Redemption - From Wrath to Resurrection - Sermons - JT English - 10.4.26

JT English (0:02)

Hey man, good morning, Storyline, how you doing?

Hey, I'm so thankful that you're here today. We're gonna open up in Romans chapter seven, if you have a copy of God's Word, and I hope you do. Romans seven, beginning in verse 14, and just full transparency, we're gonna be all over the Bible today, just all over it. So if you want, I'll have everything up on the screen, but if you have a Bible and kind of want to play like, race me to the next passage, we're gonna be doing a lot of that. So just lots and lots and lots of scripture, because today's topic is something that honestly, I'm not sure. I could at least speak for myself that I even had a full grasp on until I was really studying it this week. And it's also one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it, you see it everywhere. Like remember those magic eyes that you would, that's what they were called, right? Magic eye, like those pictures on the wall that looked like nothing, and then you saw it, and then you could only see it. Remember it was like a whale, and someone was like, hey, there's a whale on that picture. You're like, it's not a whale, it's a bunch of colors. Does anybody else remember these? Okay, good. I was like, I feel like I'm making something up here. Nobody was responding. That's kind of how I feel about this a little bit. You see it, you're like, oh my gosh, this is on every page of the Bible. So lots of jumping around, but I want you to see what God's word has to say about this question in particular. We're in the middle of a series right now talking about the atonement. And the atonement means, what did Christ accomplish at the cross? Like, what is it? And the Bible uses a lot of different words to talk about what Jesus did. It uses words that we've already covered, like propitiation or expiation. Again, you don't need to know those words, but you should know what they mean. It means that God's wrath is satisfied, that God has a disposition towards sin because he is just and loving to punish sin. It's just and loving for God to punish sin. But at the cross, Jesus propitiates. Romans chapter three, he's the Hill of Stereon. It's the place where God's wrath is satisfied. He absorbs the wrath of God. He expiates with the other big word. That means that he takes our guilt and removes it from us, cleanses us from it. Last week, we looked at the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and it's this idea that the sinless one became sinful in our place, so that the sinful ones could be declared righteous and just and innocent. So what I've tried to show you over these few weeks is that the cross is almost like a diamond.

It's a diamond that when we look at it, we wanna see the different facets, the different cuts of it, so that when the light of Jesus Christ shines upon it, and we turn it, we can see the depth of the beauty of all that He accomplished for us. And the topic we're looking at this week is redemption, to be purchased and to be possessed by God. Which is again, that's different than reconciliation. That's different than justification. That's different than anything else we've covered so far, to be purchased by God. The catechism question, I hope you're doing these at home, either with your friends or family or cat or whatever, is this question, is it's, am I truly free?

Am I free? And I think that's the right question. But we love that language of freedom, don't we? Especially as good Americans, we love freedom. Freedom is a virtuous thing. It's a good thing. Freedom is a wonderful thing. But I want you to see today that the Bible's gonna describe freedom maybe slightly differently than the way that we've been taught to think about freedom. Because the Bible describes freedom more in relationship as belonging to something. Freedom isn't to be totally free and autonomous or an individual. It's actually to say, who is my master? That's what true freedom is. We'll see that the Bible says that today. So maybe the better question, though, I'm still gonna use the, am I free? But maybe a better question is, who or what do I belong to?

Have you ever answered that question before? Who do you belong to? What possesses you? I've got some really bad news for us before I've got some good news for us. Because the Bible describes us in terms of just being humans as not being totally radically free to express ourselves, but rather being possessed by Satan. Belonging to sin, being slaves to death and unrighteousness. So the first thing that I want you to see is, is before we can think about freedom, we need to understand that we, outside of Christ, belong to or are possessed by sin. That's where we are in Romans chapter seven, verse 14 Like I said, lots of Bible today. But here's what Paul says.