Post Tenebras Lux
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13 He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Prayer
Prayer
Our Father and our Lord, you are holy.
You created the heavens and stretched them out, and spread out the earth and what comes from it.
You give breath to all people, and motion to our bodies.
You are Yahweh—that is your name.
You give your glory to no other, nor your praise to anything created.
You, Yahweh, go out like a man of war, a zealous fire within you.
You cry out, shouting loud, and show yourself mighty against your foes.
For a long time, Lord, you have held your peace. You have kept still and restrained yourself.
With great mercy and patience you endured the continued wickedness of your creation.
Now, Father, you tell us you will cry out like a woman in labor; you will gasp and pant.
You will lay waste to mountains and hills, you will burn all vegetation and dry up the waters.
And then you say this, Father: you will lead the blind, and will turn the darkness before them into light.
You say these are the things you do, and you will not forsake them.
You have sent a servant, in whom your soul delights and your Spirit rests upon, to bring justice to the nations.
You will take him by the hand and keep him, you will give him as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations.
Through this servant, you will open the eyes that are blind.
You will bring the prisoners from the dungeon, and from the prison those who sit in darkness.
Through this servant, you will bring your people out of darkness into light.
Father, I ask that the sunshine of this promise would shatter the door to every dungeon here.
That today, in this place, chains would break and prisoners would rise to new life in Christ. Amen.
Introduction
Introduction
These verses contain the hope of every Christian. These verses contain the hope for any sinner who is at the end of themselves. These verses display the power of God the Father, and the kindness of the beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
In this text are three points I want us to see:
The Darkness
The Kingdom
The Light of the Gospel
First, the Darkness.
1. The Darkness
1. The Darkness
This world is dark. It is an R rated world. The lives we are blessed to live in America are the first of its kind. Never before has their been such comfort, luxury, healthiness, and prosperity. This disconnects us from the real darkness and brokenness of the world.
We need to understand that we are born into this darkness.
5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
When Adam fell, the entire human race fell with him. From generation to generation, the consequences of the fall are inherited. This explains the constant moral evil of our kind.
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—
Death is a constant reality for every human being. We can distance ourselves from its howling, but there is no escaping its shadow.
Death will not happen until God wills it to happen, but it is guaranteed for each and every person—unless Christ returns. And for those who love the darkness, death would be preferable.
The shadow of death also changes how we live our lives. There is a kind of desperation that we experience. We experience anxiety about things because we know time is limited. If it weren’t, there would be plenty of time for things to sort out. We experience fear because we know our life is fragile, and if it isn’t protected it will slip through our hands like ash.
28 Man wastes away like a rotten thing, like a garment that is moth-eaten.
Because death is coming, we know our time is limited. In previous centuries, the reality of death was as present and constant as the cycle of day and night. However, in our current society, because of its possessions and protections, death is less like the shadow of night and more like an advanced decay. Today’s gospel is that of consumption — to go to a good school, get a good job, make good money, and buy nice things. But the school always costs too much, the job always gets old, the money could always be more, and the nice things eventually become irrelevant. It’s never fully satisfying. The gospel of consumption cannot heal a spiritually dead heart. If we do not have the light of eternity, we will only have the darkness of this world.
15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
1 John 2:16–17 (ESV)
16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires…
We need to understand next exactly what we just read in 1 John. That we are not only born into, but, by nature, love this darkness.
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Mankind is so fallen, so corrupt in his nature that we ought not ever ask the question, “how could someone do something so horrible?” The question we ought to be asking is, “how could someone do something so good?” This likely offends people in this very room. I know this, because it offends me.
19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
When the few of us here at Bowman are standing out in front of the abortion mills on surgical abortion Wednesdays, we call out to mothers and fathers pleading with them to show mercy to their baby. We tell them we are here in the name of Jesus and are ready to give them whatever they need to raise their child. And if they can’t even do that, we are ready to adopt their baby. The world says that these people are confused and want to do the right thing. Why then, do they curse at us, threaten us, and berate us for being “too judgmental”? Because the light is exposing their works for what it is: darkness. And this was every believer’s reaction before their conversion, in one form or another.
Eph 2:3 says the natural, unsaved person rejects and rebels against God, and “lives in the passions of their flesh, carrying the desires of the body and the mind, and are by nature children of wrath.”
This is the actual state of mankind, apart from grace. I believe that this actually connects with our experience. If God saved you later in life, then you likely remember a good portion of it when you still loved your sin. I do, and I shudder to remember how my darkened mind viewed and interacted with the world. Even those “good things” that I did—they were, at the very best, motivated by a desire to receive praise or create a sense of inner righteousness. How long did those moments last for me?
How long did they last for you? How do they last for you?
6 We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
Whatever moral house of cards I stacked up with my actions, like leaves they were blown away. In fact, there was a season in my life a little bit before I think I got saved where there was a deep darkness that hung over my life. It was inexplicable, uncontrollable, and could only be avoided by the most involved distraction.
What I was experiencing was the effects of attempting to suppress the law of God that I knew, by nature.
14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them
Please hear this: if you are here today, and you still hold God at arm’s length, this is why you have never found peace. This is why you lose sleep, experience fear at night, or otherwise feel like there is a pending crisis around the corner. It is because you are made in the image of God, and know what God expects from you as his creature. You and I know that we have willfully rejected Him and his authority as Creator, and we don’t even want to have him in our thinking.
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.
Listen, we all need to hear this. We are not the heaven-ready, holy and good people we have been raised to think ourselves to be.
Our culture worships practices such as “self-care, having no regrets, and following our heart.” Each of these is a fundamental rejection of what God says about us, and ultimately what we experience ourselves to be.
Where God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, we are told to care for ourselves in order to care for others.
Where God says to hate sin and flee temptation, the world calls us to cast our regrets away because guilt is a bad thing.
Where God says “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick,” the world tells us it is a noble and always-true guide for our life.
At every level, the light of the truth is smothered by the darkness of deceit. This is the domain of darkness in which we all live, and are born into.
This is the darkness that we love. I say these things with the heart of a fellow rebel; I don’t want you to harden under these words — I want you to break. We need to break. We need open heart surgery; we need utter demolition in our souls so that God can place in a new heart and fill a new temple with his Spirit.
What point is a Savior if we are able to either initiate or complete the process of our rescue?
Was Christ nailed to a Roman cross so that rebels could either take it or leave it? God forbid!
Christ was nailed to a Roman cross to free slaves in darkness.
Jesus Christ died the death I deserved for me because I loved myself and my darkness instead of God, and was a slave to it. I would never have chosen otherwise.
We aren’t only born into and in love with this domain of darkness, we are slaves to it. We are conceived in sin, learn new sins, and can’t do otherwise because we don’t want to.
Psalm 52:3 (ESV)
3 You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking what is right.
7 “See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and sought refuge in his own destruction!”
If the Lord has brought anyone to this room and they are flinching at the idea that, apart from grace, they aren’t as bad as God says they are, they need to hear these words of the Risen Christ.
15 “ ‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
There is great glory in the good news but we have to deal with the bad news first.
Christ is not a Savior to be visited on Christmas and Easter, or when you don’t have anything else going on.
Christ was not shredded by bone-whips and crucified naked to atone for partial sinners.
Christ was the Lamb slaughtered for full-bore sinners — like you and like me.
The Gospel begins with the truth about who we are, so that we can get to the truth about our Savior.
We’ve looked at this domain of darkness because we need to. We need to look straight at it with open eyes. If we don’t deal with the depth of our sin, Christ’s cross will either make no sense or amount to a cheap deal that can be taken or not.
Now, having considered the Darkness, we need to look at the second point: the Kingdom.
2. The Kingdom
2. The Kingdom
The Darkness and the Kingdom are connected. Because we are made in God’s image, and know that the God of the Bible exists, we have a permanent void in our soul.
“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you… I had grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further from You. You let me alone, and I was tossed about and wasted and dissipated. I boiled over in my fornications, and You held Your peace, You, my belated joy! You then held Your peace, and I wandered further and further from You into more and more fruitless seedplots of sorrows with a proud dejectedness and a restless weariness.” - Augustine, Confessions
We are, by nature, seeking for a kingdom. We structure our lives around doing, accomplishing, seeking, experiencing, and having more of a kind of kingdom. The kind of job we have, the things we spend our money on, what we spend our mind thinking about — all of these things are investments made into a very real kingdom. And the kingdom we invest in can only be one of two things: the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of earth.
Christ ended his Sermon on the Mount with these words:
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Christ was speaking to his disciples when he said this, teaching even to believers that they can invest into a kingdom that will ultimately be destroyed. We need to have this perspective as we live out this life. For the believer, we need to hear those words of C.T. Studd again:
“Only one life, ’twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.
And when I am dying, how happy I’ll be,
If the lamp of my life has been burned out for Thee.” -C.T. Studd
But for the unbeliever, these words of Jesus Christ must be heard:
Luke 14:16–24 (ESV)
16 But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many. 17 And at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ 18 But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please have me excused.’
19 And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them. Please have me excused.’ 20 And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ 21 So the servant came and reported these things to his master. Then the master of the house became angry and said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ 22 And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’
23 And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. 24 For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’ ”
See, the world has preached its kingdom to us. We have heard the gospel of the kingdom of man day in and day out since we learned the English language. This kingdom of the earth cannot win us with eternity so it seeks to win us with the temporary. It appeals to our lust, our comfort, our pride, and our self-satisfaction. Christ’s parable of this great banquet is describing the Pharisee’s, people who are satisfied with their timeshare in the kingdom of man. They have heard the Gospel of the Kingdom, but decide what they have now is more pressing. More satisfying. Ultimately more important
Perhaps you are hearing this Gospel for the first time this day. I don’t really know the situation of anybody here; only God can read the heart. But if God has shown a light into your life today, exposing the things that you are using to excuse yourself from the banquet, please hear me: nothing is worse than life outside of this banquet.
8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,
You aren’t there yet. There is still air in your lungs, blood in your veins, and the words of Jesus in your ears—so hear this final thing:
Nothing is better than this banquet.
Nothing is better than this kingdom.
Nothing in life is as sweet as the light of the Gospel.
3. The Light of the Gospel
3. The Light of the Gospel
And this is where my sermon, “Post Tenebras Lux,” ends. “Out of darkness, light!”
In Christ Jesus, we who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
The glory of the Gospel is this, the great exchange: Christ’s life for us, and our death for him.
When Jesus resisted temptation for the entirety of his life, it was to accomplish the salvation of his people.
When Jesus fulfilled every single letter of the Law, it was to accomplish the obedience his people hated.
When Jesus was crushed into the dirt by people like you and me, we were the ones whose names were printed on the nails.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
When we disobeyed both our heavenly Father and our earthly fathers, Christ obeyed both.
While it was God’s good pleasure to save his wicked, rebellious children…
It was God’s will to crush the Son of his love.
Isaiah 53:10 (ESV)
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief…
Jesus knew where he was going. He knew what he had to do. He knew that the
shredding of his flesh by the cat-o-nine-tail’s,
the strangulation of outstretched arms,
and the nails stabbed between the bones of his wrists and ankles
would be nothing …
compared to the unbridled torrent of the wrath of God.
…
Here, on the Cross, where the eternal justice and mercy of God meet — the Light of the Gospel shines forth into darkness.
Christ said,
John 10:18 (ESV)
18 No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”
And he did take it up again. Everything I have said to you on this Lord’s Day rests upon one, single, simple fact: there is an empty tomb in Jerusalem.
Christ is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, and through him he has reconciled all things whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
My friends, this has already been accomplished. Christ said it was finished 2,000 years ago. What Christ now says to us is this,
Rev 22:17, “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.”
Mt 11:28 “28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
When we see Jesus for who he is, and cast ourselves on his kindness, he will give us rest. He will bring us out of darkness and into the light of his kingdom — to paradise.
So, here it is, brothers and sisters. Believe in the Lord Jesus, this day, and you will be saved.