Reformed Baptist Church in O'Fallon, Missouri
HomeSermonsThe Passover Lamb

The Passover Lamb

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

1 Corinthians 15 and Galatians 1: Don’t Change the Gospel

How y’all doing this morning? Great, good, good, good, great, good, great, awesome. Why don’t you open your Bibles to, there’s so many verses I want to look at. I’m not sure where to start. What’s that? You going to bring a Bible? Oh, lunch. Yeah, we might be here a while. No, not too long. Just kidding. Open to John chapter 1. Gospel of John. Well, no, I changed my mind. Go to 1 Corinthians 15. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says this. Well, maybe we better pray for the sermon, what do you think? Should we do that? Good idea. By the way, Lorraine Kelly’s here. Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! We love Lorraine. All right, let’s go ahead and pray. Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You that You’ve given us Your Holy Spirit to understand Your Word. We do acknowledge our need for His ministry right now to teach us, to enlighten our minds, but also to move our hearts and our affections that we would not just hear, but we’d embrace the things that we learned today. We thank You for the communion of the saints. We thank You for Your presence here in Your church. Bless our time, Lord, make it fruitful in our lives and ultimately fruitful for Your kingdom and Your glory. We pray in Your name, Jesus, amen.

All right, so 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says, “Moreover, brethren,” verse 1, “I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Therefore, whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” Now, you probably know the context here. Paul preached the gospel to the Corinthians, and he says here in verse 2 that if they believed and held fast to the gospel, they would be saved. In other words, it was possible they believed what he says in vain. In other words, they didn’t really believe, or they believed falsely. And he deals with the problem in Corinth, and that was that on philosophical grounds, the Corinthians were rejecting the notion of a physical resurrection. This is because the church was, these people were coming out of kind of a Gnostic pagan background believing that material, literal, the physical body was fundamentally evil, that it wasn’t redeemable. Therefore the salvation of Christ was a spiritual salvation, but not necessarily a physical salvation. It didn’t include a physical resurrection. They argue this on philosophical grounds and Paul is helping them see that if you object on philosophical grounds to the resurrection, you’re really denying what Jesus did. You’re denying the gospel, he’s saying. So they weren’t, as we say, they weren’t connecting the dots between an idea they had over here and how that idea was at odds with the gospel. So Paul gives the gospel in maybe one of the most simplest, shortest versions here when he simply sums it up, is that Christ died for our sins, that He was buried, that He rose from the dead. That’s, he says, here’s the gospel I preached. Jesus died for our sins, He was buried, and He rose from the dead. Now we know when we read the New Testament, especially a book like Romans, or Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Paul expounds the gospel. So, as I’ve said many times before the gospel can be very small if you want to sum it up in a couple points, or the gospel is all-encompassing if you know what I mean. And really what the New Testament is, it’s the writers of the New Testament taking the gospel story of Jesus and the cross and saying this is what it means for your life and for the world. In other words, let us expound the depths of what Jesus accomplished by this simple dying for sins according to the Scriptures, being buried, rising from the dead. Here’s what it means. And so all of the epistles are really, you could say, it’s all gospel, right? Because it’s all rooted in Jesus Christ and what He did when He died on the cross, was buried and rose from the dead. If Jesus didn’t die, if He had not been buried, if He had not come back from the dead, none of the New Testament would be true. None of it would be there. It’s all really just an exposition, an explanation, a filling in of what happened, because in the Gospels when you read about Jesus dying on the cross, it’s a historical account, right? It’s not a theological account. It’s just saying these events happened. Well, okay, well what do they mean? What’s their value? What is the implication for my life? Well, we only learn this really when we turn to the epistles. So what was happening in Corinth was they were, how shall we say, trimming down the gospel. Okay, they were trimming it down, meaning they were taking part of the gospel and excluding what was fundamental to the gospel, the resurrection. Now go to Galatians chapter 1 and we see in Galatians a different problem but the [audio unclear] same problem. Paul says in verse 1 that he was an apostle “not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead,” and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia. He says, “Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Verse 6, “I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed.” This is one of the strongest texts in the entire Bible. Clearly one of the strongest texts in the New Testament. I mean, you talk about not being seeker friendly. Wow. Let him be accursed. There’s no stronger language. So this is really important to Paul, right? This is really important. And he even knows that he’s being, how shall we say, offensive. He knows he’s being offensive because then he goes, he says in the very next verse, “Do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” In other words, he’s saying, I’m a servant of God. So I have to please God, right? I have to say what God wants said, is that right? I have to preach the gospel of God, even if God’s gospel might offend some, is what he’s saying. So the Galatians were doing something similar to the Corinthians, and they were trimming the gospel. But in the Galatian case, I shouldn’t say they were trimming the gospel, they were changing the gospel. In their case, they were actually adding to the gospel. In Corinth, they were eliminating the doctrine of the resurrection. In Galatians, they were adding the Mosaic law. In both cases, they were changing the gospel. And Paul says, when he says in verse 6, they’re changing it to a different gospel, he says, which is not another. In other words, there aren’t two or three or four different gospels. You’re saying there’s only one gospel. It’s not like you have the American gospel and then you have the British gospel and you have the Japanese gospel or the Chinese gospel. There’s just one gospel. And so the point I’m making is that we can mess up the gospel. And we can mess it up by trimming it down. We can mess it up by adding things that aren’t essential. And so we need to be careful in our understanding of the gospel because our understanding of the gospel clearly determines whether or not we are believing the right gospel, right? Which really means that our souls depend on this. But in addition to our souls, as we communicate the gospel to other people, as you share the gospel with your children, as you share the gospel with friends or family, your understanding of the gospel is what you communicate. So we need to be careful that we’re not giving a, how should we say, an Americanized gospel. You know what I’m saying about that? Americanized gospel. This is the gospel that doesn’t really involve sin. This is the gospel that doesn’t involve a real blood atonement. This is the gospel of love interpreted in the context of the modern notion of love. And it is a different gospel. It is a different gospel. I’m going to read you a quote off my cool iPhone because I’m a cool pastor. If you want to see how really cool I am, I have AirPods. I might even put one in to impress you. That’s for you young people. Just kidding. Evangelical. You know what evangelical means? It’s supposed to mean Bible believing, atonement believing, Christ’s blood-bought, Christ buried, Christ coming back from the dead, Christ coming to judge believing. So an evangelical leader says, “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father punishing His Son for an offence He has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement ‘God is love.’ If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by His Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil.” In other words, what he’s saying is that the traditional, and I would say traditional understanding of the atonement, probably from, it was there in the early church, it got a little muddy in the Middle Ages, but 1100 until fairly recently, that when Jesus died on the cross, God really was punishing Jesus for the sins of humankind. He was doing that. He is saying that that is a form of child abuse. That God the Father was abusing His child on the cross. This is an evangelical leader, well known. In other words, he’s denying, and he’s even stating clear words in other books and articles, an article, he’s denying substitutionary atonement. He’s denying that what Jesus did on the cross, He was actually bearing the wrath of God against sin in the place of sinners. He’s denying that and he’s saying to believe that is to believe that God was abusing His own child on the cross. That one little paragraph has so many things in it that show how confused he is about theology. It’s astounding. To refer to the cross as a personal act of violence is to totally misunderstand what happened. On the part of the Romans, it was a, it may have been a personal act of violence, but on the part of God, it was a judicial act. And the difference between a personal act and a judicial act, well, it changes what happened on the cross. So, the gospel today in evangelicalism is a whole lot of things. And that’s why when you talk to somebody and say, oh yeah, I’m a Christian, I go to church, don’t assume they’re a Christian. Don’t assume that at all. Because the gospel, I mean, this is a gospel being preached. Okay? A gospel without an atonement, a gospel without a suffering Savior, a gospel without shed blood is being preached. And that gospel does not save. It does not save. It may soothe, but it doesn’t save.

Behold the Lamb Who Takes Away Sin

Look at John chapter 1. Did you know that the Bible has a bad word in it? Kids, are you excited? You get to hear a bad word from the pastor. You ready? All your parents are like, oh, Lord. Here it is. You ready? John 1:29. “The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold!’” that means look, pay attention, “‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’” There it is. It’s a bad word, sin. I told you the story, but I love this story. I’m going to tell it again about someone who doesn’t go here because of my preaching. They don’t like my preaching. And they told me that. They said, I don’t like your preaching. Okay, what don’t you like? And he said, because you talk about sin. I appreciate his honesty, but deplore his theology. Here’s what’s happening to the gospel. The gospel is becoming some kind of transaction in which God loves and blesses without the question of sin being discussed or addressed. You understand what I’m saying? If we preach a gospel that doesn’t mention sin, well guess what? We can’t preach a gospel that mentions grace because grace is the remedy to sin. And the irony, and this is a profound irony in this whole thing, is that some of these people really do mean well, and what they want to do is they want to magnify the grace of God. They want to highlight God is gracious and God is love and God is positive, and He’s positive, but you can’t have a gracious God if there’s no sin which the grace addresses. That’s what it’s for. It is unmerited favor. Do you understand what that means? Unmerited. Why is it unmerited? Because we merited something else because of our sin. Our sin causes us to merit judgment but God’s gracious so He gives us what we didn’t merit and we get what we don’t deserve which is blessing. If you take sin out of the gospel, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the problems of the world. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the unhappiness of the world. Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the injustice of the world.” Now if you’re really thinking about what I’m saying, you’re thinking, well He does do all that. He does. But what did He say? Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree bad and its fruit bad. In other words, Jesus puts the axe to the root. The source of unhappiness, the source of injustice, the source of the pain and suffering in the world is sin. And while we look at the problems, we look at the manifestation of the root, God deals with the root. Because if you want a world without injustice, you have to deal with the sin problem. You want a world without suffering, you have to deal with the sin problem. If you want people to truly be happy and reach their full potential, you have to deal with the sin problem because sin is the source of all of our suffering and woe. And God doesn’t pick the fruit, He attacks the root. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” And by taking away the sin of the world, He then opens up the door, if you will, for the blessing and the justice and the righteousness and the love and the joy and the peace. But we can’t get all of that without the root being dealt with. So if we try to preach a gospel that’s nicer than Jesus, well, here’s what Jesus said. You want to see what Jesus said? You all believe in Jesus? All right. Well, here’s what He said. So get mad at Him, not me. John 3. After saying you have to be born again, which implies that you’re dead in your sin and you need new life, which is not a flattering thing. He says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Good news. Amen. Good news. Next verse is good news. Look at this one. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” Good news. Should we stop there? Well, it gets a little fuzzy here now. You ready? “He who believes in Him is not condemned.” Well, that’s good news, “but he who does not believe is condemned already,” that’s bad news. Because we don’t want God, God doesn’t condemn people, does He? I mean, hmm. “Because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation,” this is it, he says, “that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” That’s what sin means. “For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.” So we want to read verses 16, maybe 17, and then stop. But you can’t, because they all go together. The gospel of God is a gospel in which God takes away sin. To deny sin is to deny the gospel. There’s no way around it. Now I understand that there’s a way, some preachers talk about sin, they talk about sin in such a way that you just feel like, oh, I’m being shamed, I’m being condemned, mean shame. That’s not the way to preach about sin. But you can’t, even as believers who the Bible doesn’t call us sinners, you know that? It calls us saints. But when sin is talked about in the New Testament, it’s talked about in such a way as to warn us and to caution us and to teach us how to be free from this terrible thing called sin. Not to shame us. But you can’t give the warnings and the exhortations. You can’t teach about holiness and sanctification, which is really how you get happy, if you get holy, you’re going to get happy. Doesn’t work the other way around. You can’t do any of that if you don’t say the word sin, and sin becoming a bad word. I mean, people just don’t say sin anymore in our society, and even in many of our churches you’ll never, you rarely ever hear the word sin, because sin is now the bad word. Sin is not a bad word. Sin is a bad thing, right?

Love, Justice, and the Cost of Sin

When you think about the cross, you know, Jesus says here, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” so that word gave is not just gave Jesus to enter into the world. Clearly there’s atonement ideas here. He gave His Son as a sacrifice for sin. He gave His Son on the cross. He gave His Son as a lamb. Now I’ll talk more about the lamb in a moment. Okay, this is all atonement kind of language. So when we think of the cross, what do you see? I mean, think about Jesus hanging on the cross, okay? Just picture Jesus hanging on the cross, beaten and bloodied and expiring on the cross. What do we see there? Well, “For God so loved the world.” That’s what we see, right? We see God’s love manifested in the sacrifice of His Son. But that’s not the only thing we see. Because when we see that image of the cross, we’re not only seeing God’s love, we’re seeing God’s justice. I mean think about it. If there was any other remedy to the sin problem wouldn’t God have done that instead of the cross? You know what I mean? You all have kids. You don’t want to see your kids suffer. Would you, would you, you know what I’m saying? Everything in you wants to protect. And yet Jesus is on the cross exposed to the condemnation of God in the place of us. So we see God’s love, but we see God’s justice. And the other thing we see is the sinfulness of sin. Jesus Christ was absolutely perfect. Right? Morally perfect. There was no fault found in Him. Look what they did to Him. Look what fallen man did when holiness entered space and time. I mean, I can understand Christians being persecuted because we’re all fallen. We do stupid things, we sin, but we’re talking about someone who is morally perfect, and the response to that moral perfection was hatred. Hatred. Read the Gospels. They said Jesus was demon-possessed. I mean they hated Him. Well that shows, what it [audio unclear] doesn’t just show us love, it does, but it shows us more, it shows us justice, and it shows us the reality of sin and the great cost of sin. That it really came to that. It came to Jesus hanging on a cross, God’s own Son. That was the only remedy. So we can’t have a gospel, a sinless gospel. Otherwise the gospel really doesn’t make sense. It’s just another offering of, it’s another self-help program. It’s another form of self-improvement. Now, there’s a lot that you might gain personally from a self-help book, and I’m not saying they’re all bad. But there’s one thing the Bible tells us that we cannot do on our own. We cannot defeat sin on our own. That’s the one thing we can’t do. We cannot remove its judgment. We cannot remove its power. We cannot remove its presence on our own. But that’s why God sent the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. God sent Jesus to take away the condemnation of sin. You know, people don’t want to hear that word, judgment, condemnation, but the gospel is the message that although that’s real, the gospel is God removes it for those who believe. The offer is to come, embrace the Savior, believe in Jesus Christ, and there will be no condemnation for you. And the other part of the gospel is that not only does God remove the penalty for sin, He removes the power of sin in the believer’s life. God works in our lives to free us from sin and to make us holy. Can I give you an amen? That’s a good thing. That is a good thing. Because it is sin that destroys. It destroys people’s happiness. It destroys marriages, families, churches, communities, nations. Sin is evil. God frees us from sin as He works in our life, as He sanctifies us, and the more that He makes us free from sin, the more we receive the blessings of the New Covenant, the love, the joy, the peace, the power, as the more we’re free from sin, we’re transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. We’re empowered to live a victorious life, an abundant life. Jesus said, I have come to give them abundant life. But we can’t have abundant life if our lives are full of sin. That’s why we have to talk about sin in the church, not to condemn, but to redeem. Not to shame, but to free people. I mean, so many Christians are in bondage to sin. And then they’re told, don’t talk about sin. How are you going to get free if you don’t talk about it? And then Jesus, so He works, His salvation frees us from the power of sin as we grow in grace and sanctification and then ultimately when we go to heaven we’re freed from the very presence of sin. It says in Revelation that there’ll be no more tears, no more sorrow. Anybody looking forward to that? You know why there’s no tears and sorrow in heaven? There’s no sin there. And God is all in all. God’s here, amen. But our joy and the wonderful things we experience knowing God in this world are all, they’re tainted or they’re mixed in with the reality of sin in the world. And so we can experience days of joy and peace and then all of a sudden we get up and we’re in the pit. Why? Who knows? Or we can walk in victory for a while and then we backslide and we sin. Our experience in this world is a mixed blessing, but in heaven the very presence of sin is removed and God is all in all. And we will live in His light day and night forever and ever. Amen. And there’ll be no tears, no sorrow. There’ll be joy unrestrained, joy that’s sustained, joy that is eternal. If you’ve ever had one of those intense moments with Jesus, ever had one of those intense moments where it’s like, you’re in His presence, He’s real. I mean, it’s like, if you open your eyes, you’re almost afraid to be standing there, you know what I mean? And you know the mixture of the joy and the awe, the reverence, all of it mixed together. You get it for a little bit, and heaven you’ll get it forever. No sin to invade, to defile, to disrupt, constant communion with our Maker. And we will see Him face to face. Not now in a mirror dimly, but face to face. Glory to the Lamb, amen. The Lamb that takes away the sins of the world.

The Invitation Still Stands

So let’s stand together. I just want to share briefly, I’ve been talking about the gospel. Many of you know Christ, some of you may not, I don’t know your heart. But the invitation that Jesus gave is still available. In other words, He’s still inviting people. He’s inviting you right now. Jesus said, come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy and My burden is light. He wants to take the burdens off you. That invitation which He gave 2,000 years ago is still open. He’s still inviting, inviting you to come into a relationship with His heavenly Father through His work as the Lamb. Because as the Lamb He bore the sins of the world, John tells us. And so you are invited based upon the work of the Lamb, if you will believe in the Lamb and His work, you’re invited to come to know His Father. And knowing God is joy. I remember all the mental things I went through as I resisted the gospel when I was younger. And all of the fears that I had, oh God’s going to make me a weirdo. Well you’re thinking, well He did, no. God’s going to do this, God’s going to make me go to the worst country in the empire, God’s going to do this. God is going to, here’s what God’s going to do for you. He’s going to take away your sin, and He’s going to make you the person you were created to be. Not the deformed version that you are right now. And I don’t mean that as an insult, but I mean sin deforms us. We are not where we have been created to be as long as sin has dominion in our lives. As He takes sin away from you, He makes you what you were designed from eternity past to be. He makes you you. But you in the image of His Son Jesus. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. So let’s bow our heads and pray, and then Chris will come up and close on a worship song. Let’s bow our heads. If you’ve never come to Jesus, I invite you to come to Jesus now. Accept the invitation. He’s inviting you to come to Him, to believe in Him, to trust Him. Say yes to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, thank You for dying for my sins. Thank You, Lamb of God. I want to know You, I want to know Your Father. You pray that to Him, He will hear that prayer. He will respond to you. And you can begin today a relationship with Him. Lord Jesus, we thank You that You are the precious Lamb of God without blemish or spot. We thank You, Lord, that You bore our sins, as John says. And because of Your death for our sins, Your burial and Your resurrection, we now can know You, that we are not condemned, that we are forgiven, that we’re in Your family, that we are blessed with an inheritance, God, that we’ve been redeemed from sin, that we’ve been justified, Lord, and we’re going to be glorified. We thank You for the many, many, many blessings that cannot be enumerated that we have because of Your work for us. We give You all the praise, all the glory and all the honor, and all God’s people said, amen.