The Convicting Work of the Holy Spirit

We are so thankful to be uh back in our sermon series here in uh the Gospel of John.

And if you have a Bible with you, I invite you to open there with me to John chapter 16.

John 16 · chapter mention

About five, maybe ten years ago, we could say, Um, if you just looked out into culture, um, it was fair to say with some degree of accuracy that that we were a culture that lacked moral convictions.

If you just think about just the ep the time of history we lived in, things, the word like tolerance used to be a really popular word.

You don't hear it that much anymore.

Today it's more so conform or we'll cancel you.

But maybe 10 years ago, five years ago at the most, um tolerance was the order of the day.

Live and let live was sort of the high moral ground.

You'd have coexistence was a secular mantra you'd find on numerous cars.

You still, if there's an old car, you might still see those occasionally, but but that sort of cultural value has largely gone away.

Now there's a very strong sense of conviction.

It just happens to be not a lack of conviction, but of corrupt moral convictions.

We've all seen the acceleration of ideas, we've all experienced them.

Um it used to take a long time for ideas to take root in a society, but with instant access and incessant access through social media, everyone all through the nation can literally get the same news on their phones with the same notifications and alerts at any given time, not to mention, over the course of days, weeks, or months, how quickly ideas, good and bad, can proliferate.

This is called the speed of information in our day and time.

What this means is that often cultural convictions of yesterday are uh considered passe today, and the opinions of today will soon be pulled down tomorrow, like so many monuments.

For all that to say, I'm grateful to know that biblical truth and the people of God who hold to biblical truth can be timeless and triumphant.

You hear the phrase sometimes you want to be on the right side of history.

Well, the problem with the speed of information is like the right side of history in which moment?

Because what used to be the right side of history 200 years ago, quite different 100 years ago, quite different 50 years ago, and extremely different in the present moment in which we live.

The right side of history is God's side of history, because he always wins in the end.

Which means that we as the people of God, if we are centering our thoughts and opinions and even moral convictions on God's unchanging word, that no matter how the cultural winds blow, we can point true north, although imperfectly, because we don't perfectly understand things.

As we go through our lives, we understand things better, but we can stand on God's word because it is perfect and unchanging.

I love the words of the hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

It says there that the body they may kill.

That is the opposition around us.

The body, they may kill us, but his truth abideth still.

God's kingdom is forever.

If you like analogies, I like to think about moral convictions that come straight from the heart of God and his righteous character.

It's almost like the law of gravity.

So the law of gravity is one of those funny things that you can try to redefine it, you can deny it, you can be a gravity denier.

You can be someone who even criticizes those who believe in gravity.

But moral truth, like gravity, is such that if you take a leap into the abyss of moral subjectivism, in the end, your world will come crashing down.

Because what God says is true isn't just true because he says it, it's true because it actually reflects reality.

And we as the people of God are never in a better position when it comes to moral convictions about what is true, what is wrong, what God approves of, what is righteous, good, beautiful, and what is destructive and wrong and unrighteous and unapproved by God.

Josh McDowell, in He's a Notable Christian Apologist, he has said this about moral convictions.

He says, Have a convictions can be defined as being so thoroughly convinced that Christ and his word are both objectively true and relationally meaningful that you act on your beliefs regardless of the consequences.

That's moral conviction that we want to shoot for today.

It's the kind of moral conviction that comes from none other than the Holy Spirit of God.

In our text here in John chapter 16, Jesus is going to tell us about the ministry of the Spirit.

John 16 · chapter mention

We're going to call our sermon message this morning the convin the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.

The convicting work.

He does a lot of things.

There's teaching, there's testifying, there's confirming.

We're going to focus this morning on the convicting work of the Spirit.

So, by way of just a little bit of review, John 16 comes as part of John, end of John 13 through John 17, which all happens in the course of a couple hours, where Jesus, during and after the Last Supper, is in this extended conversation with his disciples, and in John 17 with the Father.

In this final conversation before his death with them, Jesus prepares them for his imminent crucifixion.

Because Jesus knows that once he leaves, I mean, he's been holding this whole band together, right?

Can you imagine like following Jesus around, like he's the guy all the time?

Where's Jesus is the big question.

And then he's gone all of a sudden?

That was going to happen to them.

But Jesus is going to tell them in verses 1 through 7 that this is actually to their advantage.

Imagine it being to our advantage that Jesus goes away.

Says a lot about how powerful the Holy Spirit is, how effective the Holy Spirit is in carrying forth his ministry that God has given him.

Jesus says that it is to our advantage that Jesus go back to the Father and that the Spirit be sent among the church of Jesus Christ and throughout the world to perform the full range of his new covenant ministry.

And that's how our text begins in verses 5 through 7, Jesus saying, Hey, this is actually going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or something like that.

Our text ends in verses 12 through 15, where Jesus acknowledges that there are still many things he wants to teach them, but they're not yet ready to hear him.

You ever feel like that's you?

The fact is, sometimes we pray and we want to know, we ask God for things, we ask the question, why God?

But he's like, puzzle Tom Cruise, like, you can't handle the truth.

But one of these days, the Holy Spirit's gonna teach you.

So our text ends in verses 12 through 15, telling us that he will guide us into all truth when he is here.

He will instruct us, guide us, reprove us.

But the heart of our text comes in verses 8 through 11, which is what I want to read for us at this time, if you would look on in John 16, verses 8 through 11, that talks about the convicting work of the Spirit.

John 16:8–11

And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment, concerning sin because they do not believe in me, concerning righteousness because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer, concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

For the rest of our time together, I want us to think if you can use a mental picture about this uh this concrete laying crew, laying this uh three layers of foundation and three pores that are gonna be bound together by all the rebar of this text.

And this three-layer foundation that the Spirit is laying is actually gonna be the bedrock that should underlie every other moral conviction you and I may find.

It's tempting to go through life where you're just like going through and using your own common sense to see what is right and what is wrong and what should be allowed, what shouldn't be allowed, what should be made legislation, what shouldn't be made legislation, what should I let my kids do and not do, et cetera, et cetera.

But the fact is we ought to start at ground zero with this work of the Holy Spirit.

This is the foundation of every other moral conviction that holds any water.

The first of which he says in verses eight and nine is that the Holy Spirit will convict the world of sin, to convict them about sin.

He says, and when he comes, he'll convict the world concerning sin because they do not believe in me.

In Koine Greek, the term convict here that Jesus uses, it means to refute, to confute, to bring to light, to expose.

The Spirit's coming to the world and he is exposing, he's shining a light into the dark recesses of souls and exposing not just sin, but the evil of sin, the sinfulness of sin, the reprehensibleness of our sins.

The Spirit is all about creating moral convictions, and the first way he does this is by convicting us about the evil of our sins.

And he points out specifically, this is Jesus talking.

He says, the overarching sin that really is at the root of every other sin is unbelief in and consequent rebellion against Jesus as Savior and Lord.

The Spirit will come, and when he does, he'll convince the world of their sin because they do not believe in me.

Now, it may be on your mind as you're reading this, you're thinking, well, who is this world?

It's a good question.

Because John uses the term cosmos, world, uh in a lot of different ways.

So we find in John 3.16, right, he says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

Whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life.

He loves the world.

But then you find later on in John chapter 14, he says the world doesn't receive the Holy Spirit.

John 14 · chapter mention

They're at odds with God.

They resist him, they're at odds with him.

John 17, verse 9, Jesus says, I don't pray for the world, I pray for those whom you've given me, contrasting the world with the people the Father gave him.

John 17:9

Uh it doesn't get any easier when you turn to 1 John because he says we shouldn't love the world or anything in the world.

And if you if you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you.

Then elsewhere in chapter 2, verse 2, he says he's a propitiation for all of our sins, even the sins of the whole world.

So, what is John using this term cosmos for?

I believe that the convicting work of the Holy Spirit in this text, when he says he's going to convince the world of sin, and you may disagree with me, and I would love to come up and talk to me afterwards, and we can, and you can even convince me or show me there's better cases.

But the consensus view is that he's talking about the effective work of the Spirit in actually convicting someone.

This isn't talking about uh just influencing someone, but they never actually reach conviction.

The kind of work he's talking about here is an efficacious work, I do believe we'll see.

And so, while there may be some influence of the Holy Spirit on all people uh throughout the world, bearing witness to the truth, I do believe Jesus has in mind here the people who are brought into the fold of those Jesus calls his own.

He says he will expose, he will convict.

In fact, the noun form of this same verb means to supply proof or internal persuasion.

So I don't think you can say that after the spirit does his efficacious work, it's actually not efficacious.

I believe he convinces us about our sin.

Matthew Henry put it this way: He said the Spirit convinces of the fact of sin, of the fault of sin, of the folly of sin, of the filth of sin, that by it we become hateful to God, of the fountain of sin, that is the corrupt nature within, and lastly the fruit of sin.

That the end thereof is death.

The Holy Spirit proves that all the world is guilty before God.

In Jesus' time, the Jewish feast of Pentecost was observed 50 days after the feast of Passover.

That's why it's called Pentecost.

Pentified, 50, something like that.

So 50 days after the feast in which Jesus was crucified, there was a big feast that Jews would come from all over the country to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost or the Feast of Weeks.

It was the um uh the planting, right?

Well, Jesus promised that the spirit would come and would empower his church after he left.

Well, Jesus left somewhere between that day one and day fifty there, and this the church was just left waiting, waiting.

We find in Acts chapter one that the church, 120 people strong, was just in a in a room.

People often think it was the upper room where Jesus had the last supper, and they were up there praying, praying, praying for the sending of the Holy Spirit as Jesus had promised.

And in Acts chapter 2, during the feast of Pentecost, you find that prayer to that answer, the answer to the prayer in Jesus' promise here in John 16, it comes true.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

You find that the Holy Spirit descends upon his church, 120 people, and these cloven tongues of fire appear on them, like visible fire on top of them.

And they literally start speaking in languages they had never learned.

And there were Jewish people in Jerusalem worshiping that week from all over the country, speaking many different languages, and it says that many of them heard in their own language and they were shocked, saying, wait, how'd they know my language?

These guys are Galileans.

They're they're talking with a southern accent initially, and then they're talking in Parthian.

They're talking in Cretan.

How do they do that?

Well, the Holy Spirit had given this gift, and they were understanding in their own languages.

So they were speaking and they were understanding in this tongue.

The Holy Spirit was doing a mighty work.

During that time, Peter, the man who just a few weeks before had denied Jesus three times, now he stood up in front of a huge city full of people in a busy thoroughfare in Jerusalem, and he preaches a bold sermon about Jesus Christ.

And we're going to get in a little bit of what Peter preached.

We find this in Acts chapter 2 and verse 22.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

The apostle Peter said, Men of Israel, hear these words.

Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst.

As you yourselves know.

You see, he was preaching to a lot of people who had actually been in Jerusalem 50 days before, and had cried, Crucify, crucify him.

As you yourselves know, he says, This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of the Romans or lawless men.

God raised him up, loosing the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

What could be more horrifying than realizing you'd killed God?

Except to realize that, hey, he's not dead anymore.

He's coming back for vengeance.

Can you imagine how this would get their attention when he was saying, preaching that the very one you crucified, he wasn't just some rabble rouser, he wasn't some political uh enemy of the state, he wasn't just some uh man who made himself to be more than he was, he was God in the flesh, he was the Messiah, and you killed him.

And he's back.

Most of the people who heard Peter and the apostles and the disciples, when they heard them preaching and teaching and talking, they mocked.

Some would even say that they sounded like they were drunk on bad wine.

But there were some in the crowd that Acts chapter 2 says, were convinced of the message they preached.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

We find this in Acts chapter 2 and verse 37.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

After Peter preaches this message and says, You've killed the Christ.

Luke narrates.

Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?

The word cut to the heart here, cut, denotes being pricked violently, pierced, stung, smitten.

This wasn't just in one ear and out the other.

When they heard this, they felt personally culpable as being the guilty ones in sermon in Peter's sermon.

The Spirit had awakened some of the hearers to this fact that less than two months prior, they'd killed the long-awaited Lord of glory.

Now that just happened.

Was Peter's oratorical skills as a previous fisherman just so powerful that they couldn't withstand his words?

Or was Jesus fulfilling the promise he'd made in our text?

Convincing those who formerly belonged to the world, who were under the power of the wicked one who rules over the world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.

Now, if we try to think about what this may have been like, I'm sure most of you have thought through a little bit what you would do if you had an intruder in your home.

Right?

Horrible thought.

No one wants to think about it.

But you've probably thought about it, especially if you're a man, right?

Sometimes you like to think about that.

Just imagine your instrument of war.

Let's say you hear something, and maybe the dog barks, and you look over and your spouse is still in bed next to you, you look at the baby monitor, the the babies are still in bed, and you know this is an intruder.

And your heart starts beating fast, and you hear someone walking down there and door open and close, and you're just like, this is it.

And you take your instrument of choice and you and you go around the corner and you and you sneak up upon this person in the interest of protecting your family because it could be you next, it could be your kid next.

And you take that person's life.

You shoot them, you bludge them, you do something, and they fall to the ground, and you're shaking, and your adrenaline's rushing.

And imagine going over to the light switch and flipping it on, and to your horror, it's your brother.

You just killed your brother.

He he he was been he had been coming into town, you'd expected him, but you expected him the the next week and you had wrongly put it in your calendar, and he had, as the plan was, had come into his house with his with his own key, into your house to not disturb you and the kids, and you had just killed someone who you loved and you couldn't wait to see the next weekend.

Now imagine the horror that would fill your mind, just how you would just step back.

You what how can you undo that?

How can you undo killing someone?

And yet that has to pale in comparison to the realization that hit these Jews that just a few weeks before, they had cried out for the crucifixion of the long-awaited Messiah.

And they weren't mistaken.

They had they had hated his teaching, they'd hated what he demanded of them, they'd hated the fact that he wasn't fitting the bill of rescuing them from the Roman government, they hated the fact that he was threatening them in their place in Israel, and they had cried out, crucify him, crucify him away with this man.

We do not have him to lead over us.

We'll take Barabbas.

And then it turns out it was God in the flesh.

It was Jehovah, the long-awaited one whom Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the prophets had prophesied of, the one that you grew up as a little kid longing to know, and you killed him.

In cold blood and malice, they had killed their Lord, and he says here, the spirit pierced their hearts.

Maybe it's a play on words, that the very ones who pierced the Lord are now pierced.

I wonder if our hearts are often pierced by the reality that our sins crucify the Lord of glory.

We often think about Jesus' death on the cross as, yeah, he died for my sins, like the Romans did it, without recognizing that, well, he died for our sins.

If it weren't for our sins, he wouldn't have died, he wouldn't have needed to, he wouldn't have had to.

Our sins put him on the cross.

It was these hands, if you just hold your hands up and look at them, these are the hands that swung the cat of nine tails that filleted his body.

These are the hands that drove the nails into his sinless flesh.

This is the mouth that jeered him and mocked his pain.

This is the voice that cried out for his death.

You may be sitting here and you may object and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Stop all this God talk for just a minute.

Like, let's be realistic.

We're scientific people.

What do the professionals say about guilt?

Well, number one, you never want to feel it, it's always bad.

It's probably your parents' fault.

Sigmund Freud, he argued that guilt arose in the in the human psyche when there was a conflict between one's internal instincts and societal expectations.

So society would have these expectations and it would become the consensus society that we should live in a certain way.

But when you're being really authentic and you're living this way and it conflicts with that, you feel guilt.

So really ultimately society's to blame.

Society needs to get a grip lower, especially in Freud's understanding, their sexual morals, so that no matter what sexual deviancy you may be into, it's okay because it's coming from deep within.

Richard Dawkins, an atheist, comes at it from a little different uh point of view.

He argues that religion itself, the history of religion and the influence of religion, and people being raised in religions, and preachers like me and Christians like you, and Bibles like this, that's where guilt comes from.

If you can get rid of God, you can get rid of this notion of sin, and you say, no, we can figure it out.

We don't need God to figure out what's right or wrong, then guilt goes out the window, too.

By way of contrast, there was a man named Jesus of Nazareth who taught that there actually is something called sin, that it's a root cause of rightful guilt.

The guilt is like an alarm clock that goes off in us when the time's up.

Guilt is like burning yourself on a hot stove.

It's actually there for your good to tell you, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Jesus says that we actually are sinners when we feel the guilt of a pricked conscience, that it is a rightful guilt, that sin actually resides within fallen human hearts of all humans, and it manifests itself in our sinful actions.

And it's the merciful work of God the Holy Spirit to convince us of the sinfulness of sin, so that we will be aroused out of our lethargy, so that we could pursue salvation in Jesus Christ.

Scripture declares in Romans chapter 3, there is none righteous.

Romans 3 · chapter mention

No, not one.

There's no one who understands, no one who seeks for God.

All have turned aside.

Together they have become worthless.

No one does good, not even one.

I wonder, would you agree with that this morning?

Because if you go around with a microphone and you canvas people say, hey, yeah, I'm just uh doing a little survey for my church.

We're just, you know, talking to people.

Uh, you consider yourself a good person.

How many people out of ten are gonna say, Well, yeah, I'm a decent person, not perfect or anything, but uh on a scale of 10, I'm like eight, nine, something like that.

The fact is we flatter ourselves until the Holy Spirit convicts us that we are no better than Barabbas before God.

If the standard of righteousness that you have to leap from the ground to the top of the Empire State building, if your vertical is six inches or your vertical is fifty-six inches, it doesn't matter.

You can't reach the top.

Here Jesus points out, well, Paul in Romans 3, that there is none righteous.

God doesn't grade on a scale.

All have turned aside, no one does good, not even one.

In fact, the conclusion of the matter is in verse 19 of Romans 3 says, Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who were under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped.

All the justifications, all the excuses, all the self-boasting and promotions, stop it.

The whole world may be held accountable to God.

When God on judgment day judges sin, he's not gonna say, case number 4735A Z, it's in Canada.

Does no one know that Z is Z in Canada?

Oh man.

Okay, bad joke.

So when God on Judgment Day calls out your case number, let's say, he's not gonna say, now here's the question, I'm gonna ask you one question.

How righteous do you feel like you are?

Because that's what I'm gonna judge you on.

No, he's gonna judge you by his righteous law.

That is how God judges because he's righteous.

What judge in a court of law would say, I'm gonna judge this criminal based on how righteous he feels.

Yeah, he broke into your home, he was an arsonist, he threatened your family, killed your dog.

And but he feels to be a pretty good person, and he's actually a victim of his circumstances, so we're gonna let him off the hook.

That's not how God operates.

No righteous judge operates that way.

And so we find, secondly, that the Holy Spirit convicts the world of righteousness.

When he comes, the Holy Spirit will convict the world of righteousness because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer.

So Jesus is here saying that he himself had been bearing, testifying to righteousness in his ministry, but now that he's leaving, it's going to be the Holy Spirit's job to do this.

The Holy Spirit convicts the world of righteousness by, and get this, by revealing Christ as both the measure and the source of righteousness.

The standard and the source before a holy God, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.

Jesus is no longer seen in bodily form today, but the Spirit is still giving sufficient testimony that God's standard is perfection.

And that a righteousness that he would accept has to come from him and not from within me.

Jesus, or excuse me, John actually uses the term righteous or righteousness only three times in his gospel.

Didn't use it a lot.

He uses it more in his epistles, but he only uses it three times, twice here in our text in verses 8 through 11, once in John 17, 26, where he prays to the Father and he says, Oh, righteous father.

In other words, Jesus' understanding of righteousness in the righteousness that the Holy Spirit is going to convince us of is defined by God's own being.

If the Father's righteous and I'm not like the Father, I fall short of his glory, you can't call me righteous because he's the standard and I don't measure up.

God Himself, Christ Himself, is the measure of this righteousness the Holy Spirit will be exposing, and of course, the unrighteousness.

The story of the thief on the cross is a powerful illustration of this.

You find the thief on the cross, Jesus was crucified between two malfactors or evildoers.

Thieves, in fact, one text calls them.

And you find that once Jesus is crucified and these two men are, they're just vile individuals.

They're vile.

They're criminals.

They're career criminals.

And they're finally getting what they deserve.

And they're hanging next to Jesus, and here Jesus is hanging on the cross, and they begin to mock him and to jeer him.

But something happens in one of them.

You remember this story?

The story of the thief on the cross?

One of them begins to all of a sudden see that he himself is guilty and that Jesus Christ is righteous.

He says this when he actually rebukes the other criminals and says this.

He says, Do you not fear God?

Since you were under the same sentence of condemnation?

And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.

Isn't it remarkable that he acknowledges his own guilt in Jesus' innocence?

And so he turns to Jesus.

He didn't just think Jesus was this innocent guy who got a bad rap, and here's Rome at it again, hurting innocent people.

No, he saw something that there was no way he could know except for the Holy Spirit.

He says this in verse 42.

Jesus, which coincidentally means Savior.

Remember me when you come into your kingdom?

It's as if the Holy Spirit transformed that plaque that was above Jesus' head that said, King of the Jews, as if the Holy Spirit said, actually, thief, that's true.

This one hanging on the cross is a king, and he's moments away from entering his kingdom, and you want to get in on that.

What could possibly possess this thief to look at Jesus being crucified, stripped naked, bleeding from head to toe, and say, You're my king.

Would you remember me when you enter your kingdom?

This is the work of the Holy Spirit at play in response, Jesus amazingly turns to him in verse 43 and says, Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.

It's amazing.

If you're here today and you feel like you're better than other people, I get out of bed in the morning feeling that way, right?

And then by God's grace, I've got a mirror.

I see that, I'm like, oh, whoa, no, you're not actually.

Or I have an interaction with my wife, or I go to work, or like Brian, I kick something.

It's been a long time since I've done that, but hey, I've never had my house burned down.

It doesn't take much for me to realize, wow, I I am I am not the kind of righteous person I think.

I'm I'm so far from living the way God would have me to live.

But that is something that only the Holy Spirit can really convince us of in a saving way.

And he did it for this thief on the cross.

The thief saw in Jesus the righteousness he lacked and the righteousness only Jesus could provide.

Isn't it amazing?

I just love this story.

It's as if it's included in the Gospels just to remind us that, yeah, it's not about how long you've been a Christian, it's not about how hard you've worked.

Jesus even told a parable one time about uh this man who has a vineyard that needs uh some work.

And so he hires someone in the morning and they work for him, and at the end of the day, he pays them their wage.

Well, throughout the day, he needed more and more laborers, so he hired him at different intervals.

And the last guy was hired almost before quitting time, but he needed a little more work, and so he hires them.

They all gather at the same time at the end of the day, and the master pays them all the same.

And you can imagine there the guy who's been there all day, I mean, he's sweating, he's sore, blisters, he's kind of looking down.

And he sees he's putting the same number of coins in their hands, especially the guy at the end who didn't hardly do anything.

And this sense of injustice rose up in him, and he called out against the master and said, This is really unfair.

Now, I uh you you you gave him the same as you did me.

And and Jesus tells the parable, and the master says, Wait, didn't I give you what I told you I would give you?

This is what we agreed upon.

Right?

And they go, Well, yes, but it's unfair because you gave him more.

There's this universal sense within us that if we've worked longer, if we've given up more for Jesus, if we've been Christians, if we were raised in a Christian home, then we're just somehow better, deserve more.

And the thief on the cross, nope, he's gonna enter paradise moments later because he bowed the knee to Jesus from the heart, because the Holy Spirit worked in his life.

That's what you call grace.

And the fact is, if it weren't of grace, none of us would be saved.

If it was based on our works, none of us would be saved because it says the wages of sin, if God gives us what we deserve, the wages of sin is death.

There's a beautiful story in the story of Martin Luther, German monk, theologian in the 16th century, a key figure in the Protestant Reformation.

His conversion happened long after he had been a very faithful Catholic monk.

He was uh extremely zealous, and but there there came a point in his life when he began to really struggle uh terribly with guilt and fear of God's punishment.

Uh in a thunderstorm one time, he literally thought God was killing him.

And it was the end of the road for him.

And he began to just search scripture and try to figure out what he could do to merit God's uh uh you know escape from judgment.

He would fast frequently, he would confess incessantly and obsessively, he would he would pay penance.

He would describe this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair.

He would even say, I lost touch with Christ, the Savior and Comforter, Martin Luther would say, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my soul.

Can you imagine relating to Jesus as the hangman?

You're waiting in a cell and you're bound, and every move you make, it's just the shh shackles moving, reminding you that you're a prisoner.

And there's the hangman waiting the order for your time to be executed.

That's who we saw in Jesus.

And that's who we see in Jesus if we're realistic and honest with ourselves, if we're relating to him based on our works.

It brought him to an end of himself by God's mercy.

Luther would come to read Romans chapter 1 and verse 17 that says this for in the gospel of Jesus, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, quoting the Old Testament, the just shall live by faith.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

The words jumped off the page to Luther.

He'd never seen that.

That the just don't live by penance and confession and beating themselves with whips and cords and praying on your knees and walking up steps and all the things that you can try to do in certain religions.

But it's the just, those who are just before God, will live by faith in the righteousness that's revealed to us, not that we earn for God.

It blew his mind, it shattered his paradigm.

He became a believer in Jesus and trusting in him alone for salvation.

He would go on to write later in his memoirs.

He said, I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.

I love that he used the term paradise, like that thief on the cross.

Freely, God's grace, I don't deserve it.

I'm getting what I deserve now.

But freely by God's grace, with uh nail-pierced hands, Jesus welcomes them into his kingdom.

Because of Jesus' righteousness, not our own.

Now, once a person is convinced of personal sin and of God's impossibly high standard of righteousness, and that Christ is the only one that can supply us that righteousness, there's one more layer to this foundation that undergirds all moral convictions left in Jesus' words, and that is the conviction the Holy Spirit convicts the world of judgment.

Because if sin is real, and this whole thing about righteousness is real, if you remain outside of Jesus, there's only one possible outcome: judgment.

And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

In other words, if the ruler of this world is judged, if the one who's the most powerful, if God is crushing him under the feet of Christ, how much more not you if you don't bow the knee to Jesus?

If Satan is like a lapdog compared to God, how much more not will you escape the judgment of God?

And we shouldn't underestimate the power of this one who rules the world.

In fact, in the little epistle of Jude, or excuse me, 2 Peter, it says that Michael the Archangel, the most powerful God uh angel that God has, Michael the Archangel, meaning Archai or the one above, he's the ruling angel.

That he was so respectful of Satan's power, he wouldn't even chide him himself, but he says, the Lord rebuke you.

In other words, Satan may be on par in terms of power with Michael the Archangel, and here it says, He's judged, and so will you be if you don't turn to Jesus.

Jesus said this.

In fact, Jesus said elsewhere that he saw, this is an amazing testimony of Jesus' pre-existence as the eternal word of God.

He says, I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven.

Remember the story of Satan being cast out of heaven?

Christ was there.

The eternal word, he was the one, he was probably the word that was spoken to Satan.

Get out of here.

Get out.

Well, Satan was cast out of heaven before time began, and he'll be crushed by the time it's over.

When he's cast in the end, in Revelation 19, he'll be cast into the lake of fire that burns forever and ever.

In 1741, I'll just kind of close with an illustration here.

In 1741, Jonathan Edwards delivered a now famous sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

Enfield, Connecticut, where his church was.

His sermon vividly depicted judgment.

And in fact, it's actually stated that, you know, some would say that Edwards was this powerful order.

He wasn't.

He read his sermons, he hardly looked up.

But the spirit moved that day in a powerful way, as it did a number of times during Edwards' ministry.

He used graphic imagery to convey the precarious position of those outside of Christ.

He likened them, sounds kind of harsh.

He likened them to spiders dangling over a fiery pit.

The flames lapping up.

At any moment, that little thread was going to be singed and would snap, and that spider would fall to its demise.

Edwards used this imagery just to try to capture what it's like to be under the gaze of an angry God who's perfectly holy and you're perfectly unholy.

Through the sermon, the Spirit stirred profound responses among the congregants.

People allegedly cried out to God just spontaneously, Oh God.

They wept uncontrollably.

People who wrote memoirs about it said people were clinging to the pillars and to the pews, hoping that they wouldn't slide into hell itself as he read his sermon.

Here's just a small portion from that sermon.

He says, The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string.

Just imagine this.

And justice bends the arrow and aims it at your heart and strains the bow.

And there's nothing but the mere pleasure of God in that and angry God without any promise or obligation at all.

It's the only thing keeping the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

I remember in history class this came up and they use this as an example as just the religious extremists that believe in the hellfire and brimstone preachers of the past.

We're glad that they don't exist much anymore.

It's an example of religious oppression.

If we can just get away from that, embrace Jesus' message that God is love, and if you're just sincere, everything will be fine.

But the fact is, if there was a shortcoming to Luther's sermon, it was in the fact that it was inadequate to describe the degree of horror that would actually be the indescribable terror of damnation, the untellable horror of eternal justice that awaits someone who rejects Christ from ruling over them.

The problem is we feel ourselves to be pretty good people, and we have no concept of what it means to be a perfectly righteous being.

I was talking with a friend the other day.

And he was asking how God could almost be surprised when people sin in the Bible.

Like, doesn't God know everything?

How can God be surprised?

You're like, what are you doing again?

How are you doing this?

Doesn't God know that people and I think the answer the Lord gave me at the moment was, yeah, but if you're a perfectly righteous being, sin is always shocking.

Not surprising in the sense that God didn't see it coming.

But God can't relate casually to sin.

Oh, you yeah, you're oppressing the poor.

Okay, it's all right.

You're committing adultery, not a problem.

You're blaspheming me, you're valuing money over me, you're prioritizing all these things, my kingdom's no big deal to you, even though it is the reality in all the universe, no big deal.

Casual.

God can't do that because he's a perfectly righteous being that we can't even comprehend what truth is to him.

And so we grow weary with sin fatigue and we're just like, yeah, it's just, yeah, it's the way it is.

I've always struggled with this or that.

God never a moment feels that way about it.

It's just as horrific in one moment as it is a million years later.

Can you imagine being on judgment day before that, God?

I want to conclude in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 with the hope of the gospel.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

Because the good news of the gospel includes all this terrible bad news.

But it's only good news if the spirit has convinced you that the bad news is true.

1 Corinthians 1, verse 30, and because of God, you are in Christ Jesus.

1 Corinthians 1:30

Not because of you, not because of your parents.

Ultimately, God is to praise for you being in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

So that, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.

I just want to point one thing out.

Notice he didn't say he became for us, wisdom from God, righteousness, etc.

Even though elsewhere he does say that.

It's true that he became sinned for us so that we could be righteous, etc.

Here he says he became to us.

In other words, in conversion, there is a change in our subjective perceptions of Christ.

He used to be to me foolishness, he used to be to me vileness, he used to be to me degrading and useless.

But after the Spirit works in me, he becomes to me the very essence of wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

If he's convicted you of sin this morning, of his impossibly high standard of righteousness, of judgment to come for all of us if we're outside of Christ, will you not now see in Jesus Christ the answer to that problem?

The foolishness that we've given ourselves to, Jesus is the true wisdom.

The unrighteousness that we have been bathing in, swimming in, vomiting out and breathing back in, the unrighteous Jesus is our righteousness.

Our need to overcome the patterns and power of sin in our lives so that we're becoming more like Christ, He is our sanctification.

To be rescued from our uselessness, to stand on judgment day with nothing to bring before God, He is our redemption.

Has He answered your haunting guilt this morning by convincing you that Jesus Christ, crucified on the cross, in your place, bearing your sins, that he is your righteousness alone?

If you belong by faith in Jesus today, if you belong to God, I want to call us to flee to Jesus Christ.

He is the only answer.

He is the only safe place in the world from the nuclear fallout of God's just wrath.

Make him your hope, your refuge, and your only boast.

And if you're here this morning and you've been a Christian a long time and you're hearing all this almost through the eyes or ears of someone you've been praying for, and they don't yet see Jesus as their righteousness, they don't see their need for righteousness.

I want to encourage us to find our confidence in Jesus' promise or the work of the Holy Spirit, that there is no skeptic so doubtful in all the world that the Spirit cannot convince.

There is no cynic so hardened that she cannot be won.

There's no soul so lost that it cannot be found.

This is the work of the Spirit.

Just as Jesus promised.

May we believe it.