As a pastor and a church planter, it has come up in my thought process, in my prayers a number of times
of how we take Christians, I consider myself a Christian, how we take Christianity a little too lightly.
I mean, we come to church on Sunday and most of us, that is it. We've got to be here.
We refuse to be anywhere else or do anything else or give up our worship time together as a body
and I praise God for that. We come to work to Bible study on Tuesday night and many of us,
I'd say we get probably past half anyway, are faithful on Tuesday night and we study the Word together.
We dig in, we figure out what it means and so on. We serve God maybe every single day of the week,
seven days a week in some capacity and yet when we compare the overall committedness of the Christian body
and even if we just drill it down to our church, we really only know what we know, right?
We really only know us, our church, our family, ourselves. We drill down on that and we look closely at it.
We will see that those who are members of cults, members of worshiping or believing in a false God
or a demon God or something that isn't even that, right? Doesn't even have that kind of spiritual significance whatsoever.
It isn't even evil, it's just misguided, for example. You could even think it's Christian.
We have a couple of big Christian cults, Christian cults in the US. One of them, for example,
when you turn 18 years old, you go on the mission field. Without exception, if you are faithful to the cult,
you go on a mission field for two years. You live away from your home with limited supplies, limited money,
limited clothes, you have a bike, you're not allowed to have a car and for two years you serve what they say is Jesus.
Now we know because the teaching is cultic teaching, it's not godly teaching, it's not biblical that it is a cult
and yet they will go at the age of 18 for two years faithfully, every one of them who believes.
We don't do that. A lot of churches don't do mission trips. We don't take the gospel to other states a lot of times
or we don't go on mission in our own communities a lot of times.
A lot of churches don't do Hall of a Lot of Fun or block parties or go and knock on doors and tell people about Jesus.
And I think about the Christian kingdom as a whole and I think about who Jesus was in his three to maybe as many as five years
of public ministry walking the earth and he was always 100% committed to God.
In fact, he was so quote unquote fanatical that if they were going to kill him for what he was doing for God,
he was going to be ready for that. He was willing to die. He even told his disciples to deny themselves,
take up their cross daily and follow after him and when he said take up their cross daily,
they knew he meant be prepared to be crucified, not just to endure some minor suffering
or my pet peeve is the way my friend uses certain words. That's not your cross to bear.
When it says take up your cross daily, he's talking about the suffering unto death.
And they were supposed to be willing to do that every day and we see the disciples themselves
and all but one of them we know historically martyred for the faith in Jesus, never abandoning the truth,
never abandoning to the lies that were pushed on them the truth that Jesus had laid in their hearts and they knew.
Stephen, possibly the earliest example standing on the steps to the temple proclaiming Christ
and telling them you have crucified this one whom God has sent and they took him and stoned him.
And then here we are again comparing that to the way Christianity is today
and I think sometimes we are just not fanatics for what we believe.
A fanatic is one who is very devoted, very committed, steadfast, will not back down even in the face of violence,
even in the face of contradiction or conflict someone comes against you, whatever in what they believe in.
And I submit to you that if we would compare ourselves to the false cults of the world,
we need to be more fanatical in how we live for Jesus.
I do not mean we should strap on bombs, throw molotov cocktails, take up guns, nothing like that.
Absolutely not, right? And they will do even that.
But the fact that they will do even that when we will not go and verbally share Christ with people
who might be displeased with us says that we are not fanatical enough for Christ.
We begin a sermon series today on being a fanatic for Christ.
Today we are going to talk about how if you want to have an enduring commitment to God,
a meaning passing perseverance, passing basic persecutions, passing someone standing up in conflict with you,
maybe even someone threatening your life,
if you want to have an enduring faithfulness to God, you have to first know who you are.
I submit to you that people do not stay the course of time because of what they think they should do.
So you get teenagers get in your head that they should be allowed to do something
and their parents have a hard time convincing them otherwise.
And for a while that thing that they think they should be allowed to do, it persists.
But then when they get older and they look back at their parents, they realize,
hey, you know, I really should have done that, handled that a little bit differently.
As an early 20 something, I thought I knew everything.
By the time I reached 30, I finally figured out I knew almost nothing.
So it does not endure. What does endure is when you know who you are.
I had a young girl this week, I was talking to her and we were going through this little book.
It has these thought provoking questions.
I'll just tell you, it was Ariana, we had a conversation and she asked me, she said,
what do you feel like is your greatest extravagance?
I mean, what do you spend most of your time, your energy, your money on that is unnecessary?
And I started looking at my life and I thought, oh my goodness.
And then she said, for me, one of the hardest things is when I get around friends
or even family members who do not love God, I hide who I really am.
And she said that is one of her greatest extravagance.
She spends her effort on not standing out because her family and her friends
sometimes do not love God in a way that allows her to be who she is.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
So we have to know who we are and it starts here.
We don't go to the text first, we go to the point first.
So the first point is looking at who we were.
And I submit to you, if you have not received something from Christ,
if Christ has not done something for you, then what I'm about to describe to you is who you still are.
Unless Jesus has made you new in something different, we'll get to that in a minute,
then what I'm going to describe to you is who we still are.
In Romans 3.23 it says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
And so that means we've all done things that God did not want us to do
or we've failed to do things that God wanted us to do.
So sin is when you are not running with God, you're not being who God wants you to be.
You're not in the direction that God is trying to take you to make you the best
that you possibly can be, what he created you to be.
And so sin is when you're disobeying God, so you're not doing what God wanted you to do
or you're doing something that God did not want you to do.
And then a little later in Romans 6.23 it says the wages of sin is death.
And so it's what's paid for sin.
So when you don't do what God wants you to do, what do you get? Death.
So it's simple, except it's complicated.
And I'll tell you why, I'm going to make it simple.
I'll try to make it simple.
In the Garden of Eden, the serpent said to Eve,
I know God said that the day you eat of the fruit you will surely die,
but I'm here to tell you, you will not die.
God just said that because he doesn't want you to be like him,
and I'm paraphrasing of course, right?
So you will die or you will not die, which is it?
The wages of sin is death. Have you sinned?
Romans 3.23 says yes, you have sinned, but you're still here.
So did you die or not?
See, we've made dying down to be just when the heart stops or the brain stops waving, right?
So people are in the hospital, a life support, their brain's not working anymore,
and they say, well, they'll probably never live again.
And so because we recognize their brain doesn't work, we say they're not truly living.
They're brain dead, right?
When their heart stops beating and you can't make it beat again, they're dead.
They died, right?
And that's what we call death.
But that is only a part of death.
That's the smallest part, if you will.
We say, no, that's huge. That's huge. Yes, it's huge.
But even though it's huge, it's still the smallest part of death.
Real death is separation from God.
If you would die and be away from God forever, that would be death.
That would be the end of it. It's the final. It's done, right?
You're never going to be with God.
And so when the Bible says the wages of sin is death, what it means is,
if you have sinned, and check Romans 3.23, you have, then you are dead.
That's what Paul would say.
So a person is dead.
In fact, it says in Ephesians 2, and we're not going to go there and read this one either,
because we'll look at it later.
Ephesians 2.1 said, we were dead in our trespasses and sins.
Now, did it say we would die? No, it said we were dead. Why?
Because we have already sinned, we die.
Sin brings about death. That's how it works.
Isaiah even said, we all like sheep have gone astray.
Before Paul came, before the Holy Spirit came to help us understand this difficult concept,
we all like sheep had gone astray, means we've all screwed up.
Everybody's screwed up.
Just what Kerry was saying, the inspirational moment, her family calling her a hypocrite,
because she's screwed up. Everybody's screwed up.
If you say, I never screwed up, you make God out to be a liar, John says.
So we've all screwed up, because we've all screwed up.
We all inherited death. We were dead.
In Romans 5, in verse 12, you'll see this.
Therefore, justice through one man, sin entered into the world, and death through sin.
And so death spread to all men, because all sinned.
So how many people received or inherited death?
Everybody. That's your gift.
From your parents, from your grandparents, all the way back to Adam.
You received and inherited death.
If by some chance you never sinned, and that's not going to happen,
because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
but if a person had never sinned at all, never physically been in the presence,
and lied, stole, cheated, hated, lusted, never actually sinned,
they would still have a sinful nature, a bent to sin, a tendency to sin.
And that sinful nature arises out of the death that occurred when Adam did not trust God,
and took of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And so death occurred. Sin came in, and because sin came in, death occurred.
The wages of sin is death.
His sin didn't just kill him, it killed everybody.
Did his heart keep beating? Yes.
But spiritually, he died.
And from there, if nothing positive happened, if nothing changed,
and you can stay there for your whole life,
if you stay there for your whole life, you can live your whole life.
And I'm going to tell you what that looks like. Just make sure we're not confused.
People who are dead in their trespassing sins think themselves to be good people.
They think themselves to be better than average.
They look at the murderers, the rapists, those who committed incest,
those who stole, the embezzlers, the guys on death row, the people in jail, right?
The child molesters, they look at them and they say, I'm not as bad as any of them.
I didn't do any of that, right? I'm not as bad as any of them.
Let me give you this illustration. I read this in a book. I didn't make this up, okay?
So let's assume for a minute who was the best person you could think of to ever live outside deep.
Not who you could think of, but the best person to ever live.
And the person in the illustration shows Mother Teresa.
And Mother Teresa is a pretty awesome person.
She's a professor, a follower of Jesus, she was a missionary, she was a gospel,
preached even, right, as a pastor per se, but preached and she shared the gospel all over the world.
So Mother Teresa, right? No one, in fact, she was sanctified at the Catholic Church
because no one could ever name a time that she sinned and they could name times in which she did miracles.
So they call her a saint, Mother Teresa.
Now I want you to think for a moment who's the worst. Who's the worst person to ever live?
You might pick Hitler or Mussolini or Genghis Khan, right?
You might pick one of Hitler's generals or whatever.
You might pick any number of people. You might pick Saddam Hussein, right?
You could pick somebody that's really, really bad and you put them down there.
And between Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein, where would you fit?
Put yourself on that scale. It would be somewhere in the middle, right?
Not way down here. I mean, I don't care how bad you think you are, you're not as bad as Hitler, right?
You didn't offer a Holocaust. You might be bad, but you might be bad to you.
It might be worse to you, right? But you're not as bad as he is, so you're somewhere up above him.
But you're not as good as Mother Teresa either, right?
Because you didn't give all the money you have and give all the food to the poor
and spend your whole life serving and preaching the gospel to millions.
You're not like that either, right? So you're somewhere in the middle.
But where is Jesus on this scale?
According to Mother Teresa, he's off the scale way up there, right?
Like the scale is a foot tall and he's at the top of the Empire State Building, right?
He's so far off. So that's the righteousness of God that God desired.
That's what God wanted us to do, wanted us to be like, and we're somewhere in the middle.
And so we look at Hitler and we say, well, I'm not like Hitler.
That's what everybody who's lost in their transgressions and sins, who's dead in their transgressions and sin does.
I'm better than somebody else. And if you're okay, if you didn't do that, you'd be like, oh man, I'm nothing.
I'm worthless, right? If you thought you were as bad as Hitler, you would find a way to really be angry
or really be something else to try to overcome that because you realize just how bad you are, right?
And you'd convince yourself in some cultic way that, for example, you're destroying the Jews because they crucified Jesus.
That's ridiculous. That's absolutely ridiculous. And so you would find some way to cope because you realize how dark and how terrible you are.
And that's what they do. They say, oh, I'm not as bad as that person, or they find some way to cope.
But that's not the goal. You can see how, as you do those things, that just keeps you where you are, right?
So if you get out of bed tomorrow morning and you say, well, at least I'm not as bad as you, you should hear yourself saying,
when you say, at least you're not as bad as so-and-so, you're justifying your bad behavior.
And if you're justifying your bad behavior, then Jesus probably isn't justifying your bad behavior.
You understand? If you're living your life, comparing yourself to other bad people so that you could think you're okay,
it's probably because Jesus hasn't actually done anything.
Otherwise, you'd be comparing yourself to Christ and making that your target and that your measure.
And that changes everything because you'll never be there. It's a goal, right? It's a place that we're trying to go.
And I don't want to get ahead of myself. The bottom line is the ways of sin is death.
As men, we were dead. And if you're here today and you have not accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior,
you are dead in your trespasses and sins. You can survive that way physically for your whole life.
Some people go 80 years, 100 years that way. I don't know if anybody ever goes 100 years that way.
That's a pretty small group of people. Maybe somebody does, right? They could do it.
And you cope in a myriad of different ways. You find all kinds of different ways to be okay and get by and handle your struggles and handle your trials.
Or you may fall into a cult, fall into a false god worship, chase after money.
And then when money isn't good enough, you chase after sex for a while, then that's not working for you.
You go back to money, right? Go after social media for a while when that's not good enough. Go after money and so on.
A job, a promotion, a marriage. I remember when I wasn't saved this, I did it. I had a list and it was never written down.
I wanted to have a beautiful wife. I wanted to have a house that I owned. I wanted to have a car without a car payment.
Very specific about that. I wanted to have a good career that I could work my career for my whole life and retire from it and then live happily ever after.
I did not want a boat. I did not want an RV. I did want a motorcycle. At 25 years old, guess what I had?
I had a beautiful wife. I had a car. No loan on the car. I had a house with a mortgage, but that's how you do that.
I had a good job which I could retire from. I did not have a boat. I did not have an RV.
I thought to myself, okay guess what? I won life. I had these goals. I have won. I'm done. Now what?
At 25 years old, I said, now what? I started to say there's got to be something more to this life than the gods you can see, the gods you can taste, the gods that you can touch, the things that you can pursue.
There's got to be something more. It sometimes happens that those, because you're here today, if you haven't already, that might be where you are.
There's got to be something more than that which I can do this with or that which I can reach for and I'm still striving to get it.
There's got to be something more. And there is because you were not meant to be dead.
And that brings us to our second point. The first point was the wages of sin is death.
The second point is there is a substitutionary atonement. There's a couple of real big words for you.
So if you're a mathematician or if you made it through about fourth grade math and everybody in here I hope did, then you understand the principle of substitution.
That means if two things are equal, then they can be substituted. So two plus two can be substituted for four because two and two are equal to four.
Two times two can also be substituted for four which means by the principle of substitution, two plus two equals two times two.
That's the principle of substitution. Substitutionary means one thing was substituted for another.
Atonement means sins were paid for. Jesus is our substitutionary atonement.
So we're going to go now, if you've got your Bible, maybe give me a little hoot, a holler, amen, take a breath.
Second Corinthians chapter five. Oh my goodness, that's weak.
If you ain't careful, I'm going to turn my microphone off and do it myself.
All right, we're going to second Corinthians chapter five.
All right, that's I'll give you, it's good enough. Second Corinthians chapter five beginning in verse 14.
Okay, we're not going to read the whole chapter just mostly for the interest of time.
I would encourage you to study the whole chapter if you get an opportunity to do that this week.
Okay, second Corinthians chapter five beginning in verse 14 says this for the love of Christ controls us.
Having concluded this, listen to this, I'll start from the beginning.
For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this.
In other words, this is what has been determined. This is what's been figured out.
This is the end of all matters that one died for all, therefore all died.
Did you catch that? So Jesus died for us, thereby substituting his death for our death.
15, and he died for all that they who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf.
Therefore, from now on, we recognize no man according to the flesh, even though we have known Christ according to the flesh.
Yet now we know him thus no longer. In other words, even though we saw Jesus alive, we're not dealing with him as he was alive on the earth.
We're dealing with him now as he is eternal and the right hand of God making intercession for us.
He says, yet now we know him thus no longer.
17, therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come.
Now let's just get stupid about this for a second to make it so downright simple that you can figure this out.
Let's say you own some money. You have a couple of cars. You have a house. You have, I don't know, a job. You have family members, etc.
And then your heart stops beating and they try to resuscitate it.
Nope, can't do it. Sorry, pronounced dead. 1114 a.m. on such and such a date.
You physically died. Now do you have a car? Do you have a house? Do you have a family on the earth?
What do you still have? You have none of it. It's no longer yours, right?
Jesus died for us and when he died for us, we all died. It's substitutionary atonement.
Two plus two equals two times two. Jesus died for you. Therefore, you no longer own anything.
You no longer are dead in your trespasses and sins because he died for you.
Romans 6, 23, I quoted to you, says the wages of sin is death.
The second half of that very same verse, Paul says, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ his son.
How was the eternal life accomplished? Jesus died for you.
Don't want to get ahead of myself. Verse 18 says this, now all these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ.
Reconciled is like when you take two puzzle pieces and you put them together and they fit. That's reconciled.
That's a different principle. It's not a substitutionary principle. You come up with it. You fit with it.
And so we are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.
And he gave us the ministry of reconciliation, which means we go on then and help others become reconciled to God.
Namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
His goal was to bring everyone into right relationship with himself. He was not counting their trespasses against them.
Let's be realistic. If God was looking at the lies, the lust, the hate, the sin of mankind, would the proper response to that be,
I'm going to send my son to die to pay for that? No, that would not be the proper response.
But God wasn't looking at the sin and saying the sin needs the remedy. He was looking at the man and saying the man needs the remedy.
Sin is not the problem. It sucks, yes, but it's not the problem. The problem is death and the solution is life.
There is only one. What else is there? If you have seed and it's been baked, it can't grow. And if you put it in the ground, it will not grow.
What is the solution? Would you put some chemicals on it? Would you dissect it? Would you fertilize it?
How would you make a seed that's been baked to death grow? You cannot because there is only one solution to death and it is life.
And life can only come from one place, life. And the ultimate in life in the spiritual realm, the source of life is God.
And He provided life through His son Jesus. Back to the top of 19, it says,
Namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against Him.
And He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. In other words, we have the truth.
We know the truth of how any person can be brought into right relationship with God.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were entreating through us.
In other words, we are going to the world. Listen, you died and you have nothing like a missionary.
Missionary goes overseas, they take one suitcase, clothes maybe, right? Toiletries.
But after a month, the toilet, or two or three, the toiletries are all used up and the clothes are worn out.
They have to get everything they have from the field on which they serve, right?
If they took their phone with them, eventually their phone is outdated, dropped, broken, went down the toilet, whatever.
Everything they brought with them except them. That's us. You have nothing. I have nothing. We died.
It was all God's to start with and we thought it was ours and that was part of the problem.
We were dead thinking we owned stuff. But having died, we own nothing.
And now we have become ambassadors. We are on a mission. We live here entreating others and begging them on their behalf.
Be reconciled to God. That's the end of verse 20.
And 21 says, He made Him, that's Jesus, who knew no sin, Jesus never sinned, therefore Jesus never died spiritually,
to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
He died for us so that we live through Him. Flip over to Romans chapter 5.
If you're following along, which I do encourage you to do that because your translation may read a little different
and you might get a little more out of it if you're used to your translation.
Romans chapter 5. I won't read all of this right now. We're going to read 5 through 21 by the time we're done.
But we're just going to read right now beginning in verse 5. And hope does not disappoint because the love of God
has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
For while we were still helpless, what were we? We were dead in our trespasses and sins.
At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. I'm going to ask you something. Were you ungodly?
Let me tell you this right now. If you weren't ungodly, Christ didn't die for you.
But the good news is, even if you think you weren't ungodly, you were.
Because Romans 3.23 says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
John wrote that if you say you have no sin, you're a liar. So if you're ungodly, you're helpless.
And if you're helpless, you need Christ. And if you have Christ, you can be no longer dead.
You can be alive because of the substitutionary atonement. What did He do for you? He died for you.
His death replaces your death. A death of a godly man for the death of an ungodly man.
Death of a godly man for the death of an ungodly woman. Verse 7 says,
For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare to die.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
We'll stop right there for the moment. The for us is possibly the most powerful words.
I know you want to say Christ is powerful. I know you want to say died is powerful.
But the for us is the proof of a substitutionary atonement.
You don't have to die because Jesus died. But let's see, temporarily, you died because you had sin.
So what happened was, it was the sin that was on you that caused the death that was you, and Jesus took it on Himself.
And so now you might have the sin, but you no longer have the death. The death was taken on Jesus.
His was a substitutionary atonement. He atoned for sins He did not commit.
He died to take the death that we lived. You catch that? He died to take the death that we lived.
Now, if you believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, something happens.
A substitutionary atonement happens. Well, what does that look like?
So first of all, we saw that the wages of sin is death. Secondly, we saw that there is a substitutionary atonement.
And we're asking ourselves now, what does that look like?
Well, Paul makes it pretty clear in 1 Corinthians, and we're going to go to chapter 6.
1 Corinthians chapter 6. One second, wrong page. There we go.
He says this. He says, now, He's talking about now that I have been saved.
He says, verse 11, and such were some of you, and you were washed, but you were sanctified.
That means made holy. But you were justified. It was made as if you never sinned.
The wages of sin is death. You don't have death. Therefore, it is as if you never sinned, justified,
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God.
And then in verse 12, he says, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable.
All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.
That's what it begins to look like. Do all things as if you do them unto the Lord.
Why? Because Jesus Christ took the death that you were worthy of, that you were headed to.
Go now to Colossians chapter 3. Colossians chapter 3, and this one's a little longer.
So if you don't flip to the short ones, you might want to flip to this one.
Colossians chapter 3, beginning in verse 1. We'll read 17 verses total.
If then you have been raised up with Christ, what happened?
Jesus' substitutionary atonement, He paid for your death, right?
So you have life because your death has been paid for.
If then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above.
So what is our nomiker? What is our motive? What is our job?
What is our motto for living? We are seeking the things above.
That's what he says we should do now alive in Christ, seeking the things above.
Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Set your mind on the things above. You don't own a car. You died.
You don't own a house. You died. You don't own money. You died.
You don't own strength or health or reason. You died.
All of that was left in your will to someone else, another you that now lives.
He says set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.
We're not worried about those things. We're worried about the things that we'll have in eternity.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
If you've doubted me until that moment, there's the verse.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
There it is very clearly said. When Christ who is our life is revealed,
then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Therefore consider the members of your earthly body, that means the parts,
your liver, your lungs, your hands, as dead to immorality, impurity, passion,
evil desire, greed, which amounts to idolatry.
For it is on account of these things that the wrath of God will come.
So the wrath is the opposition of God, and the opposition of God will come.
Why will it come? Because all of those things, which we should consider ourselves dead to,
are still happening. And in them you also once walked.
You used to live that way, or die that way, I guess you could say,
when you were living in them as a dead person.
But now you also put them all aside.
Anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive speech for your mouth.
I could break all those things down for you.
Anger is when you hate somebody.
Wrath is when you oppose somebody.
Malice is when you hold a grudge against somebody.
Slander is when you talk bad about somebody.
It doesn't even matter if it's true or not.
And abusive speech from your mouth.
Do not lie to one another, since you lay aside the old self with its evil practices.
See the bad things that God would call sin, they belong to the old man.
They don't belong to you. You died.
Now you're different.
And you have put on the new self, who is being renewed to a true knowledge,
according to the image of the one who created him.
A renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek,
Jews, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarians, Scythians, slave, freemen,
Christ is in all, he is all and in all.
In other words, it doesn't matter where you came from,
you're only going to get there one way.
That's through Jesus.
And again, it doesn't matter where you came from,
he's happy to have you.
He had the joy to have you.
He wants to have you.
He loves you.
He wants you to come to be with him for an eternity.
He wants a proper relationship with you now.
And so, as those who have been chosen of God, that's us,
holy and beloved, put on our heart of compassion, kindness, humility,
gentleness and patience, bearing one another and forgiving each other.
Whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you,
so also should you.
And beyond all these things, put on love.
We've been talking a lot about that lately,
which is the perfect bond of unity.
It's what brings us together.
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,
to which indeed you were called in one body.
And be thankful.
Let the Word of Christ richly dwell within you,
with all wisdom, teaching, admonishing one another,
with Psalms and hymns, spiritual songs and singing,
with thankfulness in all your hearts to God.
You know what he's just said?
He said, go to church.
Go be the church together.
And this is the order of business.
He just gave us the order of business for being the church together.
And then verse 17 says,
And whatever you do, in word or deed,
do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks through Him to God the Father.
Do you understand?
If you cannot do it to the glory of God,
then you don't do it.
That's it.
If you cannot say, I am doing this for God,
then you don't do it.
And if you can say, I'm doing this for God,
then you should say, I'm doing this for God.
That's how we live after a substitutionary atonement
brought us to life because our debt was paid for.
But be careful.
Because this is what I see.
And I submit to you, it's why Christians are not committed
the way fanatics are committed.
Because they have forgotten that there was a substitutionary atonement.
They have forgotten that the wages of sin is actually death.
And they have skipped right to living for Christ.
And in doing so, in skipping right to living for Christ,
they are busy cleaning up.
I'm trying to quit lying.
I'm trying to quit cheating.
I'm trying to quit stealing.
Don't you understand?
You died.
You don't lie, cheat, or steal.
That person who lied, that person who cheated,
that person who stole, they died.
That person died.
Their record is clean.
All things are now made new.
So now you are busy doing the things that God wants you to do,
not because they are the things that God wants you to do.
We don't look in the Bible and go,
oh, God said don't do that.
I'm going to stop doing that.
Oh, God said do that.
I'm going to start doing that.
That's not what it's for.
This book is about framing our identity, who we are now in Christ.
It's not a set of rules.
If you met all the rules, that would not make you a follower of Jesus.
If you did everything that the Bible says to do,
that would not make you a follower of Jesus.
One thing and only one thing makes you a follower of Jesus.
It is the grace of God.
God, by His love and His desire to be gracious toward those who had sinned against Him,
and let's be very frank, who had sinned against Him, and were dead.
You were dead because you had sinned against God or had a sinful nature either way.
You were dead.
And God, in His grace, decided to bring you to life and make you a new creation.
That's what we just read.
And in making you a new creation, all of those old things, they are dead.
It's not about flesh.
It's not about money.
It's not about food.
It's not about possessions.
It's not about wealth.
It's not about looking better or doing more.
It's all now about the grace of God.
We live because He died for us.
And if we forget that, then what we wind up doing is cleansing the outside of the cup.
And Jesus said, you just cleanse the outside of the cup.
Pardon me.
He said, you just cleanse the outside of the cup.
That's all you do.
Are you cleansing the outside of the cup?
Or are you submitting your whole self to the God of the universe through the one who died for you?
You can't do better.
You can only be better.
If you choose not, if you're lost in your transgressions and sins, if you're dead in your transgressions and sins,
and you choose not to lie, you will just do something else wrong.
That's all you'll do.
But if you turn to Jesus and you say, okay, Jesus, I'm willing to have substitutionary atonement.
I'm willing to let the death that you died for me stand for me.
For my death, I will no longer be dead.
I will be alive because you say so.
And if you will do that, then He will be alive and He will live in you.
And you'll no longer be cleansing the outside of the cup.
Your righteousness is still like filthy rags.
You, like sheep, will still go astray because you are a human being.
God looks at us and He knows that we are but dust.
Does that mean you should willingly do that?
No, because all of those activities, all of those things that you would do,
they are of your old man.
In fact, it should be like this.
When you do the wrong thing and you recognize it's the wrong thing
and you say, hey, I used to do that, but I don't think that's something Jesus would do.
I can't do that for the Lord.
And you turn back to God.
You don't turn from that thing because you did do something else wrong, right?
You turn back to God and say, okay, God, I realize I'm not supposed to do that thing.
So show me what to do.
And God takes your hand or God walks your steps or God cleanses your mind or God purifies your spirit.
God does all that He says that He'll do when you confess to Him and pray to be forgiven.
And He does all of that.
And in that moment, as Kerry shared in the inspirational moment, as RJ was talking about,
you look back at it and you go, you know what?
I now realize the real problem was not that I was doing something that's wrong.
The real problem was not that I sinned against God in that moment.
You can feel terrible about your sin all you want.
It's not going to help you at all.
It has no benefit.
The real problem was that in that moment, I was being the wrong person.
I was being the dead Dan instead of being the alive Dan.
I was still worshiping my car instead of realizing it's God's car.
I was still worshiping my reason, my thought process, instead of realizing it's a gift from God that I should use now that I'm alive.
And God begins to take everything that you give Him, Romans 12, you put it all in His service,
and then you can know what is the good and perfect will of God.
You can test it and know it.
You can do the things that your living self now does and God will take care of it.
God will make it happen.
The truth is that living for Christ or in Christ is about so much more than choices.
It isn't like people come to church and they are truly benefited by coming to worship because they hear what they shouldn't do and hear what they should do.
And then you have Christians, suppose Christians come to church and they say,
well, I gave my life to Christ and they're cleaning up the outside,
but they'll hear something they're not supposed to do.
So, well, I just haven't gotten there yet.
Yeah, you have. The moment you got saved, you came to life.
And the moment you realize that those activities, the lies, the malice, all that list that we read, all of that is part of the old.
What's part of the new?
Well, teaching and admonishing and Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and singing with thankfulness, loving others, giving, being at peace,
and letting the peace of Christ rule in your heart.
All of those things are of the new you.
And frankly, if you're so busy doing all the things of the new you,
there's going to be no time for the things of the old you to creep in.
And you're going to be you, living for Christ is about so much more than choices.
You or we are going to have to rely on him to do all that we cannot.
And we can't rely on him to do all that we cannot unless we remember that it was a substitutionary atonement.
I think of it this way, and I'm coming into my conclusion already.
It has long baffled me that the fanatics of cultists, what they can do, they'll die for a lie.
They don't believe it's a lie, but they'll strap on a bomb and go in a coffee shop just to blow up 10 civilians
because they think they're going to get 23 virgins in heaven as part of a jihad.
It's stupid. It's the dumbest thing you could possibly imagine.
But they believe that lie, because they believe the lie, they'll die for it.
I'm talking about believing the truth, people.
Now, God will never ask you to put on a bomb vest, but if he did, would you?
Because if he did, then you wouldn't.
In the second century, there was a man who was brought before a king,
and the king wanted him to recant and give up Christ and Christianity.
But the man spurned that proposition and said, I'll never do it.
The king said, if you don't do it, I'll banish you.
The man smiled and answered, he said, you can't banish me from Christ, for he says he will never leave me nor forsake me.
The king got angry and he said, well, I will confiscate your property and take it all from you.
And the man replied, my treasures are laid up on high. You cannot get them.
And he became still more angry and he said, I will kill you.
And the man said, well, I have been dead for 40 years.
I've been dead with Christ, dead to the world, and my life is hid with Christ and God, and you cannot touch it.
And the king said to himself, what are you going to do with such a fanatic?
The question is not why do cultists live like fanatics, because cultists live like fanatics because they believe what they believe.
The question is why Christians don't live like fanatics.
Is it because we don't believe what we believe?
Well, I believe it. And I think God is saying we need to believe it.
But we have forgotten that Jesus died in our place.
And having done so, we are now dead and then again made alive.
We are resurrected into the newness of life in Christ.
I warned you about Ephesians 2 was coming. Here's the rest of it.
You heard the first part and you were dead in your trespasses and sins.
Now listen to this as it develops.
You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formally walked according to the course of this world,
according to the prince of the power, the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.
Among them we too all formerly lived.
We all lived within among people who were dead in their trespasses and sins.
Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind.
And we were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
That means we were children whom God was working against us because we were dead in our trespasses and sins
and doing the things that God would have us not do or rather being what God would have us not be.
Verse 4, But God, being rich in his mercy because of his great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead in our transgressions, did you hear that?
He loved us even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
In order that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God,
not as a result of works that no one should boast.
For we are his workmanship, this is Ariana's favorite memorized verse because there's a song and she loves it.
For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Did you hear it now? You were dead in your trespasses and sins.
And if you have not been made alive with Christ you are still dead in your trespasses and sins.
And you can clean up the outside as much as you want.
But unless you trust in the Lord Jesus to save you and let his substitutionary death stand for your death,
you will never be alive in this lifetime or eternity.
But God wants it to be so.
You've probably heard that Jesus died to give us life more abundant.
You ever hear anybody say that? Life more abundant.
Well if they say that they're getting it kind of wrong. What?
Anybody want to take a stab at what I mean when I say if they're saying that Jesus died that we might have life more abundant?
Well let me read the verse to you. I have it memorized so I'm going to go there and read it so you know I'm not playing.
It's John 10, 10.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy and boy he's been doing a real good job.
I came that they might have life and might have it abundantly.
See we forget we were dead.
Jesus did not come to give you any kind of abundance.
He came to give you life.
And if you will not first accept the life that Jesus purchased with his death,
you will have no life let alone a life more abundant.
He came that we might have life.
And then 1 John chapter 4 and these are my last verses for the day.
1 John chapter 4.
Got to get back there.
We're reading 1 John chapter 4.
I'll begin in 7 so that you get the full picture.
Beloved let us love one another for love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
Remember we've talked about this for weeks.
The one who does not love does not know God for God is love.
Verse 9.
By this the love of God was manifested in us.
This is how God showed his love in us.
That God has sent his only begotten son into the world.
What?
So that we might live through him.
Not continue to live through him.
Not live a certain way.
But so that we might live through him.
Because we were dead.
And this is love.
Not that we loved God.
But that he loved us and sent his son to be the what?
The propitiation for our sins.
That's the full payment for our sins.
A fanatic won't back down when a thing threatens.
He won't back down when a thing threatens his life.
He won't back down when a thing threatens his finances.
He won't back down when a thing threatens his health.
He won't back down when a thing threatens his personal feeling good about himself.
He won't back down when a thing threatens his life or his identity.
Because he knows his identity is found in Christ.
There are no lengths to which you will not go to live rightly.
Because it is only by Jesus that you live at all.
So the next time you think about sinning against God.
And you think, well I'm just going to do it.
Or I'm just going to do it because I feel compelled.
Because I'm tempted.
I'm given in.
Whatever.
You need to realize that you are spitting on the person who gave you life.
Now you might despise your mother.
She might have treated you bad.
She might have abandoned you when you were young.
She could be the worst mother to ever exist.
But she still gave you life.
She still gave you life.
You could never wish that she didn't exist.
Unless you're wishing that yourself didn't exist.
And that's exactly where you wind up if you're not alive.
But Christ died so that we might be alive.
So that we might live.
And when we live, we live for the one who died for us.
The first step in living a steadfast life.
A faithful life.
A life that goes the distance for Jesus.
Is knowing who we are.
And the first piece in knowing who we are.
Is knowing that we were dead.
And now we're alive.
I submit to you that men who are brought back to life.
There's a few stories of that in the Bible.
That they all went on never forgetting that they were dead.
And brought back to life.
And we ought never forget.
The wages of sin is death.
Jesus Christ paid a substitutionary atonement for us.
And because of that, we now do all things.
As if we are living for the one who died for us.
Which means, if somebody tells you you can't talk about Jesus.
You do it anyway.
If somebody tells you you can't live for Jesus.
You do it anyway.
If somebody puts a gun to your head and says.
You renounced Jesus right now.
I'm going to blow your head off.
You will not renounce Jesus.
Why do you think they wouldn't?
Because they knew.
Not because they knew that the guy might go ahead and blow their head off.
And they wouldn't want to go to Jesus.
And go right after they died and go.
I'm really sorry Jesus.
In the last three seconds that I was on the earth.
I renounced you because the guy had a gun to my head.
What was I going to do?
No, it has nothing to do with that at all.
We don't not sin now.
Because we are afraid that we might die while we are sinning.
And go to heaven right straight out of our sin spot.
No, we live for Christ now.
Because we were dead.
And now we are alive.
And if you are here today.
And you never became alive.
Then you need to entreat God to do that very thing.
That God said he will do every time someone entreats him to do it.
And say okay, I want to live the rest of my life for Jesus.
Okay, I realize I have sinned.
I am dead and my trespasses and sins.
The wages of sin is death.
That makes sense to me.
I, like everybody else, need a savior.
I need somebody to pay for that death.
Because otherwise we would all just live our lives and die.
And go away from God.
And the Bible calls that hell.
And that's not what we want.
We don't want to spend eternity away from God.
We want to be with God for eternity.
And more than that we want to have life.
We want to be alive now.
And then in being alive now we can say now everything is possible.
All things are possible.
But I won't do anything that's going to jeopardize my being alive in Christ.
I'm not going to do the things I used to do.
Be the person I used to be.
Be like I used to be.
I'm going to let Jesus show me who I am now.
Alive in Christ.
And that's the first step to becoming a fanatic.
And will you be threatened?
It's happened to me many times.
Will you be bad mouthed?
Will you be persecuted?
Will your friends not like to talk to you?
Or you won't get invited to parties?
Or get slammed online for your social media posts about God?
Will those things happen?
Yeah.
And if you realize you're only living now because you were dead then and Jesus made you alive,
then when those things happen you'll be like,
so well, still alive.
The person that's attacking me is still dead.
So you don't need victory over your enemies.
You just need time.
Because if they're dead in their trespasses and sins,
they'll eventually have a heart attack or get hit by a car.
And you don't have to wish that on them.
It's just the opposite.
You should wish that they would be saved.
You should wish that they will come to life.
That the substitutionary death of Jesus will work for them as He is willing to make it do.
But if they don't, they will eventually go away.
You know how many people have persecuted me that are now no longer even on this earth?
And they either accepted Christ and they're in heaven or they didn't and they're in hell.
And that's not my job.
I don't decide that.
But they're gone.
Gone, gone.
Died.
Story about a pastor.
This is a true life story, a real friend of mine.
I met him years ago at the old Baptist men's camp out.
And he was a pastor and he served in the church.
And there was a man in the church who was a deacon.
And this man and his wife decided they didn't like the pastor very much.
You could do that with me probably because I say a number of things every time I get up here that's offensive.
So somebody could decide that they don't like me.
And so over the space of two years, they verbally attacked him in the church.
They went before the church and asked for a vote of no confidence.
And the church voted confidence.
They kept him.
And then a year later they asked for a vote of no confidence.
And the church decided to keep him still.
And a year later they asked for it again.
Well, in that particular meeting they rallied a bunch of people who had come to the church who hadn't been in a long time.
And they voted him out, this one deacon and his wife.
And they got all these people to vote and they voted him out.
And so he said, I'm not going to stay.
He said, I'm going to go.
They voted me out.
He said, he could have went back the next Sunday when all those people were back and they probably wouldn't have upheld it.
But that's not the way the church works.
The church voted me out.
I'm out.
So he left there.
About five years later he ran into their daughter, the deacon and his wife.
And it was the daughter of the deacon and his wife.
And he said, well, how are your parents doing?
And she said, not good.
And the guy said, well, why not?
What's going on?
He said, well, my dad died about six months, massive heart attack, about six months after they voted you out of the church.
My dad died.
My mom died about nine months later.
It was a broken heart.
And while my mom was on her deathbed, I went in with her and I prayed with her.
I talked to her and she said one thing to me.
She said, we never should have done that to the pastor.
There's a lot of people in the world still living dead even though they claim to be Christians.
Don't let that be you.
Jesus Christ wants to bring you to life.
Jesus Christ wants to give you a new identity.
Jesus Christ wants to take all the stuff and put it to work for him.
Let it be so.
Otherwise, you may just find yourself like that deacon.
He's ordained, supposedly a man of God, pursuing someone like me who's a goofball and a troublemaker,
preaching things you don't like to hear sometimes or something like that.
But don't think that God will go quietly into that dark night.
God is not mocked.
As we close out our invitation today, realize this is just the first step in living a fanatical life for Jesus.
You're going to endure because you know who you are.