel good about how we live our lives.

And so what we do is we go from kind of activity to activity, saying, I'm better than that person in the way that I handled this.

We give something away or we identify with a victim so that we feel good about the kind of person we are, that we're not the kind of person who needs any kind of an atonement.

Then he writes this.

It can neither be dissolved by divine fiat nor repressed nor born forever.

In the Jewish moral world, in which Christianity originated, and without which it would have been unthinkable, sin has always had to be paid for, generally by the sacrificial shedding of blood.

Its effects could never be ignored or willed away.

Which is precisely why, in the Christian context, forgiveness of sin was specifically related to Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice, his vicarious payment for all human sins, procured through his death on the cross and made available freely to all who embrace him in faith.

Forgiveness has a stratospherically high standing in the Christian faith, but it's grounded in the fundamental theological and metaphysical beliefs about the person work of Jesus Christ, which in turn can be traced back to the Jewish notions of sin and how one pays for it.

And here's what he's arguing.

He's saying the reason that we have a strange persistence of guilt is because we've gotten rid of this idea of standards and then we've gotten rid of the idea of an atonement.

And that the only way that we'll ever feel free from guilt is if we embrace this idea of Jesus Christ atoning for our sin.

Not if we try to explain it away, not if we say we'll work harder, not if we merely say, just forgive me.

But only if we come and say, Jesus did for me what I could never do on the cross.

Now you may ask the question, well, if the atonement is true, then I can just sin and God will forgive me in the future, right?

And so I can do whatever I want.

It's a good question.

And in a sense, the answer to that is yes.

What the atonement means is that God has forgiven sin and that somebody who believes in him will not be loved anymore in the future by keeping his standards, or any less in the future by failing to keep the standards.

That we can be made whole and have assurance.

But here's what that misses.

And that is, it misses that sin has actual effects.

I was trying to think of a way just to illustrate this.

This is a banana.

So imagine with me for a moment that this banana represents your life.

And in your life, you do things sometimes that violate either God's standard or just your own standard.

Well, what happens is you can be forgiven from that, but there are still consequences.

So if this represents kind of the idea of a sin, you poke it through the banana, you take it out.

At this point the banana's still in pretty good shape, but I'm forgiven, but there's still a consequence.

So let's just take something that hopefully is universally agreed on.

Jesus says in Matthew 5, you've heard it said, you shall not commit murder.

All right?

Are we good?

We can agree, right?

Murder, universally sinful.

Okay, good, good.

I see no, I'm just kidding.

Um so uh so one of you're like, no, um, okay, murder, sinful.

Then Jesus says, but I say to you, this is Matthew chapter five, it says, but I say to you, if you get angry with your brother and say to him, you empty head, racca, you fool, then it's the same thing in your heart.

So so so now you have murder, you have Jesus saying, but I want to give you even a bigger standard.

So I'm gonna just say for a moment that what we can do sometimes is we can say, okay, if I sin, I can be forgiven, I can go to the atonement, but every time that I choose to say, I get angry, what I'm doing is I'm poking a hole in this banana when I do it willfully, and I just say, I'm giving into it.

So I yell at my kids, I yell at somebody at work, you know, I get mad when I'm driving my car, it's somebody going slow, and I honk when I shouldn't.

I mean, these are hypothetical.

Um, and um and and I kind of say, you know, here are all the ways that I do it.

You know, maybe I I get upset with somebody and I talk against them.

And I say, that's no big deal.

But what it does is it ruins the relationship, not just with that person, but with others.

And what I do each time is I keep poking a hole in this banana, and even though God forgives, what happens is sooner or later I have consequences that are significant.

Now, I purposely chose to talk about the calling people names, angry in that scenario.

And I used a small nail for that.

What happens if we do something big?

You ever heard somebody say, well, all sin is the same?

Well, in a sense, that's Jesus' point.

He's saying, if you sin, it's all sin, but not all sin is the same.

And here's why.

If you murder somebody, it's like taking a bigger nail.

And when you go through with the bigger nail, the consequences are worse.

You get mad, you can just say, okay, I got mad.

You kill somebody, you might end up in jail.

Forgiveness, the atonement, doesn't mean you don't go to jail.

It doesn't mean you don't have consequences.

What it means is God says, I make you forgiven.

Now, here's the other thing that happens.

And that is that God sometimes, just in his grace, lets something that we've made a mess of not get messy.

And that's beautiful when that happens.

But sometimes, even when we experience all the consequences, and this is why I like the fruit analogy, what happens when fruit dies?

If you put it back in the ground, you get seeds, you get new life.

God will bring new life maybe after a prolonged season of consequence.

And here's why I say this: if you're here and you say, you know what, I've been poking the banana and I've done it with some big stuff.

Don't lose heart.

God can bring new beauty.

Because here's the temptation that some of us will have.

We'll say, since I've done it in a small way, I might as well keep doing it.

I've already made a mess, I might as well go ahead and make a bigger mess.

And and the atonement may forgive me for eternity, but not for this life.

But here was Moses' point when he said, I don't want to go up unless I get the glory of the Lord.

Exodus 33.

What he was doing was he's saying, I need God in my life today in order to navigate what's in front of me.

In other words, yes, we celebrate joyfully what God has done in the atonement, but it doesn't take away the motivation to say, I want to live righteously in the here and now.

In fact, I think it does the opposite, because the more you see the beauty of what God has done, the more you'll say, Why would I ever want to do anything that counters what he said?

Maybe you've heard people say, Well, Christians are judgmental.

And sometimes that's true.

Sometimes Christians are judgmental and filled with self-righteousness.

But you see, if we understand and celebrate the atonement, what Jesus Christ has done, this is what this week is all about, going to Friday and Easter, what Jesus has done on our behalf, the sacrifices, why the blood and the songs about the blood are so important in the Christian faith because they're all about the atonement.

Then what happens is we become people who say, But for the grace of God, there go I.

And we begin to become people who aren't trying to assert our self-righteousness by comparing ourselves with others, but we become joyfully humble and authentic in saying, I know that it's only because of God's grace, only because of the atonement I go here.

And as we celebrate that, then what happens is we say, now I want to actually live in a way that's in accordance with this God who's so gracious that he gives me what I don't deserve.

But if we don't take sin seriously, what we'll do instead is we'll keep redefining the standard, we'll hide, we'll become hypocritical, we'll resolve to do better, and if we do better, we'll get self-righteous, and if we don't, we'll become overly defeated, we'll simply say, God forgive me, and try to move through it.

But when we take it seriously, we'll we'll savor and celebrate the sacrifice that Jesus has made.

And here's the irony.

A lot of times people will look at churches and they'll say, Oh, that church, you know, really stands on the word or something.

And their idea is if everybody kind of preaches the law, that that means that they take it seriously.

And if grace is taught, it means you don't.

Do you realize the opposite is actually true?

If you emphasize the law and get everyone to believe that we can keep the law, you're actually having a lower view of sin because what you're doing is you're saying the law is manageable.

Just do a little better.

But when we emphasize grace, we do it because we say the law is unattainable.

Now, again, it doesn't mean that we don't resolve to ever do better, but it means we understand that, and as a result, we don't lead as people with a sense of saying, be like me because I do it right.

Instead, we say, I come to Jesus and I need Jesus just like everybody else.

And that is who we worship.

So what would happen this week if you and I took sin seriously?

If we were able to say, I'm not going to dismiss it, I'm not going to just redouble my efforts, but I'm going to take my sin to the cross where atonement has been made.

And there I will find relief from my guilt rather than trying to run from guilt.

You know what would happen?

When we come to Friday, when we come to Easter, we would gather with such a sense of deep worship and joy that we would be moved to say, our God has done for us.

What no modern theory can do.

Provide an atonement for our sin.

Father, I pray today that you would help each one of us to see the beauty of the atonement, the beauty of the sacrifice of Jesus.

And that as a result, we would worship you.

And as a result, we would want to follow you.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.