Remember the Reason He Died

Transcription

1 May 3, Peter 2:22-25 Pastor Larry Adams Remember the Reason He Died Hi Everyone. My name is Larry Adams and I want to take a moment to thank you for downloading the podcast of this message. At Golden Hills we are committed to exalting Jesus and preaching the Word. Your downloading of this message is a great encouragement to us, as we know that our ministry is going out to spread God s Word all over the world. We want you to know, too, that in no way do we intend these messages to be a replacement for your involvement in a good local church, where, sitting under the authority of pastors and other teachers, you can learn to worship, grow and serve and be engaged with a body of believers where you can grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. We realize also, that some of you may be in areas of the world where there is no local church. Therefore, we hope these messages you are using, to gather with your family or other believers, or people from the community that it will be a great encouragement to you, as you hear God speak into your life, helping you to become disciples who are true, reproducing followers of Jesus Christ. 1 Peter chapter 2. One of the things I love about reading Peter s writings is that he is so human. So many times we look at the apostles as kind of evangelical super heroes, and they were great men, but they were ordinary men, called out of ordinary lives. Peter was a fisherman, and not even all that well-educated. But he was no fool. He was a man who learned, learned the hard way as many of us do. The three-and-a-half years he spent living with Jesus transformed him. He became a man who always pointed to Jesus, pointed people back to Jesus and to remember why He died. This is the way Peter summarized it in his first letter, writing to a group of really struggling Christians. This is what he reminded them of: 1 Peter 2: He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. 23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25 For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

2 Let s pray a moment: Father, some of the greatest gifts are the easiest to take for granted. There is no gift greater than the gift of life that has been given through Jesus Christ. Today, many of us in this room have been touched by Your love. We have believed on Your Son and have received Him into our lives, but we will be the first to admit all too readily that we can get a little careless in our daily walk and sometimes, even in our appreciation, forget what it really means to be forgiven. So we need these times. I need these times at the table. And we thank You for them. I pray that today we will remember the reason that Jesus died. We commit this time to You, Lord. In Jesus name, Amen. Most of us probably remember our first traffic ticket, and I know, if you are amongst those who never got one, I thank the Lord for you, but there is a reason I don t have any Christian stickers on my cars because I don t drive like Jesus very much. I don t want to incriminate Him simply by the way I operate behind the wheel! Anyway, my first ticket happened when I was 17. I was on a first date with a girl I liked in high school. I got stopped for an improper left-hand turn in Connecticut. I didn t cause an accident, thankfully, but I cut it too short. You know, you re making a left. You re supposed to go up on a right angle. I went across. Well he saw me. Pulled me over and talked to me a little bit. He could tell I was a young, youthful driver and he wanted to give me something to remember the moment by. So he gave me something! For a long while after that, I made picture-perfect left-hand turns. In fact, you could have used me on the video on how to make a left-hand turn. I didn t cut it short any more. But over time, with greater familiarity with driving and routine, guess what I went right back to the same sloppy left-hand turns. The only time I made them right again was when I was reminded to. Every time I saw a police officer, I thought, I m not blowing this again! I would forget! Time, familiarity and routine. They are an awful trio. Time, familiarity and routine can steal alertness and replace it with inattention. They can take appreciation and turn it into complacency. Time, familiarity and routine can take commitment and swap it for convenience. They can steal intimacy and favor out of a marriage. They can destroy the sense of family or even cause us to not appreciate our job. They can even steal the appreciation of our salvation. Time, familiarity and routine. They can lead to a dry and sterile and powerless faith when we lose appreciation for the real reason Jesus died. Which is why Peter gave such a powerful reminder, and called us to make every effort to know and follow Jesus. Not just to coast, but to be adding to our faith and growing. This is the way he put it: 2 Peter 1:3-9 3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. 5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual

3 affection; and to mutual affection, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. We are all prone to forgetting! That s why Peter wrote later, I will always seek to remind you of these things. Peter knew what time, familiarity and routine could do, so he exhorted people to always remember. That s why we have Communion. Jesus said, As often as you do it, remember Me. Remember Me. Communion is our remembrance of the death of Jesus. We ve shared many times, that eating this meal will not make you a Christian, won t get your sins forgiven, won t earn you any grace, won t get you into Heaven. Sin is a terrible foe. It separates us from God, destroys all that s good. But eating this meal won t do that for you. It won t save you. Only Jesus can save. Only by entering into a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, His completed work at the cross, His death, burial and resurrection, only through that relationship and by faith can you have forgiveness and eternal life. This (Communion) won t do that for you. But eating this meal, as Jesus asked, can help us to remember His death and why He died. Which is why Peter said, 1 Peter 2: He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. 23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25 For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. Communion is a Vivid Reminder of the Reason Jesus Died. What reasons does Peter remind us of? He died to pay for our sins, and He died to give us new life. Communion Reminds Us that Jesus Died to Pay for Our Sins. Peter said, in verse 24a: He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross. He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross. Back in the late 1980 s before our church ever moved out here to its current location, we met at a warehouse down on Sunset Drive. The church was a little smaller then, and I

4 remember a gift I received one Sunday from a lady who was a very unlikely person to receive it from. She was in a wheelchair. I knew from my past experience with her that she was having a really hard time, barely making it and had very little to live on, which made her gift even more precious. She came up one Sunday after church in her wheelchair. She took my hand. She opened it up, she put something in it. She closed it up. She said, This is all I have, and I want you to have it. I opened up my hand, there were ten Susan B. Anthony dollar coins that she had given me. Now when you know someone is barely getting by, and they have made a great sacrifice to give you something and you don t feel like you deserve it, and you certainly haven t earned it everything in you wants to give it back. You know they need it worse than you! But you can t give it back, because it is a gift given in love. It would be a horrible offense to do anything less than to be deeply grateful, to thank her, and certainly with a gift like that, you don t spend it. You either use it for some exalted, eternal purpose, or you keep it as a precious reminder. And that s what I did. I kept it as a precious reminder. I kept it in my office to always remind me of people s love and sacrifice. Somehow, a few years later, when we moved out to this site, I lost those coins. I don t know how it happened. I don t know how they got misplaced. I don t know how I forgot to pack them right, or whatever, but we got here and they were gone. I couldn t find them. And I remember thinking to myself, how in the world do you lose or forget something that is so precious? How does that happen? God reminded me of that again this week when I was reading about Jesus death. He reminded me, Larry, if you re not careful, you can do the same thing with the gift of salvation. Peter reminded the people that Jesus gave His life for us on the cross, His life. There will be no gift you ll ever be given greater than this one. That s why Peter said, in verse 24a: He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross. He Himself. He didn t delegate this sacrifice. Because there was no one else who could do it. No one else who would do it. In His humanity, you remember the night before He died, He was in the garden with the disciples crying out, Father, if there is any other way, let this cup pass from Me. But not My will but Yours be done. But Jesus knew there was no other way. There was no other one. No one else could pay it and no one else would. Just He Himself. Peter never forgot that. He Himself, Peter said, bore our sins in His body. Not His sins; He didn t have any. He bore our sins. For you and I who sin all the time, probably not that big of an effect do we feel, but imagine what it felt to have never sinned, and then to carry the sin of the world. Remember when the movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out? It caused a great uproar as people began to blame the Jews for killing Jesus. The Jews didn t kill Jesus. I did! My sins killed Him. So did yours. That s why Isaiah wrote, over 700 years before it happened, in Isaiah 53:5: 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. Peter knew his Bible well.

5 Or, as Paul reminded us in 2 Corinthians 5:21, 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He takes our sin, we take His righteousness. All sin was laid on Him. He Himself bore our sin in His body. The greatest pain for Jesus was not the nails in His wrists or His feet, it was the sin that pierced His body and His heart. But He bore it because there was no other one, and no other way. He bore it on the cross. It s a word that can be translated cross or tree or pole. You see, there is a two-fold image of the cross that Peter knew about because he knew that when you are hung on a tree, hung on a cross, hung on a pole, there was significant meaning behind that. Part of it was a sign of being cursed by God. When you re hung on a pole, you are bearing God s curse. Moses had written in Deuteronomy 21: If someone guilty of a capital offense is put to death and their body is exposed on a pole, 23 you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God s curse. (That s why Jesus was impaled on a cross, and why He was taken down and buried before sunset.) You must not desecrate the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance. You see, sin is a capital offense. The wages of sin is death. Spiritual death now, separation from God, and if you die with sin in your life still unforgiven, you re going to be separated from God forever. We who are still in sin, apart from Jesus, if you haven t received Christ into your life, and you haven t been forgiven, you are still under the curse that sin creates. The penalty is death for that. BUT, Peter said, Jesus took our sin, took our curse, took our death and Paul told the Galatian church in Galatians 3:13 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole. 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. You see, there was great significance in the cross or the tree or the pole, it was a sign that you were under God s curse. That s what sin does. Jesus took our curse on the cross. But it was also a sign of a sacrifice being offered to God, on the cross, on the tree, on the pole. That word, translated tree or cross or pole is literally on the wood. And that s significant. Such a phrase is tying Jesus death to the fulfillment of the whole sacrificial offering system presented on the altar on the wood, that was burned as an offering to God. You see, God gave us four gospels and the book of Revelation as a portrait of Jesus life. But He gave us five Old Testament offerings as a portrait of Jesus death. That s why, in the book of Leviticus chapters 1-7, you learn about five offerings instituted by God through Moses, to be offered at the altar on the wood. The burnt offering, where the sacrifice was made and was placed Holy on the wood, and burned and consumed, Holy offered to God.

6 Then there was the grain offering, where people would bring an allotted amount of grain. Some of it would be given to the priest to eat, the rest of it would be added to oil and burned on the wood, a sign that this offering benefits God and man. Then there was the peace offering, or the fellowship offering, I think I would have liked this one. When this sacrifice is made, it is brought and placed on the wood and burned like a huge barbecue. You know how good that smells sometimes? And that fragrance, God said, will come up to My nostrils, as a sweet fellowship (or peace) offering, reminding Me that the sacrifice made, brings peace between God and man. And then there was the sin offering, where the priest would come and put his hands on the head of a bull. He would confess his sins onto the bull, and the sins of the nation, onto this bull. Then the bull would be killed a picture of the truth: the wages of sin is death. Then the blood of the bull would be taken by the priest to the altar, and it would be sprinkled on the altar to make atonement. Then it would be dumped out at the base of the altar and the flesh and hide of the bull would be taken outside the camp to be burned. Sin is paid for outside the camp. When Jesus died, He shed His blood and poured it out at the altar in Heaven. But Jesus flesh died on a cross outside the city, on the wood. He was our sin offering. Then there is the guilt offering, or the trespass offering. The focus is on the injury of sin and the need for restitution. So with this offering, there would not only be an animal that would be sacrificed, but money would be brought to be paid into the temple, to make restitution so that good could be done in place of where sin had done damage. And then, the inner organs of that sacrifice would be put on the wood to be burned to God, but the flesh of the offering, the meat, would be given to the priests and his family and all the workers in the temple to provide their livelihood. A symbol of what? In this guilt offering, there is an offering to God but the flesh is given for the life of the people. All of those offerings, on the wood, on the tree, on the pole, on the cross. Jesus died as our sacrifice on the wood, outside the city. He was the fulfillment of all those Old Testament sacrifices, which all pointed to Him. Which is why Peter said, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross (on the wood). That s what we re remembering today at communion. And not only to pay for our sin, but Communion reminds us that Jesus died to give us new life. Peter said in the last part of verse 24 (1 Peter 2:24b-25): so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. 25 For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. It was a day where the contrasts could not have been bigger. In the morning, I was spending some time in the City Park down in Antioch with some of the poor and homeless. Many of these are really wonderful people. They all have a story and there

7 are various reasons why they are currently homeless and living under the difficult conditions that they do. When you look at the way these people have to live right now, and the reason we try to help them nobody would look at these people in City Park or living down by the river or under the various trees and bridges and say, Wow, they are really living. Nobody would say that. What was interesting to me was, that morning I was at the City Park with the homeless, but that afternoon, I needed to call on a family that lived in Discovery Bay. Now, there s nothing wrong with living in Discovery Bay, it is a beautiful community, there are nice houses there, but nobody refers to people living in Discovery Bay as homeless. There are very nice houses. After calling upon that family and looking upon that neighborhood, I thought most people would say, Wow, you re living in Discovery Bay, you are really living. But it struck me, because of the contrast, because whether you are living in City Park, or whether you are living in a place as beautiful as Discovery Bay, you re not living at all if you don t have Jesus. In fact, if you have Christ in your life, you d be a lot better off living down by the river in a tent, than living in a mansion on a hill anywhere without Him. Life, Jesus said, does not consist of the abundance of our possessions. Life is not defined by a lack of them either. Life isn t found in those things. Life is found in a person. Which is why John said, and it couldn t have been clearer: 1 John 5: And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. God is life. To be connected with God in relationship is the very definition of life itself. To be separated from God is the very definition of death. Sin is what separates us from God. Paul told the Romans in 3:22, there s no difference. There is no difference for any of us. All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. He told the Romans 3:23, The wages of sin is death. Peter understood that. You see, Peter understood that death is the ultimate wound that sin creates. Sin destroys everything it touches, but the ultimate wound is death itself. Separation from God now, and separation from God forever if those sins are not forgiven. But the good news of the gospel, Peter said, is that by His wounds you have been healed. Our greatest wound has been healed. That was the focus of Peter s message. Jesus died for our sins so that we could live in His righteousness. Peter said, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and overseer of your souls. People who use that verse to teach that you are guaranteed a physical healing from your physical wounds is totally undermining the impact of what Peter is saying. Your greatest wound is death itself and He has conquered that at the cross. His wounds have healed you! Peter said, You were like sheep going astray. Boy, were we ever! You read what Paul writes about in his epistles, making up about half the New Testament, he describes the condition in sin, apart from Christ like sheep going astray and he uses words like this,

8 you are dead, you re depraved, you re diseased and you re derelict, you re forsaken. You are dead in your sin. The disease of sin is coursing through your life. You are depraved mentally and morally, and you are derelict in the fact that you are forsaken from this God. That s not a good place to be! That s where you are, that sin creates. That s the wound. But Jesus took our death and healed that wound. So, we could be dead to sin and live to righteousness. We could be spiritually healed and now, we can come back to God, to the shepherd and the overseer of our souls. Amazing. He died so we could live. Peter was right. He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live to righteousness. By His wounds we are healed. That s why Jesus died. If you ve been around here for a while, you know that I love my country. I don t love it more than the Kingdom of God, but I love America. In some ways I love what it was more than what it is becoming, but even with all its faults, it is still the greatest country in the world. And, I am also in love with what America could be again, with God s help. Every fourth weekend in May, I m reminded of why we have the freedom to seek God s help to bring about those revivals in America again. It s called Memorial Day. All across America in almost every city, town or village, stands a memorial marker of some kind, and usually listed on it are the men and women from that village or area or region who have died to preserve, protect and defend my freedom. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever I want. Freedom is the empowerment to do what is right. As a young boy, growing up in a small New England town, when I was old enough to push a lawn mower, Mr. Getchell, who owned the local general story, hired me to mow our village green. They are all over New England. It took me two or three hours to mow it. On the far end of this village green, there was this big, granite slab marker memorial. And whenever I would get down to that end to mow, I would stop, turn off the mower (even as a young boy) and I would stand there and read the names of these people, none of which I knew. But I had been taught that these were the people who died for me, for my country. So I would read their names, because I was taught that I owed them a debt. I can t be a very good American if I forget why they died. And I can t be a very good Christian, if I ever forget why Jesus died. He died for my sins. He died so I could live a new life. What I do with that, really demonstrates whether or not I believe and appreciate what He has done. The best of us forget. I do. Which is why I need reminders. I need a memorial on the village green and I need a time at the Communion table. Jesus said, This bread is My body and this cup is My blood, given for you. So whenever you eat it, remember Me. Remember Me. Lord Jesus, I don t want to ever forget. Not ever. So I need this time. I need the time later this month to be out at the cemetery, looking at another marker to be reminded of what I ve been given as an American. And I need time at this table today to remember what I ve been given as a Christian. So, Lord, there are a lot of us here, and we re here to remember and to thank you. In Your name we pray, Amen.