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[0:00] Turn to Colossians chapter 1. We're just going to look at verse 13 and 14 this morning. We're through the part where Paul records his prayer in verses 9 through 12.

[0:14] And really, 13 and 14 make a transition from the prayer, which could almost be considered maybe part of that prayer, into verse 15 through 20. And 15 through 20 is an old Christian hymn.

[0:28] Maybe Paul wrote it. We're not sure. But he records it here. And many of the manuscripts that have it show it written as like a poem, as like Hebrew poetry and whatnot.

[0:39] And so we get to see Paul basically going off into worship and doxology and praising Jesus beginning in verse 15.

[0:49] And so he starts that here, transitions to that with verse 13 and 14. So here's the word of the Lord. Colossians chapter 1 verse 13 and 14.

[1:00] For he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

[1:13] Father, thank you for your word. And it is our prayer that you would help us to understand what we need to from this passage. We know that we cannot hit the depths of this, but we can understand something this morning that would encourage and strengthen and help us.

[1:32] And we pray that you would open our eyes and ears, that you would give us faith to listen to what your word says. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

[1:42] So I want you to remember that part of what's going on in this book of Colossians is that Paul wants them to grow in their faith, but he knows that they are being challenged by false teachers.

[2:01] You'll remember, I say it this way, and I'll try to say it again and again in the same way so you can sort of grasp and understand. It's almost as though these false teachers come along and they hear that the Colossians have trusted Jesus, and it's like the false teachers are saying, you've trusted Jesus? That's great.

[2:19] Now let us finish your training. Let us tell you the secret things that you have not known and understood. And the problem with that is that there are no secret teachings.

[2:31] Everything is plain in the scriptures. They can see exactly what it is that God has spoken to us. And it is that kind of an attitude that I think even inundates us in our culture.

[2:47] I think there's many times that we have people around us, we have different ideologies, different belief systems, different versions of unbelief that will come to us and say, listen, I know that you believe in Jesus, but the Jesus you believe in, actually it's not quite right.

[3:05] We need to help you tweak your Jesus. Your Jesus needs to be a little different. And the world is going to tell you this over and over again. They're not going to like the fact that you might call a particular sin a sin.

[3:18] And so they want you to say, no, no, no, no, no, Jesus never did that. And you kind of go like, you did not read the Bible, did you? And so as we think about how are we to handle the world around us, how are we to engage in a world around us that hates Jesus as he's presented in the Bible, and therefore anybody who follows him?

[3:41] I mean, if you were to say, pick up the Bible and that's my worldview, and the world around you says something's wrong with you, you immediately know they want you to worship a different Jesus.

[3:55] And so we want to see what Paul is telling them and how what he's doing here in these two verses sets them up for being able to defend their faith, to hold on to their faith, to be able to pass on their faith.

[4:14] And what he deals with right here has to do with their own salvation, who they are in Christ, what it is that God has done for them. And I want us, and this is what I'm hoping, because of verse 15 through 20, following verses 13 through 14, and you have a hymn of praise following verse 13 and 14, my goal this morning is that you, like Paul, would just burst forth in praise because of what you see about what God's done for you in salvation in verse 13 and 14.

[4:54] And so what is it that God has done for us? He's given to us this salvation. He's given to us this redemption. And I want us to see three things about it. Number one, salvation is the work of the Trinity.

[5:08] Salvation is the work of the Trinity. In verse 13, you see that it says, He rescued us.

[5:21] That He is God the Father. That's who that is. That is God the Father. Here's how we know this. Because you keep reading, and it says, and He transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.

[5:37] If He has a Son, He's a Father. So, God the Father is the one who rescues us. God the Father is the one who transfers us into the kingdom of His beloved Son.

[5:53] But then when you look at verse 13, I mean, excuse me, verse 14, it then shifts from God the Father to in whom, beginning of verse 14, in whom, refers to the Son.

[6:08] That is the Son whose kingdom we've gone into. It's in Him that we have redemption, the forgiveness of sin. So, one of the things that, as Paul is laying this out, is he's showing that the Trinity, and yes, right here, he's only talking about the Father and the Son, but the triune God is a part of our salvation.

[6:30] All of our salvation is brought about by the work of the triune God. Each member of the Trinity brings something to our salvation for our good.

[6:42] Now, we need to deal with two big theological topics, just real briefly, okay? I promise. If you will pick up one of the sermon notes back there or here, what I'm about to read to you is right off of that, because I wanted you to have it, because oftentimes, when we begin to think about the Trinity, the problem is, is we either say one of two things.

[7:05] We either give some sort of weird analogy with ice, or pie, or apples, or eggs, or human relationships, and all of those analogies actually do not illustrate the Trinity.

[7:18] They illustrate heresy. So, I don't want to use an analogy. And the other thing we have a tendency to say is, well, we just can't even understand this. And so we say, let's not even talk about this.

[7:29] And I'm saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, slow down, slow down. Here's what we can do. We can make several statements that are true about the Trinity like a definition. And that's what I'm going to do.

[7:40] I'm just going to read these statements to you. I won't explain much, because we're going to come back to this again and again, so I don't want to beat this, you know, too long. But here are the statements that are true, so we could say, what is the Trinity, right?

[7:56] Number one, there is one eternal being, God. Number two, he has existed as the Father, he has eternally existed as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

[8:17] Number three, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. Number four, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not individual portions of God, but each one is fully God.

[8:41] And the last statement, while being one, each person of the Trinity is distinct from the others. Now, understanding these things, knowing these things is important, because it helps us to make sense of the Scriptures.

[8:57] I'll give you just one example. When you see Jesus praying, to the Father, you have to ask yourself, to whom is he praying? And if you don't believe in the Trinity, the way the Bible teaches it, then you end up having to answer the question, who is Jesus talking to at all?

[9:18] Well, he's talking to his Father. That's who he's talking to. The second thing we need, then, to think about is that what I'm saying is that each person of the Trinity brings something to our salvation.

[9:31] And what I'm going to read for you is just a summary. I've just put together a summary of things from Scripture of what the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have done in our salvation. It'll be brief.

[9:43] I don't have all the verses. If you want them, I can get them to you. But this is just Scripture summary. Here we go. The Father has chosen us before the foundation of the world. The Father is the one who sent his Son.

[9:54] The Father is the one whose wrath is being poured out. It is the Father who raised his Son from the dead, and it is the Father who justifies us based upon the work of his Son.

[10:07] That's the Father. What about the Son? Well, it's the Son who took on flesh. It was the Son who came into the world. It was the Son who was submissive to his Father.

[10:18] It was the Son who died upon the cross. Not the Father, not the Spirit. I just need to say that. It is the Son who was raised back to life. It is the Son who was sent back to the Father.

[10:30] It is the Son under whose feet the enemies of God will be placed, and it is the Son who is one day coming back to bring an end to all things.

[10:42] That's the Father and the Son. Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit of God who empowered the Son to be born of a virgin. It was the Holy Spirit who empowered the Son to die upon the cross and to be raised from the dead.

[10:58] It is the Holy Spirit of God who regenerates dead and sinners. It's the Holy Spirit of God who seals believers for the day of redemption. It's the Holy Spirit of God in whom we are baptized at conversion.

[11:11] It is the Holy Spirit who empowers us to live as Christ would have us to live. Now, each person of the Trinity brings their specific role to us to save us.

[11:30] It is not as though the Son is working at cross purposes with the Father. It's not as though the Holy Spirit is doing something different than the Son and the Father. They are working in harmony in unity to save us.

[11:47] I mean, that ought to be a comforting thought. That ought to be a comforting thought. Your salvation is brought to you not just by Jesus, this man that once lived, but by the triune God of the universe, the Godhead, the cosmic King of all things, working in concert as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit He is working to save you.

[12:14] It ought to be a comforting thought. It also ought to be a very massive doctrinal thought. It helps us to even understand something like this.

[12:28] Jesus died on the cross to pay off the wrath of God the Father. That's why Jesus says on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[12:43] Because there's a moment in which He experiences His own Father's wrath on our behalf. We don't even have time to plumb the depths of that.

[12:54] But you understand, I'm just trying to get you to see this is a huge thing. But here's my final thought on this, and then I'll move on. It's a worshipful thought. God. I mean, you look at some of the songs that we sang today, and you've got stuff all about the Father and the Son and our salvation.

[13:14] It ought to be something that thrills our souls. It ought to be something that makes us want to sing. I mean, you know, maybe we don't write a hymn like Paul does, but we can take a hymn. We can take a hymn somebody else wrote, and we can sing it.

[13:28] There's nothing better for the morale of the church of God. There's nothing better for the growth of the church of God than for God's people to be thrilled with what God has done for them in salvation, and their hearts explode with joy because of it.

[13:46] You want to see a church that's alive? It's a church that sings. It's a church that doesn't care that if we've got this instrumentation or that instrumentation. It's a church that doesn't care if they can see the words or not see the words.

[14:00] You know, I've traveled to the third world country. I've been in the worship services where they have nothing but their voices and the joy that beams off their faces because they know that they were dead but now they're alive.

[14:11] They know that they were lost but now they're found. They rejoice because Christ has saved them. And that's all I'm saying to you this morning is be amazed by grace. Be amazed at what Christ, what the Father, what the Holy Spirit has done to save you.

[14:30] So understand something and believe the Trinity and see what Christ, what the Father, what the Spirit have done for you. The second thing that we want to see is that salvation has several parts.

[14:49] Salvation has several parts. so one of the things we need to do is we need to think about salvation the word like an umbrella.

[15:02] And underneath this umbrella are all the parts of our salvation from the things that Jesus did to the things that we experience to the promises that are yet to come.

[15:14] Right? They're all parts of our salvation and we tend to focus only on like one or two of them. But there's about twelve or thirteen, fourteen hundred of them, I don't know, maybe not that many, but twelve or thirteen of them that are there, parts of our salvation.

[15:31] Theologians have often used the term order of salvation in order to talk about them. But let me just give you an example of what I'm talking about.

[15:42] We know that when we trusted in Jesus Christ as sinners, we were saved. Right? We all know that. That's the language we use.

[15:54] Here's the language we typically use. When you ask Jesus into your heart, he saved you in that moment and made it so that when you die, you're going to go to heaven and be with him.

[16:05] Right? Did you know that going to heaven means you're going to be glorified? I mean, you don't just show up like you are in heaven.

[16:15] Like, I don't want to show up in heaven like this. Like, you know, look at all this gray. Do you know some of the physical troubles that I've got? I'm a little overweight here.

[16:26] Like, I can't run very far and I'm winded as all get out. I don't want to show up this way. I also struggle to not be angry. I also struggle to not be depressed.

[16:38] I also struggle with sin. I don't want to show up that way either. Part of what God has promised is glorification where we get new bodies and we are perfected so that we will no longer be able to sin when we get to heaven.

[16:56] Think about that. You're no longer going to be able to sin when you get to heaven. That's a part of our salvation that he's given to us. It's called glorification. Do you see what I'm saying?

[17:06] There are parts of our salvation and our passage in front of us tells us about four of them. So I just want to walk through these four parts of our salvation and just look at how beautiful they are.

[17:20] Right? The first one is the word rescue. God the Father rescues us. To rescue means to deliver or to save from danger.

[17:32] And as sinners, all humans are born in danger and need to be rescued. What are we in danger of?

[17:43] We're in danger in the domain of darkness. Now, what is and what is wrong with this domain of darkness? Why is it so dangerous?

[17:54] Well, there's a passage of scripture that Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 through 3 that sums up kind of what is the domain of darkness and why it's so dangerous.

[18:05] Listen to what he says. Chapter 2 verse 1 he says, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that's now working of the sons of disobedience.

[18:26] Satan's sin in the world, those are the enemies of God. You walked in allegiance to them. You were on their side because you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

[18:37] That is the domain of darkness. He then goes on to say, among them we too all formerly lived in the lust of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

[18:56] That's why it's dangerous to be in the domain of darkness is to be under the wrath of God. It is to be in alliance with Satan, sin, and the world.

[19:07] It's to be dead in our sins. It's to be driven by our lust. It's to indulge the desires of the flesh. It is to belong to wrath. God the Father has rescued us from that.

[19:22] God the Father himself has rescued us from the danger of the domain of darkness and he's done so through his son. So he's rescued us.

[19:34] Secondly, I would say it's the word relocate. Now our text says that the Father, he rescued and transferred us. And I'm using the word relocate because that's what the word means.

[19:45] To transfer you from one kingdom to another kingdom is to relocate you. You once lived in the domain of darkness and now you're a kingdom citizen.

[19:55] Now you belong to the son. You once were in alliance with Satan but because God the Father has rescued you, he's broken the treaty and given you a new alliance, a new citizenship in the kingdom of his beloved son.

[20:10] You've been relocated. You have a whole new way of life. You once were enslaved to Satan's sin in the world but now you are enslaved to Christ.

[20:22] So he's rescued us, he's relocated us and then in verse 14 it says in whom we have redemption. That's the third part. we have redemption. Now this is first of all redemption that is in Christ.

[20:38] We have this redemption in Christ. To be in Christ means to be united with him. That he did something and because he did that thing we're united with him when he did it therefore what he wins we get.

[20:54] So there upon the cross he redeemed us and because of that we get that redemption because we are united with him. Probably one of the best ways to understand redemption is let me define it and then I'm going to ask four questions.

[21:07] Number one the defining of redemption is to buy back. It's to pay a price for in order to buy back or to set free.

[21:18] So it was used of debtors in the Roman world if somebody had a debt and they're standing in the market trying to sell themselves in order to get their debt paid off you could walk through the market you could buy the person pay off their debt and they would come to live in your house and serve you.

[21:31] You paid off their debt you set them free from their debt. It was also used in the slave market to pay for and set a slave free. You could buy them and then you could set them free.

[21:44] So redemption is a paying a price in order to set debtors free. So let me ask these questions. Number one who is redeemed?

[21:55] When we're talking about redemption who is it that gets redeemed? The answer us. Us. We're the ones that get redeemed.

[22:06] Humanity. Sinners. Sinners are the ones who get redeemed. Number two. To whom is the redemption price paid? Who gets the money to set us free?

[22:20] The answer to that biblically is God the father gets that payment. It is God the father because we broke God's law therefore we became debtors to God.

[22:34] And his wrath was over us. And so the price is paid to him. It's not paid to Satan. Like a lot of people want to say well you know it was paid to Satan. No it was not paid to Satan. It was paid to God the father.

[22:45] The third question is who paid the price? That's right. Jesus Christ paid the price. He paid the price.

[22:57] And let me ask you this. What was the price for redemption? His blood. His blood. His death. That's redemption.

[23:08] So we have rescue, relocation, redemption. And then the final thing we have is release. Release. It's the word forgiveness of sin. In verse 14 it says we have forgiveness of sin because of this redemption.

[23:24] And the word forgiveness means to set free. It means to send away. It means to release someone from something. There's a legal idea in our culture called restitution.

[23:37] Restitution is when if you destroy someone's property or you do something to them, commit some sort of crime against them, you have to pay money to restore to them what was taken, destroyed, or treated badly.

[23:55] As simple as a broken window, money has to be paid in order to replace the window. That's the restitution. And I think we all sort of grasp that idea.

[24:06] In the spiritual realm, when someone sins against you, forgiveness is when you decide to pay the restitution for the harm you've encountered yourself for that person.

[24:21] So if you were to be sinful towards me and I forgive you, it means that I'm paying myself back in your place for what you've done to me.

[24:33] Wow, that's a big thing. That's exactly what God has done for us. We owed a debt we could not pay. And He forgave us, which means that He paid Himself back.

[24:50] He paid restitution to Himself on your behalf so that you were set free. I mean, do you see? Do you see just how glorious and how rich and full our salvation is?

[25:04] I mean, we could go on to the other parts of our salvation, but in this passage alone, just these four, it should cause our hearts to sing, to remember that we were lost, but He found us.

[25:15] We were dead, and He raised us. We were His enemies, and He made us His children. We were without a home, and He adopted us. We were enslaved to sin, and He set us free.

[25:26] We were lawbreakers, and He took our punishment. We were far off, and He brought us near. We were at odds with God, and He reconciled us. We were without righteousness, and we were covered with the righteousness of Christ.

[25:41] Christ, let there be joy, and gladness, and peace, and calm, because of what you see Christ has done for you.

[25:53] His love for you is unmatched in all of creation. There's not another example of love in all of creation that can ever illustrate the love that God has for us.

[26:11] And even if in this moment, if I were to say to you, let's sing, and you say to yourself, I'm just not sure I can sing. My heart is weighed down, and there's so many things going on in my life that I'm struggling to sing.

[26:24] Just know that even our inability to be joyful over what God has done for us has been paid for Christ, by Christ upon the cross.

[26:34] I mean, we're supposed to be joyful, we're supposed to be happy, we're supposed to be worshiping Him, and sometimes our hearts are so heavy that we can't. And the good news is that even that is covered in the blood.

[26:55] It's why we start the services the way we do with the passage of Scripture. It's why we sing a pattern of songs the way we're doing. We're singing things that try to lift up and exalt God, and then get to something about our redemption, something about the cross, something about what He's done for us, because we want to worship Him because of the salvation He's given to us.

[27:24] Well, let me hit the last one, and we'll be probably bringing maybe a little bit more practical thoughts in here to this one, and that's this, that salvation has a specific goal.

[27:37] That's what we see in verse 13 and 14. There's a specific progression of things. As a matter of fact, there's a progression that kind of assumes a couple of things.

[27:50] It assumes, first of all, that we're sinners, right? Verse 13 and 14 assumes we're sinners. How can you have forgiveness of sin unless you're a sinner? You can't.

[28:01] So that's where it starts. It starts with us as sinners. And you have to remember what a sinner is. What's a sinner? It's not somebody who makes mistakes. It's not somebody who just can't keep it together.

[28:14] But it's somebody who rebels against God. We've broken God's law. And it starts there. But the second step of this whole thing, redemption, redemption, what's the price of redemption again?

[28:28] the blood of Christ. So this passage is assuming that's the next step. It's assuming that because without redemption, I mean, without the blood of Christ, there's no redemption.

[28:39] There's no forgiveness of sins. So the first step is us as sinners. The second step is Jesus paying the price. But the third step is that redemption, is that forgiveness, with the fourth step being that the Father rescued and transferred us.

[28:53] And think about this. You can't be in the kingdom of the Son that He loves if you haven't left the kingdom or the domain of darkness. Right? I mean, if you are in Bandera, you cannot be in Medina at the same time.

[29:07] Right? The domain of darkness and the kingdom of His beloved Son. And so you cannot... Don't tell anybody I said that lives in Bandera. The pathway of what He's doing here in this verse is showing us that there's a progression and the end goal is to be kingdoms, to be in the kingdom of His beloved Son.

[29:28] So that means that we are new kingdom citizens and we ought to act like it. Now, I want to share with you four things. This comes from Dr. Stephen Lawson and his sermon on the same passage, four things that kingdom citizens ought to do.

[29:44] I thought this was just beautiful and I just wanted to share it with you. If you're a kingdom citizen, if you've been saved, if you were a sinner and Christ died for you and He rescued you and forgave you and you've been transferred into the kingdom of the beloved Son by the Father, then you ought to act like a kingdom citizen.

[30:00] And here's four things that ought to be in every Christian's life. Number one, submit to your king. Submit to your king.

[30:12] You need to think of yourself in a lowly manner, bowing down upon the ground on your knees before God. God. He sits upon a throne.

[30:24] That is the posture of a servant of God. It's bowing prostrate before him. Because he's our king.

[30:35] And if he has set us free, then we ought to be submissive to him in all things. It means that we have to get our eyes off of ourselves, our thoughts off of ourselves, and put both our thoughts and our eyes upon him.

[30:49] I loved how the song said, I think of him all the day long. Is Jesus in your thoughts? Is God the Father in your thoughts all the day long? Our thoughts, our words, our deeds, our priorities, our joys, our disappointments, submitted to the king.

[31:07] Secondly, we're to worship the king. We're to worship the king. If you're bowing there before the king in submission to him, when you look up, he is so glorious and beautiful that it ought to cause your heart to sing to him.

[31:28] I mean, when we sing, we want to sing things that are true of God. There's a lot of bad songs out there. There's a lot of bad songs that are old, and there's a lot of bad songs that are new.

[31:40] And there's a lot of great songs that are old, and a lot of great songs that are new. true. And the difference is, is that they say true things about God. That's the difference.

[31:51] Because you see, oftentimes what we want to say is that the difference has to do with how it sounds to us, or how it feels to us, and really what we need to focus on is not how we feel in the moment that we're singing.

[32:05] We need to be sure we're singing true things about God. Because when you sing true things about God, man, there's nothing like it in all the world.

[32:19] I mean, think about this, that when I think that God, his son, not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in.

[32:31] That on that cross, my burden, gladly bearing, he bled and died to take away my sin.

[32:42] I mean, when you sing that, it ought to be something that causes our hearts to just soar to him. Or you could sing something like this, what riches of kindness he lavished on us.

[32:59] His blood was the payment, his life was the cost. We stood neath a debt we could never afford. Our sins, they are many, but his mercy is more.

[33:16] Amen, right? Man, my heart ought to soar with that. And, you know, listen, I know that there's some people that struggle because of difficulties going in life, but there's some people who, they don't have any trouble in life whatsoever.

[33:28] There's nothing burdening them down. And when you begin to say, let's sing to the king, let's sing, and let's have joy in Christ and lift our voices up, it's almost like they're going like, yeah, okay.

[33:41] Man, there's nothing more I would want to see than for this church to just bellow it out. Do not be afraid of somebody going like, you sing badly. Because I'm not going to say that.

[33:52] I don't care how off-key you sing. Just sing loud to the Lord. Right? And especially you men. Especially you men.

[34:04] Sing to the Lord. Because I'm going to tell you something, it's difficult, it's difficult to think to yourself that you're singing, I love you to some guy. Like, I understand some of that. But listen, you should bust hell wide open, and you're not, because God saved you.

[34:22] Don't worry about what anybody's going to think. But let your heart soar with joy in Christ. Third thing, I've spent too long on that, sorry. Third thing a kingdom citizen ought to do is obey the king.

[34:36] We have a new heart, and because of that new heart, we now have, because of the spirit, the ability to obey him. And now we want to do what he tells us to do. What he commands is first priority.

[34:49] We need to obey him because he has commanded us to do. to follow him. And lastly, we need to sacrifice for our king. We need to sacrifice for our king.

[35:02] He said this, he said, God made me for a purpose, and he made me fast. Those are the words of Eric Little. And you probably know a little bit of the story of Eric Little, because you've probably seen the movie of the flying Scotsman called the Chariot of Fires.

[35:18] Chariot of Fire. But here's what you may not know. After the 24 Olympics, when he won the first, the gold, in the 400-yard dash, he won that one, but that was not his best event.

[35:32] His best event was the 100-yard dash, which he refused to run because it was on the Lord's Day. So he ran this other race that he was not good at, and he won the gold in that event.

[35:45] But when the Olympics were over, at the age of 22, he retired from all athletics and moved back to China, where he was born. Even though he was a Scotsman, he was born in China because his parents were missionaries.

[35:58] And he went back to China during the time of the Boxer Rebellion and served as a missionary in China, ended up in a concentration camp with many of the Chinese that were there because of the Japanese aggression and going on, and spent the rest of his life in the concentration camp teaching Sunday school and the Bible to anybody who would listen to him.

[36:22] He sacrificed for his king. What do we sacrifice for the Lord? What is it that we've wanted and that we've been willing to just give it up for the Lord and just live how he wants us to live?

[36:42] Our salvation is so full, so glorious, that it really does bring one more thought in that we need to talk about, and that's this.

[36:56] Salvation is not automatic for everybody. You know what I'm saying? Like, none of us were automatically saved just because we were Southern and Texan.

[37:08] Those are the two best things to be, right? We're not saved because of that. We're not saved because we're conservative. We're not saved because, you know, we live the way our parents taught us and we have respect for our elders.

[37:28] We're saved because we recognize that we have nothing to offer God. We're saved because we come to the end of ourselves understanding we have a poverty of spirit.

[37:39] We lack anything that we could give to God that he would be pleased with. And some of you today may have never experienced this salvation that we're talking about because you've never come to the place of seeing about yourself that you're a wicked, worthless sinner who needs to admit that because Jesus saves wicked, worthless sinners.

[38:05] He doesn't save sinners who are just barely sort of sinful and kind of okay people. He's a physician that comes for the sick. And my question to you is, do you see yourself as sick?

[38:17] Do you see yourself as sinful? Do you see yourself as wicked? Do you see yourself as deserving it, deserving his grace? Or do you see yourself as deserving nothing but his wrath? Then the good news for you today is this.

[38:30] Christ died on the cross to redeem you, to set you free from your sin, that the Father would rescue you and you would be transferred into the kingdom of his beloved son.

[38:46] Today, would you trust him? Would you throw all your sin behind you, all your self-righteousness behind you and cling to Jesus Christ? Let's pray.

[38:57]