It Is Finished

Announcements:

Good Friday Service, Friday April 10th, 10am to 11am

Easter Kids Packages - Email [e-mail] to get registered for one

Community Game Night - moved to Tuesday, 6pm to 7pm (so we will pass on the second service this week). Check out parklandchurch.ca/gamenight

Community Game Night - moved to Tuesday, 6pm to 7pm (so we will pass on the second service this week). Check out parklandchurch.ca/gamenight

Livestream Q&A with Pastor Gary Adduono in Terrace Bay Wednesday, April 8th 3-4pm - check out our facebook page or Terrace Bay Gospel Assembly . We’re taking questions that we’ll tackle together, anything you want to ask - just email them to me at [e-mail]. We’ll also take live questions during the broadcast.

Check out everything we’re doing online at parklandchurch.ca/meet

Sunday, April 5th

The Price

We are going to spend the next 3 services talking about how important the cross and the resurrection really were to us.

In order to better understand the value of the cross - we need to understand the debt that it paid. So there’s a few foundational things we need to understand to accept that.

The first is this - we are all born spiritually dead.

What that means is this - While we’re physically here, there’s a necessary spiritual component to life, and that specific connection was irreparably severed. The bible places the blame for that on what it calls ‘our sins and transgressions’.

Ephesians 2:1 NIV

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,

And this goes beyond just ‘God made us, we broke his rules, he’s mad’. The bible says that God’s spirit sustains us and gives us life. We were created not just to be in relationship with Him, but to be fully and completely sustained - even to the point of eternal life and eternal joy - by that relationship with Him.

These two words, transgressions and sins, they’re kind of two parts of the same whole. They both equate down to this idea: God created the world, He designed it to operate in life and fullness in a certain way - and Sin comes in when we break that pattern.

And this isn’t ‘arrogance’ or ‘this is my stuff’ - He is the one who knows better than us how everything works.

It’s like safety rules surrounding equipment - this is the way you should use this, this is how much voltage you should apply, this is how hot or cold it can get. People don’t write those things out of arrogance - if i make up these rules, people have to obey me! It’s just literally the way things are. If we pass these rules - there’s a consequence. Things break. We face danger.

Reality is exactly the same. God made a perfect universe - and when Adam and Eve disobeyed in the garden of eden, it brought in a dangerous element of instability. It caused our lives to operate outside of the safe ‘operating procedures’ that God had made in us from the beginning.

Disobeying God, sinfulness - it isn’t just ‘a broken rule’. Sin brings death.

First, spiritually. Sin disconnected us from that essential relationship with God. We can’t live as the people we were meant to be, as the people we were CREATED to be, because that connection was broken.

But second - physically. Death itself in the world exists because everyone sins. Because of sin, we face physical death. It was never meant to be that way. Connection to God brings eternal life - separation from God introduces death. When we’re completed and supported by God’s infinite power, death and pain washes away.

I’ve always said, you can tell things were meant to be better because we never became comfortable with how bad things were. When you see injustice, it rubs you the wrong way - because you’re built for justice. When you face hardship, it’s painful (even with the right outlook), because you were meant for peace. When you face sadness, it’s draining, because you were built for joy. The fact that we can’t settle for a life of problems, and have this innate drive to make things better - that shows me that they’re meant to be better. The problem is, it doesn’t stop at ‘so long as everyone is trying to do right’. That’s amazing - but it goes even further, to this idea that there’s an absolutely perfect God out there who has in Himself the power to bring us to that point of perfection. That ideal that we all strive for but we accept that we can’t do it ourselves. Of course we can’t do it ourselves - we need a perfect God to deal .

The truth is, we are meant for more than living with problems

I’m not shooting down our innate desire to try and improve ourselves. I think that’s great.

But I am challenging this idea that we’re meant to live imperfectly - that the human condition is about growing comfortable with the idea that things are broken, and we need to make the best we can among the pieces.

And I’m going to challenge this idea even about death itself. They say that two things are always reliable - death and taxes. Well, Even Jesus paid taxes - but Jesus didn’t suffer death. He conquered it. He showed us that God had a new path that led past the pain, past the problems, past this thing we call sin - and it connected directly to a life that was lived so much in the power of God that death itself couldn’t even hold onto it.

In Christ, we see that our lives are meant for so much more than pain. They’re meant for perfection and an eternity spent living apart from pain and death but living in relationship with God.

But the thing is, the problem isn’t problems. The thing holding us back isn’t just a broken moral compass or needing some course corrections. We started off with a scripture, and it made this simple connection - we are dead in our sin. Not broken, not lost - dead.

And I’m dipping into the Good friday message here a bit, but I wanted to end this with hope: that isn’t the end of the story. Because in our good friday service, April 10th at 10am, we’re talking about the idea that God came to earth - not just to teach, or eat, or hang out. He came with a resolute goal in mind - to turn back death itself so that we could finally be free to rebuild that necessary relationship with Him. And only He could pull that off. So please come back for good friday to hear more - let’s pray.

Good Friday, April 10th, 10am - 11am

The Payment

Easter Sunday, April 12th, 11am-Noon

The Perfection