I just want to say how much I
appreciate the worship and the way that it
has been directed, especially today, the Psalms 23.
I don't know if you have a CD
or anything, but if you could get me
one, I would greatly appreciate it.
It brought back so many memories as you
walk with Christ, so many years at your
own weakness, faithlessness, and Christ's great strength, his
power.
A student asked me yesterday about meditation.
I talked about meditating upon the Word of
God.
Just think about this for a moment.
The Lord is my shepherd.
That's a lifetime.
The.
Definite article, not an indefinite article.
The Lord is my shepherd.
The.
Not a Lord, not one among many, the
only Lord.
And Lord, I can assure you, young believer,
when you say, Lord, you have very little
idea what you're talking about.
But if you truly belong to him.
Over the years, you will begin to understand
as he breaks you and he makes you
his own.
Right now, you are such a wild calf
kicking in a field, running wild.
Someone ought to lock you up just to
protect you from yourself.
But gradually submission to the Lordship of Jesus
Christ will grow and grow and grow.
I hope I know it will, if you've
truly been regenerate.
One of the greatest evidences of conversion is
greater and greater submission to the Lordship of
Jesus Christ.
Well, I want to finish up from something
that I was saying when I was here
with you two days ago.
We were talking about the cross of Christ.
And there's no way for me to emphasize
too much this truth that the gospel is
the mystery of godliness.
And the more that you understand what God
has done for you in Christ, the more
you will give yourself over.
If you have truly been regenerate, you see
the marvelous doctrine of regeneration means that God
has taken out your heart of stone that
cannot respond to divine stimuli, and he has
put in its place a heart of flesh
that is supple and will respond to his
call.
If you have been changed in your nature,
you will have new affections and those new
affections will be toward Christ so that the
more you know about Jesus Christ, the greater
your affection will be turned toward him.
And the greater your will will be inclined
to his what you need more than anything
else is a vision, a biblical vision of
what God has done for you in Christ.
Several years ago, I began to understand.
Don't take an offense at this.
But several years ago, I began to understand
just how dull a people that we are.
A few years ago, well, several years ago,
a friend of mine from British Columbia sent
me a book.
And it was entitled Logic, and I read
the first chapter about three times, and I
said, this is about the this is about
the highest.
Expression of logic I've ever read, it was
very difficult, more difficult than anything I had
received at the university, and after I put
the book down, I noticed that on the
front of it, it had something of an
inkblot drawing their sketching on the front of
the book.
And I looked at it.
And to my surprise, the picture contained this
several what looked to be like eight and
nine year old children standing in front of
a schoolmaster and being questioned.
And I realized this book of logic written
by an old Puritan was actually the primer
for grade school children.
One of the things that I want to
encourage you to do is this in your
reading of scripture and in your seeking to
know more about Christ.
Don't dabble so much in contemporary literature, but
go back, go back into history and discover
some of the great gems, the great things
written, everything from Spurgeon to Jonathan Edwards to
one of my absolute favorites, John Flavel.
And I want to read to you something
from John Flavel this morning that will give
you something of of an insight into the
insight of our of our fathers in the
faith.
I want to share with this.
I want to share this with you so
that you will begin hopefully to draw yourself
away from all the noise and all the
busyness and all the play and all the
foolishness.
Of your age.
Especially those of you who.
Believe you've been called into some sort of
a preaching ministry that you will separate yourself.
To be men.
Who think great thoughts about God.
Flavel wrote in his first volume, the meditorial
glories of Christ.
He wrote what I affectionately term the father's
bargain.
And I just want to read to you
a conversation.
In which the father and the son prior
to eternity, prior to the cross, are speaking
to one another.
I just want you to listen.
Flavel writes this here.
You may suppose the father to say when
driving his bargain with Christ for you.
The father and the son speaking to one
another and the father driving his bargain home
with his son for you.
It says this, the father, my son, here
is a company of poor, miserable souls.
That's you.
They have utterly undone themselves.
That's you.
We are a dislocated people.
We are undone and broken.
He goes on and says, and they now
lie open to my justice.
Justice demands satisfaction for them or will satisfy
itself in the eternal ruin of them.
What shall be done for these souls?
Now I want to talk to you for
just a moment about justice.
This is extremely important because we are not
a people that are very instructed in justice.
We find it hard to understand justice, to
apply justice, but justice is an attribute of
God.
And it's extremely, extremely important.
You can't understand the gospel apart from understanding
justice.
Let me put it before you in a
statement.
The greatest problem in all the scripture, greatest
philosophical theological problem in all the scripture, you
could even say it's what all the scripture
is about.
That problem is this.
If God is just, he can not forgive
you.
Do you understand that?
See, one time I was speaking to a
university and I knew that the cards were
stacked against me and I stood up there
and I knew they thought I was a
Puritan from 200 years back, a social dinosaur
who had nothing to say that I was
going to get up there and rail about
sin.
But I stood up there and I said
this, all of you have a tremendous, a
terrifying problem.
And their response, well, what is it?
Prepare yourself.
God is good.
And this, so what's the problem with that?
Why should we tremble at the fact that
God is good?
Well, here's the reason you're not good.
You're not.
You see, if God is just, what is
he to do with you?
Is he to be nonchalant or apathetic with
regard to sin and just turn his faces,
his face away?
Is that what he's supposed to do?
Is he supposed to do like so many
evangelists will tell us instead of being just
with us, God is loving, which if you've
studied logic, you realize that what's being said
is God's love is unjust.
Is there a principle, as some believe, wrongly
believe this principle of justice in the universe,
and even God has to submit to it?
Absolutely not.
Then what are we talking about?
God himself is just.
One of his attributes is justice, perfect justice,
and he cannot shun one attribute for the
sake of another.
He cannot give love at the expense of
his holiness and his justice.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the passage
in Proverbs 17, 15, where it says this.
That anyone he who justifies the wicked is
an abomination before God.
And yet the Bible says that God has
justified the wicked.
So what are we to do with that?
Paul in Romans chapter three, that's his problem.
How can God be just and the justifier
of the wicked?
How can God be good and forgive the
likes of you?
An illustration that I use all the time
is is this.
If you were to go home and find
out, find your entire family slaughtered on the
floor.
And the man, the assassin standing over them
with blood on his hands and in a
fit of rage, you ran across the room,
you threw him to the ground.
But before you slaughtered him, practiced revenge, your
mind took control and you backed off and
you you just simply tied up the man
and called the police.
So the police come gather all the evidence.
The man has killed your family and he's
taken to the prison.
He waits his time in trial.
A few months later, he stands before the
judge and the judge says this.
I'm a very compassionate and loving and merciful
judge.
So go free, I pardon you.
What would you do at that moment?
Would you say that justice had been done?
No, you would write the Congress, the Senate,
the governor, the president, you'd call the media,
you'd alert the newspapers.
You would say that there is a judge
on the bench far more vile than the
criminals he sets free.
See, here's what you need to understand.
If God is just, how can he forgive
you?
You have broken every law he has ever
written.
Every standard of righteousness from that you have
deviated.
And all of creation calls for your condemnation.
How can the claim of the law be
met?
How can divine justice be satisfied and the
wrath of God appeased?
We go on, the son responds to the
father.
Oh, my father, such is my love to
and pity for them.
That rather than they shall perish eternal eternally,
I will be responsible for them as their
guarantee.
Now, here's something I want you to understand.
In the last several years, we have heard
a lot about God doing everything for his
own glory.
That is true.
You cannot say that enough.
I bless God every time I hear the
name of of John Piper and his constant
promotion of the glory of God.
But don't misunderstand.
God does everything for his own glory.
That is true.
But that does not annul love.
His love is real.
It's not a half to thing.
It's not something he does with a secondary
cause.
No, my dear friend, listen to me.
God loves Christ went to that cross because
he loves he loves the center.
He loves you.
I love to tell Christians this.
The most difficult thing you're ever going to
have to do as a believer, the most
terrible, the most terribly difficult, almost impossible task
that's laid before you as a believer is
this.
You're going to have to spend the rest
of your life fighting and studying and struggling
to come to the point where you can
believe that God loves you as much as
he says he does.
It almost just drains the strength out of
you.
You see, it is the love of God
that brings us to repentance.
It is the kindness of God that causes
us to be broken by our sin.
It is God's constant, unconditional, his mercy toward
us that causes us to want to be
holy.
To want to serve him.
Now, listen to what Christ says.
I will be responsible for them as their
guarantee.
Bring in all thy bills that I may
see what they owe thee.
Lord, bring them all in.
Sometimes young men will come into my office
and they'll tell me how they are in
love and I'm glad for it.
Oh, they're in love.
They're so in love.
I mean, they would fight an army for
this girl.
They would swim the oceans.
They climb Mount, they do anything for her
and they marry her because they love her
so much.
And then they come back in my office
about six weeks later and they're going, what
have I done?
If I had any idea what I was
getting into, that means that basically their love
was just romanticism.
But here's what I want you to see.
Flaval is pointing out something in Christ's omniscience.
He knew what he was getting into.
Father, bring in all thy bills, bring them
all in.
When he went to that tree, he was
not surprised at what happened there is some
liberal theologians would try to make us believe
he was not surprised.
He knew everything he was going to suffer
in your place.
And yet it did not daunt him.
It did not stop him.
It did not cause him to second guess
why his love for you.
And if God would give his son for
you while you were yet a sinner, how
much is the love of God of what
kind of stuff is that love of God
made?
And if Christ would go to that tree
knowing full well what he was going to
suffer and yet do it anyway, how great
is his love for you?
How great is his love for you?
Now, listen to what Flaval says here.
Lord, bring them all in that there may
be.
This is one of my favorite parts.
Bring them all in that there may be
no after reckonings with them.
You don't understand what I just read, because
if you did, my, you would probably start
running around here and screaming out for joy.
He said, bring in every one of the
bills.
That there be no after reckonings with them.
Now, what does that mean?
Something that if you will grasp, it will
literally set you free that when Christ died
on that tree, he was telling the truth
when he said it is finished.
There are no more bills to pay.
He died for past sins.
He put them away.
He died for present sins.
He put them away.
He died for future sin.
He put them away.
There is no after reckoning.
Let me give you an example.
So many people think that they are going
to go to heaven based on a work's
righteousness, that they've done the best they they
could and that they've done rather well.
They will admit failings and sin in one
part or another, but basically they're good enough
to go to heaven.
Yet Adam and Eve sinned one time and
the entire creation was cast into condemnation.
You see, you're standing before God, if you
are, if you truly have a right standing
before God, it can never be just ninety
nine percent perfect.
There cannot be one blemish upon you.
If you are to be a child of
God, if you are to belong to him
or if you are to be his servant,
if you are to dwell with him and
know him and be in heaven, you have
to be absolutely perfect.
And thus you are made by the death
of Christ on your behalf so that you
always stand before him as righteous, always every
sin paid for.
Now, oftentimes, as Paul the apostle was addressed,
people will say, well, if that's the case,
then what are you saying?
Let us sin that grace may abound.
Only unconverted church members talk like that.
If you see grace as a license to
practice carnal freedoms, you are unconverted.
This kind of grace humbles you, fills you
with joy and makes you want to be
more.
It makes you want to be more.
At my hand shall thou require it, father.
I will rather choose to suffer their wrath,
the wrath that belongs to them than that
they should suffer it upon me, my father,
upon me be all their debt.
The father.
But my son, if thou undertake for them,
thou must reckon to pay the last might,
expect no abatement, abatement, a diminishing of a
thing.
I can remember many times going down the
Amazon River or the Maranon River in Peru
in an open 22 foot, 18 foot launch
and seeing the rain clouds coming down the
river, knowing that they can swamp the boat
in a matter before you can even get
to shore because the Amazon's rather wide.
That deluge comes, it can swamp your boat
right there, fill it up with water before
you can make it to the ground.
And you'd say you'd pray for an abatement.
You'd look at that cloud approaching and you'd
hope that somehow it would split, that it
would move to the north, the south, but
it would it would come away from you,
a diminishing of the storm.
What the father is saying is if you
undertake for them, expect no abatement.
You must pay the very last might.
I am not going to withdraw my hand
from you just because you're my son.
Now, here's a part that sends glory and
chills down my spine.
The father says, Thou must reckon to pay
the last might.
Expect no abatements.
If I spare them, I will not spare
you.
How can you be anything other than a
slave of Christ?
Did you just hear what I said?
If I spare Paul Washer, I will not
spare you.
That ends my life.
Do you see that?
That ends my life.
My life is now over.
Let him who lives live for him.
A beloved shackle is this truth that binds
you to Christ.
I am spared.
I wish that some of you truly knew
God.
That you knew prayer is being on your
knees three feet away from an F5 tornado.
I wish you could catch a glimpse of
the holiness of God and the radical depravity
of your own heart.
How that would set you astir.
You want to be strong.
You want to be passionate.
Neither strength or passion is an act of
human will.
It is because of a vision, a biblical
vision of what we are, of what the
law demands, and the fact that he spared
us because he didn't spare him, that you
would be shackled to Christ.
Like the hymn writer said, all the vain
things that charmed me most, I sacrifice them.
My great prayer for you.
It's not a mighty intellect, although that can
be helpful.
My great prayer for you is a vision
of Christ.
Of what has been done for you.
Because I know once that your mind has
been confronted with that.
Everything else will fall in place.
And the son responds, content father, let it
be so.
So.
Charge it all upon me.
I am able to discharge it.
I love what Flavel wrote there.
I am able to discharge it.
No one angel or man could say that.
But the mighty Christ, the captain of our
salvation, broad in shoulder is he.
Deep in chest is he.
Strong in limb is he.
Charge it all upon me, father.
I'm able to discharge it.
He is able.
Not only to cancel sin, beloved Christian, but
to break the power of canceled sin.
He's not only able to save you from
the condemnation of sin, he is able to
save you from the power of it.
You have two problems.
Our man has two problems.
One is the condemnation of sin, and that
is overcome to the doctrine of justification, that
we have a right standing before God because
of the virtue and merit of Christ.
But then there's the power of sin, and
that is overcome by the doctrine of regeneration.
That we are given new hearts, we become
new creatures with new affections.
It does not mean that we we never
sin again.
It does not mean that that we do
not struggle with sin.
It does not mean that we are incapable
of falling.
But what it does mean is that we
are truly changed creatures with new affections and
those new affections are set upon righteousness.
And he says, and though it prove a
kind of undoing to me, isn't love amazing?
That Christ would love to such a degree
that he would call the cross a kind
of undoing, though it impoverish all my riches,
empty all my treasures, yet I am content
to undertake it, content to undertake it.
There are so many principles, so many truths
in the cross.
One of the most amazing to me.
Is that the bride he died for was
at the moment of his death full of
sin, filth and unrighteousness, soiled and marred by
every wicked hand of the world.
And yet he gave his life to clean
her.
To make her his own.
I just want to finish this one part
by by talking about an Old Testament story
is very famous that we all know about.
There was a man by the name of
Abraham and God came to him one day
and said this.
Take now your son, your only son whom
you love now.
Now, come on.
He didn't have to say it that way.
Listen to his language.
Genesis 22 to take now your son, your
only son whom you love.
Do you think that at this moment God
is trying to tell us something?
Do you think that what he's saying here
possibly is looking forward to a greater event?
I assure you that it is.
Look at this.
Take your son.
Your only son whom you love, Isaac, and
go to the land of Mariah and offer
him there as a burnt offering on one
of the mountains, which I will tell you.
So the old man.
Obedient to the voice of God, he takes
his son to Mount Moriah.
He lays him there.
We have no evidence of a struggle on
Isaac's part.
And the old man surrenders his will to
God, possibly pulls back a flint knife ready
to drive it into the heart of his
own son.
And God says, stop.
He says this, Abraham, Abraham, do not stretch
out your hand against the lad and do
nothing for him.
For now, I know that you fear God
since you have not withheld your son, your
only son for me.
And Abraham turns around and there's a ram
in the thicket caught by its horns.
And Abraham calls the place Jehovah Jireh, the
Lord will provide.
Whenever you use the term Jehovah Jireh.
Please don't say.
I'm praying for that new Mercedes or that
new house or this or that Jehovah Jireh,
the Lord will provide what an abomination, what
a litmus test of the heart.
Jehovah Jireh, the Lord will provide a sacrifice.
But I can assure you that there are
many today in Christianity that would rather have
a Mercedes than a sacrifice.
Jehovah Jireh, listen to me, my dear friend,
I have known the gracious hand of God
for 30 years.
I want you to know his kindness in
all things is beyond measure.
It will break your heart into his goodness.
But at the same time, I know this.
That he has given me Christ, it is
enough.
If I have to wallow in pain for
the rest of my life, if everything is
struck down that I love, if every tree
in my life becomes barren, I should still
raise my hands and bless the God who
gave his son, his only son, whom he
loves for me.
You should need no other motivation.
No other thing that you look for to
carry you through the Christian life.
This one thing he has done, and it
should be enough to propel you throughout all
your life into greater and greater and greater
and greater depths of holiness and devotion to
him.
So the story about Abraham comes to an
end.
The son is saved and everyone sighs a
bit of relief and the curtains are drawn
to a close and you think, whoa, what
a beautiful ending to that story.
The only problem is it wasn't the ending
to the story.
It was merely the intermission.
Generation after generation passes and the curtain in
the theater opens up once more.
And there it is across a dark, twisted,
ugly cross.
And there's just enough light to see.
That there is a figure hanging there.
It is the son of God.
Bearing your sin.
And then God lays his hand upon the
brow of his son.
His only son.
Whom he loves.
And he draws back the knife of divine
justice.
And he slaughters him there.
Slaughters him there.