Romans 3:21-26 | Redemption through the Cross

This is City Post Church. We're about three things.

Build equipped and send all under the Lordship of Jesus

Christ. A small church plant in Fort

Worth, TX. Who decided to do things a

little differently? Adoramos Ajesu Cristo I love

City Post because of the people. It's where I belong.

We truly preach the Word. I love City Post because of the

community we've been able to build.

To do ministry like Jesus. For light to push back darkness.

This is City Post podcast. Wow, good morning, City Post.

It is always good to be with you.

And my name again is Gary. And I've been with you guys a

lot of times and some of you may not know this, but my connection

to City Post Church is I LED a college ministry at UT Arlington

for many, many years. And some of my most illustrious

students have included Joseph and Kayla, Ernesto, Rachel,

Pastor Ricky, more recently Eric Mendez, give it up for Eric.

Thank you for leading us in worship this morning.

But Eric has been leading worship for our college ministry

at UT Arlington as well for the last couple of years.

So I've worshipped a lot with Eric and I've also danced a

little bit when he's DJD. So but when I think of this

church and God's good work that he's been doing in your midst

these last few years and exciting in a new building, my

first time in your new beautiful building. 3rd John 4 says I have

no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the

truth. So it frequently I thank God for

his good work in this place. People you people following him,

seeking him serving him, loving him, loving your neighborhood

and I rejoice because of it. So thank you for letting me be

here this morning. Pastor Ricky said you're in a

sermon series just on the gospel, and he asked if I would

bring the next message in the series on this topic of

redemption and the scripture we'll look at it comes from

Romans chapter 3 and verse 21 is where it begins.

Romans 3 · chapter mention

The idea of redemption is this, that Jesus came to save us from

sin and death. This is the heart of the

Christian message. This is what it's all about.

Jesus came to save sinners like me.

And this passage we get to look at this morning, Martin Luther,

he made the argument, he said that the book of Romans is the

center of the Bible and this passage is the center of the

book of Romans. So the heart of what it means to

be a Christian is what we'll look at today.

If you study the book of Romans, at the very beginning of it, the

apostle Paul who wrote it gives the theme for the book in verse

chapter one, verse 16, he says, for I'm not ashamed of the

gospel because it's the power of God that brings salvation to

everyone who believes. For the Jew and for the Gentile,

the gospel can save anybody. And we receive the gospel, Paul

says here, and he'll say in our text, we receive God's

righteousness, the washing of forgiveness.

We receive it by faith in Jesus. So I'd like to read our text

after that. We're going to break it down

line by line, and I'm a little bit more of a teacher than a

preacher, so we'll do that. We'll go line by line.

But in Romans 3, starting in verse 21, Paul says, but now

apart from the law. And when he says law, he means

the Old Testament. What God gave the Jews in the

Old Testament, but now apart from the law, the righteousness

of God has been made known, to which the law and prophets

testify. This righteousness is given

through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

There's no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have

sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified

freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ

Jesus. God presented Christ as a

sacrifice of atonement. If you're an underliner, that's

the word to underline sacrifice of atonement.

Your Bible might say sacrifice, or it might have a big word,

propitiation. We'll go there in a minute.

A sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of blood by

received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his

righteousness because in his forbearance he had left sins

committed beforehand unpunished. He did this to demonstrate his

righteousness at the present time so as to be both the just

and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

There's a story, some of you who are older like me, I don't have

a lot of hair. I see a couple of bald brothers

in the room. Some of you may remember this

story, but in 1990 a man named Joe Banks from Staten Island, NY

was diagnosed with an incurable disease.

He had about one month to live and a businessman who knew Joe

approached him with a very unusual offer.

This man was ACEO of a industrial company, an

industrial firm, and he offered Joe.

He said, for the last month, while you live, I'm going to

offer you one month of a lavish lifestyle, however you want to

live, if you'll agree to an unusual end to your life.

See, in the South Pacific there was an island, small island

inhabited by a tribe called the Wapani.

They were a primitive tribe, but they controlled the mineral

rights that this company wanted access to.

And the CEO tells Joe Banks, he said, if you will, these Wapani

believe that on their island there's a volcano.

And the within the volcano is a God who's angry.

And periodically, once every 50 years, every generation must be

appeased with human sacrifice. So if after a month of lavish

living, you agree, you'll throw yourself into the volcano,

That's the deal. Did anybody remember this story?

Joe agrees to this, and he starts his adventure.

And eventually, he's rescued by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, who

plays Joe in Joe Versus the Volcano.

I think we have a slide realizes it was a scam all along and he's

not dying. And they live happily ever

after. Do you know this story?

OK, it's a, it's a funny movie, kind of.

But here's the story that gets repeated all throughout human

history. We know somehow ancient

religions understood somehow that there was a God or they

believed in gods and that somehow our lives, our

sinfulness had angered them and their wrath had to be appeased.

It's the beginning of the movie King Kong, the old school King

Kong movie. Do you remember Faye Raye was

the actress and the natives were offering her as a sacrifice to

this giant ape who they saw as like their deity.

Ancient religions practice sacrifice, sometimes humans,

sometimes child sacrifice. The Old Testament, this is the

picture. They knew that Israelites knew

that God Almighty, perfect God was offended by our sin and God

said don't offer yourselves, instead let me provide a

sacrifice. So we institute this whole

system where once a year on the Day of Atonement, they could

offer an animal as a sacrifice to cancel out, as a picture of

Jesus who'd come later, cancel out the wrath of God, a life

sacrifice to meet the demands of an offended deity.

That's what in your New Testament, what we just read the

word sacrifice of atonement or propitiation means.

And it sounds like an ancient backwards custom, but it's

actually deeply rooted in reality.

There's a God and we've lived in a way that offends and hurts

him, and something has to be done about it.

So our text, before we dive into it to get us up to chapter 3, if

you know the book of Romans, I hope you've read it.

If you haven't, it would be a great reading this week.

But the first 3 chapters to get us where we are, the context,

what came before Paul writing this makes the case everybody is

guilty. Nobody's exempt, nobody's so

good that they just get a free pass into heaven.

We're all guilty, every person lost in their sins.

So if you trace it in chapter 1, he makes the case by looking at

these Romans that lived around the Jews, looking at their

lifestyle and how if you know much about the Romans, they did

some freaky stuff. And he describes what they did

and makes a case they're lost. That's easy case.

Then he turns to the Jews who prided themselves on being good

people, and he makes a case that you're there.

Maybe we, because we're kind of religious people here, they're

even more guilty because they have God's word and they still

disobey it. Then at the beginning of chapter

3, right where we pick up, he's going to make a case, yeah,

those Gentiles are guilty. Us Jews are guilty.

We're all guilty. And he strings together this

long string of verses from the Old Testament, just makes a

case. Every one of us has turned away.

Every one of us has lived selfishly.

Every one of us deserves God's wrath.

And that's where it picks up Now, this notion of being

guilty, let's be honest, in our culture, it's an unpopular

notion. We would rather say everybody's

OK, you're OK, I'm OK, love yourself, accept yourself, self

esteem, self love. It's what the new age movement

that's like kind of growing right now.

Crystals and Wiccan and all of that stuff.

It's what it's all about. There's there's divinity within

you and you're OK. Try telling a mother that her

child is bad if you want to see an angry mother.

It's not a popular notion, but on the flip side, every parent

knows we don't have to teach. To teach my two sons how to be

selfish, I didn't have to teach them how to talk back.

Somehow that was already there. I think they got it from me.

Another way we think wrongly about sin is we tend to think of

sin is like I'm just breaking an arbitrary rule, like God made a

rule, don't do this thing, whatever it is, and I just broke

that rule. Sin at its heart is an offense

against an infinite being. And even if my offense is small,

the greater the one offended, the greater the offense.

And how great is God? One way of tracing this idea out

is if I sin against an Ant, nobody, nobody really cares.

In fact, if you get bit by an Ant, you're probably happy.

But if I sin against a dog and I kick a dog, some of you are

probably going to get pretty upset, right?

But then if you sin against a person, now it's a crime and I

can go to jail. And in some ways, if you send it

even against an even greater person.

Like it's one thing if I make a joke that I'm going to

assassinate Ricky, but it's another thing if I make a joke

I'm going to assassinate the president.

And the more serious the offense, willful rebellion

against our king is high treason.

So our problem is pretty serious.

That's the case that he makes leading up to this.

How bad is our situation? Infinite crime deserves small

punishment. Infinite punishment.

So the reality is we got a problem.

Can I get a name in? We've got a problem.

How bad is our situation? The reality is, we can never by

our own good works, by our good intentions, by religious deeds,

by church attendance, but we can never in and of ourselves muster

up enough to save ourselves. For the Jews, no amount of

following the Old Testament, no amount of those sacrifices

Paul's going to make the case, no amount of giving tithes going

to the temple will save them. For us Christians, going to

church won't save you. Serving in church, that's next

level stuff, right? It won't save you.

Avoiding sin. Keeping our hands clean, you

know that won't save us. Loving our neighbor won't save

us. Singing worship songs won't save

us. Posting inspirational quotes on

Instagram Bible verses, it won't save us.

Voting for the right candidate. I don't know if there is a right

candidate, but it won't save us. Let's see what will the passage

we're going to look at, it's very dense.

There's a lot there. So we're going to unpack it a

phrase at a time. Let's start at verse 21.

Paul says, but now apart from the law, the righteousness of

God has been made known to which the Old Testament, the law and

the prophets. Anytime you see law and

prophets, Jesus says this to the law and the prophets say that's

just a way of saying what we call the Old Testament.

The law was the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah,

the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and the prophets were

the next set of books, the prophetic books.

And then there was also some called the writings the Tanakh,

but they would just say the law and the prophet shorthand for

the whole Old Testament. He's like, so he says Jesus,

even though the picture wasn't full in the Old Testament, it

talked about him. Some of you are like how can I

believe that Christianity is true?

One good reason is because for 800 years, even 1000 years

before Jesus came clear predictions that he would come

and exactly how so the law and the prophets testify that he's

going to come and he's going to offer the righteousness we

desperately need the first word. What's the first word in verse

21? It's but some people call this

the biggest, but in the Bible it's a very impressive

conjunction. Get your mind out of the Gutter

City post. We're in trouble, but Christ

offers righteousness. Here's what he says about the

Old Testament law, about following rules, though He says

that the law was powerless. Here's a way to think of what

the law was. The law is like a mirror.

Now I want you to imagine that you're in a bad situation.

Imagine you've fallen into the mud.

Imagine you've fallen into the mud and your hands are tied

behind your back. So you don't have arms.

So you've fallen into the mud. Your hands are tied behind your

back. You come into the house and the

mirror shows you exactly what's wrong with you.

There's mud all over, but how much can the mirror help you get

clean? So God's law shows us our

predicament. It shows us what we need, but

trying to keep it doesn't make us clean.

The laws like that mirror, following the rules can't save

us. We need a righteousness apart

from the law. We need a shower, something that

can cleanse us and wash us apart from being religious.

Another thing, following the law is like, and when I say

following the law, we could expand this to just trying to be

a good person. We could expand this to just

coming to church. Following the law is like

drowning and you're struggling to in the water and you don't

know how to swim. And so somebody says, let me

help you and they throw you a book from the library on how to

swim. It's no help to you at all.

It'll show you what the problem is, but until you can take time

to really work, what you need is a rescue.

So let's keep going. Verse 22.

We're going to do 3 verses together right here.

He says this righteousness is given through faith in Jesus

Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between

Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the

glory of God. All are justified freely by His

grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

In this passage there are three halls.

First, all who believe they're saved, all who exist, they sin

and fall short, and then all who are justified or made right.

That happens if they are in Christ Jesus.

Another cool thing we see in this passage is we get to see

this unfolding, the expansion of God's plan to save people.

See, for a long time the Jews thought salvation was for their

people, and we can be kind of guilty of that.

God likes my people, my kind of people, people who look like me,

think like me, act like me, live where I live.

We can all be guilty of this, but he doesn't love those

people, my people. And those people are changed

depending on where you are in the world.

But we all think like that. But here we see the Jews thought

that way, an expansion of God's saving covenant to all people.

For 1500 years the Jews said it was just us.

Now it's Jews plus Gentile. You know, the Gentiles were

everybody's. Not a Jew, it's everybody.

Jesus is for every ethnicity, every nation, every background.

And what I love. I don't travel a lot, but I get

to travel a little. I know you guys go to India

sometimes, Super cool. Wherever you go in the world,

you see Christ followers everywhere worshipping.

We went to India once and we got to worship and sing praises in a

very Indian way with Indian students.

It was beautiful. You go to China and you'll see

Chinese believers who worship in a very Chinese way in house

churches and it's beautiful. It's funny, India and Pakistan

are they're going at it right now.

But in India there are people who worship Jesus.

In Pakistan, there are people who worship Jesus in Russia and

Ukraine, there are people who worship Jesus.

In Revelation 79. Guess what?

We're all together worshipping Jesus.

The gospel is for all people, not just some people.

Another thing these verses tell us is that this righteousness

that we need, that's for everybody, doesn't come to

everybody. It comes to a certain kind of

person. Those who, what does it say?

Those who believe comes to those who believe.

Well, what is belief? In our culture right now, a lot

of people tend to think belief is kind of like good vibes.

Like I just kind of like think positive thoughts.

I give good energy over there. It's like belief is a sentiment

or a feeling. Be positive.

Nope. That's not what belief in

Scripture is. It's not what faith in the Bible

is. Faith always has an object.

I don't believe in some random nebulous thing.

I believe in something. My belief is in something.

It's not a touchy feely sentiment.

Faith is only as good as the thing that it's in.

So what if you need to cross an ocean and your absolute faith

and trust to get you across this huge chasm is in the Titanic?

It's not a good thing to have your faith in.

Faith is only as good as the object.

What if you need Peace of Mind, you need some inner peace, you

need happiness, you need you. You need some joy in your life

and your hope and absolute faith and trust is in the Dallas

Cowboys. What if you need Peace of Mind

and it's in the Texas Rangers? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

What if you need to feel safe and secure because the world is

shaky and your faith and your trust is in the S&P 500 stock

market or Bitcoin? Some of you young guys have some

Bitcoin. What if your faith, when you

need to get to heaven, is in yourself to try hard enough to

be good enough to make yourself perfect enough to get to heaven?

We need a better object for our faith.

If we're going to make it to God, we need Jesus.

Jesus is uniquely able. Jesus is uniquely good.

He's uniquely qualified. He is God, become a man.

He is the sinless Son of God. He is the one who died for our

sins, who was buried in a grave, who three days later was

resurrected after appearing to a lot of people to prove that he

had overcome death, ascended into heaven.

He's the one that right now sits at the right hand of the Father,

enthroned in heaven. He's coming back one day.

Christians, we don't just have faith.

We have faith in Him. And if your faith isn't anything

else, it's in the wrong place. Faith in Him, though, causes us

to receive the righteousness we need.

This passage also points out that we're saved by faith in

Jesus. But even our faith isn't like

something I did like sometimes I want to pat myself on the back

because I'm like, I have faith. This person over here doesn't

have faith or something better about me than that person.

Faith is me saying there's nothing good about me.

Jesus is the only one who's good.

My faith doesn't earn salvation. My faith is me saying I'm going

to trust the one who did earn salvation.

The scripture we just read said that righteousness comes by

grace. That Greek word karis literally

can be translated other places a gift.

So every time you see grace, just put gift in there if you

want to make sense of it. Whenever it says grace is a gift

from God, it says gift is a gift from the gift is a gift from

God. Imagine a kid at Christmas.

People who love the child so much have sacrificed.

They've wrapped these things that they know the child will

love. They put the gifts on it.

And this grandmother who loves their grandchild so much has put

all their thought, some resources into the gift.

The child who doesn't understand gifts unwraps the package.

It's exactly what they wanted, and they run to their room.

They get their Piggy Bank and they start trying to take out

money to try to pay grandma back for the gift they've just

received. That's not how gifts work.

Gifts are ours to receive. See, as Christians, we don't try

to live a good life, a holy life.

We don't try to love our neighbor.

We don't try to do acts of service to somehow pay God back

or to somehow impress him so he'll look down on us and give

us favor. When we trust Jesus, he gives

the gift of eternal life to us. And we do those things out of

gratitude. We hug our grandmother when she

gives us a good gift, and we thank God in worship and by

living a holy life after He saved us.

Grace is unmerited favor. You may have heard that before.

What is grace? Grace is like us getting

something good. We don't deserve unmerited

favor. That's actually not a strong

enough idea of what grace is. Grace is not just undeserved,

it's I'll deserved. It's not just I didn't deserve

it. I actually deserved bad and not

good. And instead I didn't get the bad

and I did get the good. It's I'll deserved gifts.

It's not merited favor. It's not even unmerited favor,

it's demerited favor. Grace is US waking up every day.

And is this a safe place? Can I testify about my own life?

I don't wake up every morning, pop out of bed and say Lord,

anything you want me to do today is exactly what I want to do

today. I wake up a lot of mornings just

wanting to do what I want to do today, right?

I don't wake up selfless, I wake up selfish.

Grace is US everyday doing something that would offend God.

Grace is US running away, and Him still running towards grace

is like the story of the prodigal son.

Do you know that story Jesus tells about a son who took his

father half his father's inheritance while his father was

still alive? And he spent it recklessly in

wild living, it said. And then he comes back and the

father, instead of being harsh with him, runs to him, showers

gifts on him again because his son who was lost has returned

home. Tim Keller says that it's

actually not the son who was prodigaling.

It was the father who was prodigal.

He wrote his little book called The Prodigal God, because here's

what the word prodigal mean. It comes from the word

prodigious, which means to spend excessively, lavishly,

extravagantly. And the son did that when he

wasted his money, but the father did it all the more when the son

came back. He didn't deserve the Father's

riches, but the Father gave them anyway.

There was a controversy in Christian worship a few years

ago. Eric probably knew this one

about this song called Reckless Love because it said God was

reckless and how much he lavished his love on us.

And people are like, we can't call God reckless.

Jesus described in that way, at least not reckless in a negative

sense. But I didn't deserve it and he

showered it on me. His grace, His goodness.

It's actually a controversial idea.

The Muslims and atheists actually mocked this idea that

God would punish his own Son in order to save sinners like us.

They say He would never stoop to our level to become a one of us,

and he would never punish himself in that way.

He would never stoop that much. But my God did verse 20 going

says God presented Christ as A and my Bible says sacrifice of

atonement. Is that what this says?

Yep. Your Bible might just say

sacrifice if you've got like maybe a new living or something

like that. If you got an ESV or a King

James, it probably says propitiation.

And that's the actual Greek word behind it.

God presented Christ as a propitiation, a sacrifice of

atonement through shedding his blood to be received by fate.

So here's a question, Church, that's before us.

What exactly did Jesus accomplish when he was on the

cross like that? That that's the, that's the Good

Friday Easter message, right? Jesus on the cross and

resurrection. What happened there?

And the short answer is lots of things.

It wasn't just one thing. One thing that happened was

justification. The guilty sinners were made

clean. Another is regeneration.

We had sinful hearts and He made us new creations.

Another thing is adoption. We were cut off from God and He

gave us a new relationship. Another is what the Bible calls

expiation. That's a fancy word, but it

means we were guilty. We were covered in shame.

Some of you feel this, you feel guilty, you feel covered in

shame. And Jesus came to cleanse, to

take away guilt and to take away shame.

But here what the Scripture is going to say happened on the

cross, and this may be the most important thing, is propitiation

or atonement. It's a rare word in Scripture.

It's only used three times. It's a sacrifice that cancels or

satisfies the wrath of an angry deity.

Remember Joe on the volcano? But ancient cultures got it.

They understood exactly this. Because embedded in our psyche

we know if there's a God, he and I might have a problem.

And I get we got to do something.

And so in the Old Testament, God commanded his people, Israel, to

offer propitiation once a year, a spotless lamb in their temple.

On top of the ark of the covenant, there was a there was

a top made for that art made out of solid gold.

They called it the mercy seat. Inside that ark was the 10

commandments representing God's law.

And once a year it was said that that mercy seat was as if that's

where God sat. That was his place when he came

to dwell with his people, Then that's where he came.

Once a year, sinless lamb offered as a sacrifice, blood

sprinkled there. It's a start.

Uncomfortable picture for some of us.

Did you know whenever they were translating the Bible from

Hebrew into Greek, which is what our Bibles written in, they had

to figure out how are we going to translate the word mercy

seat? And they translated it

propitiation on the cross. Jesus with that picture that one

day a year for over 1500 years with that picture foreshadowed

was one day on the cross, Jesus would take the punishment.

One day Jesus would die the death once for all.

It's what we remember in this church.

When you do you guys take communion.

When you take communion, you remember his body, his blood

shed for us. It happened.

It happened once and for all, so that now by believing in Jesus,

we can receive that. My wife Teresa couldn't be here

today because she's actually teaching the Bible at our church

back in Arlington. She's like a cool Bible teacher.

I'm so proud of her. But part of her story is she

grew up in the Catholic Church and over time, she, like,

started rethinking her theology. And some of the passages like

this made her rethink her theology.

And hear me real clearly, many, many Catholics know God.

And I'm a Baptist, right? And there's a lot of Baptists

who don't know God. So this is not about Catholic

Baptist, whether one knows the Lord or doesn't.

But there is in those two churches a different view of

Christ's sacrifice. Some of you know this, the

Gospel, and here it says that Christ sacrificed himself once

on the cross for all time. Our Catholic brothers and

sisters, they have a different view of Christ's sacrifice.

They say, yes, he did kind of definitively on the cross, but

now every week in the Mass, he sacrificed again and again.

In fact, the word sacrament is rooted in the word sacrifice.

And so when the when when communions taken in those

churches, they say Christ is being offered again and again.

But here's what for my wife, one of her big realizations came

when she read in the book of Hebrews chapter 10, it says this

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

is in verse 11. It says day after day in the Old

Testament, the priest would offer the same sacrifices over

and over which could never take away sins.

But when this priest Jesus had offered for all time 1 sacrifice

for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.

For by 1 sacrifice he made perfect forever those who are

being made holy. I'm so grateful that Jesus isn't

just saving us, but has saved us.

So now let's finish our passage, let's finish Romans.

He did this verse 25 to demonstrate his righteousness.

For in his patience, in his forbearance, he left sins

committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his

righteousness at the present time so as to be both just and

the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

In college ministry, we talked to a lot of skeptics, like

people who've got a beef with Christianity and two objections

that they raise pretty often. One is, why doesn't God just

stop evil? How can there be?

If you look at evil in the world and you claim God is good and

he's powerful, but he doesn't stop evil.

Either he's not good or he's not.

So why doesn't God stop evil? And then the other objection is,

how could God send anyone to hell?

And it's funny because they almost answer their own

objection by raising those two questions.

Because eternal punishment is God's solution for evil.

One day Christ comes back and he will purge this earth of evil,

and he'll make right every wrong that's ever been committed,

every unjust act. They'll be an answering to it,

and everybody who stands as an enemy of God will be cast away

from him. Eternal punishment is God's

solution for evil. One day he returns.

But because he loves us, because he loves this world, because he

loves this country, because he loves the nations, He's taking

his time, He offers his precious Son.

And he hasn't judged the world before now wanting as many as

possible to believe. So will you.

Will you believe? I know most of you do, but maybe

you haven't yet. And you can, you know, as I get

ready to close, you know, the last phrase Jesus offered on the

cross when he hung there, he said seven different sayings

with the last thing he said is he said is what finished to

Telestai. It's that Greek word and it's

actually a very unique and a very precise word.

And in those that culture, it was used in three contexts.

It was used in business on receipts for business

transactions when a debt was paid in full.

It was a specialized word for that.

It was used in judicial court when somebody's sentence, prison

sentence had been completed in full.

It was used in military when a not just a battle had been won,

but a decisive battle had been won and there was no further

conflict. In Christ.

Our sin debt is fully paid, our punishment is fully served, and

our war against sin and death and even Satan himself is fully

won. Praise God for redemption.

Practically, applications won. Why should I even want to be a

Christian? Peace of Mind, help with stress

and anxiety. So I can have meaning and

purpose. So I can have like some

structure and morality for my life?

Yeah, yeah, kinda. But even more, because Almighty

God made you and you're cut off from him unless something

changes forever and the gospel redeems you.

Other things that happen when we come to Christ and we understand

redemption, it changes my life in practical ways.

Because I've been redeemed, I've received grace.

I can be more gracious to others.

I can be less judgmental and more forgiving.

I can be more quick to forgive because I've been forgiven.

I can be more less likely to become angry because I

understand an angry God. His anger has been taken away

and He paid the price to take away that anger.

So I can absorb some of the anger I feel at somebody else

for their offense because God's absorbed an infinite amount of

offense. We can be less fearful about the

future because we know who holds our future.

We're going to be less of a hypocrite because I know I'm

lost. Apart from Jesus, I'm not any

better than anybody else. So if you have a decision you

need to make today, I know there'll be people at the front.

You can come forward to pray. If you've never received Christ,

you can come forward and they'll pray for you and walk you

through what it means to put your faith in Christ.

If you just want prayer for some issues, some brokenness, some

hurting in your life, come forward for prayer.

Let's pray and then we'll close with the song.

Father, thank you for Jesus, the almighty, sinless Son of God,

our Savior, who took every last bad thing, every thought, every

motivation, every action, every careless word, everything I've

ever done or will ever do in him.

Let it be nailed to the cross, put to death.