Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 19, 2019 | Good Friday Message - Purpose

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April 19, 2019 | Good Friday Message - Purpose · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:01
SPEAKER_00: After I'm done speaking, uh, we're going to remember uh the Lord's death for us in a physical way.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're gonna ask you, when you're ready, no hurry, to get out of your seat and come up to one of these three tables and uh break off a piece of the unleavened bread, the purity of Jesus represented there, and uh grab a cup representing the new covenant in his blood.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: Take it back to your seat when all have been served.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: Feel free to eat and drink as soon as you're ready, by the way.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: And then when all have been served, I'll come up and close us in prayer.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you for a few minutes about purpose.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: About the purposes, the reason for Good Friday, but you know that four days ago on Monday, Notre Dame Cathedral burned in Paris.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: If you've had the privilege of being there for whatever reason, uh you probably agree with me that it's the most enjoyable, the best thing about all of all of France that I, in my opinion, I just I absolutely loved it.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's shocking to see an 850-year-old great structure, great in the history of Christianity, European Christianity, shocking to see it burn.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: But so moving that when the firemen came in, despite the fact that the steeple first fell and then the roof fell, that what they saw when they came in was that the cross was still standing.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: And um I think that's symbolic in a way of the fact that the religion of Christianity is burning, being replaced by secular humanism and Islamism in Europe.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: And in the West, Christianity, the religion of Christianity, is collapsing in many places and burning.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: But the important thing is that the cross still stands.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you about the cross.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: The next few minutes, I want to talk to you about uh six purposes of the cross, why Jesus died for us.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh somebody wrote a book a number of years ago.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's either 50 or 100 reasons why Christ died for us.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: I'll just give you six today, and my mine will divide into three sections, uh, three groups of two apiece.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: The two primal reasons, two personal reasons he died for us, and two practical reasons.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: I'll start with the practical, we'll go six by four, three, two, one.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: The two practical purposes, number six, is that Christ's, the purpose of Christ coming to die on Good Friday was to destroy racial hostility.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: The hostility, the animosity, the prejudice between Jews and non-Jews when Jesus was here was in every way as serious as the hostility and prejudice between races and ethnicities and nations today.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: But Christ's death was purposed to destroy that racial hostility.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: For the great apostle wrote in Ephesians chapter 2 that with Christ's death, he broke down the wall of hostility, establishing peace through the cross.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: When you see, uh you see these you see these marriages, these weddings nowadays more often than you ever used to, and when you see the wedding, as I have, of a Christian Arab to a Christian Jew in Israel, when you see a marriage, a Christian marriage between a black and a white, a Hispanic married to an Asian, it is a snapshot of the unity that Christ came to establish on the cross to destroy hostilities between races, ethnicities, and nations, and to build a bridge of peace out of the wood of the cross.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Number five, the second of the two practical or relational purposes of Christ coming to the cross was to establish marital harmony, to destroy racial disharmony, to establish marital harmony.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: God's design was never for marriage to be painful, miserable, and yet many marriages are.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: Ephesians 5.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: God's design for marriage is that the husband love his wife in the way Christ loved the church, sacrificing himself, and the wife responds to the love of her husband the way the church is to respond to Jesus Christ.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: This kind of love is possible because Christ came and died on the cross on Good Friday.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: Those are the two practical and relational reasons.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Purpose number four, these next two are personal and emotional.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Purpose number four is to show God's love for sinners, to display God's love for sinners.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: This is the answer to Roberta Flack's old musical question: where is the love?
6:29
SPEAKER_00: The love is hanging on the cross today.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: Because the greatest love ever shown is the love of God for the world that caused him to, John 3.16, give his one and only son, which is not just the greatest love of the world, it's also the most shocking love of the world, right?
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't know about you, but I tend to love people who are lovable, or at least to start acting a little nicer or clean up their acts a little bit, you know.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: But God shows his love for us in that Romans 5.8, while we were yet what?
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Sinners Christ died for us while we were still rebels.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: That's so his love's not just the greatest love.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: It's unbelievable.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: It's shocking.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: It's when we were enemies, it's when we're opposed to him.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: And in the person of Jesus Christ, of course, you know, they were spitting it and mocking him and gambling for his robe and beating him and all this kind of stuff.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: And yet Galatians 2.20 says it wasn't just God the Father who loved us, is that he loved us and gave himself for us.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: Jesus himself, saying, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: His love is unbelievable.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: But chances are some of you here don't feel loved.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's the way it always is.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: That's what Lauren Daigle sang about earlier this year.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the top, top songs this year all across the world.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: You say.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: It's so popular.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: It uses the background music all the time, you know, sports events, any, you know, romantic, anything having to do with love, anything having to do with self-acceptance and self-worth on television, you hear Lauren Daigle's song, You Say.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: But when she wrote that song, and when when she sang that song, she was singing it to God when she sang, you say, I am loved when I don't feel a thing.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: You've heard it, right?
8:27
SPEAKER_00: You say I am held when I'm falling short.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: When I don't belong, you say I am yours.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And I believe.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: It tells you that you are.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: The second of the personal and emotional purposes of the cross was to quote four words, to bring us, I'm sorry, that's five, to bring us to God.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Here it comes, 1 Peter 3.18, that he might bring us to God.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: That's personal, that's emotional.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: That's bringing you home to someone who wants to be your friend, who wants to have reconciliation and fellowship and intimacy and so forth.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, we were meant to experience full and lasting happiness from hanging around God forever, and he wants that.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: And so the cross was purposed to bring us to God.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Seems a little weird.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Do we really even long for that inside?
9:52
SPEAKER_00: C.S.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Lewis said.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: We've never really longed for anything else.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: It's the secret longing of our human heart that we can't define.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: It's this longing that we have to know our creator.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: It's what Tom Brady was referring to, perhaps ignorantly, after he won the Super Bowl when interviewed, he said, there must be more to life than this.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: Or even more recently, Professor Adam Frank, Dr.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Frank, scientist, astrophysicist at a professor at University of Rochester, writer of the book Light of the Stars, in his blog, Cosmos and Culture, not a believer, says, and I quote, there's a hunger in all of us for more than just facts.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: We hunger for meaning.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: It's like Shakespeare, he said, writes in the Tempest, we are such stuff as dreams are made on.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: We have dreams, we have desires.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: And God has planted, our Creator has planted in us a desire, a magnet that draws us toward him, and the cross makes it possible.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: It was a purpose so that God could bring us to himself.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: For what good is salvation if all it is is saving us from hell but not saving us to God?
11:18
SPEAKER_00: What good is redemption meaning to buy, if it means buying us out of bondage, but not bringing us all the way to the person who purchased us?
11:31
SPEAKER_00: Forgiveness isn't good news if all it means is erasing a debt, but it doesn't mean some sort of a personal reconciliation.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: Justification isn't good news if all it is is correcting your legal standing before God, but not bringing you fellowship with him.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Adoption, that great Christian word, is that good news if it puts us in the Father's family, but doesn't put us in his arms?
12:03
SPEAKER_00: No, the purpose of the cross is to put us in his arms, to bring us to God, in whose presence is fullness of joy, at whose right hand there are pleasures forevermore.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: Those are the two personal and emotional reasons.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: The final two reasons, the final two purposes of the cross.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: We're up to number two now.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: These are primal, these are substitutional.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Number two is he came to take on himself our guilt, our condemnation, our punishment.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Something in us resists right away.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we read that, hear that verse, there's no condemnation.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: For those who are in Christ Jesus, you go, why should I be condemned?
12:51
SPEAKER_00: What punishment do I deserve?
12:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm a good person.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, you want to talk about me being guilty, destined for judgment, but the answer is a dirty three-little word, sin, S-I-N, not an accepted word in modern society.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: We've replaced it with non-moral words like weakness, insensitivity, error, mistake.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, come on, we're all aware that there's something terribly wrong with the world.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: We're all, when we look at ourselves, aware that there are obsessions and there are tendencies and compromises inside us, that there's the covering of fibs and, you know, the betraying of people at times.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's David Brooks of the New York Times trying to, he was trying to defend the word sin in his secular audience.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: And he said this, he said, let's admit it.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, sin, he said, is not some demonic thing.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: It's just our perverse tendency to take good things and just to warp them.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: The same ambition that drives us to create a new company is what drives us to be materialistic and to exploit people.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: The same lust that leads to children, leads us to cheat and commit adultery.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: The same confidence that leads us to creativity and daring is the same confidence that leads to self-worship and arrogance.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: The same friendly personality that leads you to chat away with people and create relationships leads you to blab things that you shouldn't say, to betray confidences that people shared with you.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes some of those things aren't even true, and so that turns them into slander and it ruins reputations.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: And yet, of course, we say, well, those are small things.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: David Brooks writes, New York Times, he says, the getting rid of the word sin doesn't change the fact that there's something in us that's perverse.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: And Good Friday says, stop thinking that it's small.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Christ would not have needed to suffer a bloody death if sin was small.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: Think of your sin up against the incredible standard of a pure and holy creator.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Realize who it is you have rebelled against and realize how you have upset the order of the universe by defying the order and the God who created you.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: But because we think sin is small, we commit another horrible error.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: We think we can balance the records, we can make things right, we can get a little better, we can do some self-improvement, forgetting that, hey, it's impossible.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Come on, look at you, look at your history.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Salvation's not won by balancing the records.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: You need to cancel the records.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: Someone needs to take the punishment, someone needs to carry the guilt, someone needs to take the consequences of your sin on himself.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: And on Good Friday.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: That's what God did.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Because we're incapable ourselves of balancing the record books.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Christ came, lived the perfect life, hung on the cross, and Isaiah 53.6 puts it this way: God laid on him the iniquity of us all.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: He took our guilt, our condemnation, our punishment on himself, our curse, said Paul.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: But praise God, that gets us off this stupid performance standard where if I do this and this and this, if I'm slightly better than the other people I know that there, therefore God will accept me.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm sincere, I'm giving it a fair faith, you know, try.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna ever be saved because we're wonderful.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: If you're ever gonna be saved, it's because he's wonderful.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And he took your pain, he took your sin, he took your punishment because he's wonderful.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: Thank goodness.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: No.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Thank God.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Your goodness will never get you there.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, I've talked enough on that one.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: A lawyer friend of mine raised a glass earlier this year and and said in his toast, I love it.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, maybe we'll get what we want, maybe we won't, but let's just hope we don't get what we deserve.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: He's exactly right.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: The other and final primal, the number one purpose tonight that Christ came was to give eternal life to all who believe him.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Because if he took our condemnation, our punishment, our guilt, our sin, then he also took the death, the eternal death that's a punishment for us, and therefore can give us eternal life.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: I met people who are in such pain.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: You have too, who don't wish for life.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: They even wish for death.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: At least they say they do.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: They want it just to end.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: You really don't wish for death.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: What you really wish for is relief because you'd like to have the good times back again.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: You would.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: You'd like to have life and love and laughter and happiness.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: You'd like to have your best friends rise again from the dead and rejoin you.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: The longing of the human heart is to be like God, who put us in his image, and God loves life and loves laughter.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: The deep longing of the human heart is for heaven, which is with God, and it's life eternal.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: Don't wonder whether or not you want life eternal.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: It's the secret longing inside you, and it is why Christ came to die today.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: He's put eternity in your heart, and he's died to give you eternal life.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And when you get there, mind can't conceive, eye hasn't seen, ear hasn't heard the wonderful things God has prepared for his children.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: When the kids were small, I was studying up on suffering and death and reading, just read a book about suffering and death, decided to interview my children.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: I felt like they were they needed a little introduction to this sort of stuff.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: So I went into the living room where they were playing.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: And I asked my oldest, a six-year-old, who's sort of the resident theologian of the family, said, Adrian, does God make all sick people get better?
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Immediately.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: She said, Yes.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: Really?
20:25
SPEAKER_00: Does God make all sick people get better?
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Without hesitation.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: She was also an optimist.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Does he really?
20:41
SPEAKER_00: A little more hesitantly, since it was the third time I was asking.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: So I decided to try to shake her faith a little bit.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: I reminded her of a friend of our family, a woman who was in a wheelchair who for years had had trouble breathing and so forth.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Do you know her, don't you?
20:59
SPEAKER_00: Adriel said, Yes.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: She nodded, and I said, Well, what if she gets sicker and sicker?
21:08
SPEAKER_00: She'd already been coded a number of times.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: And Adriel said in a whisper, she'll die.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: Adri's four-year-old brother, not the theologian in the family, but the logical, no-nonsense trivia expert.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: The four-year-old spoke up at that point and said, Then they'll put her in a box and put it in the ground.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: She's never been a Hallmark movie kind of a guy.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: But Adrian balanced it.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: She said, But she's a Christian.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And so God will take her to be with him.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Christ came.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: He came for practical reasons to destroy racial hostility and to establish marital harmony.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: He came for personal, emotional reasons to display, to show us his love for us, even when we don't feel it.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And to bring us to God.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: And he came for primal, fundamental reasons.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: He came to take the guilt, sin punishment that should be stamped upon us.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: He took that for us, including our death, so that then he could give eternal life to all who believe in him.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: That's why he came.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: That's why he suffered this morning.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: That's why he died at three o'clock this afternoon.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: That's why you're here.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we've come to remember as you ask us to.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: To remember your death.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: We've been doing it with our voices.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: We've been doing it with our minds.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: Lord bless us as now we do it with our hands.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: As we do it by taking the bread and drinking the cup and remembering your death until you come.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Amen.