All language subtitles for Lukewarm - Why the Cross 2025 1080p AMZN WEB-DL h264 DDP FrendlyMuhammad.en

(dramatic music)

In ancient times, the

world viewed the cross

as a shameful form of capital punishment.

It was a symbol.

This person has crossed the line.

It might be something similar to the way

that we think

about the electric chair today.

A cross is a very serious symbol.

It's a symbol

of the very graphic reality

of what Christ

did for us, and giving himself up for us.

He laid down his life on the cross.

When I see the cross, I see

all that

Jesus went through to provide forgiveness

for me.

He had his flesh ripped off.

He had his blood spilled.

He was so weak

he couldn't carry this cross.

And it was the worst

kind of public execution

that the Roman officials could devise.

It was it was done publicly.

It was done in a way that

tortured and humiliated the victim.

The way that Jesus was crucified

by Pontius Pilate

was unbelievably savage and brutal.

He's condemned to death,
(crowd shouting)

and then he's forced to carry the cross

to the place

where the execution takes place.

And then he's savagely nailed

to the cross.

The Romans have a

particular kind of now

called a crucifixion nail,

and the nails get hammered

through his wrists into the wood,

and then they tie his feet

together on the bottom of the cross,

and then they hammer another nail

through his shin.

So he's

now physically nailed to the cross

and then he's hoisted up

headfirst, hoisted up.

And then he hangs from the cross.

And it's the most savage

form of punishment you can think of.

It's absolutely brutal and awful.

He was beaten, the hair of his beard

ripped out, a crown of thorns.

Even the shame of carrying his own cross

and going to the place of crucifixion,

and then being on the cross and still

being mocked,

pierced through

and facing

all of the torture that it was.

There was much physical torment

and suffering that Christ endured.

Matthew 2746.

The cry of dereliction My God, my God,

why have you forsaken me?

When you understand who that was,

that that uttered that cry,

the eternal Son of God

who never deserved to be forsaken.
(crowd shouting)

You never deserved to know.

One moment

of the father's displeasure

is bearing in himself

the way that I deserve to be treated

for an eternity.

He swallows that up in three hours,

and then you add all of the

the ignominious, shameful

things that he had to accept

on the way

to the cross,

being spit upon, being beaten,

being mocked,

being accused of being worthy of death.

Right? This man deserves to die.

The Sanhedrin says

there's never been a man

who's deserved to die less.

There's never been a man who's deserved

the opposite of death more.

He endured not only the physical agonies

of the crown of thorns

and the thirst

and the flagellation

and the crucifixion,

the nails and all that.

But on the cross

he also endured the full, undiluted fury

of God's wrath that burns against sin.

Even though he knew no sin,

he took our sins

upon himself on the cross

and bore the wrath of God on our behalf.

That's what a cross is.

(low thunder)

Lukewarm.

It's not something Christ likes.

There would be no cost

that I would give to follow him.
(slow music)

And that's a lukewarm Christian.

They're not. He's not a Christian.

It's just someone who isn't actively

opposed to Christ.

Happy to receive any blessing

he pours out on them,

but willing to give nothing.

The following.

Lukewarm is scary, too,

to realize that that is you,

the lukewarm

Christian, doesn't really exist.

I mean, I can look back on my life

and say,

I see that in myself

and how I would have claimed

to have been a Christian doing

nothing for the sake of the kingdom.

The term really comes from revelation

chapter three, and Jesus addressed

the church.

Related to Sia,

and he talks about those

who are lukewarm as being

neither hot nor cold.

And there's so many Christians,

quote unquote, in this country who are.

And I was there. So I mean, that was me.

I was not hot.

I was not cold.

I was just doing nothing.

The Bible talks

about the fruit of your life.

So when you look at a tree

and you see a maple leaf,

you know it's a maple tree.

When you see a tree and you see an apple,

you know it's an apple tree.

Because the fruit that the tree produces

tells you what kind of tree it is.

So when we look at our lives,

we see, am I producing the kind of fruit

that shows I'm living for Jesus Christ?

Does my life resemble

wanting to know God, to follow him

according to His Word?

Not just according to what I think?

And am I willing to submit

to God and His Word?

Some people say they follow God,

but they throw out half of the Bible.

So then they make a God of their own

making in their own liking.

That's not a Christian.

When Jesus said, take up the cross

2000 years ago, people knew

exactly what he meant

because they had seen crosses in action.

A cross was a place of death,

a cross was an instrument of execution.

And Jesus was saying,

you must be willing to die for the gospel

if called upon to do so.

None of us really ponders the meaning

of the cross as deeply as we should.

For Christians, both

in ancient times and today,

the cross represents

the very epicenter of our faith

in our world today,

the cross has become,

for many people, a form of art,

or maybe even a good luck charm.

Before I was

saved, it was just a symbol,

just something that I imagined.

And I knew that

it was supposed to comfort me,

but I didn't understand.

Nowadays, when people think of crosses,

they think of something

that you just maybe

put on a pendant around your neck, or

you might find it in a church here

or there.

It's just kind of a symbol of

a loose symbol of Christianity,

whatever that means, or symbol of peace

and love, that kind of thing.

But that's that's not what a cross is.

But he was pierced for our transgress

oceans.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement

that brought us peace.

And with his wounds we are healed.

Verse six.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned every one to his own way.

And the Lord has laid upon him

the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53 portrays

in very simple terms,

and a very clear fashion,

that Christ was nailed

on the cross to pay for sin.

Scripture often uses

the expression of the cross

as a kind of summary

for the whole gospel,

so that when

Paul speaks about preaching the cross,

the cross of Christ,

he's talking about

more than just the wooden

beams and splitters.

He's talking about

the atoning work of Christ.

It'll mean different things

to different people.

There are unbelievers or just,

you know, merely religious unbelievers

who who have cross

earrings, cross necklaces,

cross bracelets,

even churches

that don't preach the gospel

that are pretty much apostate,

they have a cross on their church

or cross is sprinkled about,

and a lot of people use it

just because it's a statement

that says I profess to be a Christian.

The image of the cross

has been commercialized

in in our culture.

I think in the last 30 years, marketing

has just decided

we're going to plunder

whatever we can

in this Christian subculture.

And so if they like

the contemporary music

that sounds just like the world's

contemporary music

will present,

that will hype that up

with just with the Christian lyrics

and with the, you know,

a few interviews with the band

that sound somewhat spiritual

and things like that.

If we can get them to embody

certain icons or let's do that.

And one of those things

has been the cross itself,

whether it's jewelry

or whether it's an embossed

cross on a Bible cover or whatever else.

In many cases, it's innocent, right?

In many cases, it's

the cross means a lot to me.

And so when I have choices

about what

earrings I'll wear or necklaces

I'll wear or tattoos

I'll get or whatever.

These are the things that I want to show

people who I am in society.

You'll see celebrities

who obviously are not Christian

wearing the cross

like just a piece of jewelry

that actually goes against them,

that they are not indeed saved

because of how they live.

It shows that the cross to them

is just a piece of jewelry.

It's not a deeply ingrained

symbol of Christian unity.

Some people can use those things

as a crutch.

This is my jewelry.

This is my statement of who I am

as opposed to

this is who Jesus Christ is.

This is who God is.

This is who we are in light of God's law.

This is what Christ has done

to overcome who we are

and what we must suffer.

You are witnesses to a martyr row

where we get the term martyr,

somebody who stands up and testifies

to the truth of the scriptures

and the truth of the gospel

and suffered for it.

Taking up your cross

means to lose yourself,

to deny

yourself, to tell yourself no,

no.

My life priorities have been inverted.

I'll leave you for Christ.

Now, the problem we have,

we still want to save our life.

There's still a little bit of our life

that we want to save.

We want to hold back from Jesus,

want to save that for ourselves

so that we're not taking up

the whole cross.

We're living with a divided mind.

There's no remedy.

There's no further atonement.

It's a hopeless situation

for those people.

And what makes it

so frightening is Jesus says

that will be the case for multitudes.

Many people who

who think they're believers,

who profess to be believers,

who probably go to church every Sunday

and yet live their lives

under their own lordship

and don't give Christ

his rightful place

in their hearts,

and they will be

consigned to hell forever.

I have a saying that I

that I like to say often.

I said, you know, it's easy

to be like Jesus

until you have to be like Jesus.

Part of our

affections are still in the world,

part of our affections, all for Christ.

But we don't want to take up that cross,

because we know that taking up that cross

is going to mean exactly what Jesus said.

It means I'm going to have to lose

my life,

and we don't want to do that.

We don't want to do it.

Christ said to his disciples,

if you want to be my follower,

you have to take up your cross.

He was saying to us

that we need to enter into his suffering

not for the reasons of atonement,

because His atonement

paid the penalty for our sin,

but as followers of him,

we have to understand that

the pathway to glory

that he blazed involves suffering.

And so in this life we will suffer.

Scripture says,

all who live godly in Christ

Jesus will suffer persecution,

and suffering

is part of the Christian life.

The whole epistle of First Peter

talks about this, that we suffer

now, and Paul says

that the sufferings of this present

time are not worthy to be compared

with the glory that is to be revealed,

and that should be the perspective

of a Christian that we willingly accept

the sufferings of this life,

knowing that Christ suffered for us,

and therefore it's

fitting and reasonable

that we would suffer for him as well.

A Christian life that costs nothing

is worth nothing.

Modern Christianity

is dangerous, silly, easy.

It's too convenient.

There's this easy to believe

ism that people teach

and preach and promote.

And just saying I'm a Christian

and therefore I'm I'm saved.

But there is no cost.

There is no commitment.

There is no surrender.

There's just words, empty words.

Our culture in Western culture,

everything's easy.

Everything is convenient.

And that has seeped into the church.

What am I really doing

to surrender my life to Christ?

What is the cost of following Christ?

Not many people are considering the cost

of what it means to follow after Christ,

and that's what Christianity needs today.

(slow music)

So when he says,

if anyone wishes to come after me

right there,

that's a call to be a disciple.

Now, disciple and a Christian

are the same thing.

And you can see that primarily

John chapter 12,

where Jesus will say, verse 25,

if you don't hate your life,

you're not saved.

And so you take that text

and put it together with this one.

We're talking about salvation.

So what does it mean to deny yourself?

It's a synonym for repentance.

It's a turning from self as a authority,

as the one in charge of my life,

even to the point of death.

If I have to you,

that's the taking up your cross.

No one would have heard him

say that and think, law,

my mother in law is my cross,

which means night.

She's wonderful,

but my illness is my cross

or my spouse is my cross.

Nobody hearing him would have thought

that it wouldn't

have even come to their mind

that he's

using some kind of imagery

for a difficulty in your life.

When you take up your cross,

you're on your way to your execution.

So he's saying,

if you're going to follow me,

you as you is over, it's done.

Finished.

Now, instead of following you,

you're going to follow me.

That's what it means to believe in him.

So this is all synonyms

for repent and believe.

Somebody is just sinned greatly.

They've done a lot of bad things.

They know

they've done a lot of bad things.

They are convicted.

They are guilty.

They are just

the kind of person

that Jesus came to die on the cross for.

Jesus did not come to call the righteous,

but sinners to repentance.

It is not those who are healthy

who need a physician, but the sick.

And your sin is not greater

than the infinite righteousness

of the Son of God.

The great examples,

that is the Samaritan woman at the well,

John four.

Here we have a serial adulteress.

And what I love about

how Jesus handled it, he not only dealt

with her current adultery,

he went back and dug up the previous five

adulterous relationships

that she's been in.

Jesus that you said correctly,

you have no husband.

Matter of fact, you have five

the gospel is such that

it digs up every day, every day.

So test it to by the woman

at the well who herself

ran to her fellow Samaritans

and said to them,

come see a man who taught me

everything I ever did.

This is my plea to that person right now

watching this

who thinks they're too far gone.

I urge you to come see a man

who knows everything you've ever done.

He knows it

and is willing to forgive you

not only for everything you've ever done,

but for everything you ever will do.

If only you will come to faith in him

and in his sacrificial, vicarious work

on the cross

to pay the sin death that you cannot pay.

So there's someone watching this.

I would encourage you

to read John

for the story of the woman at the well,

and understand that the same Jesus

who told her about

everything she ever did

knows everything

you've done

and died on the cross

to forgive your says,

if only you will come to faith in him.

Mark chapter eight, verse 34.

He summoned the crowd with his disciples

and said to them,

if anyone wishes to come after me,

he must deny himself

and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save

his life will lose it.

Whoever loses his life

for my sake in the Gospels will save it.

For what does it profit

a man

to gain the whole world

and forfeit his soul?

For what will a man give

in exchange for his soul?

The context of that text is important

because it's very easy for people

to treat that text like a fortune cookie

and talk about it

as this is deeper life teaching.

This is

how you grow in the Christian life.

That's what this text is about.

But when you read it in context,

you realize he's

actually talking about salvation,

because we're talking about forfeiting

your soul,

gaining your soul,

giving something

in exchange for your soul.

We're talking about

Judgment Day in verse 38.

We're not talking about

sanctification here.

And he's summoning

the crowd and his disciples.

So he's got non-Christians

there in the city of Assyria.

Philippi, a hotbed for demonic ideology.

Number one, he's got his disciples, but

11 of them are saved.

One of them is a make believer.

So you've got every kind of person

in their midst right there.

When God saved me,

all of a sudden

the sin

I used to love, the sin I used to enjoy,

it didn't taste good anymore.

All of a sudden, I began to hate my sin.

I didn't want that sin anymore.

I wanted to please God.

That turning from sin and turning to God.

I was repenting. I didn't even know it.

You know, I was broken over my sin.

I didn't want to do it anymore. I.

I wanted to please God.

And when when people that I,

longstanding friends would ask me,

why aren't

why aren't you coming out with

us anymore?

The only answer I can give them was

I just found something better.

For if we go on sinning willfully

after receiving

the knowledge of the truth, there

no longer remains the sacrifice for sins.

This is an admonition to believers verse.

He's not talking to unbelievers here.

If we go on sinning willfully

unrepentantly after

receiving the knowledge of the truth,

there no longer

remains a sacrifice for us.

So that does, you know, good.

The danger of that reality

is your self deceived

and you begin to hear your conscience,

and then you,

you know, begin

to kind of lose your bearings

as to like what's right and what's wrong.

No one who is born of God practices sin

because his see that is,

God's seed abides in him,

and he cannot practice sin

because he is born of God.

So the person who is truly regenerate

does not practice sin.

Person who would in

whom God's Holy Spirit

truly dwells, does not sin willfully.

When whenever I'm struggling with sin,

whenever I'm faced

with the decision to sin,

assuming that I can actually

think about it before I act,

one of the best things

I can possibly remember

is that if I sin now,

that's going to be a sin

that God the Son took for me

on that cross,

because I'm not going to lose myself

and I am saved.

And if I sin that that is a sin, that

Jesus Christ took the wrath of God, that

I should be in hell for an eternity

for that one sin

and if I had that mindset.

That if I do this, I'm

just the person he had to take from me.

That's enough

for me to turn away from that.

If you are a believer,

you do not

go on sinning willfully

because of first John three nine.

It says you cannot

because the Holy Spirit

dwells within you,

so you cannot, as a believer,

live a habitually sinful lifestyle,

a lifestyle, a willful, continuous,

unrepentant sinning that is not to say

that even a believer

cannot be gripped by some habitual sin,

but within the believer,

even in a habitual sin

that they're struggling with,

there's going to be

that conviction of the Holy Spirit

that's going to drive them

to repentance every single time.

Willful thing is unrepentant sinning.

And according to first John three nine,

that's impossible

for the person

to who has truly been born of God.

The parable of the soils

talks about people

who, you know, the

the seed springs up

and you think it's a plant,

you think it's a Christian plant,

but the cares of the world

take it down or or the allure of sin.

And the reality

that that plant

is not actually a Christian plant

becomes clear. So.

So the risk could be

sharing your conscience.

Or if you're truly not safe,

the risk is being self deceived

and entering into eternal health

when you die. So pretty high risk.

I was getting deeper and deeper into it,

thinking that it was noble,

thinking that it was godly.

And I'd already been feeling

drawn to this order

called the Hermetic Order

of the Golden Dawn.

And they happened

to have a cross in their symbol.

So to me,

I justify joining this occult order

because I thought as a Christian,

because there's a cross in it,

it must be okay.

If you come up to a lot of people

and say, so, tell me,

are you a Christian? Yes.

How did you get saved?

They never mentioned Jesus.

They never mention his death

on the cross.

They never mentioned his resurrection.

They never mentioned repentance

and faith in Jesus

and his person and his work

and what he accomplished on the cross.

They usually gravitate to well,

I did this.

I went forward at an altar call.

I prayed the sinner's prayer.

I asked Jesus in my heart.

I made a decision for Christ.

You know, millions of things

that they did.

No mention of the Savior.

You just say a prayer, invite

Jesus into your heart and you're okay.

You're saved

and nothing could ever happen.

And it's just such a superficial view

of what is involved

in this exchange of my life for Christ.

He took my sin. I get his righteousness.

If I can't live that out and love

righteousness and love Christ

and have no basis thinking.

I'm a true Christian

and I think the church is filled

with people like that

who've given lip service to Christ,

who've invited him into their hearts,

but they haven't given him a place there.

He has no influence there.

They live their lives as they want,

and they think they're all right

because someone told them

that as they prayed this prayer,

they were guaranteed heaven forever.

And Scripture

just doesn't know anything like that.

Scripture says.

In fact,

if anyone doesn't love the Lord

Jesus Christ, let him be a curse

which tells us that the real

designation of who is a true believer

is the answer to the question,

do you love Christ if you truly love him?

And Jesus said,

if you love me,

you'll keep my commandments.

So if your love for Christ is visible

in the way you live

as someone who lives a superficial life

filled with disobedience and

fleshly pursuits and selfish desires,

that person has no business thinking

that he's a true Christian.

I used to always think one day I'll

I'll, you know,

get right with God,

or one day I'll do what I know is right.

But for now, it just seems too hard.

But the more you send, it

snowballs and the more and more

and the weight gets heavier and heavier.

And so the enemy is a liar.

And those things,

they might seem glittery and shiny

and beautiful and fun in the moment,

but they lead to death.

Sin leads to death.

People often

say that they're Christians

and unfortunately are not.

And a lot of times that has to do with

look how good I am.

And they just look at the externals,

but they don't look at the heart.

It's it's not about your good works.

It's not about how many times

I've read the Bible.

It's not how many times I pray a day.

It's not how often I go to church.

If I go into a garage,

it doesn't make me a car.

If I go into a restaurant,

it doesn't make me food.

Well, going into a church

does not make you a Christian.

You can't earn your way to God.

So praying, going to church

Sunday, Wednesday night, chicken dinners,

all those things that I grew up with it.

Maybe you still love

hearing great music

and really being moved by that music.

None of that saves anyone.

It is the height of human arrogance

to think that we can

somehow overcome the debt that our sins

have earned,

the debt

that we owe to the eternal, infinite God.

We can perform to satisfy

God's wrath and to attain his holiness.

There is nothing that we can do

our works.

Bible says

Isaiah chapter 64 are as filthy rags

before a thrice holy God.

And that is a very gross description

in the Hebrew.

We have no hope of

satisfying God's wrath,

apart from the atoning

and proprietary work

that Christ did on the cross.

There is no amount of good works

that we can perform to satisfy

God's wrath.

God is infinitely holy.

He is infinitely just right.

And as he told Moses

when he declared his glory

to him in Exodus 34,

that he would

by no means

allow the guilty to go unpunished.

So when somebody is forgiven

by God,

God just doesn't say,

okay, I'm going to pretend you didn't sin

because he is infinitely just

every sin

that we commit must be paid for in full.

And we have two options.

Since every sin is an infinite offense

to an infinite holy God,

and since hell doesn't

sanctify us and we keep sinning and hell

it fuels our eternal destruction.

In Colossians chapter two,

we learned that our sin

actually accrues a debt,

and it talks

about a legal debt

that goes against our account.

And when we think about

what God did through Christ on the cross,

the terms they use are

that that debt was paid.

We can either pay for that sin ourselves

in the lake of fire forever and ever,

or place

our faith

in his finished work on the cross.

He then gives to us, or imputes

to us, or reckons to our account

his perfect and infinite righteousness.

And because of that,

because he takes our place on the cross,

we then are able to go free,

to be forgiven, to be justified,

to be reconciled by God

through the redemption

which he accomplished on the cross.

That the Old

Testament fits into three basic

divisions the law, the writings,

and the prophets.

We see, anticipate

portions of the Messiah suffering,

including

suffering on a cross

in all three of those divisions,

for example, in the law,

in Numbers, chapter 21,

we have the children of Israel

in the wilderness,

and God judges them

by sending fiery serpents.

And then Moses creates a bronze serpent

on a pole.

And those who look up to

the serpent are saved.

And in John chapter three verse 14,

we see that that's actually

in anticipation of the fact

that the Son of Man will be lifted up,

and all those who look to him

will be saved.

And then in the writings,

which includes the Psalms,

we have Psalms like Psalm 22, where

so much of what David wrote

there is quoted

even by Jesus on the cross.

It's an anticipation by David

of how the Son of David, the greater

son of David, will one day suffer,

including things like,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And then when we look to the prophets,

we have

passages like Isaiah 53 and Zechariah 12

and other passages that anticipate

and predict the Messiah's suffering,

including the kind of suffering that fits

execution via crucifixion.

There is nothing that God doesn't know.

He knows all things.

Think back to when Adam and Eve

first sinned.

God.

Instead of just clothing them

with cotton or leaves, he made garments.

It says, of skin.

Whose skin was it?

It was the skin of an animal.

So that was a foreshadowing

of the necessity

of blood

being spilled for sin to pay for sin,

because Scripture says

the life is in the blood.

So when Jesus came, people ask,

well, why did Jesus have to die?

Well, he had to die

because we needed a perfect human

who never sinned without blemish

to pay

for the sins

of all those who would believe in him.

So when Christ died on the cross,

it made sure that every single

thought, deed, or action is forgiven

for all of those who believe

and trust in Jesus Christ.

Jesus couldn't go and prick his finger

and shed a drop of blood,

and everybody gets to go to heaven.

That's not how it works.

Blood shed is a

synonym for suffering a violent death.

So way back in the book of Leviticus

and chapter 16 and 17,

you have the day of the tomb,

and then you have discussion

about the meaning of the blood.

And God tells Moses that it is

the life that is in the flesh,

that when shed takes the life

meaning of the life that's in it.

So blood shed is a synonym

for death, a violent death.

The Bible tells us very clearly

that Christ was sacrificed

before the foundation of the world.

In other words,

this was always God's plan.

If God is infinite in knowledge

and wisdom, he's outside of time.

We can't limit God

by how we think

in the eternal plan of God.

He knew that when he created us,

he knew that we would fall.

He had a plan worked out in eternity.

The Bible teaches us

that God has an all encompassing plan

for everything whatsoever

that will ever come to pass.

It's called his decree.

A good text on that would be Isaiah 46,

verses nine

through 11,

where God declares himself

to be the only God,

the God who has declared

the end from the beginning

and bringing about all his good purpose.

You even see in the book of revelation

the last book of the Bible,

John, saying that Jesus is the lamb

who was slain

before the foundation of the world,

which shows you

that there was intentionality

before the universe was created,

before heaven, before earth,

before anything was created.

God had a plan to bring himself

the most glory

through Christ and the cross.

So the Old Testament

anticipates

that this is the way

that the Messiah will suffer.

And in fact,

even Jesus himself

says that he must suffer this way

in order to fulfill the scriptures.

First Corinthians one verse 18 reads,

for the word of the cross is foolishness

to those who are perishing

before Christ.

We are all perishing.

We are all dead in our sin.

We are all sinners prior to Christ.

Man and his rebellion

thinks that God's wisdom is foolishness

and thinks that the preaching

of the cross,

the preaching of Christ,

that the gospel is foolishness.

But God says the wisdom of man

is foolishness.

But the verse continues to say,

but to us who are being saved,

it is the power of God.

See, the cross has power.

The cross has the power to save those

who are perishing.

So we have to decide

who are we going to believe?

Are we going to believe

God and His wisdom,

or the world and their wisdom?

Because the two are mutually exclusive.

The world looks at the wisdom of God,

says that's foolishness.

And the gospel, the cross of Christ.

It's irrelevant.

And God looks at the world

and all of their wisdom.

And he says, that is foolishness.

Are we going to believe it?

Are we going to submit to it?

That's the crux of the matter

is what you know, what did God say?

And will we submit to what he said?

There are lots of young people today

who don't even know what the Bible is.

They don't know what sin is.

I mean, generation Z,

less than 9% of them go to church.

They're very, very secularized.

And so for them, man determines truth

because that's the foundation

that we're

giving through the public

education system.

If you went to them and said,

I want to tell you some good news,

Jesus died on the cross for you.

What?

Who's Jesus?

What do you mean, die?

Why do you die for your sin? Sin?

What do you mean by sin?

How can you explain the gospel

unless you start in Genesis

to help them understand

that there is a God

who created us, who created all things,

and he created the first man and woman,

and the first man rebelled against God.

And we're all descendants of that man.

That's why

we are in rebellion against God.

We have a problem for sin,

to define all the terms, to explain

who we are, where we came from,

that we have a problem

and what the solution is.

You have to start in Genesis,

a man brought in a death in the world.

So a man has to pay the penalty for sin,

where all descendants

of that one man, Adam.

So we're all sinners,

so we can't pay the penalty.

So God stepped into history

in the person of His son,

to be born

of a virgin, to die on a cross,

to be the perfect,

sinless son of man,

the God-Man God that man

so that he could pay

the penalty for our sin

because he conquered death.

One of the lessons of the cross

is it teaches us

to examine ourselves,

to see if we're really in the faith.

What Jesus says really,

at the end of the sermon on the Mount,

what righteousness really looks like.

And he starts with commending people

who are humble and broken

and realizing

that they're sinful and confessing it.

And yet he ends then

with saying in the judgment,

many people will say to him, Lord, Lord,

didn't we do this?

Didn't we do that?

And he will say, depart from me.

I never knew you.

That is, I think

perhaps one of the most

terrifying passages in Scripture.

Right up there next to our God

is a consuming fire.

And it's a horrifying thing

to fall into the hands of the living God.

That's what it's talking about,

is final judgment

for people

who lived their lives

thinking they were okay

because they said a prayer, or they

they kept up

the facade of Christian belief,

but they really didn't in their hearts,

own Jesus Christ or know him.

And he will say at the judgment,

I never knew you.

There are many today

who think that

because they prayed a prayer,

walked and I all signed

a card,

had some sort of experience in their past

that no matter how they have lived since

or how they are living in the present,

that because they added Jesus

on to their life at some point,

that they have eternal fire insurance

and that's the way they treat the gospel.

They treat the gospel as sort of, I, I,

I did that, I've been there

and now I can live however I want.

That's not biblical Christianity.

When I was in college,

I just felt like an empty person.

I really had no identity.

And again,

I still would have said I was a Christian

while living like the devil.

I tried meth and heroin that summer.

I was going to raves and parties

and got myself

in very dangerous situations,

just extremely empty on the inside.

Evaluating myself.

Back then, it was an absolutely

horrible, wicked human being.

And then one day, supernaturally

using radio

waves in the air and

causing static or whatever

on a station that normally comes in

is completely providential.

It's not miraculous.

I was driving, delivering packages

and stations

that I listened

to were no longer coming in,

and I got mad and I got frustrated,

but I had a job to do.

So I just hit the seek

button on the radio

and as it scrolled through

and didn't bother to stop anywhere,

it landed on a station and

the very next words were.

Well, I can prove to you

there's a God,

but you're not going to believe it.

Once you have the Holy Spirit

living in you, click.

And then it kept seeking.

So I went on to the next thing

and it didn't stop there.

Again,

on some level,

I started panicking like

I wanted to get that back.

But do you mean you can prove to me

there's a God? That's what I mean.

That was the moment

that he began to use the gospel

to change my life.

That that was the moment during

those years, college

was a very sinful time of life

for myself.

And the hardest part

about thinking back on

that as a believer now is knowing that

during that time, the whole time

I knew what I was doing was wrong.

It's like,

I know what I'm doing is wrong right now,

but I wanted to please my flesh

that badly.

I can recall times

walking into sin willfully

asking for forgiveness afterwards,

knowing that I was going to go

and do it again.

That's where I was.

I was so steeped in myself what I wanted

and praise God for his mercy

and being forgiven for that.

But sadly,

it's like I knew where I was at.

I knew something was wrong,

I knew I was in sin, but you know,

the flesh is just,

you know, outside of Christ.

It's you can't really know any better.

That's what you want.

People want to avoid God's wrath

because God is a good God.

No, it is God's goodness

that will be the reason

you experience his wrath.

But God is also loving.

He's provided a way to escape his wrath

through sending His Son,

the Lord Jesus Christ,

to be the punishment, to be

the substitute that we need.

I grew up in the Philippines.

My family are Catholics

and very religious.

So we go to Catholic Church every Sunday.

When I was nine years old,

my mom started bringing us to

charismatic church,

and there are everywhere in my small town

in the Philippines.

When they asked me,

I would say that I am saved,

but deep in my heart I know I was not.

I don't know why

I thought highly of myself

that I could meet God halfway.

It's like it's not only God who has to do

good things,

like I need to do good things as well,

and I know I can meet his standards.

And then one Sunday,

a preacher

who visit the church

and he preaches the verse Ephesians

two eight.

It is by grace

you have been saved through faith

and looking back that God has opened

my spiritual mind

to that truth of that verse,

that it is only through Christ

that my good works

will not bring me anywhere.

When we think

about conversion

from a biblical standpoint,

what we're talking about

is a total transfer

mission, a supernatural work of God,

whereby the Spirit of God regenerates

the sinner,

gives the sinner new life,

takes a dead heart

and makes it live,

opens blind eyes to the truth of who

Christ is.

And the result of that transformation

is that the sinner

now has new affections

and a new allegiance.

Instead of loving his sin,

he loves his Savior,

and instead of being a slave to sin,

he is a slave to Christ.

When Jesus addressed

the church at Laodicea,

I mean they were they were safe.

They were secure in their riches

and everything they had,

and they were clinging to that

as if like they were content almost.

And how many people in this country

could say the same thing?

We don't really come under threat

for following Christ.

So sure, we can all claim Christ, right?

Everyone can be a Christian,

and we can just go on living

like the rest of the world.

Now the cross really represents

Jesus Christ

paying for my sin in my place,

that God would love us so much

that he would send His Son

to bear my sin.

And when I think about my sin and my life

and all the ways

that God has been so good to me,

so merciful to me,

and yet

thinking of the grossness of my sin,

but the amazing

character of God displayed on the cross,

that he would bear that in my place.

It's so beyond humbling.

It was Jesse Ryle,

the 19th century preacher,

who said that

the thief on the cross was saved,

that all might have hope

until the last moment.

But he said,

but only one of the thieves were saved,

so that none might presume,

and so that counsels

each one not to put it off,

not to say, well,

the thief teaches me I can delay.

No, only one of the thieves with savings.

You've got to do it right now.

That man's life was worth nothing.

That man's life was spent

in the sin and wickedness

for which he was suffering as a criminal.

And Jesus looks at him and says, today

you will be with me in Paradise.

The Lord Jesus,

remember me

when you come into your kingdom.

I'm flinging

myself

upon the mercy of the King of heaven

who will come into his kingdom

as surely as he's

hanging right next to me now.

And that's it.

That's the appeal of a good conscience

in faith that Christ says,

the one who comes to me

all in no wise cast out.

You come to me in simple faith

with nothing in your hands,

and I will supply everything

that you couldn't.

The law of God will come looking for you,

and the law will find me,

and it will be satisfied.

It won't come looking for you anymore,

because it will have everything

that it needs.

Justly to be satisfied in your place.

That's what it is.

That's substitutionary atonement.

That's the Savior.

And no works, no rituals, no rites,

no mantras, no recitations.

Faith alone.

God made him who knew no sin.

Paul says to be sin on our behalf

so that we might become

the righteousness of God in him.

And what that means is,

is Jesus, though sinless,
(dramatic music)

was treated by the father on the cross

as if he had sinned and committed

all the sins of all those

who would ever be saved.

And they were all poured on him

when he was on the cross,

and he received the wrath of God

to pay the penalty

for all who had believe.

And so that's what the cross was about.

In Romans chapter three verse 25,

it says that are speaking of Jesus,

whom God displayed

publicly as a propitiation in his blood.

Propitiation is a big theological word.

But the Greek word Erasmus,

it carries

the idea of appeasement, of satisfaction,

and in the context of our sins,

in the context

in which the Bible uses it.

Jesus was our propitiation in that

he took upon himself the due

penalty that our sins have earned.

And God's wrath was poured out not on us,

but poured out on his Son.

And in so doing Jesus propitiate it.

The wrath of God.

He appeased the wrath of God.

He's satisfied God's wrath.

And so that's what we mean

when we say

that Jesus was a propitiation

for our sins.

The heart of God is such

that he knows we're wretched.

He knows this.

This is the God who not only knows

you, he created you.

How can you know something

more intimately

than that?

You created it

for the person who out there,

who thinks they're so far gone,

they don't understand that God's grace

is an outflow of his character,

which God by nature cannot betray.

He cannot betray his own character.

He cannot betray his own nature.

He not only is gracious,

he is grace.

He not only is loving, he is love.

I think that I'm so grateful

that the Lord, you know, saved me.

It shows his mercy.

And I know that because he's merciful

and he's a loving God, that

nobody goes to hell unjustly.

Now, a lot of Christians

have a hard time with hell.

They don't want to talk about it

because it just sounds so

mean to other people.

But I always say,

if you know

God's character,

he is never unjust because he's perfect.

He's never unjust to

anybody, anytime, anywhere.

So nobody will be in hell unjustly,

even though it's uncomfortable

to think about, God's

justice has to be served.

But he also is merciful.

I can look over a period of time

and tell that my desires had changed

when the realization sank in that

I was forgiven because I can look back.

And there was.

For some reason, I started to hate sin.

One night in my studio apartment,

I was just walking across my apartment

and I was demonically attacked

and I collapsed to the floor on my knees

and I heard myself cry out,

Jesus Christ, save me!

And in that moment,

I had the peace

that I'd been looking for my entire life.

I was delivered from that demonic attack

just like that,

and I knew that

it was the God of the Bible.

The father,

the son, and the Holy Spirit

who had saved me in that moment,

who had set me free.

I grew up in a small town

next to a swamp, and I was Greek

Orthodox and Roman Catholic,

and that was a very works based system.

And so I was involved in the Orthodox

Church, and I was serving

as an altar boy.

I'd have the incense

and I'd be walking around the church.

I'd be holding

large golden crosses and think, I'm

going to heaven.

This is my ticket to heaven.

But it was one day we

asked our Greek priest

about the Book of Revelation,

and he looked at us

and said,

I will never teach you that book.

You said, why?

Why won't you?

Why don't you teach us about the Bible?

And he said, well, it'll scare you.

And he said, what

if a priest can't

teach us about the Bible?

Then why are we even going to church?

The significance

of the cross to me in my life

is it just radically changed me.

You know,

I just grew up non-religious, professing

Catholic family was just pagan,

just lost,

didn't know anything about God,

didn't know anything about the Bible.

And it wasn't

until I understood

what Jesus did on the cross

and how he bore my sins

in his body on the tree,

and how he suffered in my place

as my substitute,

that my life radically changed.

I mean, like overnight, I got saved.

Ensley became an avid student,

an avid reader,

an avid studier of the Bible.

Just overnight, my life changed.

I, I became different.

It did.

It wasn't just behavior modification,

it was life change.

It basically made me into a new person.

It gave me a new awareness of God,

a whole new world view,

a whole new purpose for living,

new drives, new

ambitions, new goals, new everything.

As Paul says,

it changes you into a new creature

and old things pass away

and all things become new.

So that's what the cross did to me.

I was,

present in the Astrological Society

at the time,

and I started to get a compulsion to go

to church,

and I say a compulsion

because I didn't want to go to church

because I had no interest in church.

I start reading the Bible

because I thought,

if I am not doing astrology

and I'm going to church,

I guess I'll just read the Bible.

You know,

I just thought it would make sense.

So I started with Matthew

and I'm reading the passage

where Jesus is on the boat and the storm

comes up

and the disciples are scared

and they wake him up and he rebukes

AC in the wind,

which of course immediately obeys.

And then he tells his disciples,

you know, where is your faith? You.

You have a little faith.

And that passage just grabbed me,

and I kept reading it

over and over again.

And as I was reading it

for the first time, I understood who

he was.

I understood

that I had been going away from

God my whole life, that my spiritual path

was completely against God.

And and I understood

it would have led me to hell.

And I understood that he had died for me.

And so I turned my life over to Christ.

And I knew right away I was

I was a different person.

It was very clear.

It was immediate.

And here I told

people, I'm

not interested in Christianity.

I don't want to be a Christian.

You know?

And I thought, now I am a Christian.

I'm not what I wanted to be,

but here I am. I am one of.

My own conversion,

one of the first sermons I ever heard,

as a new Christian was,

sermon on the gospel from Isaiah 53.

And before that,

I had no clue

that Christ was in the Old Testament

in any way,

or that the Old Testament talked

about Christ's atoning work.

But Isaiah 53 is such a clear picture

of what happened at the cross

that I would say

one of the most important chapters

in all of Scripture.

It's a pivotal discussion

because what it does is describe

the reason for the cross,

and it is the definitive proof

that Christ's death on the cross

was a penal substitution.

In other words,

he was vicariously bearing the penalty

of others sins.

He gives us credit for his righteousness,

and we get the reward for it,

even though he didn't deserve to die.

And we certainly don't

deserve his righteousness.

But that's the way the atonement works.

And if it's anything

other than a penal substitution,

it isn't a full atonement.

It leaves us with something

to do, some example to follow,

or some righteousness

to produce of our own.

But because the cross is what it is,

a penal substitution, Christ

has not only fully paid

the price for our sins,

but also fully fulfilled all of the legal

requirements of the law

for righteousness for us.

So we get the righteousness

he took the sin.

And that's the gospel in a nutshell.

We can't trust in our own goodness.

We have to trust in Jesus Christ

and what he's done alone for salvation.

That's why we say

we've been saved by grace through faith.

It's not of ourselves.

It's a gift of God

so that no 1st May boast.

That's from Ephesians chapter two, verses

eight through ten.

And then in verse ten, God says,

he is going to create in us a new work.

He uses the term of a craftsman.

He says we will be his craftsmanship

created in Christ for good works.

We look at the storyline of the Bible

from Genesis to Revelation.

It's interesting that biblical history

begins really with two trees.

There's the tree of the knowledge

of good and evil,

and there's the tree of life.

And the first of those trees

represents sin,

because it was

by disobeying God

and eating from the tree

of the knowledge of good and evil

that Adam and Eve fell and cast

the entire human race into

the tree of life represents salvation,

and as a result of man's sin,

he was cut off from the tree of life,

cut off

from the presence of God,

cut off from salvation.

And yet,

when we go

to the end of the Bible

to revelation 21 and 22,

we find the tree of life there,

and we find that

there are people

who have access to the tree of life.

And so the question is, how can those

who have been condemned because of sin

have access to salvation?

And the answer to that,

almost right in the middle of the story

is the cross, this third tree.

And that tree represents
(birds chirping)

substitution, right?

So a tree that represents sin,

that casts all of humanity

into separation

from God and into condemnation.

How is it that fallen

mankind can have access to salvation?

It's through the cross.

So the story of salvation

is the story of three trees,

one the fall, the second forgiveness,

and the third eternal life forever

in the presence of God.

For those who are in

the thief on the cross is a classic

display of grace.

It gives hope to every one of us,

because we all pray for

our family members

who are resistant and friends

who are resistant to the gospel.

And we all hold out the hope that

as long

as there's life

and breath in an individual,

there is hope for repentance

and faith in the gospel.

Because that man came

to the very end of his life,

nothing in

his life

would have testified to the notion

that he would be in heaven.

And yet,

because he met the Savior that day,

and because God gave him grace to

to see what was happening,

he responded in faith and crisis.

Today you'll be with me in Paradise.

Everyone who draws breath on this earth

was born a sinner.

We are born with a sin nature.

We are sinners by birth, by nature

and by choice and by our actions.

So we have no righteousness of our own.

We must have the righteousness

of someone else.

And his name is Jesus.

(music fades)

♪ O come, ♪

♪ O come, ♪

♪ Emmanuel, And ransom ♪

♪ captive Israel, ♪

♪ That mourns ♪

♪ in lonely ♪

♪ exile here ♪

♪ Until the Son of God ♪

♪ appear. ♪

♪ Rejoice! ♪

♪ Rejoice! ♪

♪ Emmanuel ♪

♪ shall come to thee, ♪

♪ O Israel. ♪

♪ Rejoice! Rejoice! ♪

♪ Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel. ♪

(no audio)