Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / November 17, 2019 | The Names Of God - Yahweh Tsidkenu

Transcript

November 17, 2019 | The Names Of God - Yahweh Tsidkenu · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
0:00
SPEAKER_01: How are you?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah?
0:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh, hi.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Good to see you guys.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: So we're in a series called The Names of God.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: We've done ten names of God.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: We have two to go this morning and next Sunday.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: And um just to uh review them really quickly, if you've been with us and you don't know how to pronounce them, go ahead and say them with me.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: The first one we did, Elohim means creator.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Then comes Adonai, Lord and Maker.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: The personal name of God was Yahweh, the God who is here for us.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: Then we had a name that an Egyptian maidservant came up with, El Roe, the God who sees me, followed by El Shaddai, Amy Grant's word for him, God Almighty.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: And then Yahweh, the Lord will provide, Yahweh will provide, followed by El Olam, the everlasting God.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: And then Yahweh Tzva.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh, try that one more time.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh Tsva, oh, Yahweh of armies, really cool, really cool name.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Unless you're a pacifist, but no.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: It's a cool name.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: So and then uh two weeks ago, Emmanuel, God with us, followed by last week.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: Abba Papa.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: My favorite name.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: So my favorite, their favorite name I like my grandkids calling.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Now, um the name, there are some fifth, sixth grade kids over Cara Prayer Vell that learned a names of God song this fall when I heard that.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: I asked Sam to go over and videotape it so you could see it here.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: Not all the words are easy to understand, so the first stanza that you're gonna see is Jehovah Rapha, the Lord our healer, Jehovah Rohi, the Lord our shepherd, Jehovah El Nas, the forgiving God.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: This is who he is, they're gonna sing.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: This is who he is, this is who God really was, this is who God really is, this is who God always will be.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: The fifth and sixth graders care parable.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Forever and ever, amen.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: Yay! Clap, clap, clap the how it's cute, like Ashley.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: I love to hear children sing, and we're gonna get to hear that again next week.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: So the name of God, the eleventh name of God, the name of God for this morning, is a name that is all about measuring up or not measuring up.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: Some of us came to a gut-sinking realization when we were about six years old that we didn't measure up.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: We had an older sister, maybe a brother.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: He was obedient, he was smart, tried his best to please mommy and daddy, or she was always on time in the morning, on time to dinner, and at night, on time for Sunday school.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: She did her lessons, he memorized his verses, even if it was in the car on the way to Iwana.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: For them, it seemed natural, it seemed easy to be obedient and smart and at the top of the class, but compared to them, you on the other hand, realized it's true.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: You didn't measure up.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: We struggled against we who had that older brother or sister who was nearly perfect in every way.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: We struggled against our inclinations to be late for everything, to play when we should have been doing our schoolwork to clean up uh our bedroom instead of leaving it a mess.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: We struggled not to disobey our parents in secret or even to lie to them to their face.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: We knew we didn't measure up.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: And we were a little bit miserable about it.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: Not only didn't we not measure up at home, we didn't measure up at school.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: When teacher asked a question to the class and waited for hands to be raised, other kids always seemed to think of the answer a little quicker than we did.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: And even when we did think of the answer, and the teacher looked at us expectantly, hoping we would finally raise our hand, we kept our hand down because we were, to be honest, a bit of a rebel and we didn't want to compete in a race that we knew we would eventually lose.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And when we were forced to give an answer because she called on us, as often as not we gave the wrong answer.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: We knew that no matter what standard was used, it was true, we didn't measure up.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: The last 20 years we've lived in a world, we're living in a world of social media, which as much as anything else reminds us constantly that we don't measure up.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: Which of us hasn't had the experience of turning on your laptop or your smartphone and then reading or seeing something on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat or Pinterest seeing something that makes you feel like you don't measure up.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: Photographs, oftentimes, of your very best friends, at least people that you know well, who are laughing and having a wonderful time at a concert or at a ball game or at a party, and it makes you suddenly realize that in comparison, your life and your achievements and your fun just don't measure up to that.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: One time you made the mistake of actually posting something yourself on Facebook or wherever, social media, you were trying to make a difference, trying to share something you felt strongly about.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: It was a big mistake.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: It took you weeks to recover from the ridicule and the disgusted comments posted in response, and those were just from your relatives.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: It's occurred to you lately that you're not just a little different.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: Frankly, you're just not good enough.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: You don't measure up.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you that God doesn't particularly care for the fact that you're comparing yourself to everyone else, but he's not going to argue with you when you come to the conclusion that you don't measure up, because after all, he's been telling us that for a long, long time.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Saying things like, There is none righteous.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: No, not one.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: And what is righteousness after all, but a standard of measuring up?
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Because what he means and what anyone means by righteous is doing what's right and not what's wrong.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Doing and saying and thinking what's good instead of doing and saying and thinking what's bad.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: When you think about that, that's the moral standard in the universe.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: And as much as Billy Graham was right 50 years ago when he said that a lot of people now are attacking even the idea that there's a moral standard, the truth is that we all, basically in our own selves, still live by one.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: We have a moral standard, even if it's a little twisted, even if it's not about so much right and wrong as it is about, I don't know, the environment or whatever progressive cause happens to strike your fancy.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: But the fact is that we all still have that standard that knows what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: We know that we ought to think and we ought to do and we ought to say what's right, but we think the wrong things, we say the wrong things, and we do the wrong things.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: And instead of treating people right, we sometimes hurt them instead of living right.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: We don't even behave according to our minimum moral standards.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: And we're miserable about it at times, especially sometimes when we come to church or we think about God.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: So God says to us this morning, I've got this name that I need you to know.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: It's my name, and it's a doorway into really the most, one of the most important, if not the single most important thing that you can know about heaven, hell, salvation, and measuring up.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: It's a name that you may not have known, but it's a name that you need the first day you discover or realize that you don't measure up.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't mind if you go through your life realizing that you don't measure up, but if you realize that, then you also need to know my name, Yahweh Sidkeinu.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: Say that a little, it's a little bit of a weird name, but try saying that name with me, will you?
10:43
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh Tsidkenu.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Notice the sounds there.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: Just think of those three sounds, Z, D, and K.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: Zid K Zidkenu.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna hear those sounds again.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful name, it's a lovely name.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a name that means Yahweh, our righteousness.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh, our righteousness.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: And in between, in behind, in the shadows of some of the songs we've sung this morning, especially that third one about how there's a chasm between us and God and a mountain that we can never seem to climb to the top of.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: This idea of not measuring up, this idea of righteousness has been at the back of it.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: And God says, I've got an open door for you.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: I want to tell you about this and how important this is to you.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: God gives us that name in one passage of Scripture.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a book of Jeremiah.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah was a prophet, he lived at 600 B.C.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: It was the worst time in Israel's history up till then, because they're about to be completely taken into captivity by Babylon.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: If you've got a Bible, you may want to turn there so you can underline Yahweh Tzed Cana here in verse 6.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: But it's a passage that's rather famous in many circles, in academic circles, because it starts off criticizing the shepherds, that is, the spiritual leaders of Israel.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: God says, you know what?
12:06
SPEAKER_01: The reason you're going into captivity is because you've sinned, you've fallen short, you don't measure up.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: But here's the problem: what's even worse is that your prophets, priests, and kings, your leaders, your shepherds, the ones who should have been taking care of you, they don't measure up, not even close, and they're leading you astray.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture, declares Yahweh.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: And your translation will say, declares the Lord, all in capital letters.
12:36
SPEAKER_01: But in a names of God series, we really have to use the real name of God, don't we?
12:42
SPEAKER_01: So God says, you know what?
12:43
SPEAKER_01: Your prophets, your priests, your kings are leading you astray.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: They don't measure up, you don't measure up, you're about to go into 70 years of captivity.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: Life's gonna get really hard for you.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: Now, I wonder if it's a coincidence.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it is.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: I've never heard this connection made before, but it just so happened that the last king of Israel, the king that was presently sitting on the throne, was named King Zedekiah.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: And if you notice, it has those same three sounds in order, Z, D, and K, the same three sounds as Tzid Kenu, right?
13:21
SPEAKER_01: Because it is actually the same word, Zedek, comes from Tzedek, and that means righteousness.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: It happens that the last three letters are the first half, the shortened form of the personal name of God, Yahweh.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: Basically, this name, King Zedekiah, means Yahweh is righteousness.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: But that was kind of ironic because he was one of the worst, though short-lived, kings that Israel ever had.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: Even though his daddy was the godly Josiah, he was the third son of Josiah.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: Even from the moment he stepped, he sat on the throne at age 29, young enough, but old enough to know better, Zedekiah, which means Yahweh is righteous, didn't live that way.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: He always did evil in the sight of Yahweh.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: He never ever came close to measuring up, and he never even tried.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: And eventually he got his sons killed in front of him and his eyes gouged out because he was so bad, even the king of Babylon couldn't stand him.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Now, the world in Israel in that day, like the world today in the streets of Haiti and in the streets of Hong Kong a couple of months ago, is full of people crying out.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: We would love to have leaders, we would love to have shepherds who said the right things, did the right things, thought the right things, treated people in the right way, but they don't.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: And in Israel in those days, there was a general cry.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: We want Zedek, we want righteousness, we want life to measure up.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: And so God replies in verses five and six with our key verses.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: And he says, Listen, I want to make you a promise about this.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: Behold, days are coming, declares Yahweh.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: A day is coming when I'm going to raise up for David, that is a descendant of David, a righteous branch.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: Guess what three letters you find in here?
15:12
SPEAKER_01: Z D.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay, it is the same word.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: In fact, the word is tsadiq.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: We would pronounce it now.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: A word, by the way, that's been used, that's used, uh, has been used in the press, especially the Jewish press, to return the to refer to the president of Home Depot this year because he's an old man, he's the owner of Home Depot, he's not a Christian, but he's a very orthodox Jew.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: But he's called Sadik because he spends so much of his own money helping out the poor and the needy, and so he's called Sadiq.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: He's called a person who treats other people right, who measures up.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: But that's the word used right here.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: For I'm gonna raise up a righteous branch, and he will reign as king.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: I wonder who this could be that God is promising.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: And he's gonna act wisely, he's gonna do justice and here it is, Zedek, actually, Zedekah, in the land, righteousness.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: You're looking for righteousness, you're crying in the streets for someone, for leaders, for shepherds to be righteous.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: I promise you a righteous leader, and in his days, Judah's gonna be saved.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: I wonder who's coming that'll bring salvation.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: And Israel will dwell safely, and this is his name by which he'll be called Yahweh Sidcana.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: Say it with me one more time.
16:28
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh Sid Kana.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: Who do you think he's forecasting or predicting, a descendant of David, who's who's going to come on the scene and be called a king and is going to bring salvation to his people and to the people of the world?
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Obviously.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the right answer to every question.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: You know that.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be Jesus.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be, he's Yahweh Sid Kenu, the Messiah, the servant of God.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Right?
16:56
SPEAKER_01: That's the answer to the need of Israel.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: Now, last time I'm gonna show you any Hebrew, but again, notice the three letters, Z, D, K, or T-S-D-K, that divide Sid Keno, divides into two words.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Sedik, which means righteousness, just need you to know that the Ainu at the end, the Inu means our.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: That's why we say Yahweh, Sid Kenu means Yahweh, our righteousness.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: That's the name God says we need.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: God, why do you say we need that name?
17:29
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm glad you asked, he said.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: Let me take you through it.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: Mankind as a whole and as individuals longs for righteousness.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: How can a man be righteous with God, Job says, longing for it.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Mankind as a whole longs for it.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: We long for just and righteous societies where people are treated fairly.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: As individuals, we long for it.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: We long in our own selves to be people who say right and do right and think right and be treated right and treat others right.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: But the problem is we don't have tzedek.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: We don't have righteousness because there's no one who is tzedekah, not even one person, says Psalm 14, quoted again by Paul in Romans 3.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's like that.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we're born without it, despite what you sometimes hear.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Little babies and infants are not perfect.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: They are not perfectly righteous, they're not glorious little creatures.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: No, I was guilty when I was born.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: I was sinful when my mother conceived me.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: I start off behind the eight ball.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: And then we try to become righteous in our life.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: We try to measure up by making efforts to do the right things.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: Romans 10, 3.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: They're ignorant of the righteousness of God, and here it is, they attempted to establish their own righteousness.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: You may look around the world and think that they're pagans, but the truth is that everybody around the world really is striving to meet their own moral standard, whatever that standard is.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: The problem is that it doesn't work.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: We fail to measure up, and we remain unrighteous.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah 64, 6.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: All of us have become like one who is unclean.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: That's a strong verse, isn't it?
19:10
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I prefer to end that verse with the words, and all our righteous acts are like Mexican tap water, or you know, something else that I've experienced, or all of our righteous acts are like uh emails from Nigerian princes or gas station Chinese food or something like that, you know.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: But it's just whatever we do, it doesn't work out.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: It's unrighteous.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: It falls short.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: We're like Pharaoh crying out, God is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: Pray to God for me.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: I can't do it.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm falling short, and we despair of ever attaining it.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: How can we do it?
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Job cries out.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: The problem is that we've been clueless as to the only way to become righteous.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: We've been heading about it the wrong way because of our ignorance.
19:57
SPEAKER_01: Quote, since they're ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they've not submitted to God's righteousness.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: Romans 10 3.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: Trying to measure up or become righteous has been doomed from the start.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: Galatians 2.16, by the works of the law no one will be proclaimed righteous.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: It won't happen.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: It won't happen.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: It's a dead end from the start.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Even when we did our very best, it was a hopeless attempt.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: Romans 3.20, no one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: The law simply shows us how sinful we are.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: Why does it simply show us how sinful we are?
20:35
SPEAKER_01: Because even when we make long lists of to-do's and don'ts and rights and wrongs and goods and bads, we find that we never eventually can even live up to our own list.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: We always fall short.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: We just don't measure up.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: In fact, doing our very best was precisely the wrong way to go about it and to get that righteousness.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: For if righteousness could be gained, Paul says Galatians 2.21, if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: You understand, I think, that if there was some possible way for you to do right and think right and be right, measure up on your own, even if it took all of your efforts, if you could somehow do that, then it would make no sense for God to send his son to earth and live on this earth for those years and then to die a bloody death that somehow the best of us could somehow earn our own way.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, doing our own best was precisely the wrong way to get it.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: The fact is, we need God to wrap us in the righteousness he requires.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: Quote, Yahweh clothed me with the garments of salvation, he covered me with a robe of righteousness.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: In other words, we can't do it ourselves, we fall short.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: We need God Himself, the one who requires this moral standard, to actually.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Supply it.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: And the reason that we have to get it from him is he's the only one who is righteous and the only source of it.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: God is the righteous God.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: Quote Elcetic throughout the Old Testament.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: Amazingly, and here's the tipping point: God is eager to provide righteousness to us so that we'll measure up.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: How does he do it?
22:22
SPEAKER_01: Answer.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: Get this.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: By merging us with his righteousness, or with his righteous son, Yahweh Tsid Kainu, the Lord Jesus Christ, making him our righteousness.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: Isn't this interesting?
22:42
SPEAKER_01: What an amazing thing.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: But this is what the New Testament tells us that God has united you with Christ Jesus.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so that in a way, when you look in the mirror, you are looking at the face of Jesus Christ if you are a son or a daughter of his.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: The process is that God makes Jesus our righteousness.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: Paul's the one who says it most clearly in 2 Corinthians, when he says, You are in Christ Jesus who became our righteousness.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: He himself, Yahweh, our righteousness.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: And the key verse in the entire New Testament, hope you can see it here, is 2 Corinthians 5.21.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: Will you say that verse out loud with me?
23:43
SPEAKER_01: It's that important.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: This is called the great exchange.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: In that moment you trust Christ as your Savior, when you look to the cross and say, that there, that's my Savior.
24:07
SPEAKER_01: I believe in Him.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: I can't do it myself.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: I'll never measure up.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to give up all my deadly doing and effort and so forth and accept His righteousness.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: What happens is an exchange happens.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: He has taken your sin upon himself on the cross.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: He then gives you his righteousness, and you're a transformed creature.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: Someone who rides horses was saying to me that it's something like, you know, all the work I do in exercising and being ready for an equestrian event.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: But the thing is, if me and my horse win, the fact of the matter is really it wasn't me, it was the horse that did it.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: And forever and ever, amen.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: You'll not be in heaven boasting that somehow it was by works you were saved, but you'll be boasting in the Lord because He's the one that carried you across, because He was in you.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: I've always thought that that picture of the cat looking into the mirror and having a lion look back with sort of arrogance or sort of desire or wish or whatever else.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: And then I realize, thinking of this verse today and this concept of Yahweh Tid Kainu, that that's maybe exactly the same as when you and I look in the mirror and Jesus Christ looks back, saying, You know what?
25:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm now in you, and my righteousness is your righteousness.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: God in us, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: God's way to make us righteous is captured in one verse in Romans 4, 5, which says, to the one who does not work.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: What?
25:54
SPEAKER_01: What?
25:55
SPEAKER_01: What?
25:55
SPEAKER_01: Who does not work?
25:57
SPEAKER_01: But believes in him who declares the ungodly to be righteous.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: What?
26:02
SPEAKER_01: What?
26:03
SPEAKER_01: Declares the ungodly to be righteous?
26:06
SPEAKER_01: His faith is credited for righteousness.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: So number one, I've got to be ungodly.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: I have to qualify that way.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: Is that counterintuitive or what?
26:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can go around the world and when you talk to people about how do you get to heaven, it doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter if they're businessmen or if they're politicians or religious people around the world, one thing everybody agrees on is that if you are good, you get to heaven.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: Now there is some debate about how good you have to be.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Do you have to be good all your life, or can you be just good for the first 20 years of your life and then kind of slip off the edge, or maybe good for the last 10 years of your life?
26:44
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people say I'll be good later.
26:46
SPEAKER_01: Does it involve going to church every Sunday or two Sundays out of every month?
26:51
SPEAKER_01: Do you have to be there every time the doors are open, or is it enough just for me to go to church on Christmas and Easter, right?
26:59
SPEAKER_01: And so there's all these questions about how good I have to be, but one thing we do all agree on is that you have to be godly to go to heaven to measure up in God's eyes, right?
27:08
SPEAKER_01: We think that.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: Even the best religions that man can concoct, and I'm thinking now of Islam and Judaism and so forth, clearly hold to this.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: Islam, the Muyazin, hope wakes you up at an ungodly time in the morning about 4 a.m.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: when you're in Arab countries.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: And you know what they're saying?
27:26
SPEAKER_01: If you know any a little bit of Arabic, you recognize over and over again.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: Allah Raham, El-Rahami.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: That is, God is merciful, God is forgiving, God is gracious, God is merciful, God is forgiving.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: But you know who he's merciful and forgiving to?
27:44
SPEAKER_01: Allah is merciful and forgiving when he opens the books and finds out that you have merit that has deserved him being merciful and gracious and compassionate to you because you have measured up, because you've been meritorious, because you've done good works.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: Judaism does the same thing, looking at the 616 commandments, according to its count and the Mosaic law and the Torah, those who have done those, those who have been full of charity and done what is right, thought, what is right, spoken, what is right, and especially treated people in the right way, those are the people that have earned the grace and the mercy of God.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: Right?
28:17
SPEAKER_01: And yet all of a sudden you come to a verse where Paul turns everything in its ear and he says, You must be ungodly or you will not qualify.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: And number two, you must not work, you must not make an effort, you must not trust in your works, you must not trust in your very best efforts to measure up.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: And number three, you must believe.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: Your faith is credited for righteousness.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm in this whole way of going about it by which we uh by which we make our list and decide who's in and who's out.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: Has so many flaws when we think about it.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't think this really happened, but I heard it happen, and so I'm gonna share it with you because it's, you know, it's like it was uh in Leavenworth or somewhere like that, where a church, apparently, I don't buy it, but a church had a contest that people can enter trying to find the single most moral, most upstanding, most righteous citizen until they receive this entry quote.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: I don't smoke, I don't touch alcohol or drugs, I don't gamble.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm faithful to my wife, and I never ever even look at another woman.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: I am hardworking, quiet, and obedient to authority.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: I never go to the movies or to rock concerts.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: I go to bed early every night and I rise with the dawn.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: I attend chapel every Sunday without fail.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: I've been like this for the past three years, but just wait till they let me out of here.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: Because when you can make less and you can be on the surface incredibly righteous.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: But of course, the problem is it may just be on the surface, and righteousness is more than just saying right, living right, treating people right.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: There's something deeper.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: Now the law promises that if you'll just do these things, that you will measure up.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: But the law is a little bit like that guy who gave me the quiz.
30:10
SPEAKER_01: He said, Tell me uh what is it that's yellow, has feathers, sings, uh, plays baseball and lives in a cage.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: What's yellow has feathers, sings, plays baseball, lives in a cage?
30:23
SPEAKER_01: Right.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: He said, I have no idea.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: He said, a canary.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: I said a canary doesn't play baseball.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: He said, I lied about the baseball.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: That's what the law does to you.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: The law gives you this list and says, you know what?
30:34
SPEAKER_01: You do this, you get to heaven, and then you get to heaven, and God says, Well, that's not the way I put it down.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: You didn't live up to your own moral standard anyway.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: And the law says, I lied about the heaven part.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: Because the fact of the matter is that way doesn't work, it's never worked, it's never going to work, and if it could work, it would mean that Christ didn't need to come to earth to die.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way God works things.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: God requires we be ungodly, we not work, but we simply trust Him for salvation.
31:03
SPEAKER_01: That's what Yahweh Sid Kenu is for.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: There's an old catechism, it's my favorite catechism, as if any catechism could be somebody's favorite catechism, but I don't talk creeds, I don't talk catechisms here, but there's one that dates from 1563, written by a small group of people in Heidelberg, Germany, at a castle that I like.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: I like especially its answer to question number 60, and it goes like this.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: It's all about what I'm talking about this morning.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: Question 60, how are you righteous before God?
31:36
SPEAKER_01: In other words, how do you measure up?
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Here's the answer: get this.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: Only by true faith in Jesus Christ.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: Even though my conscience accuses me of having grievously sinned against all God's commandments and of still being inclined toward all evil, nevertheless, without any merit of my own, out of sheer grace, God grants and credits to me the perfect righteousness of Christ.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: Can you say amen to that?
32:05
SPEAKER_01: Grants and credits to me the perfect righteousness of Christ as if I had never sinned nor even been a sinner.
32:15
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: And the last line: all I need to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: All I need to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.
32:25
SPEAKER_01: Do you understand that?
32:26
SPEAKER_01: All I need to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: I am not a I confess that when I'm, I do pray as I'm preparing sermons, but I am a normal, carnal human being, and therefore I could not get out of my mind a line by Kurt Russell from the tombstone movie at this part.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: All I need to do is accept this gift.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: All you need to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: And I saw Kurt Russell in the bar saying to that guy, so are you gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?
33:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: I I know it makes you ashamed to have me as your pastor, but but I think of that, and I think of the fact that you and I are so helpless and we think we can get there on our own, but actually we're just standing there bleeding.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: We're bleeding out.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: We're dying because we're trusting in our own best efforts to get to heaven.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: And God's saying to us, whoa, whoa, that's not my plan at all.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: My plan is that you trust in someone else who bled for you.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: My plan is that you put your faith in him.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: Will you do something about that?
33:34
SPEAKER_01: If you simply accept that free gift and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, so I stop and I say to you, so you're gonna do something about that?
33:44
SPEAKER_01: You're just gonna sit there and bleed.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: So let me give you five takeaways from this.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: You always said Cana is the righteous one who says, you're no better than anyone else, Jim, like the rest.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: You don't measure up.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
33:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I grew up in sort of a little fundamentalist type community thing with us twelve children and our little Baptist circle and so forth.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of thought that, you know, the people who weren't Christians, they were all pagan, whiskey slurping, backstabbing, pagan, you know, who, if they can only get saved, then they'd be honest and just and really nice people by Wednesday.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I thought there was this huge gap, and then because I couldn't talk to people normally, I took a job during my college years during the summer, thousands of miles from home, knocking on doors, so that I would learn how to meet and deal with people.
34:35
SPEAKER_01: And you know what I learned there?
34:37
SPEAKER_01: I certainly didn't make any money for the first few years I did it.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: But I learned something very clearly, and that is that I learned that I was completely wrong about the idea that people who grow up in church are Christians are any better, any better, or really any different from anyone else, because I met literally thousands of total strangers over these years, those years who came to the door and turned out to be kinder, more merciful, more gracious, more normal, you know, than I was.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: I realized the real difference between, shall we say, us and them.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: It's not a difference of who's better or who's worse, who acts better, thinks better, treats people better.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: The real difference is who's the one who's accessed God's righteousness, who realizes they're no better than anyone else.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: They don't measure up to the standard.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: But we have a loving God, says Yahweh Tsid Kainu, who, when I ask him to fix me and make me better so that I measure up, actually says, absolutely not, but I'll give you myself.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: My favorite groups, one of everybody's favorite groups in the world in the last 20 years, singing group is a British boys group called Cold Play.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've heard of them, but their most popular early song was called Fix You.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: It was a song about how, you know, there was there was affection involved and love, and eventually not only were they going to help their friend, but they were going and I will fix you.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: It kept being repeated.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: I always felt a little uncomfortable with that, but but you know, we need people who will love people and other people who will fix people.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: I tend to be more of a fix you person.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: My wife has sort of been the more of a I'll I'll love, I'll just sit beside you type of a person.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: You know, we need both kinds, but one thing we don't need is we don't need God fixing us, and God says, I'm not gonna fix you.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: That's not how you measure up.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: It never is about you, it's only about me.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: I refuse to fix you until that final day.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Until then, I'll give you myself.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: So that when you step into the judgment room and you look at God, he won't evaluate you because you've been prettied up and fixed up and you're a better person than you used to be.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: No, he'll look at me when he sees you, because he'll see me in you, and he'll say, You're as righteous as you need to be, you measure up.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: The third of the five takeaways is I realize Yahweh said Kane was the only wise God who saw what our greatest need was and supplied it.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: And our greatest need was that we not that we become nicer people, or else he would have told us to join a sensitivity group at the at the local YWCA or go to a small group at church and learn how to treat people.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: Our greatest need wasn't financial, or he didn't send an economic person.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't political, or he'd done a better job of giving us politicians, sorry about that.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: But he saw that our greatest need was actually that we didn't measure up and we desperately needed to measure up, or he could never have fellowship with us for eternity, and he supplied it by sending Yahweh Tsid Kainu to die for us.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: And fourth, that he's a merciful God who reaches out to wrap us in his robe of righteousness to become our personal Savior who assures us that now, no matter what the voices say, in your head or outside, that we do measure up and we measure up forever.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: Some of you, if you're like me, at this point are thinking of that Lauren Daigle song that goes, I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I'm not enough.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: You say I am loved when I don't feel a thing.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: And let me take the liberty to alter her words a little bit.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: You say, God, I am righteous when I know I've fallen short, and I believe.
38:41
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I believe.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: What you say of me, that I measure up, because you measure up, for I am in you, and you are in me.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: In a moment we'll sing a hymn, a song, actually a worship song based on a hymn, songs by Matt Marr, entitled Lord I Need Thee.
39:10
SPEAKER_01: When Matt explains why he came up with that song that we've sung here a number of times, that's real popular, he says, Well, actually, it has two influences.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: One is that old hymn that says, Lord, I need thee every hour.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: But the other is, and now he mentions one of my favorite books of all time, the book Four Loves by C.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: S.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: Lewis, in which Lewis mentions four kinds of love.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And he said in that book, he said, C.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: S.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Lewis said there's one kind of love which we don't really want because we're too sophisticated and too independent and too self-sufficient.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: We'd like to outgrow it, but it's a kind of a love that you never grow out of needing.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: And it is called need love, he said.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: It's the need love of needing God, needing God at every moment for the rest of your life to be everything that you are not and everything that you are needing.
40:05
SPEAKER_01: And that's when Matt says it hit me.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: I need God and I always will.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: He's my defense and my righteousness.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: In the name of God Himself, He is my Yahweh Titanu.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: Father, we are so grateful for the fact that you take our failed efforts and instead of making us a little better, you throw them in the trash can, and then you just give us yourself and say, here I am.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: I'll take care of that for you.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: We so appreciate that because we so often feel as though we don't measure up.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: We don't measure up in our family or in our school or in society or whatever it is that we fall short, and it's so nice.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: Lord, that we've got someone inside us telling the voices to shut up, telling us that we do measure up, that we're a child of yours, in Jesus' name, in the name of Yahweh to the Kenu.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: We pray, Beshimeshua.
41:19
SPEAKER_01: Amen.