Victory In Jesus (Funeral) (3)
Notes
Transcript
Personal Comments
Personal Comments
First, I want to say how honored I am to be here today with this family.
I did not get the chance to know you all very well over the past couple of months, but I did get the chance to visit with Mrs. Phyllis once while she was in the hospital here in Livingston. She was sleeping when I stopped by so we never got the chance to officially meet, but part of her family was there when I stopped by and I got the chance to meet with them and learn a little bit about her and her life.
One thing that has been consistent in every conversation I have had with people is that she was a true Christian. She believed in God, loved God, and lived for God. That in itself, gives us hope and makes this day a lot easier to bare. As a child of God, her suffering is over and her new life with Christ has begun, and what a wonderful life that is.
With that being said, today is still a tough day. Today we mourn. We mourn because a separation has occurred. Physically speaking, Mrs. Phyllis is no longer with us and that hurts, and there is nothing I can say to make you feel that separation any less. Only time, love, and support from others can truly help with that.
But I want you to see today that it is also a time of celebration. As a child of God, death is not a punishment but a reward. It is the moment that victory is claimed over sin and the separation that it causes. It is the moment when our entire life’s work culminates into a single moment of standing before Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. It is the moment when grace is completed and eternity with God begins. That is truly a time of celebration.
For those of us left here, it is truly a tough time. But if we can take a brief moment to see through her eyes, what a wonderful sight to behold. She is heaven with Almighty God. Every sacrifice she made, every pray that she prayed, every effort that she made to live for God brought her to this very moment of walking through those pearly gates of glory and into the presence of Almighty God. Praise God!!!
Mrs. Phyllis has already preached her funeral by the life that she lived, and most of you know it better than I do, but I want to take a few moments today to present the Gospel of Truth. It is the same Gospel that she devoted her life to, and it is the same Gospel that took her to Glory.
Content
Content
55 “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.
Death is what we see before us today, but I want to go back to the beginning and explain exactly how we got here and hopefully provide a better understanding of what we see before us.
Naturally speaking, there is a great gap between man and God.
God is omnipotent, which means that He is all powerful, and mankind is weak.
God is omnipresent, which means He is everywhere at all times, but man is limited to being right here, right now. We can only be in one place at a time.
God is omniscient, which means He knows everything, but man is very limited in knowledge and wisdom. There is so much that we do not know.
Do you see the gap? It is huge. It is so huge that it is impossible for us to cross.
The entire story of the Bible is a story of how God has revealed Himself unto us so that we might be like Him.
In the beginning, God created two people, Adam and Eve, and placed them in a beautiful garden called Eden. It was a place of perfection. Neither Adam or Eve had experienced anything evil in their existence and therefore were completely innocent. They had no concept of right or wrong, good or bad, or anything beyond that.
God gave them only one command to follow, which was not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In essence, God says, “This is who I am. I am perfect. This place I have created is perfect. You, which I also created, are perfect. If you want to continue in this perfection, all you have to do is stay away from that one tree. You will be allowed to enjoy all that I have given you as long as follow that one command. The day you eat of that tree, you will fall from your perfection and no longer be allowed to stay here.”
From the very beginning, we have a foundation of sin and righteousness. To be righteous is to be in the will of God and to be sinful is to go against the will of God.
We all know the story. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit God commanded them not to eat and they were banished from God’s perfection.
At that moment, death was inevitable. God promised them they would die and death was sure to come. From that very moment, the result of sin became evident to mankind. Sin causes a separation between us and God.
Later on, we see this scenario play out again. Once again we see God reveal Himself unto mankind so that they might know what the expectation of life was.
God spoke to a man named Moses. He tells Moses that He is going to use Him to deliver his people from oppression and bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey, the promised land.
God holds up His end of the deal. He brings them out from under the hand of Pharoah, and leads them towards the promised land. During the journey, God gives Moses His standard of righteousness. It was called the law. God said, “This is my standard of righteousness. If you keep these laws, then you will stand before me just and righteous and deserving of heaven, but if you break even one of my laws, then you have fallen from perfection.”
See perfection is spotless, unblemished, pure and whole. Any single thing that disrupts that perfection makes it imperfect. One sin makes us imperfect. 99.9% good is still not perfect. And God has stated that His standard for our admittance into heaven is 100% perfection.
As with Adam and Eve, the Israelites did not fully obey God’s law and suffered because of it. Instead of getting to enter the promised land, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.
God allowed the following generation to enter the promised land but even they did not get to stay there because they failed to follow God’s standard of righteousness.
We see the story of redemption play out all through the OT, but yet the people are still in sin.
This goes to show us, that regardless of our best efforts, we cannot overcome it. The desire of sin within us is more than we can bare. Even knowing the standard of God’s righteousness, we cannot defeat it.
This means that if we are to overcome this tactic of Satan, the temptation to be drawn away from God through worldly means, something outside of ourselves is going to have to accomplish it within us. We simply cannot achieve it in and of ourselves.
God knew this. So when we open our Bibles to the new Testament and begin with John 1, we read these words:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Once again, we see God reveal Himself unto us, but this time it was different. This time, God Himself took on the likeness of man and came to dwell among us. He showed Himself unto us through the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was and is, God in the flesh. He is God incarnate.
1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets,
2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;
3 who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
This time, God revealed Himself unto us, but then He went a step further.
Not only did He reveal Himself unto us, He gave Himself for us.
The penalty of sin is death.
22 And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.
In other words, for sin to be forgiven something has to die. This is the payment God requires in order for sin to be forgiven. In the OT, they used animals as sin sacrifices. The would use the blood of bulls and goats, but this sacrifice was temporal. The sacrifice was only good enough to atone for current sin. When new sin arose, more blood had to be shed.
There is always a price of reconciliation. Always!!!
If someone wrongs you, there is a price that has to be paid before you will forgive them. This price of reconciliation is called the atonement.
God created man perfect. We started up here with Him. Through sin, we fell from that perfection and now we are down here. In order for us to be reconciled to God, there is a price that has to be paid. Our restoration unto fellowship with God came at a great price.
Jesus lived a perfect life. He never committed a single sin. He did what we were unable to do. He lived His entire life in the will of God and never broke a single law.....not one.
15 For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Therefore, according to the Word of God, He did not deserve to die. “For the wages of sin is death.” Death is the penalty of sin, but seeing that Jesus never sinned, He did not deserve to die.
He gave his life anyway. He shed His precious life’s blood at Calvary as the atonement for all of sin. Because He was the perfect, spotless, lamb of God, He was the perfect sacrifice. And because He was the perfect sacrifice, His blood was good enough to atone for all sin: past, present, and future. All sin for all people.
Jesus blood is the price of your reconciliation. He paid a debt He did not owe, because we owed a debt we could not pay. The Son of God became the Son of Man so that the sons of men might become the sons of God.
Jesus bridged the gap between man and God. He came unto us and made a way for us to get to God. But, we must take the way that He made for it is the only way. He is the only way.
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
To accept Christ means that we believe in who He is. We believe He is the sinless Son of God. We believe He came from God to us so that we might get back to God. We believe that He died in our place. We believe that what He accomplished at Calvary satisfied the payment God required for our sin, and we believe that in Him we can experience a new life apart from the desire of sin.
As we do that, our sin is placed under the blood sacrifice of Christ and is forever forgiven. The price of reconciliation is accomplished through the atonement of Christ, and we now stand perfect before God. Our sin is laid to His account and His righteousness is laid to ours. We then are justified through Him.
19 For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell,
20 and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.
21 And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled
22 in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight—
As we previously stated, there naturally exists a gap between us and God, but God has sought to extinguish that gap by revealing Himself unto mankind throughout the years. Satan looks to expand the gap by using certain tactics that keep us separated from Him. He has two main tools in his toolbox that he repeatedly uses:
Sin
As we have already seen, sin separates us from God and His blessings.
1 Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, That it cannot save; Nor His ear heavy, That it cannot hear.
2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear.
Sin has this effect because it is in direct contradiction to the will of God. Every time we sin, it causes us to be pulled just a little bit farther outside of the will of God.
Death
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If Satan can kill you before you repent of your sin and give your life to God, then you will be forever separated from God and from those who have gone on before you in faith.
That is why death is such a tragedy for those who do not know Christ. For those who are lost and undone, death means judgment and complete separation.
I love the end of the verse though:
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If someone dies separated from God, it is not because God did not do His part. He has taken every measure possible to secure the salvation of mankind. He has given revelation after revelation of Himself to us, so that we might know Him and walk in His will.
16 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.
17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
Commitment
Commitment
Mrs. Phyllis understood these great truths of God. She trusted her eternal salvation to Jesus and now the verses that we started with are all the more true in her case:
55 “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.