Reflection - The Darkness

You know, the incarnation is the most important event in the history of mankind.

God literally came down to earth in the form of a helpless child.

Immediately, his life was in danger.

God was after him from the beginning.

He came down in very humble circumstances to a very humble family.

He lived the perfect life that you and I couldn't even begin to think of doing for just a minute.

And he went to the cross a perfect sacrifice, totally sinless.

And he died there on the cross.

But, most importantly, what he did and we all know that, because sometimes we think about the pain of a crucifixion but the greatest pain he felt when he uttered those words my father, why have you forsaken me?

He took on the wrath, the due penalty for the sins that you and I committed.

It was the most amazing thing, and that atonement is something that we celebrate on Easter normally.

But as we go through this Christmas season, we are going to focus on the amazing gift that it was, that he brought this light to the world, because, again, without the incarnation, we don't have the cross.

And as we consider this amazing gift from God during the Christmas season, what we want to do is focus on the power and the work of Jesus, as illuminated through the words of the prophet Isaiah in chapters 59 and 60.

And we're going to focus on him bringing light to the world.

Now we've titled this Christmas series Reflection, and in this series we're going to be answering three questions that really are laid out in these two chapters.

The first question is what would the state of mankind be if Jesus never came into the world?

That's today's message, which I've titled the Darkness.

The second message is why does it matter that Jesus came into the world?

And the third message how does the light of Jesus continue to shine on earth until his glorious return?

Now that brings us up to the fourth and final part of this series, and this is going to be pretty special because we're going to have three people from the congregation, three people give their testimonies about how Jesus took them out of darkness and into the light.

And I'm telling you they're inspiring stories and I think they will bless you.

So that's what this series is all about, and so I've entitled my sermon the Darkness, because we're going to look at what this world would look like without Christ if we did not have that hope.

So let's go ahead and read the text, for today it's the first 15 verses of Isaiah 59.

So let's go ahead and jump into it.

Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dull that it cannot hear.

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity.

Your lips have spoken lies.

Your tongue mutters wickedness.

No one enters suit justly.

No one goes to law honestly.

They rely on empty pleas.

They speak lies.

They conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity.

They hatch adder's eggs.

They weave the spider's web.

Who eats their eggs dies.

He who eats their eggs dies, and from one that is crushed, a viper is hatched.

Their webs will not serve as clothing.

Men will not cover themselves with what they make.

Their works are works of iniquity and deeds of violence are in their hands.

Their feet run to evil and they are swift, shed innocent blood.

Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity.

Desolation and destruction are in their highways.

The way of peace they do not know and there is no justice in their paths.

They have made their roads crooked.

No one who treads on them knows peace.

Therefore, justice is far from us and righteousness does not overtake us.

We hope for light and behold darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.

We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope like those who have no eyes.

We stumble at noon as in the twilight, among those in full vigor.

We are like dead men.

We all growl like bears, we moan and moan like doves.

We hope for justice, but there is none.

For salvation.

But it is far from us, for our transgressions are multiplied before you and our sins testify against us.

For our transgressions are with us and we know our iniquities Transgressing and denying the Lord and turning back from following our God Speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart Lying words, judgment and redemption.

Justice is turned back and righteousness stands far away, for truth is stumbled in the public squares and uprightness cannot enter.

Truth is lacking and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey Father.

As we read this account, it's humbling, father, the picture that the prophet Isaiah paints, the picture of godlessness, the picture of men without God and Father.

As we enter into this sermon, as we unpack this Lord, we pray that you would do what you do so well through your spirit, and that is convict us, father, show us open our eyes and ears to hear that you want us to take out of this.

Lord, and most importantly, father, I pray it gives us a perspective that we need as we enter into this season, a perspective, really, that's more than just this season, perspective that we should hold strongly for the rest of our lives.

So we pray your blessing on this in the name of Jesus, amen.

Well, that was uplifting, wasn't it?

You know, I guess, if you could look at our sermon series from Good News, bad News, I pulled the short straw.

I get to talk about the bad news, but you're going to see, it's important for us to know the bad news.

It really is.

The bad news, of course, is the answer to the question what would this world look like if Jesus never came?

You know many churches, by the way, don't preach on stuff like this.

Many churches don't want to talk about sin and the ugliness of sin, because it's not really uplifting.

We want to talk about what Jesus can do for us, but we don't want to talk about the sin that is rampant in the lives of people.

We want to scrub the gospel, we want to make it more palatable, but the Bible doesn't scrub the gospel, and I will tell you that if we don't understand the fallen nature of man, we don't understand that we will not appreciate what was done on the cross for us and the magnitude of that.

So the purpose of this morning, I'm just going to walk through these verses with Isaiah 59 and I'm going to look at the fallen state.

We're going to look at the fallen state through three different symbols that Isaiah brings out in this, and those symbols are the heart, the wall and the path.

The heart, the wall and the path.

Now, before we jump into this, it's really important that we understand the context of when these words were written and to whom they were written, because a lot of times, if you just jump into this, you would miss that.

So we need to understand where this is coming from.

So, obviously, this is written by the prophet Isaiah.

He was a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah and he actually, depending upon what source you look at, roughly 741 to 704 BC is when he prophesied to that kingdom and, by the way, he prophesied a message of both hope and judgment.

The book has both.

By the way, how many people are still doing the Bible project, they're reading the Bible project.

Well, you remember we just went through, not too long ago, the book of Isaiah, right?

So we've read this and, by the way, I think they did a wonderful job of the video that introduced the book of Isaiah.

It was great.

So he ministered excuse me, he prophesied to four different kings of the southern king of Judah Uzziah, jotham Ahaz and Hezekiah, and the two elements of the one is the message of judgment.

That was something, as you read Isaiah, you cannot miss.

There's a huge portion of it that is a message of judgment against the king and the kingdom of Judah because of their turning away from God.

And, by the way, when we think about, you know, the kingdom of Israel or the kingdom of Judah, when we think about them turning away from God, what's the most prevalent sin?

That's always mentioned Idolatry, idolatry, right, idolatry, which, by the way, if you were to grade sin, you could make a case for it.

It's the worst one, because that's when you say, god, I'm rejecting you and I'm going to go worse, I'm not going to worship you, the living God, that I have a whole testimony of you pulling my people out of Egypt and parting the Red Sea and giving us manna and all these incredible things that you did.

No, I'm going to worship this inanimate piece of wood instead.

That requires me, by the way, to run my kids through fire.

Just blows your mind to think about it.

But that's what they did, and they rejected God.

And so the message of judgment is that, Judah, you will be punished for this.

And what did that punishment look like?

Well, first it looked like the invasion of the Assyrians and then the invasion of the Babylonians.

So everything Isaiah wrote about happened and, by the way, it didn't happen in his lifetime.

He was dead about 100 years before that first invasion came, but God used him to prophesy about it.

But there was also a message of hope, a beautiful message of hope, and that hope was that God was going to make a way, he was going to come back and he was going to restore and redeem the people of Judah, bring them back to their land, and that's a whole other series of sermons, right, but what's really interesting about Isaiah is, in all of these prophecies about the hope of the restoring of the kingdom, so many of them were messianic.

Did you know?

There over, well over, there's about 330 messianic prophecies in the book of Isaiah, 330 mentions of the coming of the Messiah.

Of course most of us remember.

The one that jumps to our mind, of course, is Isaiah 53, right, that's both a beautiful but a little frightening, and scary, but so detailed prophecy of Jesus Christ and what he came and did.

So chapters 59 and 60 come towards the end of the book, okay, and they fall within a section of Isaiah where the prophet is describing how the servants of God will inherit the kingdom of God.

And so this first part, this first Isaiah 59, is really broken into two pieces.

The first part is a mere picture of what man looks like in the fallen nature and specifically, of course, the kingdom of Judah.

Isaiah is describing what that current state looks like.

But the second part is what happens when God redeems them.

Okay, so, like I said, I got the bad news, I got the darkness, but again, there's a purpose for this.

So, with that, let's look at these three symbols the heart, the wall and, of course, the path.

So let's start in Isaiah 59, verses 12 and 13.

Isaiah 59:12

For our transgressions have multiplied before you and our sins testify against us.

For our transgressions are with us and we know our iniquities.

Verse 13, transgressing and denying the Lord and turning back from following our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart lying words.

Isaiah knew something that most of us should all know, and that is sin begins in the heart of man.

It begins in your heart.

Everything we say reveals the condition of our heart.

Everything we do reveals the condition of our heart.

My mother-in-law used to have a saying that says a drunk man says what a sober man is thinking.

Think about that.

Go to your local bar, you'll find that out.

But what's interesting about that statement is God knows what your heart is.

Some of us have gotten pretty good at posing.

You know we're going to pull ourselves together and hope we don't get into a road raid incident before we get to church.

We can hold it together, but listen, god knows your heart.

I had someone look at me recently and say do you think I'm saved?

And I said I can't answer that question.

God can and you can, because, if we're honest, we know our heart right.

I can see your actions, but I can't judge your heart.

God knows that.

He knows that.

So if we understand that, then we understand what Isaiah was trying to say here.

He was saying we know our iniquities.

This is a really important statement.

We know our iniquities.

He's saying that the sin is willful and purposeful.

Most of the time I would say all the time people know that they're sinning, they know what they're doing is wrong.

No person has ever lived will stand blameless before God and say well, I just didn't know.

I just didn't know because, see, there is a moral law that's written in the minds and hearts of every man that has ever lived man, woman.

Of course, cs Lewis has talked about this extensively in many of his writings.

Mir Christianity has a whole chapter dedicated to this, but he has a quote.

He says conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural lawgiver.

And, by the way, this moral law that is in all man, all mankind.

If you're ever dealing with somebody who doesn't believe in God, there's a question that there's a really simple way that you can help them understand God.

And the first thing is you say do you believe there's evil in this world?

Well, yeah, there's evil.

Well, if you've identified that there's evil, then there must be good.

Right, because how can there be evil without good?

No, I agree with that.

Okay.

So you agree that there's evil and there's good, so you're agreeing that there is a moral law that's at work in humanity.

And they say yeah.

And then you say where did it come from?

Where did it come from?

Did it crawl out of the mud with us when we evolved?

I don't think so.

That moral code requires a moral code giver, and that's God, and that's God.

So it's the heart of man that Isaiah identifies as wretched and broken and where all sin originates.

And it's really important that we understand that, because when you look at that as a core element to this whole passage, then you can see everything that he's describing is coming from a sinful heart.

Everything is coming from that sinful heart.

And if I were to toss a couple of scriptures out, a lot of you would probably remember these scriptures Jeremiah 17, 9.

Everybody knows that one right the heart, is deceitful and, above all things, desperately wicked.

Who can know it?

I know who knows it.

God knows it.

God knows what your heart is.

But Jesus paints an even clearer picture of that in Mark, chapter seven, in verse 21 and 23.

Look what he says about the heart, for from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts.

And then he gives a list Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness All these evil things come from within and they defile a person.

Sin, first and foremost, starts in our heart, and I've heard great messages, by the way, about the process of sin, right, and how that begins with our heart, our thought, and then an action, right, this is where it starts.

We have to understand that before we then get to the second point which we're going to talk about now, and that is the wall.

Now, if the heart's unredeemed, the natural proclivity is going to be to sin.

Right, and what he now talks about is how sin builds a wall of separation between us and God.

So let's look at the first two verses of this chapter.

Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened.

In verse one it says that it cannot save, nor his ear dull, that it cannot hear.

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and God, and your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

Sin separates us from God.

This is probably the most commonly quoted scripture when you're addressing this whole concept of sin separating us from God.

It's really.

It's not.

Doesn't use this terminology anywhere else that really in the Bible except for here, and it's important that we understand that that sin does separate us and it does build a wall.

Where did it all begin?

Well, it began in the garden.

Think about what happened with Adam and Eve when Adam sinned.

Okay, when he sinned, one of the first things that happened was they were expelled from the garden.

The garden symbolized the presence of God, and why couldn't they go back in the garden?

It was a flaming sword.

They were the ones really that put that flaming sword there.

That was the wall that separated them, and ever since then we've been separated from God.

That's the result we're separated from God.

And it's important to note here that the first verse in here says something pretty telling.

It says behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or is ear dull, that it cannot hear.

God is totally capable of saving.

It's not that he can't do it and that he's incapable, but our willful walking away from him means he can't, he can't, and we have to understand that.

Now I'm gonna do an object lesson.

I'm gonna have a couple of people come up to help me with this.

I like to do object lessons every once in a while, because I think sometimes when we see something, it makes it a little more clearly.

So I've got two people that are gonna help me out, plus, of course, tim's gonna bring my props up.

Now, what we have here is well, we have a height difference.

But other than that, now Gary is going to represent God.

Yes, I had to find a humble person for that.

I don't know what it says about my friend Robert.

Here, robert is gonna represent man, and sinful man.

Okay, so this is, but this is really important that we understand this.

So here we are, we're in this situation, and they are face to face, in fact, shake each other's hand.

So this is the unity that they have.

This is the unity we have with God.

We're face to face, we're looking, we have a relationship.

Now, when sin enters, the first thing that happens is there's a severing of the contact and we turn away.

So, if you watch, he's gonna turn away.

Now, just stop here for a minute.

You'll notice that no longer is he looking at God, he's no longer seeing God, he's now turned his face away and, more importantly, when he begins to sin, take a step forward, he begins to build a wall between him and God.

Okay, so as he continues to sin, take another step, robert.

The wall gets bigger and he continues to sin, and the wall gets bigger and two things are happening.

Not only is the wall getting bigger, you notice, he's getting farther away from God, and this will continue on until there's a wall that he's put in front of between him and God.

But what's really significant about this, and I want to really help you understand this he turned, he moved, he built the wall, but what's God doing?

The whole time?

God hasn't moved.

God is still wanting that relationship.

God didn't turn and walk away.

Sometimes we think of that because we put on God what is not a godly characteristic.

God doesn't give up on us Praise God.

He doesn't turn his back on us, although there are scriptures that talk about that and we understand that right.

But in our relationship with him, if he's calling us, he's not gonna give up on us.

In fact, oftentimes he pursues us.

But this is what that wall of separation looks like and it's gonna stay this way until something changes.

So, thank you, gentlemen.

I appreciate it.

You can leave those here, actually.

Yeah, thank you.

Now everybody's gonna tell Gary he's God.

From now on, amy.

We have to talk about this later, amy, I think.

So the result of this wall?

What is the result?

Well, the result is sin runs rampant and we lose sight of any type of righteousness.

Now, I don't like to read scriptures like this, but I think it's important to understand the depth of the depravity of the person that has walked away from God.

So I got a couple of scriptures.

Paul wrote to the Galatians, in Galatians five, beginning in verse 19.

Now, the works of the flesh are evident.

I love the fact he said they're evident, meaning you guys should be able to see these.

They're evident.

And he goes on sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealously, fits of rage, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like, and things like these.

That's an ugly picture.

And he picks this up, by the way, in the book of Romans, in the first chapter.

He's talking about people that have rejected God and he says they are filled.

In verse 29 of Romans one.

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetedness, malice.

They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

They're gossips, slanderers, haters of God that's a strong phrase right, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

I'll never forget one time watching a video where someone says even if there was a God, I wouldn't worship him.

That's a heart that is turned totally away from God and it's a frightening place to be.

And, brethren, if there was no promised Messiah, if God never sent Jesus to this earth to redeem us, then all of this that was described would be the reality for you and the reality for me.

Do we understand that?

Do we grasp that?

That would be our reality?

This world would be hopeless.

Satan's ultimate goal is to destroy all of mankind.

That's what he wants to do.

That's what he started in the.

He started that in the garden and he continues that to this day.

And he's he doesn't.

He must know he's defeated.

Christ took care of him in the wilderness, right, I mean, he knows he's defeated.

We talk about Satan being defeated, yet he continues to try.

But there'll be one day that we're all waiting for, when he will be cast into that other darkness.

We cannot wait for that day, but until then he's trying to do that.

He wants people to walk in this.

I want to address a question, by the way, that naturally comes up, and that question of if mankind is so wretched without God, then why are there still some semblance of goodness in people that don't know God?

Right, you see that?

You see that all the time.

Well, this can really be explained by the doctrine of what's called common grace.

I don't know how many of you have heard of this doctrine before, but it's a really important to understand this and it is a huge topic.

I don't have time to cover it today, but I wanna give you a definition of it, because you need to understand that without this common grace that God covers this earth, we would have this everywhere.

So this is a great quote from Sam Storms, and he says this common grace as an expression of the goodness of God.

Okay, common grace is an expression of the goodness of God.

Is every favor Now falling short and limiting?

It's not salvation, right?

It's every favor other than salvation which this undeserving and sin-cursed world enjoys at the hand of God.

This includes the delay of wrath, the mitigation of our sin natures, natural events that lead to prosperity and all gifts that humans use and enjoy naturally, see, and there's plenty of scriptures that prove this, but again, I don't have time to go into it, but I just want you to understand.

We sometimes, as Christians look at the fall and say to this world and go, man, satan's got control of this world.

Where's God?

If God wasn't here and if common grace wasn't on this world, you don't even want to know what kind of a catastrophic result that would be.

God has his hand on, he's mitigating human nature, he's got a control of everything.

If he didn't, it would be terrible.

And I would really encourage you to study more in the common grace because it's important that you understand that the doctrine of common grace deserves its own sermon.

But again, rest assured, without that, this world wouldn't well, it wouldn't be here.

Let's just put it that way.

So let's go to the third point, and that's the path.

I say it talks about the path.

Now, again, let's keep the first one the heart.

When the heart is turned away from God, it begins to walk away from sin and, of course, builds that barrier, the wall.

So you have the heart, the wall, and now we're gonna talk about the path and this path.

Isaiah spends a lot of time with some really poignant imagery about what that path of wickedness looks like, and we're gonna pick it up.

In verse seven he says their feet run, and I'm gonna emphasize the words that have this concept of moving and a journey and a path.

Their feet run to evil and they are swift to shed innocent blood.

Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and destruction are in their highways.

The way of peace they do not know and there is no justice in their paths.

They have made their roads crooked.

No one who treads on them knows peace.

Therefore, justice is far from us and righteousness does not overtake us.

We hope for light and behold darkness and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.

Really poignant imagery about what this path of unrighteousness looks like.

And again, we've already said it, but again, adam was the one that put us on this path from the very beginning.

Romans 5-12,.

It's a memory verse for a lot of people, you know.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all of sin, we.

Adam is our federal head.

We now are children of his from that beginning, from that time.

And so we sin.

We're nobody's guiltless.

Nobody's guiltless.

And I love and I've said this before, but I'll tell you it's so poignant, just if you ever think that maybe you're not that bad, okay, I wanna pretend that we could put up on this screen your thoughts for the last six hours and then play it for everybody.

Any takers?

No, no way.

Okay, so maybe you're not that good.

You see what I'm saying.

It's important that we understand that.

And when we're on that path that Adam put us on, when it's not, when we don't have a redeemed heart this is what happens, and he talks about some imagery here their feet run to evil.

They don't go.

Oh, look, there's evil over there, I'm gonna go check it out.

No, they run to evil, runs to evil.

You know, I recently went to Las Vegas on a business trip.

Fortunately, I was stuck in one place most of the time, so I was in a trade show and in one of their big meeting rooms and stuff.

But you know the phrase what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Think about that phrase I'm gonna live life the right way here in Knoxville, but then I'm gonna go into Las Vegas and I'm gonna sin, sin, sin, sin.

But then I can just walk back here and there'll be no consequences.

Are you kidding me?

But that's what people try to do and forget Vegas.

That's what we wanna do.

We wanna run to evil.

That's the way the mind is, and I like the imagery where he says desolation and destruction are in their highways.

The sinful man, the sinful heart, leads a life that's desolate of meaning.

You know, I've heard it said everybody has a God-shaped hole in their heart, right, that only can be filled by God.

When you think of desolation, has anybody ever watched the movie the Martian with Matt Damon?

It's a pretty neat movie.

Yeah, I mean, he's on Mars with some crew members of theirs.

They've got a compound there and they're well, this big storm comes up and they gotta go.

It's gonna knock their spaceship off.

So they all trying to get there in the storm.

Well, he gets hit by some flying debris and they take off without him and now he's stranded there.

Okay, now he doesn't have enough food to last him until the rescue mission comes, right.

So now he has to grow food.

The landscape of Mars is a desolate place.

Nothing is going to grow there.

He has to end up trying to grow food inside of his little dome where he was living.

But that's desolation.

There's nothing that will grow there.

You think of it.

You know there's places on this earth where nothing grows, right.

Well, that's the heart, that's the desolate heart of someone who doesn't have God.

Satan is out to destroy us and the other word, destruction, is so powerful.

Don't fool yourself.

He wants to destroy you and you know how he can destroy you.

He wants to get a twofer Meaning.

If I can destroy Tyler, then I could destroy a lot of people.

I can destroy his family, I can destroy his church.

It's one of the reasons, by the way, we ask you to pray for the elders, because Satan's going to come after us all the time, because he knows if he can get one of us to fall and we've all heard the stories Usually it's sexual failing of some kind.

Right, we've all heard the stories that have been in churches.

I've been in a church where that happened.

I bet you, many of you, have had right, because Satan wants to get us so he can try to wipe out as many people as he can.

Right, but forget that he will still come after each person individually.

If he can get somebody in a marriage to commit adultery Now, suddenly, their mate is impacted, their children are impacted, their extended family is impacted, their church is impacted, their circle of friends.

It's a terrible thing.

Sin is ugly and this is the thing that we can't wink at sin.

Brethren, do you realize?

We tend to want to do that?

We just want to wink at sin.

Oh, this is a little sin.

I can guarantee you something.

The only thing that's wrong is that the Son of God, he, doesn't wink at sin, and you want to know why?

Because that sin required the sacrifice of His Son on the cross.

I don't care if you tell a lie to your five-year-old or you murder somebody.

The consequences on this earth are different but when it comes to Him on His throne, he's not winking at sin, because that required the blood of the only Son of God.

We understand that.

This is why it's important.

We understand this, because if we understand this, we will now understand the greatness of this whole season and the greatness of what Jesus did.

The incarnation changed the course of human history and gave us hope that we didn't have.

No one treads on them.

He talks about the highway of evil.

No one treads on that highway of no peace.

You know, every morning I wake up and I thank God that he's given me salvation, that he opened my eyes, because every day I know it's not on me, I know that the sovereign hand of God is over top of me and it's walking, and even though I've got to walk through some tough things sometimes some of you are walking through some really tough things right now but I know one thing is that God never leaves me and he's there, no matter how terrible it is, he never leaves me.

That's peace, brethren.

That's peace.

It scares me to death to think about the fact that I have to wake up every morning and know that everything that happens that day is on me.

Oh, that would be scary.

That would be no, that would be terrifying to me and so many people.

That's why, when something happens in their lives, they fall apart because they see no purpose in it.

Have you ever been to funerals that are not believers?

I'll never forget a funeral where a young man was killed in a car accident.

He was probably in his 20s, left a young widow and a child, and I heard her cries.

They were just mournful, they were just ripping my guts apart.

They were cries of no hope.

Listen, we've lost some really close, wonderful loved ones here, even in this last year, and there were tears.

Of course there's going to be tears, but they're not tears without hope.

Scripture says we don't grieve like those who have no hope.

We have hope, but I'll never forget the cries of that young widow.

She had no hope.

It just ripped your heart apart.

We have hope, we have peace.

And you know we completed that sermon series on Ecclesiastes and it's interesting because people have tried to find hope in lots of things Relationships I know people have turned away from God for relationships.

I know it's going to happen, it's going to be sad, it's going to be sad.

You can't find it in relationships.

You can't find it in possessions, you can't find it in accomplishments you name it.

You can't find it in Amazon.

There's no hope in any of that stuff.

The only hope we have is in Jesus Christ.

So listen, to conclude, you know my purpose this morning was to show you how hopeless man would be without Jesus Christ, and the plan for redemption of mankind that God put in place from the beginning of time is the only hope we have, and it is an ugly and desolate picture.

I don't really like to give sermons like this, but I think they're important to the body of Christ.

Jerry Bridge is one of my favorite Christian authors said something that I in a book that I thought was really poignant.

He's talking about sin and really just getting right down to the core of what sin is.

He said sin, in the final analysis, is rebellion against the sovereign creator, ruler and judge of the universe.

It's rebellion.

It resists the rightful prerogative of a sovereign ruler to command obedience from his subjects.

See, we're not.

We need to place God on who he is.

He is a sovereign ruler of this universe and we're his subjects.

It says to an absolute, holy and righteous God that his moral laws, which are a reflection of his own nature, are not worthy of our wholehearted obedience.

So why?

Why did we decide to preach a sermon on the wretchedness of sin in the Christmas series?

Why didn't we just pick up on verse 15b and skip this message altogether?

Well, the answer is if we don't really grasp how utterly hopeless we are without the work of Christ on the cross, then we cannot truly appreciate the significance of what Jesus did for us.

We can't.

You minimize sin, you minimize the sacrifice of Christ.

It's as simple as that.

We need to understand total darkness in order to see what light means.

What light means, and I really thought about going into a lot of the qualities of light and darkness.

But you know, you've heard, darkness is the absence of light.

Anybody been in these caves where they turn the lights off and you can't see a thing?

You put your hand in front of your face.

It's almost impressive, right?

Well, that's the darkness we would be in if we didn't have the hope of a Savior.

Praise be to God that we do.

We have to always remember how dark our lives would be without that.

Even us is redeemed, and that's one of the reasons when you hear the testimony that's going to be in the fourth message in this series, you're going to find it so wonderful because it's going to contrast.

This was the way I was going and there was a big wall between me and God and this is the way I went.

This is how God changed my life and he changed my heart.

And listen, somebody in this room, I don't know, maybe you're at that point where you still haven't made that decision.

Maybe you're still somewhere over here and you might be thinking I'm really not that bad of a person.

But you know this whole Christian thing, it's kind of extreme.

You know, if you want, we can scroll your sins up here for everybody to see If you're being impacted by that.

But what's being said here?

That means your heart's being changed.

It says in Ezekiel we're going through this in the Bible project.

It says that God takes away the heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh.

A heart of stone doesn't beat, it's got no blood in it, it's not alive.

Heart of flesh does.

He's bringing you to life and his goal is to do this.

That's his goal.

That's the goal that God wants to break down that.

And what did he do on the cross?

Remember what happened on the cross?

One of the most powerful things that happened the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom.

That separation was taken away.

And that's what we have and what he wants to do now.

No way, he wants you to go this way.

He wants you to embrace him.

He wants to put you on a path now, this way.

That's what repentance means.

You've heard it in many sermons.

Repentance means I'm walking this way and I pivot and I now walk this way.

That's what God wants for you, and we're going to have a prayer team up here that can pray for you, and one of us would love to pray for you if you were in that place, because I'll tell you on this side what we've read today.

That's all that.

You have to look forward to.

On this side, you have eternal life, peace, contentment and joy.

That's what's waiting for you.

Stand up to your feet and let's pray.

Heavenly Father, how kind you are, how gracious you are that your creation you created from the very beginning.

You created a plan to redeem us.

And, father, all of us here that have been redeemed, we realize it wasn't because of one thousandth of a percent of something we did.

It was because you decided that you wanted us in the book of life.

And, father, who you want with you you will have with you and we are yours.

And, father, as we've taken this look back into the dark side, as we've taken this look into what a terrible, desolate place it would be the poverty of man.

Without you, father, I pray it would help each one of us, as we pray today, tomorrow, that it would further brighten and further just glow, just shine forth the light and the brightness of Jesus Christ, and that we would see that this isn't just a season to be.

So I'm so glad Jesus came.

This would be a season, lord, that brings us great joy and appreciation, that goes far beyond December 25th, that literally pervades our lives every day, that we realize where we could have been, where we maybe were, and then where we are now.

So, father, help us to never forget that, father, and we give you the praise and glory and we thank you for redeeming us in the name of Jesus.

We pray Amen.