Salvation & Identity (Easter 2022)

Introduction

All right, you knew it was going to happen so let’s hear it...Christ Is Risen…He is Risen Indeed!!!

Yes He has and this is the foundational message of our faith. I hope you know that. With everything else that the Church, the Ekklesia has become, this one truth is central to any hope that we have. . That Christ Is Risen…He is Risen Indeed!!

What the Apostle Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth is just as true in our Churches today. He said...

1 Corinthians 15:14 (ESV)

14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

There is just no point to believing in Jesus at all if He didn’t rise from the dead. For one thing that would make Him a bold face liar because He said He would rise from the dead, but it would also mean that all of his life, teaching and claims would be powerless to affect us today. At best they would be historical but not transformational.

So without Jesus raising from the dead I am wasting my life as a Preacher and you are wasting your time gathering together each week. We might as well gather together and watch TV ... at least we know that is lying to us.

This is true not just for us, but for every Church on the face of the earth. That is why I love this responsive greeting that I have kept as part of our tradition here at Friendship Church. I didn’t invent it, it is a greeting that is being shared by so many Ekklesia’s around the world today. That Christ is Risen…He is Risen Indeed!

But even greater than that is how it also travels back through time. As we have been looking at the early Church all year we have seen how this primary truth was proclaimed by the Apostles and taught in all the early Churches. That is why Paul said that without the resurrection...our faith is in vain. He continues later in the same chapter to say..

1 Corinthians 15:17–19 (ESV)

17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Did you hear that? If Christ has not been raised then we have no hope because our biggest problem, our biggest need has not been dealt with.

Tension

Some of us think that our greatest problem right now is all kinds of other things. We are struggling with family feuds, financial burdens, employment woes, destructive addictions and many other issues. On top of that our world right now seems in upheaval as we are daily bombarded with news of the ongoing health crisis, racial and political tensions and war crimes in Europe. I am not saying that those are somehow not “real” problems, only that all of them, as diverse as they are, can be traced down to one root cause.

That root cause is SIN

I know when I say that many of you are thinking about sin like it is just a finger wagging, being naughty kind of thing…don’t be naughty, be a good little boy or girl...but this tiny little three letter word is a much more complex than that.

It isn’t just a question of morality, it is a question of identity.

Now there’s a word that will get in your trouble in today’s day and age. You can’t turn on the news right now without someone fighting about identity. What you hear is that we each get to choose who we are or what we identify as.

I was playing around with a giant tic-tac-toe board over at a friends house this past week and as I placed my piece into the grid I said, “I know that looks like an X but it identifies as an “O”. Twenty years ago we all would been like, “What?!?” but today you know exactly what I mean. Because that is such a huge part of the public discourse right now, to what extent do we get to choose our identity.

But God has not left us ignorant on our identity. He has clearly revealed who we are. Genesis 1 tells us that :

Genesis 1:27–28 (ESV)

... God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Our identity is that we are created beings that have been charged with the task with ruling over the rest of creation to the glory of God. And in the beginning there was only one rule that God gave our first parents. Only one piece of “morality” for them to show their faithfulness by.

Genesis 2:16–17 (ESV)

16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

And our first parents flourished under God’s loving, lone rule until the day they broke it. On that day our first parents rebelled against God and the good way that He designed His world to be. They became “Sinners”. For that is what Sin really is. It isn’t just this “naughty, naughty” thin it is rebellion against the good way that God designed His world to operate. That changed everything in our world. It changed everything in our lives. We now have a new identity. We are created in the image of God, but fallen in our rebellion against Him. We are “Sinners”

We don’t like to talk about it, but it doesn’t make it any less true. The Bible says it this way: Romans 3:23 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Without a recognition of this shared identity of haven fallen short of the glory that God designed in us...we have little to celebrate on Easter or any other Sunday.

We were all born into this shared identity as descendants of our first parents Adam and Eve, and then we affirm that identity every time we Sin. Every time we act in rebellion against God and good way that He designed His world to be.

What does this rebellion against God look like? Do we raise our fist and say “I don’t care what you say, I am going to do things my way!”? Some of us may have, but more often than not, it is much more subtle than that.

Basically, we just don’t believe God when He tells us that the way that He designed things to be is the only “good” way. We think we can find our own way to “good”, a better way than the one God designed. Even though He was the one who designed us to fit just perfectly into the world that He created…we keep looking for other ways to have “good” outside of the way that God has created for us…just like our first parents did.

And we are so deeply entrenched in this “subtle” rebellion that we often cannot even see the many ways that it is working to destroy our hearts, our minds and our lives. We are not even looking to be “fixed” because we can’t see to the core of what is truly broken in our lives. We see the effects of the brokenness on the surface. The tension filled marriages, the wayward children, the financial burdens, the fights, battles and wars…but we can’t see to the root of them.

God can. God does. He looked at the fallen condition of His creation and He decided that He had to rescue us from ourselves. He had to rescue us, or save us from our Sins. If God’s world was going to return to the glory that He designed it to reflect, then He would need to save it from the Rebels who have destroyed it. Including loving those rebels enough to save them as well.

So this morning we are going to look at the three ways that the God has saved us from our Sins through the Resurection of Jesus Christ that we celebrate today. We have laid these out in the past and we have referenced them many times from many different places in Scripture, but I believe that these things are so core to understanding our true Identity that they bear repeating.

So typically I give you a passage to turn to each Sunday, but today I am going to be all over the place. If you are quick you might be able to turn with me to each verse, but otherwise all the text will be on the screen and the references are in the notes page in the bulletin.

I will pray though, and then we will get after the three ways that we are “Saved” from our Sin through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Truth

Theologians use three distinct but interdependent terms to describe our Salvation. They are all found in the Bible at different places, but for our purposes today they serve more as categories of these three ways in which the salvation found in Jesus Christ works.

The first one is called

1. Jesus saves us from penalty of our Sin (Justification) (Rom 6:23; Col 2:13-15)

Justification means that the legal requirements of God’s divine law have been justly resolved. In other words, the penalty for our sin has been paid. The Penalty for rebellion against the good God is to be removed from His presence and all the good things that he created. That makes sense doesn’t it?

If we were born into a Kingdom that was designed by a loving King who provided for all His subjects with every good thing that they needed in mind, body and spirit and then we decided we didn’t want to honor that King as King any more and instead we were going to create our own “Good Kingdom” then it would be right, fair and just for that King to judge our rebellion and remove us from His kingdom.

When we refuse to honor the King as the King then He removes us from His Kingdom. This removal is what we call death. Romans 6:23 says: For the wages of sin is death. That is what that our “Sin” earns us. Our rebellion earns us removal from the holy presence of God in His Kingdom.

Now we might say, sure I have done some bad things but it’s not like I am Hitler or something. I mean I am not perfect, but there are a lot of people who “trespass” worse than me.

That is probably true. We can all find someone who is a worse sinner than we are…as long as we are the judge of what is good better or best. The problem is that God’s holiness is perfect. So even if you only commited one sin, which is a laughable idea, how would you make up for it?

WE can’t....because there are sins of both commission and omission. In other words, it is just as much a sin to not do something that you should have done as it is to do something that you shouldn’t. So to be “perfectly good” would mean that there is never any room to get ahead because every good thing that you could do, you already must do. God’s perfection already demands that you do all the good that you can do. So once you are behind, even with just on sin, there is no making it up.

That is just as true for one sin as it is for however many you and I have…which is a lot more than one.

The Penalty for our Sin must be paid. Our good works won’t cover the bill. The only just and right penalty is death. For the wages of sin is death. Thankfully that is not the end of the verse or the end of the story. Because the second half of that verse says: But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Penalty for our Sin must be paid. Either we pay for our rebellion by our eternal death, or we receive the free gift of eternal life by bowing our knee to Jesus as our King. There is no other way to be Justified.

Colossians 2:13–15 (ESV)

13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

There is no other way to be Justified, to be freed from the penalty of sin except to come under the blood of Jesus, the perfect lamb of God who was sacrificed for us.

The Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples before he died was a celebration of the Passover. The Jewish festival that reminded them of the time when their people were slaves in Egypt and God was about to send Egypt the penalty for their rebellion against Him. To protect His people, God instructed them to kill a spotless lamb and place the blood on the doorframes of their homes. Then when the angel of death came to take the life of the first born son of every family it would passover every house that was covered by the blood.

And what struck me this week is that was all it took for a family to escape the wrath of God that night was to have enough faith to come under the blood of that lamb. Anyone, from the most caring, kind and moral Jewish family to the roughest, toughest most immoral among them…if they would just come under the blood then they would be saved.

That is the Salvation of Justification. Those bloody door frames were a foreshadowing of the covering that Jesus’ blood brings to us. It doesn’t matter what we have done in the past. We cannot be good enough to escape from God’s wrath without it and we cannot be bad enough to be beyond the reach of Jesus’ blood.

To be Justified, is to be saved from the Penalty of Sin, but “the Penalty of Sin” is not the only thing that we need to be saved from. We also need to be saved from the Power and Practice of Sin. Something we call...

2. Jesus saves us from practice of our Sin (Sanctification)

Ephesians 2:8–9 (ESV) says

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

All you have to do is to place your faith and trust in Jesus, to come under the blood and you will be saved, however in the very next verse it says that there is work to be done...

Ephesians 2:10 (ESV)

10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Salvation from the Penalty of Sin is not an invitation to sit around till Jesus comes back and gets us. It is to be set free to finally be able to do what God designed for us to do from the very beginning.

And this is something that many people just don’t understand. They think that Jesus saves people by swooping in and saving them from some crisis so that they can get back to living the way they lived before...but being saved from the Penalty of our sin does not make SIN a safe way to live. Sin is never safe. Continuing to operate in rebellion against our good God and the good way that He designed the world to be is never a safe way to live.

The Bible describes our position before Justification as being a slave to sin. We couldn’t help but sin, because we didn’t have the power that it takes to not practice sin. But when we were Justified, the control that our Sin master once had over us was broken.

Romans 6:6 (ESV)

6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

After we are Justified we are given the power of the Holy Spirit that works within each believer to grow them over time into the image of Jesus Christ. We become like Jesus, because lived the way that Adam and Eve were created to live but wrecked by the fall. Jesus successfully did what our first parents failed to do.

And this is an important distinction between these two different aspects of salvation. Justification is a one time event where by faith we come under the blood of Jesus and the Penalty of our Sin is paid. Sanctification is not a one time event, but a constant process where we are working hard to reject our old habits and ways of relating to this world and moving closer and closer to the identity we were originally created to have. Listen to how the many books of the New Testament describe this process...

2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

We are not made new as in something different than human, but we are made new as in restored to what God originally created us to be.

Philippians 1:6 (ESV)

6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 (ESV)

23 Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is God who is doing this sanctification work in us, and so it cannot fail us

Hebrews 10:14 (ESV)

14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

This verse tells us that all who are being sanctified have already been justified in Christ Jesus.

Do you hear all the process language. Progression language. We are being grown. We are being sanctified. We have become new and over time we will be closer and closer to the image of Jesus Christ, the perfect example of God’s design for mankind. In Him, we have our identity restored.

I would say that focusing on Sanctification is one of the distinctives of Friendship Church. It is something that we highly value. We know how Sin is not a safe place to live and we want to be a community that helps one another to run from the devastation that it always brings.

In fact when someone asks me about Partnership, which is what we call membership here, that is one of the first things I tell them. Partnership is a relationship of accountability. You are asking us as a Church to help hold you accountable to become like Jesus, and we are inviting you to help hold us accountable to becoming like Jesus. We do this by bringing God’s Word to bear on everything we do here and desiring that working so that every aspect of our life is aimed at His glory. We do this because before he died, Jesus asked God the Father to Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. John 17:17 (ESV)

Not everyone wants to belong to a Church that does this. Gets all up in your life like and stuff. So sometimes we don’t get any further than that introduction but I don’t want anyone to be mislead about what we about. Phil 2 commands us to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Phil 2:12b-13) so we just don’t see there to be any room to be a Church where people feel comfortable just showing up and sitting in a chair each week.

We are to “work out” our salvation. And it is work, but it is not forever. There is a third part to our Salvation.

1. Jesus saves us from the penalty of our Sin (Justification)

2. Jesus saves us from the practice of our Sin (Sanctification)

3. Jesus saves us from the presence of our Sin (Glorification)

As long as we are here on earth we will be wrestling against at Sin in the hard work of Sanctification, but that will not always be the case. There is a reason that we say “Rest in Peace” after someone moves on from this world. The harshness of this toil, this labor, this WORK will end. The “Rest” will come, but not on this side of heaven.

Romans 8:30 (ESV)

30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Someday we will be free even from the Presence of Sin, and oh do I look forward to that day, but just as our Justification opened the door to our to Sanctification, our Sanctification will impact our Glorification.

We may not focus on this as much as we should, never really focus much on this, but the Bible has a lot to say about the reward that will be ours if we persevere in becoming more like Jesus. Jesus himself talked about those who would be least and those who would be most in the Kingdom of Heaven. That seems to indicate that even though there isn’t a bad seat at the table, some are better than others.

In speaking of the day when He will brings this Glorification Jesus said:

Matthew 16:27 (ESV)

27 For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

So we can never work our way to heaven, but our works will matter in heaven. We will rewarded for the work that we did in service to our Resurrected King Jesus.

Gospel Application

And this brings us back to the question of Identity. God has not left us ignorant on our identity. He has clearly revealed who we are.

We were created as a good part of His very good creation who is either:

A. Still a slave to the penalty, practice and presence of Sin or

B. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, We have been Justified, we are being Sanctified and one day we will be Glorified to spend all eternity with Our Lord and Savior.

Christ is Risen…He is Risen Indeed.

I don’t know which one it is for you, A or B, but I do know that SIN is never safe and Jesus is the only Savior. If you have questions about which one you are and you want to talk about it then Easter would be a great day to have that conversation. I would love to talk to you or connect with someone else that you know understands about these things.

Romans 6:23 (ESV)

23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let me invite the Worship Team Forward as I pray.