God constantly invites us to return to His presence and allow Him to fix what’s wrong in our lives.
In Isaiah 1:18, He invites us to “Come let us reason together.” Reasoning with God means allowing Him to highlight, confront, correct, and cleanse us from the sin in our lives, thus, the verse goes on to say, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”
Being confronted with your sins and having them corrected doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience. To be honest, it’s something that our flesh (our human nature) dreads. This is why we find it so hard to go to church on Sunday. This is why we avoid preachers, evangelists, and many times, why we decline to go to counseling or therapy.
We don’t want to confront our sin, our flaws, our bad decisions. We want to simply ignore them and hope things get better. However, the best way to exacerbate a problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist. The best way to solve a problem is to confront it head on. Admittedly, that’s a scary and unpleasant task, but healing requires it.
And, God invites us to reason with Him so He can do that work for us.
This process is demonstrated in action in Isaiah 6, and we see God extend this same invitation to King Ahaz in Isaiah 7 when He invites Ahaz to “ask a sign of the Lord.”
At Life Point Baptist Church, we are not here to cause you to feel shame, or to berate you or intensify the pain your sin has brought you. We do want to introduce you to our Lord so He can heal you. Services start at 11 am on Sunday mornings. We’d love to meet you.
In Isaiah 1:18, God says, “Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
As we discussed last week, to reason with God means to come to the Lord, allow Him to convict you of your sin and correct your sin, and then God will cleanse you and forgive you of your sin.
In Isaiah 6, we see what this looks like, as Isaiah has his reasoning moment with God.
In John 9, the Apostle John continues his mission to demonstrate to us Who Jesus really is by recording the miracle of the healing of the blind man. John opens by telling us that this man was born blind, that it was Jesus who saw him, and he recorded the conversations between the apostles and Jesus concerning the man’s condition.
There was a thought process in Israel during Jesus’ day that if good things happened to you, God was pleased with you. If bad things happened, God was angry with you.
In the case of the blind man, what happened? Was God upset with his parents? Or with a future sin this man would commit.
Jesus answered, “neither,” saying that the man was born blind so that the works of God would be manifest in him.
From this passage, we see that the Lord sees us. We then see how God works in our lives, and we see the timeframe by which God works. For more, check out Pastor Leland Acker’s message posted above.
The conversation continues between Jesus and the Pharisees in the aftermath of His forgiving the woman who was taken in the act of adultery in John 8. The Pharisees are challenging Jesus’ authority and trying to discredit Him, while Jesus preaches the truth and calls them out on their Spiritual ignorance.
In this message, Pastor Leland Acker warns about the dangers of studying scripture without learning Who God is, and how many high-level Bible scholars spend lifetimes reading and studying scripture without knowing God. Such was the case for the Pharisees.
So, in this passage, Jesus reminded the Pharisees that, like all non-believers, they stand condemned before God. The only escape from this condemnation is through faith in Christ.
Jesus then confirmed His identity and promised blessings to the believers. Listen in as Pastor Leland Acker brings us an encouraging word from this powerful passage.
In chapter 8, the Apostle John records the account of the woman taken in adultery, in which Pharisees challenged Jesus by bringing a woman who was allegedly caught in the act of adultery, and demanding that Jesus tell them what her consequence should be.
In that famous passage of scripture, Jesus told the Pharisees that the one without sin could cast the first stone. After they all left, realizing both their own sin and their inability to win this particular debate with Jesus, the Lord asked the woman where her accusers were. When she said no one stood there to condemn her, Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
John 8 is a beautiful account of the sinless perfection of Christ, and His grace and mercy upon us as we struggle with sin.
After this incident, Jesus proclaimed, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
Jesus being the Light of the world is a recurring theme in the book of John, beginning with John 1, in which states that “in Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”
With that, we are reminded that life with all of its meaning, fulfillment and blessings, comes from Christ. He is the source of life, intellect and creativity. This means that, ultimately, Christ is the source of all that is good in life.
Check out this message, as Pastor Leland Acker discusses how Christ being the Light of the world brings goodness to our lives and gives us deliverance from the darkness of this world.
What does it mean to be in Christ? For the Apostle Paul in Romans 8, being in Christ simply means to be redeemed by the power of the Gospel. Being in Christ means you trust Him for salvation, and you have the hope of entering eternal life in His Kingdom as a result.
In John 17, Jesus has just observed the Passover meal with His disciples. Having broken the unleavened bread and shared the wine, thus instituting the Lord’s supper, Jesus spent the next few moments preparing the disciples for what would come next. From John 13-16, He prepared His disciples for His arrest, trials, and crucifixion.
As He discussed these things with His disciples, He reminded them of God’s eternal plan through all of it, and how it would all work to their redemption. Still, things weighed heavy on the heart of our Lord, and on the hearts of the disciples.
So, in John 17, Jesus lifted up His prayer to God. In that prayer, He prayed for His own glorification, for the protection of the disciples, and then He brings the prayer to its glorious conclusion in verses 20-26 as He prayed for the unity and glorification of His disciples.
You read that right… the unity, and the glorification of His disciples.
Christ prayed that His disciples would be one, that they would be unified. Since verse 20 shows that Christ not only prayed for His disciples, but also for all future believers, we can conclude that He prayed for our unity as well.
This unity that Christ prayed for was not a generic hope that we would all be able to get along. Unity can only come from being centered around a central idea, theme, ethic or cause. There has to be a basis for unity.
In His prayer, the Lord prayed that we would be one in God. The basis for our unity is the Lord Jesus, and our Heavenly Father. In a broader sense, the basis of our unity would be in what Christ was about to accomplish on the cross.
Unity among believers can only happen if we are centered upon the Gospel. If we lose our focus on the Gospel, we will find ourselves preoccupied with different things, and those different things will divide us. Therefore, we must continually focus and refocus ourselves on the Gospel.
As Alastair Begg once preached, we must preach the Gospel to ourselves daily to prevent ourselves from drifting from the Lord, and placing our trust in ourselves and our own understanding.
Indeed, once we lose focus on the Gospel, we become more focused on the menial things of this world, and such drift more toward selfishness. This is the cause for most church divisions.
Show me a church that is divided over worship style, and I’ll show you a church that has lost its focus on the Gospel. Show me a church divided over carpet color, sanctuary decor, and programs, and I will show you a church that has lost its Gospel.
Show me a church building that has been placed on the market as the congregation it once housed disbanded, and I will show you a church that forgot the reason for its existence.
When we lose the Gospel, we lose unity, we lose purpose, we lose everything.
Jesus prayed that we would be one. That we would be united in will and understanding, that we would hold the same mission. That can only be accomplished through our unified focus on the Gospel.
Jesus then prayed that we would be glorified. Specifically, in His prayer He mentioned that the glory that was given to Him was also given to His disciples. This “glory” is translated from the Greek, Doxa, from which we get the title of the song, Doxology, which means to make renown, or to be well thought of.
Christ not only made His name great in the Earth by completing the Gospel, He lifted up the names of His disciples, too. This was done so that the disciples could turn around and glorify the Lord.
There are aspects to our transformation in the Gospel that make us stand out in this world. The purpose behind our standing out is to direct people to the Gospel.
The purpose of all of this is to effectively proclaim the Gospel and lead others to salvation. Is that a purpose we live by? Or do we get in the way with our earthly and selfish desires? To ensure that we do the former, and not the latter, we must be Gospel-focused.
The Point... 