Please turn with me in your bibles to Matthew chapter 27. I have been preaching in Matthew, believe it or not, since 2011 and we are just about done. I am excited to look forward and I have even now begun to pray and seek the Lords face in terms of the next passage of scripture that we should begin to discuss as a church. It has been an incredible journey to look at the life of Christ as we have been walking verse by verse and chapter by chapter through the gospel of Matthew. I just want to say to all of you here at First Baptist Church, thank you for your generosity and your kindness in supporting our missionaries who are going to New Mexico this next week. That was an incredible sacrificial gift that you have given last week and it was an answer to pray, so I just want to say to all of you: Thank you very, very much.

This morning we come to an interesting section of scripture which has puzzled theologians for centuries and indeed for millennia. How is it exactly that God, the second person of the Trinity and the Son, could be separated from the rest of the Trinity? Is an actual separation, a severance within the Trinity, what is taking place here?

Let’s pause, as is our custom, and ask the Father to help us by his spirit. Please bow with me. Lord, we just come to you this morning and we pray God that you would open our eyes to see the significance of what is unfolding here on the cross; the depths of the pain and the agony that Jesus is experiencing not only physically, but also spiritually. There is obviously something taking place here Father, which goes beyond what we are capable of understanding in terms of being human creatures having never known the perfect intimate, holy, unblemished and unbroken fellowship within the triune God head. Father we struggle to wrap our minds around it, but we pray Lord that you would show us this morning the depths of exactly what was experienced by Christ though we will never fully understand it. We pray Father that your spirit would help us to strain forward into the darkness of the mysterious transaction that took place here. Help us to wrap our minds around it. We pray and ask these things in Christ’s name, Amen.

Perhaps one of my most favorite poems dealing with the cross and what Jesus did on the cross is “The Agony” written by George Herbert. I have quoted from this poem before and I quote again today “Who would know sin?” It is a question. If there are any among you today who are wanting to truly understand and grasp sin, George Herbert is going to give us a poetic device to really begin to help us to see.

      “Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man, so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
        His skin, his garments, bloody be.
Sin is that Press and Vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.”

It’s one of those lines that when you read it you step back and you stop for a second and you wonder what he is saying there. Sin is hunting its food through every vein. You realize sin is hunting food through my veins and as you begin to ponder on this poem you understand that he is describing sin as this power that courses through us. It is a part of us and we are sinners, but it is also an alien hostile power that has seized us that now compels us, driving us forward and tempting us, enticing us, luring us, but ultimately forcing us to our own destruction. As we come here to Matthew chapter 27 in this last section, the gospel writers are more interested in what Jesus is doing to address the power and the problem of sin than they are even with describing in any great detail his physical suffering. It should strike you as rather unique when you are flipping through the gospels, in particularly Luke who was a physician, that as he is talking about the trial by night and standing before Pilot in the morning and this whole ordeal when they nail him to the cross that he only offers one of the thinnest narratives of physiology of crucifixion. You would expect even John or Matthew or Mark to stop and make mention of what is happening physically, how the nails were driven and exactly how they shredded his back when they flogged him before the crucifixion. You would expect some sort of graphic description and yet when you go beyond the gospels and you begin to dissect in the letters to the churches and the writings of Paul or Peter and the New Testament you see time and again that they draw your attention not so much to the fact that Jesus physically suffered; although, undoubtedly that was a part of the atonement, they want to draw your attention to what he was accomplishing spiritually on the cross. We begin to see glimpses of that even here in the passage beginning in Mark 15:25 “And it was the third hour when they crucified him.” The third hour is 9 am in modern time. Jesus was nailed to the cross at 9 am and for the first three hours there isn’t much of an account of him saying anything or giving any words or speaking anything, but from the ninth hour, that is from noon, Jesus begins to make his utterances. We know from the gospels of Mark and John that Jesus said a few different statements. Matthew doesn’t draw our attention to the fact that Jesus cried out “It is finished.” Matthew doesn’t draw our attention to the different statements Jesus made to the thieves next to him where he said “Today you will be with me in paradise with my Father.” Matthew doesn’t draw attention to those things, but he does draw attention to this: “There was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” So, we have the crucifixion as a six hour event divided up into two parts. There are the first three hours and then the second three hours. Starting at about noon Matthew says there was a darkness that covers the whole land. I can recall as a boy in grade 6 attending my social studies class. The school that I attended was an old school built back in the late 40’s/early 50’s and this particular class room, though it was not a basement, it was designed in such a way that it was an interior room with no windows; today that would be totally forbidden. You would want to have a window in a classroom. There is this thing about sunlight making people happy and happy children learn better. But, back in the day it was totally utilitarian and this school was built for pragmatic reasons. I remember sitting in my social studies class and we didn’t have all the fancy projectors and modern amenities of a classroom today. My teacher used an overhead projector where you put the transparency on the light box and it projects it up onto the screen. Of course, you can’t see anything unless you flip off the lights. I remember that without fail we would come into class, the teacher would put her transparency on the light box and she would walk over to the light switch and she would flip it off. There were no windows in this classroom and the darkness would fall and it was a thick eerie darkness of an old school. Of course, middle school boys tend to tell stories of ghosts and all this sort of thing so perhaps it’s that cultural awareness of the eeriness that sort of heightened the experience but the darkness I recall as a young man was palpable; you could touch it. Inevitably, though this happened every single day of the school year, some smart wise kid cracking a joke would whisper loudly so that the whole class could hear “it's the end of the world.” That was to be understood on two levels: 1. It’s darkness and darkness is bad. 2. We are about to have to learn which is also bad. So, I can recall from a young age knowing that darkness was in some sense a sign of God’s judgment. We know this from the scriptures. There are several points throughout the Old Testament in which God speaks of darkness in which darkness has fallen. We know there are several accounts in which as one point God stopped the sun in the sky and at another point he caused the sun to go backwards. There is an account mentioned in Amos in which the sun is darkened. Of course, all of this starts with the initial darkness, the first time we see this show up is in the book of Exodus in which God is bringing judgment on the nation of Egypt. He is trying to rescue the Hebrew people and he is trying to call out the Hebrews from Egypt and the ninth plague before the striking down of the firstborn son (tenth plague) there is, as the scriptures describe it, a horrific darkness over the whole land, but not over the land of Goshen where the Hebrews are living. So, we know that it’s super natural. Some scholars approach this text and they say that what is happening here is that there was an eclipse and that somehow the moon and the sun came into such an alignment that the light was kind of blocked out, but it wasn’t pitch black and you could kind of still see and make your way around. Other scholars have theorized that what was happening was that it was one of these Middle Eastern winds that would blow dust and all the sand came blowing in. It would be sort of similar to the smoke that has rolled in this morning. You would look out and the sky would sort of be blanked out the sand and it wasn’t pitch black, but it was clearly darkened. That is not what the text says. Look again carefully with me. It says “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” The word that is used here for darkness is describing a pitch black soup of invisibility. They would have to have struck torches. They would have had to have lit candles at noon and from noon until three in the afternoon when the sun is at its zenith in the sky and it should have been the brightest part of the day. They could see nothing. Now of course, they know as good students of the Old Testament that this darkness represents the judgment of God and that it could very well be the end of the world. It is in this darkness that Jesus cries out “Eli, Eli lema sabachthani? That is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark has this same expression in Aramaic and Matthew records it here for us utilizing the Hebrew expression. It is from the word “El” with the possessive pronoun, the letter that is attached at the end which we transliterate “Eli.” The Hebrew word “El” meaning God with the “I” on the end of it signifying possession; my God, my God. Even though what he is about to say blows our mind it is important to note at the very beginning he still says that the God that is forsaking him is still his God. The god who even now is pouring out upon him the sins of humanity and simultaneously pouring out upon him his own wrath and judgment against ALL of that sin, the one who is in a moment to be said to have forsaken him, Jesus says “He is my God.” Here is the question: Why have you forsaken me? Is it possible for the trinity to be severed? Is it possible for the second person of the triune God somehow and in some way no longer be a triune God? The scholars have puzzled over this and we understand after centuries of thinking about it that Jesus never once ceased to be God; not for one second. In his person and the nature of who he is and will always be, he never lost any of the nature or any of the personhood. He never lost any of the attributes of his deity. He was from start to finish God. His nature, the essence of who he was could never be changed and how we know this comes from later on in the text. Our text continues in verse 47. “And some of the bystanders hearing it said this man is calling Elijah. And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said Wait let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And then in verse 50 “Jesus cried out again with a loud voice.” Notice the expression; “and yielded up his spirit.” That verb there is in the middle tense voice of Greek language. Again we are about to have a grammar lesson, some of you hate this, but bear with me alright? This is how it was initially explained to me when I took Greek 101 at Dallas Baptist University. It is the illustration that was used to help me understand verb tenses and so it is one I always use when I am preaching. I have had parishioners tell me over the years that it is a bit of a morbid illustration, but it is the one that I was given and I always go back to it. Suppose you have a knife; the active use of this verb tense “to have a knife to stab” means that you are stabbing some other object. You are the subject performing the action and some other object is receiving the action; you stab an apple. The passive voice is where you are stabbed; somebody else has the knife and then they stab you. You are recipient of the action being performed. The middle voice is the voice that indicates where you are performing the action and you as yourself are also the recipient of the action being performed. You have the knife and you are the one acting with the knife and yet you are the one receiving the action being perpetrated by the knife. You are stabbing yourself; that is the middle voice. Scripture says Jesus yielded up his spirit. It is in the middle voice which means that what the bible is saying is that Jesus is in total control of his death from start to finish. The bible is saying that as far as Jesus is concerned he is choosing in that moment for his life to end, that he is causing his life to end, that he is yielding his spirit, his is the recipient of the action which he himself is doing. He is inflicting upon himself his own death, but he is not using the cross to do it. There is no discussion here of asphyxiation and there is no discussion here of him bleeding out on the cross. There is nothing like that. In this moment Jesus calls out with a loud voice. Matthew doesn’t tell us what he says, but we know from the other gospels he cried out tetelestai meaning “it is finished” and then he gives up his spirit. Matthew doesn’t record that here as he focuses in on the fact that Jesus yielded up his spirit. The significance of it is this: No one person in this room, in this city, or anywhere in the world in the history of mankind has been able to just by willing it, end their own life. We absolutely are capable of suicide, don’t get me wrong. You can take a gun, put it to your head and pull the trigger; you can choose to borrow upon the power and the force of the bullet entering into your head. You can throw yourself off of a building. You can make the choice to jump and borrow upon the force of gravity. There are any number of ways you can end your life, but none of that describes what Jesus did hear. What Jesus did hear with a loud voice, notice it, if you are on the verge of dying as a result of being asphyxiated on a cross you cannot call out in a loud voice. You do not have any oxygen. You do not have the air. Now, he is in agony, he is in pain, don’t misunderstand me. This is crucifixion that we are talking about, but Matthew wants the reader to understand what the first century reader would most defiantly understand about crucifixion. The first century reader would have an understanding of crucifixion that goes way beyond what you and I know because we have never seen it. For days these guys would hang on this torture stick and when their life was about to come to an end and as they were expiring on the cross the one thing that they no longer have is the air or the oxygen in their lungs to cry out with a loud voice. First century historians record that when it came to the bitter end of crucifixion they weren’t making any sounds. You did not even hear the gurgling in their chest. They were utterly silent taking those last few minutes to try and push themselves up on that cross to try and get one last gasp of air. None of that describes what is happening to Jesus here. Matthew makes the statement “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice.” And then Matthew says that he “yielded up his spirit.” You and I cannot will our death in the sense that no man can just say “I am going to die now” and then drop dead. But Jesus from start to finish was in total control of what he was doing for us on the cross. He never once forsook any of the attributes of his deity. There was no loss of his supernatural power. There was no element of him in terms of no longer being God. When Jesus says “my God, my God why have you forsaken me,” he is pointing to something else. It is not a severance within the trinity in terms of his deity or his personhood as the son of God. Jesus is pointing to the fact that his fellowship with the Father is broken. He no longer experiences the intimate relationship that should be his. The book of Hosea the profit Hosea describing God says that God has eyes that are too holy to look upon sin. God cannot be in the presence of sin. God cannot permit sin to come near to him. This is the Nature of our separation. So, it shouldn’t surprise us that knowing this from the rest of the scriptures that as Jesus is dying on the cross he is experiencing not only the torment and the agony both physically and spiritually of what he is enduring on behalf of us, but the thing which would consume his attention, particularly as we come to the end, is he notices and he recognizes there in the midst of the darkness that the infinite fellowship that he has always had from eternity past  with God the Father and God the Spirit is now broken. He is still one with them in terms of his person and his essence, but in terms of the relationship that they have enjoyed that is broken. What is happening here is crucial with regards to your sin and my sin. I want to share with you just a little bit further on that a curtain is torn in two. It says that the centurion notices “Truly this was the Son of God,” verse 55 says “there many women there looking on from a distance who had followed Jesus from Galilee.” They obviously observed that he died. A little bit further along in verse 57 it says “When it was evening there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph who also was a disciple of Jesus.” He went and he got permission from Pilot and he went and buried Jesus in his own tomb which he had freshly cut from the rock. Then is mentions again Mary Magdalene and the other Mary and they are watching this tomb. Jesus is taken down off of the cross, everybody notices when he dies that he is indeed dead, there is even the comment “he was the Son of God.” Crazy things happen, there is an earthquake and the temple veil is torn, dead bodies come back to life and after His resurrection they themselves go into the city and begin testifying who Jesus was. But, Matthew is interested in taking us a little bit beyond all of those supernatural events to something else. Joseph of Arimathea took the body and buried him away. Jesus make the statement “why have you forsaken me?” a clear indication that the relationship that he has always experienced with the Father is now broken. He is still part of the triune God, but the relationship is hurt. Now, his body is buried away for three days until Sunday morning, the morning of the resurrection. What is going on there? As we consider the crucifixion and as we consider the atonement, time and again we always come back to Passover. It always seems to be the most prevalent. That there is this lamb that we offer up on our behalf. To truly understand the depths and the power of sin you would need to look beyond Passover to another Jewish holiday and that is the day of Yom Kipper; the Day of Atonement. This is the holiday which helps us to understand exactly what needs to happen with our sin. I invite you to turn there with me. Go to Leviticus chapter 16. God is giving instructions to the nation of Israel regarding how they are to celebrate Yom Kipper – the Day of Atonement. There are elaborate rituals prescribed for offering sacrifices, for cleansing the temple, cleansing the alter, the High Priest cleansing himself and his whole family. It comes down to this statement that after having cleansed everything and having done all this ritual to make everything ready in verse 15 “Then the High Priest shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat. Thus he shall make atonement for the Holy Place because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses. No one may be in the tent of meeting from the time he enters to make atonement in the Holy Place until he comes out and has made atonement for himself and for his hue and for all the assembly of Israel. Then he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord and make atonement of it and shall take some of the blood of the goat and put it on the horns of the altar all around.” In verse 20 “And when he has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.”  Now again, we only understand what is happening on the cross by looking back at the Old Testament. In Yom Kipper there are two sacrifices which have to be made –

1. For the people to do justice for their sins.

2. Then we have this scape goat (or live goat) which we then confess on all the iniquities of the people and drive it away into the wilderness.

There are two ideas that are presented to us in the Old Testament regarding sin.

1. It requires justice.

2. It has to be put away. It has to be driven away to a far place.

As we come to the end of this account of Jesus being crucified and having looked at the shame and horror of the cross we come now to this statement where Jesus is saying “why have you forsaken me?” He is experiencing now the reality that God the Father and the spirit are withdrawing their presence from him. The relationship is broken. When you are reading this you are taken aback by the account of dead bodies coming out of tombs and want to talk about that some more. Matthew skips right over it. You read about the centurion and there are other gospel writers that talk in detail about him and why he made the statement that he made. Matthew only mentions it briefly.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there and they saw the body in the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea took the body and placed it in the tomb and witnessed a giant stone was rolled over the tomb. These are the points Matthew wants you to focus on. Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience that has a better understanding of what is going on here. The idea that Matthew is trying to drive home to us is that Jesus dying on the cross pays for the justice that is necessary for our sins, but Jesus being buried in the tomb also shows that the power of sin is being driven away. It is being broken and it is being driven away into a remote place. You say “Pastor, that’s new. I have not heard that before.” Perhaps the greatest chapter in all the bible dealing with this reality of sin in found in Romans chapter 7. There are a couple of things we understand about sin. You and I, the way we talk about it, talk about it primarily as though it is a guilt issue; that we have done wrong. That is a part of it. We have willingly chosen to do that which is wrong, but there is another element of sin. It is an element in which we are enslaved to it. In Romans chapter 7 Paul makes a couple of profound statements regarding sin. In Romans 7:23 Paul says “I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” He describes sin not just as actions that he performs of which he is guilty and not just as crimes and things that he has done that are wrong. He talks about sin as though it is a power, a law that resides in him. He goes on in verse 24 “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He is talking again about his body and referring to it as an instrument which is driving him forward to his own destruction. He is asking who is going to save him from this body of death. He goes on again and says “I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” There we see that there is this almost alien power residing within us with a malevolent and malicious intent. Jesus makes the statement in John 8:34 “Truly, truly I say to you everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” The statement that Jesus offers forth is that when you choose to do that which is wrong, you are guilty. You have made a choice, you have embarked upon an action and that makes you guilty. There is an element of guilt which you are responsible for. But, he says in the moment that you do that, the moment that you sin you become a slave of sin as though there is now a power that chains you up and locks you down and you cannot escape from it. Paul is talking about that power. He is saying that he knows that he is under that power and there has to be somebody that is going to save me from this thing. We see here the last thing that Jesus is doing upon the cross is not only performing justice for our sins, he is breaking the power of sin. He is destroying the grip that it has on us. I am aware that we have visitors who are with us this morning and undoubtedly the question is presenting itself to you right now “how does Jesus dying on the cross break the power of sin that drives me?” Undoubtedly you are sitting here this morning and you can all recall a time in which you knew there was something you should do that was a good thing, but instead you did what was wrong. Afterward you stepped back and you realized how horrible it was that you had done this wrong thing and you can probably recall a time in your life in which you could just sit for an hour staring at the wall reflecting on why you did that bad thing. It may feel like only 30 seconds has gone by, but then you look at the clock and you realize you have been sitting there wondering over this and fretting over this for hours upon hours. I remember not too long ago moving the refrigerator in my kitchen over to the other side of the kitchen and the handle of the door was on the wrong side. My wife had asked me if I would move the door handle over to the other side so that it makes more sense for the way that we open it. I said “Yes honey, I’ll do that for you.” Of course 6 months went by and I still hadn’t done it and one day she was out grocery shopping and I thought today is the day; I am going to surprise her. So, I am flipping the door and of course you have to dismantle the door and when you come to the hinges it requires a torque screw. The only thing on this planet that can safely remove a torque screw without doing significant damage is a torque socket. I did not have a torque socket. In that moment I am feeling anger and frustration. I am going through the rolodex in my mind of who I might know that has a readily accessible torque socket. That would be nobody except for the hard core auto enthusiast. Right in that moment my 2 daughters come rolling into the kitchen right where I am working on the fridge. They are playing and laughing with their Barbies and they are kind of chasing each other around. One is playing Ken and one is playing Barbie. I am not sure what the game was, but one was running from the other and Olive tripped and fell into me and hit me. I wasn’t even working on anything, just sitting and pondering on the torque socket problem with anger in my heart. She is only a 30 pound child so when she hits me it is not a significant injury; yet, in that moment I got angry. I stood up in my frustration and I said “Can’t you guys play somewhere else. Can’t you see that I am busy working here? How is it that you never have any respect for your father?” In that moment as I begin to unload on my children I could see in that this is wrong. They are just kids and they are just playing. I know what you are thinking, so you stopped right there and you apologized and you said please forgive me didn’t you? (chuckles from the congregation) You are laughing because you know it didn’t happen. I could see it in that moment, I knew what I was doing was wrong and I couldn’t stop myself mid-strip. I couldn’t stop myself mid-tearing a piece off them. Knowing it was wrong, there was something possessing me. Afterwards when they had gone to their bedroom I calmed down and I went and I apologized and asked their forgiveness. As I was lying in my bed that night and I am thinking “Man, have I done irreparable harm? Is this one of those traumatic memories that they are going to go seek counselling later on down the road in life? Will our relationship ever normal again?” I don’t know because when I went to apologize they said “its okay daddy we love you. We are not playing Ken and Barbie.” I was like “its okay kids, you can play with Ken and Barbie. That is not the problem, its fine.”  Sin holds us. It is a power. By Gods grace we can sometimes identify it as it is happening, but it doesn’t mean we can stop it. Jesus breaks the power of sin by carrying it into the tomb. You are sitting here this morning and thinking “that’s me. I have had those moments where I know I have done wrong, I know in the moment I was sinning against the Lord and I was committing an egregious mistake. How do I get delivered from that?” In this chapter, Romans 7, Paul says that the only way to be delivered from it is to die to it. He makes the statement in Romans 7 “My brothers you also have died to the law.” He is talking about the law of sin. “You have died to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.” Paul’s statement there, using the illustration of when a man and a women get married, they are bound by law and if they try to marry someone else they will be called an adulterer, that is in effect until one of them dies. Either the husband dies or the wife dies; until one of them dies they are bound together. Paul says that in the same way you are bound to the law, that is the power of sin, until something dies. Either you die or it dies. We know that the power of sin is still at work and still operation in this world. Paul’s solution is that you have to die and you die through the body of Jesus Christ. You say “That’s a really broad theological concept. Can you break it down on a more basic level?” Yes I can. The short answer is you must die to sin through Christ. How do you do that? How can we do it? In Galatians 2:19 Paul make the statement “Through the law I died to the law.” So, it’s the same idea, different book, but he is still touching on the same idea. He says he died to the law in order that he might live to God. He has been crucified with Christ. So again, it is through the body of Christ and through what Jesus did on the cross. We are talking about these abstract ideas, but from a very pragmatic point of view, what does that mean? What does it mean to die with Christ? Paul goes on: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” “And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” The instruction there is very straight forward. You look away from yourself to Jesus, to God, the word in the flesh. The bible uses this metaphorical language to say that what is happening is that you are dying with Christ on the cross. There is a death that is taking place, but it is not literal in the sense that you are climbing up on that cross two thousand years ago and being nailed there with Jesus. He is talking about spiritual death. The instrument which is called upon to bring about that spiritual death in your life is the instrument of faith. We are not talking about a historical understanding of what Jesus did two thousand years ago. Salvation cannot be produced by reading a history text book. It is more than a simple intellectual accent to some basic facts of a guy dying on a cross two thousand years ago. We are talking about placing all your hope, all your confidence not in yourself, but in the one who upon that cross died for you. That is in fact life changing. It means that you don’t trust your own judgment anymore. It means that you don’t trust in your own strength anymore. It means you don’t rely on yourself anymore and it means you don’t get up in the morning and think “I am going to do whatever I want to do today.” Paul’s statement is “the life that you now live, you are called to live by faith in Christ.” He uses an even more important statement by saying “It is actually Jesus Christ living through you,” Which means that every decision, every action, every behavior you engage in from the job you choose to take to the days you choose to work to the people you associate with and call friends, the places you go to, the hobbies you engage in, right down to the decision on whether or not you are going to be honest with the guy sitting next to you on the bus about the fact that you worship Jesus Christ; all of those decisions are no longer yours. If you are to die to your own life and live to Christ and to have Christ live in you, the instrument that kills you is the instrument of faith and it is a double edged sword. It means that you now place all your hope and all your thoughts before the word of God. You look to him to guide you. You look to him to direct you. The old you must constantly day by day be forced to submit and surrender to who Jesus is. Paul goes on in another book, 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, “the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, one has died for all; therefore, all have died and he died for all, but those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now one therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh. We regard him that was no longer. If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation.” Paul make the statement which is famous to Paul; he uses it all the time – “Salvation only belongs to those who are in Christ.” It is what we would call in Greek grammar a locative tense preposition; locative meaning location. Imagine a sphere and the world is out here and the world is lost. The only people who go to heaven are those who approach this circle where Christ is described as being and they step into Christ. Paul’s statement in Galatians is that means the life that you now live He now controls it. The statement that Paul makes in Romans mean that what that results in is you have died with Christ upon the cross; not literally, but spiritually. The power of sin is broken by faith. It is precisely at this moment that some people will say “So all faith is, is basically positive thinking?” What you hear about in any self help book or seminar? That is exactly wrong. Faith is only as good as the one in whom you place it. To be in Christ is not simply a matter of trying to think positive happy thoughts. To be in Christ means you are placing your faith in Him and only in Him. All the self help text books in the world cannot save you. Only Jesus Christ. It is a bit of a mystery, I will be honest. For reasons that we can strive towards, for reasons that we can sort of feel our way out into the darkness and try to grasp a hold of, but reasons which ultimately we can never fully understand God promises to send his spirit into our hearts if we place our faith in Christ. If we commit to living our lives as he would have us, he will deliver us from this body of death. That’s what Jesus was doing on the cross. So who would know sin, let him repair unto Mt. Olivet. There shall he see a man so wrung with pains that all his hair, his skin, his garments bloody be. If you want to know sin you need to know Jesus to fully appreciate your sin.

“Sin is that Press and Vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.”

If you would be delivered from this body of death you must have Jesus.

Let’s pray. Father we thank you so much for your word to us. We pray God that you will have opened our minds to understand our need to place our face in Jesus, to surrender our lives to him. We thank you Father that he broke the power of sin, that He did justice for sin. Father, help us to trust in Him. We thank you Father for the deliverance you have given to us on the Cross. We thank you Father for putting away our sin and breaking its power. Now we ask Lord, having been made perfect for all time by the singular sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross, that you would help us to continuously walk in obedience to you. We pray these things in Jesus name, Amen.