Episode Transcript
Jesus said in Matthew 28, verse 19, go therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. You welcome to go teach all nations, bringing you Christ's teachings through australian and international speakers. And here is today's presenter, Bruce Novelly. Let's pray, shall we? Hi, king of heaven, we bow in adoration before you. We recognise your great love for us.
A love that caused your only begotten son to set aside his royal robes and his kingly crown, to come down here to this rebellious spot in the universe, to live amongst people who despised and hated him and hung him on a cruel cross. And he did it for us. This morning I want to talk for a few moments about Jesus'love for us.
Our hearts are open. We pray that the spirit will come. We give him permission to enter our hearts and change those old, stony, cold hearts into hearts of flesh.
And this we pray in Jesus name. Amen. The last research report that I could find for Australia showed that sleep disorders were costing Australia more than $51 billion per year and going up.
And all this was before coronavirus showed up. Poor sleep is an increasing problem among many Australians, with one person in every four struggling with their sleep. The report said that Australians were swallowing more than twelve and a half million sleeping tablets a night.
That's close to 45 billion sleeping tablets per year. And that's just so that people can get a good night's sleep. And I haven't referred to tranquillizers or the more powerful drugs.
Why? Well, there may be many personal reasons for our sleepless nights. There will always be those stresses and strains that come with the tensions of modern life. However, sociologists tell us that one of the major causes for poor sleep is a sense of guilt.
Guilty because we have failed to reach our intended best, our ideal. Guilty because we have failed in many ways. And for every one of us, this feeling of guilt is the seasoning of daily life.
Every man and woman of sensitivity, who wears a stain of selfishness and sin, experiences this sense of guilt and failure. Guilty because we have failed to measure up at home and at work, delinquent as parents, disappointing as lovers, distant as neighbours, and yes, deficient even as Christians. Sometimes even Christians feel that they are at the mercy of their own inherited temperament or mental disposition, at the mercy of formative experiences of early years and at the mercy of the pressures of society to conform.
All these pressures bring about a sense of guilt and failure, even for the Christian. Life seems so inevitably to bring it. It's so complicated, so many things to do, too many things to remember, so many people to please.
Who can cope? And then there is the nature of life. One modern humorist has coined the saying Murphy's law. And I'm sure that you have all heard of Murphy's law, and many of you, like me, have experienced Murphy's law.
It states that if anything can go wrong, it will at the worst possible time and in the worst possible place. What it really means is that everything is against us. Anyone can try it out, butter 20 or 30 pieces of bread and drop them one by one at random upon a carpet, preferably a very expensive carpet.
And always, yes, always more than 50% will land butterside down. Yeah. And so we feel daunted because the motto of the world seems to be, we are against you.
And with this threatening sensation comes guilt. And the world seems to be increasingly competitive. And men everywhere are pushed beyond their capacity and become impatient, angry, irritable men, all the while claiming to be Christians.
Very often, ambition pushes us. And suppose at home or at work, life is pressure filled. What then? Who can cope with that? Who can live under the constant strain without erring? As a generalisation, we could say that there are no successful parents, or so our children assure us anyway.
Our children tell us that everyone else's parents are much kinder and wiser than we are. They allow their children longer time up, more time with their devices, take them nicer places, buy them nicer clothes, have more recent cars and buy better homes. And our psychologists add to that.
Well, while the psychologists continually disagree, they are agreed on one thing, and that is that we are awful parents. They tell us that, for example, we ought to spend at least 25 hours a day with our children and yet leave them plenty of time to themselves so that they can develop their individuality. They remind us that we should not be so strict as to destroy in them free will, capacity to choose.
But nevertheless, we must have fixed standards. Who can cope? All are agreed. Everyone is sure every parent is a failure.
That's the message. And then there is the problem of loving. Some of us find it hard to express love, however much we feel it.
Maybe we have not been loved as a child. And no one can truly express love unless they have been loved. That's why so many parents reap what they sow, because the capacity to love depends on whether you have been loved.
And then there are those who cannot communicate at home, cannot talk about the things that matter most, and that brings guilt. Our paths grow wider as the seasons toward the ones that we said we would love and cherish to the end of our days. Guilt, guilt piling up, intensifying.
Who is without it that has sensitivity? And then there is the sense of failure because of unrealized ambition. We all began with great ideas of what we wanted to do and become. But as the years rolled by, adult life became a process of coping with reality and we came to accept our limitations.
Middle age is often a kind of adolescence whereby we begin to ask again, who am I? And to refind ourselves. Albert carmus'famous book, the fall, tells us that if we wish to find out what man is, we must first see him as guilty. Goulding's famous book, the Lord of the Flies, has the same message.
You do not begin to understand what man is until you see him as guilty. Guilty, guilty as hell. And when we come to true religion, it intensifies guilt.
It tells me that because of what I am, every cell and fibre of my being is opposed to God and his law. This is what drove the Pharisees into a frenzy. The Pharisees had succeeded, most of them, in not killing or stealing or doing the flagrant things.
But Jesus said, the trouble is your heart. You are thinking evil, you are coveting, lusting, hating. He said you were guilty, damnably guilty.
It yes, true religion intensifies our feelings of guilt and failure. It redefines it as being what we are, not just because of what we have done. And the worst thing about any one of us is that it is nothing that we have done.
It is what we are, self centred, obsessed, engrossed and consumed in our own ambitious ways and loves. And there are many Christians today who are burdened down with guilt because as Christians they feel a sense of failure in their falling short, that the christian way is all too difficult. They are afraid that they won't make it, that it's all too hard, they will never be good enough, that the battle is too demanding.
Well, what can we do about it? What can we do to get rid of these feelings of guilt, of not being able to measure up? The answer is simple. One word. Nothing.
And if it all sounds so hopeless, if I were to leave it there, but God has done something about it for us. And it is to this that I would direct your attention this morning. The words of Romans, the third chapter and verses 20 to 28 are some of the most superlative and sublime verses in the entire Bible.
I'm not a theologian and so I am unable to go back into the original Greek and unpack a precise and accurate rendition of this passage. However, after reading and pondering over these verses, I am convinced that the words of Paul are so important, I'm going to have them put up on the screen behind us so that we can all read them together. We are going to be reading this passage in the language of today, the language that you and I can understand.
So please, if you have your Bible, then follow along with me if you will. And I am going to be reading now from the third chapter of Romans starting at verse 20. And we are reading the acropolis of the christian faith here starting at verse 20.
There is not one person who can be declared right with God by keeping the law. More accurately, it is because God has given us his law that we have now become aware of our sinful condition. Verse 21.
However, God has offered us a way by which we can be made right with him, which is completely separate from our efforts at trying to keep the law. And throughout scripture all the prophets have confirmed this to be true. The way that God has made it possible for us to be right with him is through Christ's faithfulness in keeping the law, and it extends to everyone who believes in him.
Verse 23 there is not a difference between any of us. We've all sinned and fallen short of God's glorious ideal for us. However, we are all made righteous.
Verse 24 sorry. However, we are all made right with God freely by the grace that we receive through Christ. And it is because of his unmerited favour toward us that we are able to stand blameless before the lawgiver because he has paid the wages of our sin for us.
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son as our atoning sacrifice. And it is through jesus'faithfulness that we are made right with God. God did this in order that everyone might see and appreciate his goodness and justice in the past by believing in a coming blood.
Substitute God in his mercy, forgave people their sins through the blood of a sacrificed lamb, even though Jesus had not yet died. But now that Jesus has come, we today are able to look back and believe that his sacrifice has made us right with God and freed us from the death sentence that is rightfully ours. Christ's sacrifice proves that God is just and that he will pardon everyone who believes in Jesus.
So what then do we have that we can boast about in our law keeping or in our religious good? No, there is absolutely nothing that we have done that we can boast about, for our acquittal is not based on our obedience to the law or on how good we think we are. We can only say, then, that we are made right with God through our belief in the faithfulness of Christ. And this is quite separate from our poor efforts at trying to keep the law with all our human foibles and faults and failings.
Our law keeping can never be without fault. However, in this passage, our standing before God is not based on our flaws and failings. It's based on our belief in Christ's faultless faithfulness.
It is his faithfulness in keeping the law that declares us to be without fault before a holy God. And for you and me this morning, that is really, and I mean really good news. The verses that we have looked at here are some of the most moving, soul stirring verses in all of scripture.
They are the pinnacle, the peak, the unchangeable Everest, the acropolis of the christian faith. These verses launched the Protestant Reformation. This was the heart and the message of William Miller.
This is the message of James and Ellen White that began this movement. You will have noticed in the heart of that passage, verse 24. And let's have that put up on the screen for us.
It says, we are made right with God freely by the grace we receive through Christ. What is grace? Grace is just another word for love, but it has its emphasis on a love that is unearned, undeserved, unmerited. Being made right freely.
It's a gift. All the things that count most in life, fresh air, sunshine, love, friendship and sympathy. You cannot buy any one of them.
You cannot earn any one of them. You could toil till kingdom come, but you could not buy a cubic centimetre of fresh air. You could not earn a single sunbeam if you worked your fingers to the bone.
You could not deserve a heart of love from a friend or neighbour by anything you did. You couldn't really deserve it, because none of us are loving to the core. But what we cannot earn, God has given.
And does he do any less in the spiritual realm? Being made right freely, that word elsewhere translated as a gift without cause, being made right freely by his grace. The good news of the gospel is that God has done something about our guilt. He does not ask us to fix our faith upon a feeling, upon an experience, or upon an institution, but rather upon the granite rock foundation of an event that nothing can disturb or change.
God has done something about our guilt. This is the grace that is spoken of about here is the in spite of love. The message of the New Testament is not that the kingdom of Christ is to come, it's that it has come, now is salvation.
Come now is the accuser of the brethren cast down. You have been reconciled, who were dead in trespasses and sins. You who are dead, he hath quickened together with him by grace ye are saved through faith.
It is a gift of God. Because one died for all, all died. This is why there is to be a second resurrection.
Because, as in Adam, all die, so in Christ all may rise. Christ has guaranteed the resurrection of every person. He has redeemed every person, and so every person will be raised, and those who reject his gift will go down into the dust again, because even a gift must be taken.
You will have noticed that in this passage, speaking about being made right, verse 20, there is not one person who can be declared right with God by keeping the law. Please don't relegate that to only just the past. Please don't relegate that to just the beginning of the christian life.
That is a fact of all time. That's a fact at the close of probation, and beyond that is a fact. If you have been a Christian for 50 years or 50 seconds, at no time in life is any man declared righteous by his good works.
For a very obvious reason. To be made right by works, the works would have to be absolutely perfect in every jot and tittle. For cursed is everyone that continueth not in all the things of the law.
To do them, to do them all, and to do them all thoroughly, and to do them all the time. And so please do not relegate that verse to just the past. By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be declared righteous.
Whether I have won a thousand souls, whether I have been a missionary for three score years, whether I have been an elder, a deacon or a deaconess, a worship leader or a Sabbath school teacher, makes no difference. No person is declared righteous by the law at any time, any point, any stage. Even if I could keep the law perfectly from here on, what about my past? It's not enough to say to the baker, I'm going to begin to pay you from here on.
What about the bills? Guilt is permanent, does not cease. When we begin to reform. Our past is enough to hang any one of us again and again and again.
Maybe that is why Ellen White wrote these words found in manuscript 36, written in 1890. The point which has been urged upon my mind for years is the imputed righteousness of Christ. I have wondered why this matter has not been made the subject of discourses in our churches throughout the land, when the matter has been so constantly urged upon me that I have made it the subject of nearly every discourse I have given to the people.
The light given me of God places this important subject above any question in my mind. There is not a point that needs to be dwelt on more earnestly and repeated more frequently or established in the minds of all than the impossibility of fallen man meriting anything by his own best works. What does this mean? That we cannot be made right by our works.
That God in Christ has declared us righteous through the sacrifice of Christ? Well, to bring it down to the lowest common denominator, it means that God loves us just as we are, and that he has paid the price that we should pay. What we cannot do, he has done at great cost to himself, because he loves us. What we are talking about here is the love of God for sinners.
Do you remember General Booth? He was the founder of the salvation army. His motto was, go for sinners and go for the worst. And that's what God has done.
Gone for sinners and gone for the worst. And the message of the cross is, I love you, sinner. I died for you, sinner.
God loves us as individuals. He does not save churches or groups. He saves individuals.
Napoleon was once asked how he got on in a certain battle. Oh, he said, I lost so many thousand men, but nobody of any importance. That's not the way God works.
God knows people by name. When he stood under the tree, he looked up and he called him Zacchaeus. He not only knew a man was there, he knew who he was.
Zacchaeus. And at the tomb he Seth unto her Mary. And he sends a man to a street called strait, into the home of a man named Ananias.
He knows us by name. He knows you by name. That's the meaning of the cross.
But it's more than that. It's not just a cheap love. It's not an emotional love.
It is a just love. God has to be just as well as the justifier. He has to uphold his law.
There would have been rebellion in the universe if God had just said to sinners, okay, let's forget it and start again. God couldn't do that. The law is what God is.
The law is an unchangeable, eternal standard of righteousness. It is not a method of salvation. Never has been since the fall and never can be.
But it is a perfect standard. And God had to be just as well as the justifier. So the cross means more than just.
I love you. There was an old Polish Jew who heard a preacher preach on the love of God. And he came to the preacher at the end and he said, you have no right to preach on that unless you have seen, as I have seen, the blood of your friends running in the gutter on a cold winter's morning.
And the minister said to him, how can you believe in the love of God? And you, a Jew who has seen all your friends slaughtered. The old Jew said, when I heard of the gospel, I found that God met us at the place where I always was. Where I always was, in my thoughts and my heart, on that crawl, grey morning, watching the blood of my friends go down in the gutter.
And I found that the gospel told of God being immersed in our blood and tears, our toil and our weariness, that God met us where it hurts, and that God immersed himself in it. You see, that's why I believe in the love of God. But there is even more to it than that.
Maybe I can illustrate it this way. A man had a wife, and she had been unfaithful to him and their child. Their little girl was of the wife, but of another man.
And the husband knew this, and for months he wrestled with the knowledge. How could he forgive his wife? But it seemed the only thing that he, a Christian, could do. So he said to her one day, dear, let's forget it.
I forgive you. Frankly, fully, freely. I forgive you.
And he thought it was finished. But time passed. And his brother, who had come to visit him, said, look, your wife has not received your forgiveness.
She's acting a sham. She's living outwardly righteous, but she's like a half a dead person all the time. She has not accepted your forgiveness.
And then the man, the culprit, the rascal who had been guilty of immorality with the wife, turned up. And the husband turned to his wife and said, come on, dear, forget it. I've forgiven you.
And she turned on him, and she said, I am sick of your tolerance. I am sick of your broad mindedness. It nauseates me.
What do you expect me to do with all this generosity that costs you nothing. Now there's the rub. The husband could forgive his wife, but he could not take away the stain of guilt.
And for God to forgive without doing something about the guilt would have convulsed the universe. And so he didn't act that way. Forgiveness that cost nothing is not forgiveness in God's sight.
May be difficult to forgive, but it is much harder to accept forgiveness, because we all know that wrongdoing costs, and costs dreadfully. That is why the Jew could see in the cross and the bloodstained gutters the reality of existence. And saw that the gospel and the gospel only could meet reality.
Guilt must go. To believe in Jesus is to be fused into him. And as we become one with him, what is his becomes ours, and what is ours becomes his.
And all we can give him is our sin and guilt. And he took it to the cross, but he gives to us the merits of his atoning death. And so sin is covered, sin is paid for, sin is atoned for.
He cleanses me from the guilt and the power of sin. But always in that order. That's always the order of God's gift and God's demand.
And never reverse them. Never reverse them. It's a human nature for us, like Adam and Eve, to cover our own nakedness.
I don't need your skins, God. I can do this myself. I'm a pretty good tailor.
Here's the fruit that I have raised up, says Cain. Take this, Lord. I don't need a lamb.
It has always been a tendency of man to make his own way up. Let us build us a tower that we may go up into heaven. That's the spirit of Babylon.
Let us find our own way up. Works are tremendously important, but altogether fatal if put in the place of or before our faith in Jesus Christ. I would not work my soul to save for that the Lord has done, but I would work like any slave for love of God's dear son.
We don't work to the cross. We work from the cross because we have been accepted just as we are. Because he justifies the ungodly, because he receives sinners.
The blind came blind, and the deaf came deaf, and the paralysed came paralysed. But they did not remain as they were. He changed them.
We cannot change unless we come, and we come just as we are, trusting wholly in his merits. This is the good news of the gospel. Let us not try to hold up to God the candle of our works alongside the mighty sun of the works of Jesus Christ.
All you and I could ever do for Jesus is just a drop compared to the mighty Pacific and Atlantic oceans rolled together. Scripture says that even what the Holy Spirit works within us in a lifetime of holiness is just the beginning. But the down payment that was given to us in Jesus Christ at the cross.
Let's not insult God by offering him a cent for eternal life. And now, what will we do about God's gift? What will we do about the righteousness that he offers? The cross of Christ is central. It is the great divider of time and humanity.
There is before Christ and there is after Christ. There is in Christ and there is out of Christ. And the message of the cross demands decision.
Demands decision from you and me here this morning. The cross is crucial and it is central. It separates to the left and to the right.
Glory or gloom, eternal life or eternal death. He that hath the son hath life. He that believeth hath everlasting life.
But he that believeth not is condemned already. He that believeth not abideth under the wrath of God. The cross divides the world.
It divides this congregation. We are either in Christ or we are either out of Christ. There's no third world here.
You are either in or out. You're either trusting in what he has done or what you are trying to do. The second is fatal.
Just as fatal as if there were no works as the result of what he has done, that, too is fatal. The christian life is not a striving to have faith. It is not a striving to be good.
The christian life is looking to Jesus. It's not seeking purity. It is seeking the pure one.
It is not seeking patience. It is seeking the patient one. It's not seeking out love.
It is seeking the one who is altogether lovely. This is the christian life. It is beholding him.
Before I close, I would like to challenge you personally. I want to read to you the words of an old lady and ask you as we close, whether they sum up what some of you feel about the gospel. Note these words written by an old lady then in her late eighty s.
I am the Lord's. Not reluctantly, but with joy and forever I exalt in the thought. Here at the foot of the cross, I devote my life to his service.
All I am, all I possess, all of which I am capable. Every act, every word, every thought, every emotion, every plan, hope and desire, all are Christ and shall be his forever. Come what will honour or reproach, joy or sorrow, life or death? I am the Lord's.
And with all my powers of mind and soul and body, with all my being will I serve him wholly, earnestly, joyfully, world without end. This morning, as you have sat there, having heard of the amazing love of God for you, a God who knows you by name, who has pursued you and me personally, individually, down all the crooked tracks of our lives, who has had mercy on us, who has kept us, who has sheltered us and protected us times without number and dealt with us infinitely better than we deserve in his name, who took our guilt, who died for us to convince us of his love. Are you prepared this morning to say, Lord, because of your amazing love for me? I am willing to give my life to you just as I am.
Lord, I want your spirit to create in me the power, the love that your own son had, that the martyrs of every age had, the reformers, the pioneers of this church had, that I want to have. If you are willing, this morning, then in the quietness of this place, as we close our worship service together, you can send out a silent prayer of thanks to the one who gave his life for you. Tell him that you love him and that you wish to surrender your life to him.
He has promise to hear your prayer and take away all your feelings of guilt and failure and give to you the peace that comes from knowing that you are accepted just as you are. God bless our gracious and loving God. We came here this morning just as we are, but we do not want to leave the same way we came.
We ask that you will go with us into this new week. Live in us. We pray that as we touch the lives of people in the street, in the supermarket, in our schools, in our homes, that they may be able to see that there is a difference in the way we live.
May we be your representatives this week because we come to you just as we are. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
This message was made available by the Bunbury Seventh-day Adventist Church. For more resources like this, visit their YouTube page. Bunbury SDA. This programme has been brought to you by 3ABN Australia Radio.
