The Great Exchange: Righteousness - 2 Corinthians 5:21 (Mar 31) Myles Holmes

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

Our church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists.

Glied God for the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

The Spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Father, forever, your name is glorified.

We truly believe those words.

Lord, we would believe them if you were to save one soul in our midst.

God, forever you'd be worthy of all praise.

But here we are gathered in this room.

So many of your redeemed in this place, purchased and bought by the blood of Christ and given new life by your resurrection.

God, we give you all the praise, and you are so worthy of it, and all the praise that we could ever muster for all of eternity will never even begin to scratch the surface.

God, thank you for what you have done in your Son.

Thank you for raising him to new life.

Lord, thank you that because he has won the victory, because death no longer has sting, because sin is defeated forever, for all of eternity, Lord, we now have hope.

God, you have invited us by faith to participate in his victory.

And Lord, we are bowing our hearts before you now to say, Lord, we do.

We love you, Lord.

We are so thankful.

Our hearts are filled with praise, and Lord, we seek to even worship you now as we continue to delight in the truth of what you accomplished raising your son to life.

On this day, Resurrection Sunday, Lord, we give you all the praise to thank you.

Bless our time together, Lord.

Use this to magnify even more praise to your name in our hearts, God, as we hear your words.

God, we pray this all in the name of your Son.

Amen.

Take a seat as you grab your seat.

Can you take your copy of God's word and open it up to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 21?

2 Corinthians 5:21

If you don't have a copy of God's word, you can flag down one of our ushers who are making their way to the back right now, and they'd love to put a copy into your hands.

And if you don't own a copy, you can keep this as our gift to you.

We love God's word at this church, and we love to know what God says to us.

I want to share one of my biggest accomplishments in life for you right now.

One of my greatest accomplishments, I tell my wife about this constantly, is that I married up.

Many of you who know my wife, in fact, all of you who know my wife know that to be true.

That's a great section for a hearty amen.

Amber and I, we married young, and I constantly remind Amber of my accomplishment in securing her before she really realized what else was out there.

Now, I tell that to Amber all the time.

It's one of my uh you know comedic bits that I share.

Every husband has that, thinks they're a comedian.

Their wife does not think that so much.

And Amber, she doesn't love that joke, and I don't think she's especially gonna love that I'm sharing it with all of you this morning.

And that you guys did laugh, so now I can tell her it's a verified great joke.

However, I think that exchange, however true that may be, illustrates something that we are after this weekend during these resurrection services.

As we celebrate Resurrection Sunday, what we are celebrating is that God has wed himself to us, and a great exchange has taken place where God has given all of his blessings to us.

He's given us all good.

In Ephesians it says he's lavished grace on us in Jesus Christ.

It's like to know God post-resurrection is like to stand under Niagara Falls of God's grace, just lavishing over you and over you and over you.

There is no end to it.

We're reminded that God has given us all things.

This is what Paul says in Romans 8 32.

He who did not spare his son on Good Friday, but gave him up for us all.

How will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

What the resurrection proves for us is God's willingness to put into your account all of his righteousness and to take from your account all your debt that your sin had built up and place it into the account of Jesus Christ.

It is this great exchange that it has taken place.

Not only has God placed all of his righteousness in your account, he has taken our iniquity, he has taken our wickedness, he has taken our weakness, and he's placed it on the shoulders of Jesus Christ.

It is this great exchange that Easter reminds us of.

It's this divine news that God, every Easter, He echoes down from heaven this message that He is so willing to give you all of Himself with nothing left in reserve.

And He is so willing to take from you all that you all this debt that you have built up through your sin, so that He might freely deposit His righteousness to those who believe.

It's good news, it's divine good news, it's from God Himself, and it's such good news that you actually haven't understood the gospel until you hear it and you say, That's too good to be true.

I mean, this this is a test of gospel preaching.

One of the ways that you know someone's not preaching the gospel is if you hear that and you say, Well, that's pretty good, you know, that's acceptable news.

One of the ways you know someone's preaching the gospel is you just cannot believe it.

Sounds too good to be true.

Why would God ever do that when we give him nothing and he gives us everything?

Why would he ever do that?

The news is too good to be true, especially in our world.

Is there anything free today?

Feels like there's nothing free, right?

There's a price for everything, an increasingly steep price for everything.

And if there's not a price, then in our digital internet age, there's some sort of information that's wanted for the free thing that we're getting.

And yet here is God saying the greatest thing we could ever possibly attain, eternal salvation, unending joy, life for all of eternity, is a free gift.

It's a great exchange in which God gives you all goodness and all blessing and takes all wickedness and shame from you, and it sounds too good to be true.

Well, in light of the reality that the good news sounds too good to be true, God has also given us Resurrection Sunday.

And what Resurrection Sunday does is it acts as sort of like a receipt.

It is a receipt that if you believe in Resurrection Sunday, if you really understand what took place on Resurrection Sunday and believe the historical facts of what we are told happened, you have for yourself this receipt from God Himself, a divine receipt telling you that God has accomplished these things, that the good news indeed is not too good to be true, that it is true.

And you have in the resurrection from God's lips himself this confirmation that it is yours.

I want you to see proof of that this morning.

That you might be convinced now more than ever that the great exchange is true.

And we studied this on Friday, and I want to return to the second half of this verse, but I think nowhere else in Scripture do we find this truth so clearly laid out as in 2 Corinthians 5 21.

Look at what Paul says there.

For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Resurrection proof for us this morning, and I want you to see this first that the resurrection is proof that God has purposely pursued my salvation.

God has purposely pursued my salvation.

I want you to direct your attention to a couple words in this passage.

In fact, it's only really two words in the original Greek, but they're such, they're words that are so filled with meaning.

And the first word I want you to see there is the first three words in my English Standard Translation.

It's these words, for our sake.

For our sake.

Three English words to translate one Greek word.

The Greek word is uper.

The late theologian Carl Barth said that this word here is the most important word in all of the New Testament.

It's a small little grammatical word.

And though it may have been an exaggeration to say that, it certainly does capture what Carl Barth said, that this small word displays so much meaning that we could really spend a whole eternity contemplating its wonder and its depth and its meaning.

You remember the days in school when a substitute teacher would come and stand in the place of a substitute, of your teacher, as a substitute?

And this is what Jesus has come to do for you.

You being a sinner, he came for your sake to stand in your place on behalf of you.

He came to give you a new spiritual bank account where you were riddled with debt to God.

Jesus came with perfect righteousness to trade places with you.

Now, this word it reminds us that God's intentions and the events of resurrection weekend, he has intentions, and his intentions are salvation.

Jesus came to this world with a purpose, and his purpose was that he would act in a way that you could see the life of Jesus and say, I want to participate in that.

I want in on that life.

I want that life to be lived on behalf of me.

He came for our sake.

It was a life that he's calling us to participate in.

Now you and I likely know what it is like to participate in something that we actually aren't involved in.

I do this regularly as a sports fan.

Those who are in the church are laughing for some reason because they know I'm about to bring up the leaves.

But I cheer for the leaves, and when the leaves win, I say, We won! We did it.

Last night, Austin Matthews scored a 60th goal.

I said, We did it! We scored 60 goals.

Now I haven't stepped on the ice once this year.

I've done nothing, and yet I speak as though this was done on my behalf.

This is my team.

I'm participating in their wins.

Now, when they lose, like any good Leafs fan, I say, Well, though, that team is horrible.

That's their team.

They lost.

They stink at hockey.

But when they win, I've done nothing to contribute to this team's success, but I participate in the victory.

And this is such a weak illustration to illustrate what God has done for us on resurrection weekend.

It is a participatory event.

This isn't something that you hear about like all other history and say, well, that's really cool that that happened.

It is something that for today it has relevance for your life because what God has done in resurrecting Jesus, he is calling you to this morning to participate in.

He's calling for the resurrection to impact and shape your life.

This explains baptism for us.

Why do we celebrate baptism?

Why did Daniel walk into the tank this morning?

Well, look at what Paul says in Romans 6, verse 3 to 4.

Romans 6:3–4

I'll read this for you.

It's because of what I'm talking about, because God wants to give us a public physical opportunity to say, I'm on team Jesus.

And that the victory that Jesus has won is my victory.

So look what Paul says in Romans 6.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

The water, it symbolizes something for Daniel this morning.

It symbolizes that when Jesus died on the cross, there united with him was all who would be baptized.

So that Daniel now looks at his penalty.

Sorry to talk about you so much this morning, Daniel.

But Daniel, who looks at his penalty for all the sin, all the shame, all the guilt that he had built up, he now looks to the cross and he says, the penalty's been paid.

It was paid on my behalf.

Jesus has paid the penalty for me.

This is why baptism is in water.

This is why baptism is full immersion, because it represents death.

I tell everyone who I baptize, if I hold you under that water, you know what's gonna happen.

You're gonna die.

And they say, I don't know if you should be the one baptizing me, but they keep letting me.

But it also represents life.

So that in verse 4 of Romans 6, Paul says, We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.

Baptism says this, it's this physical representation of this.

I've been raised to new life.

I've defeated death, not in my own power, but because Jesus has invited me to team Jesus so that I can participate in his victory.

This is why baptism is so exciting.

None of us, none of us can defeat death.

Death has taken every human being for all of history, and yet one person defeated it, Jesus Christ defeated it, and he invites you this morning to participate in that defeat, to say, I have been raised to life with him.

Even though I wasn't there physically, I was baptized in the waters.

And there God confirmed this reality that the death and resurrection of Christ was on my behalf.

I was baptized in the death of Christ and raised to new life in the resurrection of Christ.

That's why in Romans 6, Paul has this assumption that all who believe have been baptized like this because they have this longing desire to unite themselves to Christ's victory in a physical way.

And while the death and resurrection of Christ secured glory for God, I want you to understand that the reason it secured glory, the reason why God was so adamant about the events of the resurrection weekend was because the glory he would secure was in the salvation of his people.

You see that?

What is the primary reason Jesus came to save us?

Well, well, the primary reason is his glory, but it is the glory he secures by bestowing his righteousness on you through Christ.

This is why Paul says, for our sake, for our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This was the divine purpose of Good Friday, that we might become the resurrect the righteousness of God.

That God would give a righteousness to those who could never possess it themselves.

This was God's purpose in coming to earth.

It was a missionary effort.

You recognize that?

I mean, we give rightly such praise to those who take the gospel to unreached nations, don't we?

We love the missionary stories of the people who go to these unreached people groups and learn the language so that they can take something, the gospel, to these people who, unless they did that, they would never have a chance of securing eternal life.

And you need to understand this is exactly what Jesus has done for you.

You are the missionary people that Jesus was sent to to save.

Jesus has given you something that you could never secure by yourself.

And the resurrection is powerful proof of it.

We had no ability to sway God's decision to raise Jesus from the dead.

We had no participation practically in the victory that Jesus would have over death.

As humans, we could put Jesus in the grave, but nothing could keep him there.

We could put Jesus in a tomb covered by a stone that was, it was humanly impossible to move a stone, but you couldn't a heavy stone could not keep Jesus contained in the grave.

This was God's divine purpose to raise Jesus to life.

And if God decides to do something, there is nothing that can stop him from doing it.

And so God had decided from eternity past that he would defeat death, that he would defeat sin finally and forever, and so nothing could stop the resurrection of Christ.

We're saved because of the purpose of God.

He moved.

He desired our salvation, he made him to be sin in order that we might become something.

This is the Easter truth that you and I celebrate this morning that we are saved because God first loved us.

He moved.

If God did not choose to save us, none of us would ever have come to him.

It was his choice.

He saw you in eternity past, and he said, This is my child.

This is why when Jesus in John chapter 8 speaks of his sheep, he says, This, My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and I give them eternal life.

John 8 · chapter mention

They will never perish.

No one is able to snatch them out of my hand.

But look what he says: My Father who has given them to me is greater than all.

Why are you saved?

Because the Father, in eternity past, he saw you, and he chose to give you to the Son so that the Son would come to earth, and on Good Friday, he would die with your sins, and on resurrection Sunday, he would be raised with your new life.

It was the Father's choice, and none of us, none of us made the first move.

I love what Spurgeon says about this as sort of a testimony.

He says, I must confess that I never would have been saved if I could have helped it.

As long as I ever could, I rebelled and revolted and struggled against God.

When he would have me pray, I would not pray.

And when he would have me listen to the sound of the ministry, I would not.

And when I heard and the tear rolled down my cheek, I wiped it away and defied him to melt my soul.

But long before I began with Christ, he began with me.

And I can't help but to know that that is the testimony of each of us.

I mean, that's my testimony.

If you had talked to me the day before I met Christ and you had said, Who is Jesus Christ?

I would have said, I think a curse word.

I don't I do not know who Jesus is.

I had never heard of Jesus.

I was not on the path at all.

I was not contemplating at all.

And then out of the blue, God sent missionaries after me that I might hear of the good news.

And I received something that day that I didn't even know that I needed.

Because God had begun with me long before I had begun with him.

Long before you purposed to set your soul upon Christ, he purposed to give his life for yours.

You were given to Jesus by God.

He sought you out.

But notice his purpose here.

Notice his purpose in the second half of verse 21.

Another small word that in the Greek is one word.

So that.

The second thing I want you to see this morning is that the resurrection is proof that Christ has supernaturally secured my righteousness.

The resurrection is proof that Christ has supernaturally secured my righteousness.

You see, all of this Good Friday activity, the Savior dying on the cross, wearing a crown of thorn.

It all had this purpose, and the purpose is here so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is the great exchange.

Christ took our sin, he was made sin, being treated with the punishment of a sinner in order that you might receive all of the righteousness of God without reserve.

He was treated as a traitor, as a criminal, so that we might be treated as a child of God.

We switched places.

That doesn't mean that he stopped to be the perfect son of God, but it does mean that he was treated as though he was a sinner.

We can't imagine this.

We can't imagine what this would be like.

I mean, the closest equivalent I could possibly like dream up in some sort of imaginary scenario would be if one of the amazing women of our church, if they decided, I'm gonna go downtown Toronto at night and I'm gonna do ministry among the prostitutes there.

And suppose that this woman had been pure her whole life, you know, she wouldn't even watch a show if there was any sort of sexual promiscuity in it.

She'd been, she had separated herself from that type of sexual sin her whole life, and there while she's doing ministry among these prostitutes, the cops show up and they arrest everyone, and she finds herself in the back of a van with all of these prostitutes being treated as though she had lived that life.

That's the position that Christ took.

But the gospel doesn't stop there.

Not only did Christ take our position as sinners, Christ also gave us his position.

So that the gospel says, positionally, we've changed.

We've now inherited his righteousness.

We've become the righteousness of God.

To be treated as though we are children, the very Son of God.

That's not to say that we become entirely righteous.

You and I know that.

If you're in Christ, you know that you're not perfectly righteous, that you still struggle day to day by sin.

But it is to say this that just as Jesus was not tainted with sin, though he was made to be sin, so we are now made to be righteous, though we do not have full and complete righteousness yet.

This is what Paul's getting at in 1 Corinthians 6.

Let me read this for you.

He says, This do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived.

Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

But listen to what Paul says, and such were some of you.

And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, and you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Now, what Paul says there in all of these adulterers and idolaterers and sexually immorality uh immoral and the men who practice homosexuality, and the thieves, and the greedy, and the drunkards, and the revilers, and the swindlers, what Paul is saying is that in the name of the Lord Jesus, by faith they have been justified.

That's exactly what Paul's getting at in 2 Corinthians 5.21.

They've been declared righteous.

Though their identity is the identity of thieves, swindlers, on their judicial file, so to speak, has been this big stamp that has been divinely and eternally stamped onto their file.

They are declared innocent.

They're righteous.

Now here's what has happened: sexually immoral people, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice sexual homosexuality, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, swindlers, are coming to Christ and experiencing a positional transformation.

Though this was once their identity, in Christ, they are receiving something new.

They are becoming the righteousness of God.

And this very point here, this very point is why so many refuse the gospel because they hear and they believe and say, that's good, but I just gotta wait till a certain point.

Like I just gotta grow a little more before I'm really a Christian, before I'm really into this.

And that's the very point that you know you do not understand.

Because what God is doing is not going around the world and seeking to save people who are like kind of okay, who are doing a bit of a good job.

What God is doing is he's going around the world and he is bringing into his kingdom adulterers, idol makers, swindlers, thieves.

He's bringing sinners.

He's bringing rebels.

That's what God is doing here in this church.

That's what he's doing.

He is saving people who don't deserve, who once lived a life of sin and rebellion and saving them.

So they become his righteousness.

He's chosen in his mercy to give it to you.

If your faith is in Jesus Christ, these words are for you, that you have become the very righteousness of God.

So that God looks at you, and because you are positionally now in Christ, he no longer identifies you as a sinner, but your identity, your position is that of Christ.

A perfect righteousness.

There's a beautiful truth for us concerning this righteousness, and it's where this righteousness is.

You notice this in the text here?

Paul says, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

And so I ask you, Christian, where is your righteousness?

Paul's answer is that it is in him.

And that is a crucial detail that is so filled with hope for us.

Imagine this.

Imagine that after the service, I came up to you and I gave you in cash$10,000.

Now, first you'd say, wow, what's the salary of this pastor that he's just carrying around, this cash.

But secondly, there would be sort of like this trepidation, wouldn't there, of carrying around this amount of cash.

Like, I really don't want to lose this.

I better hold secure, I better hold this cash secure.

I better like really hold on to it tightly because I could lose this, and that would be really bad.

That is not the type of righteousness that you have received in Christ.

This is so important because the Roman Catholic Church has preached this kind of righteousness.

The Roman Catholic Church has said that righteousness is something that is given to you, and now it's your responsibility to keep.

That is why, for the most part, Roman Catholicism is a it is a faith of works because you are given this righteousness and you gotta keep it clean.

So you better get to the confession.

You better practice the sacraments, you better be baptized as an infant because it's all about these works.

God has given you this gift and you gotta keep it.

Keep all that money, keep all that, all$10,000 of it.

This would be a terrifying reality.

And yet, notice God has not given you righteousness to make you perfectly righteous, He has given you a righteousness that is in Christ.

What does that mean?

It means that you can't affect it.

It is with Christ.

And where is Christ?

Well, this is what we celebrate on Resurrection Sunday.

He's in heaven.

He's in heaven.

This is this is why Paul or Peter in 1 Peter verses 3 to 5 he says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.

Why is it imperishable?

Why is it undefiled?

Why is it unfading?

Why cannot the Christian's inheritance be taken from him?

Because look at this, it's kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed at the last, in the last time.

What God has done to illustrate this is He's given you that$10,000, but He has said, This is yours, but I'm going to keep it secure for you, so that you can do nothing to ruin it.

In Christ, we look to God and we say, Hallelujah, thank you.

It is kept in heaven for me.

No one can touch it.

Jesus has our inheritance, and through the resurrection, he has brought our righteousness to heaven where there is no sin.

This isn't like Adam and Eve living in a garden where they could be tempted to fall.

Christ is in heaven, and in heaven there is no option.

He's won the victory.

Our righteousness is secure there.

It cannot be taken from us because it's not with us.

Our righteousness is in him.

So long as your righteousness is in Christ, it cannot be touched.

It is secured so long as you are in him.

And for the believer, this is the joy of resurrection Sunday.

That God has won and he has given us a victory that cannot be taken from us because it is not our victory.

It is the victory of Christ.

I wonder if you're here this morning and you don't know Christ.

You've never placed your faith in Jesus Christ.

And I want to speak to you for a moment.

And I want to ask you this question.

What do you have in this world that you are absolutely sure of?

What do you have in this world that you know, like you know without a shadow of a doubt it's yours?

You have it.

I can't help but to think there's not much.

You think about the day and the age that we live in, with politics the way that it is.

It just feels like, man, it feels like nothing is normal, doesn't it?

Doesn't it feel like we're kind of like in a pot and the pot's like just at the boiling point?

You think about the economy and the pursuit of money and materials, and you think, man, all this can go to waste in just a few seconds.

It could be like trying to hold on to sand, and the tighter you grip, the more it falls out of your hands.

What about your health?

We've known people who are perfectly healthy one day, the next day.

Given a diagnosis of a sickness that ends their life so quickly.

And some people not even given that.

There's not much that's certain in our life, is there?

There are a few things.

One of them is our death.

And in a real moment of clear-headed thinking, I just need to ask you: do you have anything in your life that you are absolutely sure of beyond that day?

On that day when you are on your deathbed, what will you grab on to?

What assurance do you have of things in the eternity future?

The believer in your midst, they rest their eyes, and you know what they they know?

They know that because Jesus was resurrected again, this reality that was symbolized in their baptism, they will be resurrected.

They close their eyes in death and they say, This isn't the last thing.

Like this life was such a speck of eternity, and they close their eyes and they're ready, waiting for the day that Jesus returns, so that they can be resurrected to new life.

They're given a new resurrection body, and for all of eternity, they have life won by Jesus Christ.

The believer, when this world passes, has the greatest hope of a new world that is coming with their resurrection.

And my question for you is what hope do you have?

What hope do you have?

And are you content to leave this place without an assurance, an assurance that goes beyond your certain death?

Are you content to lie down one day and never rise again?

The believer isn't.

And the believer sees what Jesus has done through his resurrection, places their faith in Jesus Christ, and knows that they have an inheritance now that is in heaven kept for them, unable to be touched by anybody.

And if you place your faith in Jesus Christ, you can receive that inheritance right here in this moment, and you can be given an assurance that goes beyond the grave.

Christian, here's the reality we celebrate this morning that because of the resurrection, you have something that cannot be taken away.

And so we give him all the praise because in him, our inheritance is in him, so he gets all the praise, he gets all the glory, he gets all the worship.

Let's pray and thank God for this reality.

God, we we do give you all the praise.

Lord, thank you for the resurrection.

Thank you for the hope that is ours in Christ alone.

And God, I pray that our life would be lived in this constant pursuit of the glory of Christ for what He has done that we celebrate on this weekend.

God, our hearts are filled with such joy.

Knowing that this was death and resurrection was a historical event that was done for us, for our sake, in order that we might become the righteousness of God.

And so, God, we give you all the praise.

And we turn to you now, Lord, to give you the worship for what you have done in Him.

God, we thank you.

I pray this in the name of your Son.

Amen.