Purchased and Marveling

should apologize for that initial meeting with the phone. You want to know that your family is going to be going to a place where they will be fed the word of God. And I think I called this church and then I called two or three other churches in the area and Rebecca and Alan and their Their girls didn’t have much of anything to do with the decision at the time.

When they got here, they had two. One was a tiny baby. That was Savannah. And some of you will remember that. And then they had Reagan while they were here, and they had Aubrey while they were here. And, yeah, Aubrey while they were here. And they’ve added one more, Ireland, to that group now. One of the things that occurred when I made that call and then when Rebecca and Alan came here.

I want to get to the words so I won’t take too long. But one of the things that occurred was that there really was an instant. We were kindred. We agree on far, far more than we disagree on. We actually had our first disagreement yesterday. And it was awful. And he still thinks I’m wrong. And I still think he’s wrong. And we love each other anyway. But they came here, and then we came to visit, and we fell in love with this church.

And there are so many faces I’ve never seen in this church, and I’m thankful for that. And then there are faces that I remember. Forgive me if I don’t remember every name. It has been three and a half years since we’ve been here and we have left Michigan, or actually we were in Tennessee at the time, but we had a church that was really growing there and we were trying to learn new names all the time. And I’m still trying to learn the names of the children in our church.

We have one family with eight, we have several with six, we have one family that has six that, They had four boys, they had twins unexpectedly, even within a week of having the twins, they didn’t know. And they had twins and they were both boys. And we got word yesterday that they were gonna have a daughter. So they’ve got a girl on the way. But again, it is so good to be with you this morning.

Take your Bibles, if you would, and turn to 1 Corinthians 6. First Corinthians chapter six, let’s pray together. And then the very first part of this, in fact, in some senses, all of this will be just a little bit unusual, I think. But by God’s grace, we hope and pray that we’ll handle the word of God accurately and that it’ll be a blessing to you and that we will all be guided toward Christ. So let’s pray.

Father, thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you for this church. Thank you for the ministry that it had for a part of my family. And Lord, we pray that you continue to bless the work here, that you would lead Pastor Ron and all who are involved to greater heights, greater understanding of your word, to more honor Christ. And may we be a part of that even today as we seek your truth and your son. So Father, use your word. direct us in it. May we be faithful for Christ’s sake. Amen.

A few years ago, I had a man who was fully dedicated to expository preaching come to me and challenged me with the task of expositing my way, not through a book of the Bible, but through a song that I was hoping if you did not know already that I could introduce to you today. but you know it already, called His Robes for Mine.

And at first, I mean, I’m an expositor. I start in chapter one, verse one of a book, and when I get done with the book, I’m done with that book, and I move to the next one pretty much is what I do. And I was a little bit apprehensive about that, but it became clear to me after a while that this could become a series a doctrinal series on the atonement. And so I took up the challenge and preached five sermons, one on each verse and one on the chorus. I preached each of them expositorily through one of the passages from which it flowed.

And I’d like to bring the last of those to you today, and I want to do that for at least three different reasons. First reason is totally self-centered and totally selfish. It’s because I couldn’t remember for sure what I preached here the last time I preached, so I didn’t want to repeat the same sermon, and I knew I hadn’t preached this one. And you kind of laugh a little about that, but that is a terror if you go somewhere and preach, and then you go preach the same sermon again.

But a second reason I wanted to is because This does deal with one of the most vital doctrines in all of Scripture, and that’s the atonement of Jesus Christ. And I want you to see Christ. I want you to love Christ. I want you, if you’ve not been saved, to trust Christ. And then there’s a third reason.

And I listened to the singing this morning and maybe this reason kind of went by the wayside because I heard lots of voices lifted up in song and I love that. But I had noticed through years of ministry and so forth that a lot of times the singing, and this is especially true I think in churches that are really committed to expository preaching. The preaching is the highlight. And I still think in some ways that’s what it ought to be.

But the whole service is to be worshipped. The giving is worshipped. The singing is worshipped. The fellowship is worshipped. Preaching of the Word of God is worshipped. I should be worshipping as I preach to you. And you should be worshipping as you listen to the Word.

Take it in. Seek to apply it to your own situation in life. And so everything revolves around worship, but I kind of noticed that there were some situations where people just kind of ran through songs, didn’t think about what the song said, because they wanted to get to the next thing, and it was just kind of this warm-up for the message. And I want to encourage you in your worship. So let me ask you, when you sing in this congregation, do you think When you sing, do you think? Is your mind engaged or do you just go through the motions? And I want you to, when you come to the fellowship and to the worship of the corporate body of Christ in this local place, I want you to be challenged so that we can joyfully and rightly give worship to God through our singing.

Now, that’s why. Now let me kind of introduce you to the message itself. Some time ago, I read of an English teacher who gave us part of an assignment, the following task, write a sentence using the word why. Now just mentioning that, some of you are probably going through, okay, I would write this sentence or I would write that sentence. One probably very intelligent student gave maybe the best answer of all, why? That’s a whole sentence in and of itself. Now, that word can be used in an infinite number of sentences, I’m sure, but it stands as a sentence on its own. And so that was a very good answer to the question or the assignment.

And now I ask another question with the word why in it. Why would I begin with an illustration like that? Usually an illustration is something that comes after you’ve made a statement. Now I want to illustrate that for you. I have developed a principle or mentioned a principle from scripture. Now let me illustrate it.

I’m beginning with that. Why? Because sometimes the best way to get a point across is to be as limited in your words as possible. So let me tell you why. I begin with that illustration. Because I’m going to give you why the atonement in three words. And I could use three different words. For example, I could use because God or God is love and and he pours out his grace upon us because of his love. But the passage that we’re going to read. Deals with something that’s very sinful, and so let me put it this way.

God hates sin. Get that? The reason for the atonement is because God hates sin. That makes the atonement necessary because he must judge sin. And we can expand it and say this, God hates sin because he’s holy. He’s perfect, righteous, separate from all that is evil. And thus he can never excuse evil or refuse to punish evil.

Keeping that in mind, we actually preach a gospel that says God will fellowship with us even though we are sinful. How can that be? How can God fellowship with me because I am a sinner? The reason is the atonement. The reason is that the Lord Jesus Christ paid the price for my sin. That’s why. And that’s the only reason why. Nothing good enough in me, nothing worthy in me for God to come and start fellowshipping with me. Nothing in me that God needed that He would come and start fellowshipping with me. The reason God can fellowship with me is because of what Christ did on Calvary. That’s it.

And so, before we actually get to 1 Corinthians chapter 6, I want to to do something that I shouldn’t have to do, but in this culture, and I probably don’t have to do it here, but you need to understand that in the culture at large, we need to do this anymore. We need to think about what sin is. Because the world doesn’t know anymore. Let me give you an example of that, a few examples of that. One is this. Adultery is no longer adultery. Somebody had an affair. See how the wording is softer? Drunkards are now alcoholics and they’re sick, they’re not sinful. We soften it. We seem to have new forms of reference for sin being created on a daily basis.

Some time ago I read a book by Carl Truman called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. He was speaking about the background and mainstreaming of perversions like homosexuality and transgenderism. But he did indicate that there was one form of evil that was not tolerated in our culture whatsoever.

And that was pedophilia. He said this, Yet here I come to an important phenomenon requiring that I qualify the notion of the modern self simply as a psychological man or the expressive individual. Even now, in our sexually libertarian world, certain sexual taboos remain in place, pedophilia being perhaps the most obvious. Not all expressions of individuality, not all behaviors that bring about a sense of inner psychological happiness for the agent are regarded as legitimate. That book was written in 2026, or excuse me, 2020, six years ago. And before I even finished the book, I started hearing multiple news reports on the push to mainstream pedophilia. They’re not pedophiles anymore.

Some of you know what they are, right? They’re minor attracted persons. Minor attracted persons. And they’re born that way so you can’t condemn that as sin. These are people, by the way, that very often have to be segmented from the general population of prisons because the prisoners hate that so bad they’ll kill a pedophile. But again, according to modern psychological pundits, they’re just that way. They’re just born that way. They can’t help it.

And so to understand what sin really is, let me take you through three passages of scripture really quickly. The first is in Genesis 3. You know the story. You know the fall. God places Adam and Eve in a perfect garden with a perfect relationship with one another, with a perfect environment, with perfect food, and with a perfect relationship with him, and Adam rebels against God. And before you condemn Adam too much, we would have done the same thing. And plunge the world into sin. And the original sin of our first ancestor really was a great rebellion against his creator. And then you come to Exodus chapter 20, and God is giving what we know of as the Ten Commandments.

You shall have no other gods before me. You’re not to make an idol and worship it rather than me. You’re not to take the name of the Lord your God in vain. which I think is much more than just associating that word, the name of God with the word damn. It’s more than that. A man really introduced me to this several years ago, and he talked about, we’re not to carry the name of God into the world in a vain fashion. That’s really what’s involved here. I shouldn’t call myself a Christian and live like the world.

That’s in some ways taking the name of the Lord my God in vain. I’m carrying his name into the world, but I’m doing it in an unworthy fashion, in a vain fashion. Then he included to remember the Sabbath, and then honor your father and mother, and you shall not murder, commit adultery, or steal, or bear false witness against your neighbor. And then finally, he got the covetousness, and he said, don’t covet anything.

That’s a quick rendition of the Ten Commandments. Anybody here want to hold up your hand? Don’t do that. But anybody here want to volunteer and say, well, I’ve kept all those? You mean we don’t have any of the rich young rulers here? You know, all those have I kept from my mother’s, you know, from my earliest days.

He wouldn’t admit that he’d sinned. And if we think that we haven’t sinned because we are Because we haven’t physically gone out and murdered anybody, Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter five that you’ve heard it said, you shall not murder. But he goes on to say, basically, if you hate your brother, you’ve murdered him in your heart. And then he talks about adultery, you shall not commit adultery.

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount condemns all of us, for we’re all guilty of breaking God’s law in one way or another. Whether we have actually stolen anything, we’re all likely guilty of covetousness.

We wanted something that wasn’t ours. And by the way, that starts very early in life, doesn’t it? And all of you who have had children or all of you who have children now, you’ve seen children take toys away from the other one and you know, they didn’t, sometimes they don’t even want it themselves. They just don’t want anybody else to have it.

We had a young lady that was in our church some years ago and she got married and moved to another city, good ways away, but we were told they had a little child And the child was only about two years old and they were starting to see real signs of a sin nature. I’m shocked it was that late in the process that they were noticing this. But she was in shock. I didn’t think this would show up till they were a little older.

No. So sin is a universal problem among mankind. and we need the atonement. His Robes for Mine gives us a wonderful musical doctrinal treatise almost on the atonement. I want to just quote some of that and I’m going to leave some of this out because When I preach this somewhere else, and I don’t do that often, preach sermons multiple times, but I did hear someone say something one time, if it was good enough to preach once, it’s good enough to preach twice if you’re in a different place or whatever. Think about this. The first verse, Chris Anderson, who wrote the song, said it’s based on 2 Corinthians 5, 18 to 21. I won’t read those verses right now.

Write those down if you want to and look them up later, but the verse says, his ropes were mine, a wonderful exchange. Clothed in my sin, Christ suffered, neath God’s rage. Draped in his righteousness, I’m justified. In Christ I live, for in my place he died. Isn’t that true? Verse two is based on two passages of scripture. First Peter chapter three, verse 18 in Romans five. 15 to 17, Peter said this, he said, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit. Now here’s what Chris Anderson said in the song. His robes for mine, what cause have I for dread?

God’s daunting law, Christ mastered in my stead. Faultless I stand with righteous works, not mine, saved by my Lord’s vicarious death and life. Third verse of the hymn is based on Romans 6, 20 to 23. Most of you or many of you know that verse 23, at the very least, you’ve memorized it, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. In light of these truths, that third verse says, his robes were mine, God’s justice is appeased.

Jesus is crushed and thus the father’s pleased. Christ drank God’s wrath on sin, then cried to his done, sin’s wages paid. Propitiation won. And I tell you folks, you gotta work to get propitiation in a song. I’m glad he did. That word has such rich meaning in scripture.

Christ took God’s wrath that belonged to me. And that brings us to the fourth verse, and this one always, always gets me. Based on 1 Timothy 1, 12 to 17. Fourth verse says, his robes remind such anguish none can know. Christ God’s beloved condemned as though his foe. In this next line, I get chills every time I sing it or just speak it.

He as though I, accursed and left alone. I as though he, embraced and welcomed home. If that doesn’t do something in your heart, I don’t even know what will as a believer. He was accursed for me. He suffered my judgment, and I am welcomed into the presence of God Almighty because of that.

That’s amazing. We sang amazing grace, is it not? So let me come to the chorus. We sing these words, I cling to Christ and marvel at the cost, Jesus forsaken, God estranged from God. We’ll deal with that one in a moment. Bought by such love, my life is not my own. My praise, my all shall be for Christ alone. Let me tell you what Chris Anderson, the writer of the hymn said about that verse.

He said, finally, we added a refrain which expresses our wonder at the cost of our salvation, then responds to Christ’s love with worship and consecration. Thus the song doesn’t really progress from verse one to verse four, but instead moves toward and peaks at the refrain after each of the four meditations. So think of it as four meditations, and then each of those four meditations bursts forth in praise.

And I ask you, what a work has been done by God. What a price has been paid. by our Lord Jesus Christ. And what worship should fill our hearts as we consider that awful price. Now turn your attention to 1 Corinthians chapter six. You thought I’d never get there, but we’re there. Paul is in the midst of confronting and correcting a lot of problems that had developed in the church at Corinth. And here in this passage, the specific issue is the evil of sexual immorality. Believers are to flee from this grave sin. So note the apostle’s words beginning in verse 15.

He says, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says the two shall become one flesh. The one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him.

Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body. But the sexually immoral man sins against his own body. For do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.

Now, We thought about what Anderson wrote in that hymn. I’m gonna borrow from him a little bit from my outline, okay? I’m not plagiarizing, I’m giving Chris Anderson credit here. I’m not stealing anything, he used these words. But I want you to see first the necessity of clinging to Christ. I cling to Christ. Now we can’t cling to our sin that necessitated the death of Christ. We must rather cling to Him if we know Him.

Notice the wording again in 1 Corinthians 6.15 through the first phrase in verse 18.

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. For do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For he says, the two shall become one flesh. But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him.

Flee sexual immorality. When we flee from sexual immorality, We don’t just run to any place. We have been made, according to verse 17, one spirit with the Lord Jesus. So we run to Christ. We flee to Him. Now, why would we do that? Why would you flee to Christ? Well, think about this. I cling to Christ because He’s the only way to salvation. He’s the only way to salvation. I must have Christ or perish. Without Him, there’s no hope, no true happiness, and no heaven. Without Him, there is hell and nothing else.

Jesus could not have been any clearer when He said to His disciples, I am the way, the truth, and the life, No one comes to the Father but through me. Peter understood this to be so, and so he boldly spoke these words to the Jewish leaders who thought they could work their way to heaven, and who thought that just by the fact that they were Jewish, they were gonna get into heaven. And he said to them, and there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.

Acts 4.12.

Corinthians then, and we today, must cling to Christ because He is the only one who can assure us of salvation and eternal life. But secondly, I cling to Christ because He has made me a part of His bride. Though Paul doesn’t make a specific reference to Christ as the heavenly bridegroom, and to the church as the bride in this passage. The wording does speak of an intimacy that God ordained in marriage.

We read in Genesis 2, 24 to 25, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh and the man and wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Paul’s argument here is that immorality creates a kind of one flesh relationship between a man and a woman to whom he is not married. This is presented as a great evil, and it is, and a poor substitute for the one flesh relationship that a man establishes with his own wife in marriage.

It also ruins the picture of Christ and his bride. The church having a relationship so intimate with Christ that it’s described as being one in that he’s described as being one in spirit with the Lord. Question that must come before us is how can we be united with Christ in that kind of a way, in that kind of a union, and at the same time, take our bodies and associate them with a prostitute through an immoral relationship? How can we be members of Christ’s body and one with a prostitute at the same time?

And I’m not going to tell you that’s absolutely impossible because saved men and saved women have fallen. But that is a terrible sin. Thankfully, it can be forgiven. For our purposes in this message, I want to emphasize ever so briefly this idea of the intimacy between the Lord Jesus and his people. Again, we are made one with him in salvation. Why should we ever feel the need for or pursue that which he is forbidden?

And let me ask you this question, is he not enough to satisfy? At risk of taking too long here, and I don’t want to do that, but I have grown very frustrated over the last several years of hearing people talk about, and I’ll probably get in trouble over this, Pastor Ron did not tell me to say this, okay? So if you got a problem, come to me.

I have grown weary of people talking about their dog or their cat or their ferret or whatever being in heaven, and if it’s not there, heaven just won’t be heaven. You ever stop to realize that’s a thought process about God and about Christ Jesus, our Lord? If heaven requires more than the fact that you get the fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ who died to save you for all eternity, you got a wrong view of heaven. If you need more than that, you’ve got a wrong view of heaven.

Some of you have been married as long as I have. My wife and I, if you were here before, you may not remember, but my wife’s name is Michelle. We’ve been married for over 43 years. I cannot imagine living without her. But according to Jesus, I’m not gonna be married to her in heaven. And that’s a little bit funny to me, weird to me. Why not? Well, part of it is because of this.

I am a part of the bride of Christ, and we’re not going to need that marriage anymore. We are going to have a relationship with our Lord that is so close and so wonderful and so intimate that we don’t need those kind of relationships anymore. And we will all love each other as much as we love our mates and in fact more because we will have been glorified and we’ll be able to love in a way that we can’t even now.

Again folks, if your heaven needs more than the fact that Jesus is there and you are with him, that’s a problem. I cling to Christ because he’s the only way to salvation and because he’s my heavenly bridegroom. I also cling to Christ because he is the focal point of heavenly worship. Think about what goes on in heaven as it was revealed to us in Revelation 5. Let me read you a few verses.

Worthy are you to take the scroll and open its seals. This is the departed saints. You were slain and purchased for God with your blood. people from every tribe and tongue and people and nation and you made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God and they will reign upon the earth. Worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. To him who sits on the throne and to the lamb be the blessing and the honor and the glory and the might forever and ever.

This is heaven. This is the worship of Christ in heaven. And if he’s the object of worship in heaven, should he not be the object of worship for you and me today? We cling to him because he is God in human form. We cling to him because he’s worthy as the spotless lamb who gave himself as a sacrifice for sinners. You and I must cling to Christ. Beyond that, I marvel at the costs. When was the last time you just stopped and contemplated what Christ did for you and marveled?

Look again with me at 1 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 18. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral man sinned against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?

And then this phrase, for you were bought with a price. What a cost. Therefore glorify God in your body. You were bought with a price. You’ve trusted the Lord Jesus. He bought you with a terrible price. Those to whom Paul wrote would have understood that better than we do. They had seen people crucified.

You ever stop to wonder why crucifixion is never described in the Bible really? Psalm 22 is actually the best description you find anywhere in scripture. Why was the cross, the physical cross, not really described in Scripture? I think it was in part because the writers of Scripture didn’t have to describe it.

Everybody around had seen it. And we are told in other works from that time that you could just mention crucifixion or the cross and people would tremble. It was so awful. Think, if you would, about Psalm 22. I mentioned that that’s the best description we find anywhere in all the Word of God. Let me read several verses. Begins with, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Far from my salvation are the words of my groaning. Oh my God, I call by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest.

Yet you are holy. enthroned upon the praises of Israel. In you, our fathers trusted. They trusted and you rescued them. To you, they cried out and were granted escape. In you, they trusted and were not disappointed. But I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people. All who seek me mock me. They smack their lip. They wag their head saying, commit yourself to Yahweh. Let him rescue him. Let him deliver him because he delights in him. By the way, that’s all sarcastic coming from those people. Yet you are he who brought me out of the womb. You made me trust when upon my mother’s breast. Upon you I was cast from birth. You have been my God from my mother’s womb.

Be not far from me, for distress is near, for there is none to help. Many bulls have surrounded me. Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me. They open wide their mouth at me as a lion that tears and roars. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws, and you lay me in the dust of death. For dogs have surrounded me, a band of evil doers has encompassed me, they pierced my hands and my feet, I count all my bones, they look, they stare at me, they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast love.”

And that’s the clearest physical description of crucifixion you’ll find anywhere in scripture. And just reading it is horrifying to think about. gives us an awful description of what it was like to die on a cross. And for Christ, both the physical and the social suffering were extreme. Not only did he suffer perhaps as horrible a form of execution as man ever devised, but all his companions abandoned him.

Yes, it’s true, John came back at the end there a little bit. There’s something greater here. There’s something greater. The greatest suffering of all is expressed in the first phrase. When Jesus cried out on the cross, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He’s not a sinner. In the song, His Ropes for Mine, Chris Anderson speaks of that with the phrase, God estranged from God. What is that? What is that? A lot of questions arise and I had people come to me when we started singing this and say, I don’t like that phrase. I think that’s gotta be wrong.

And we can ask the question, how can God be estranged from God? Can the one who is three and yet one from all eternity actually be estranged one from the other two persons in the trinity? Can it be divided? And our answer would be no. And yet. The and yet must be included here for to determine that the son who was the god man left the man Jesus prior to his cry is to hold a position held by Gnostics who taught that the Christ Spirit came upon Jesus at his baptism and left sometime before the crucifixion. Or at least sometime before he said this. And that’s not so. So what do we do with the cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I tried to turn to minds better than my own.

According to John Calvin, he said that some people have said that Christ made this complaint. rather according to the opinion of the common people who witnessed his sufferings than from any feeling which he had of being deserted by his father, but they have not considered that they have greatly lessened the benefit of our redemption in imagining that Christ was altogether exempted from the terrors which the judgment of God strikes into sinners.” John Phillips said, that a great gulf separated Christ the Son from the Father. Jesus had not become sinful, but he had become sin for us.

And he said this, no wonder he was abandoned by God. No wonder he roared out like a lion in pain. He was tasting death for us. experiencing what every lost soul should experience in hell for all eternity, what it meant to be a God abandoned in the dark. Another commentator, Alan Ross, said this, put it more precisely, because the Father abandoned Him who died in our place, He will never abandon us who have come to faith in Him. Warren Wiersbe said this, when he spoke these words, Christ spoke these words. He had been engaged in a mysterious transaction with the Father, dying for the sins of the world. On the cross, Jesus was made sin and made a curse for us.

In some inexplicable way, he experienced what condemned lost sinners experience away from the presence of the Lord. Away from the presence of the Lord. In his commentary on Matthew 27, John MacArthur said, in this unique and strange miracle, Jesus was crying out in anguish because of the separation he now experienced from his heavenly father for the first and only time in all eternity. It is the only time of which we have record that Jesus did not address God as father.

Because the son had taken sin upon himself, the father turned his back That mystery is so great and imponderable that it is not surprising that Martin Luther is said to have gone into seclusion for a long time trying to understand it and came away as confused as when he began. In some way, and by some means, in the secrets of divine sovereignty and omnipotence, the God-man was separated from God for a brief time at Calvary, as the furious wrath of the Father was poured out on the sinless Son.

What a, what a, what a price. What a price God, price paid. His own father turns his back onto him. And you know what I came out of when I read all through those commentaries and everybody else I could find to read? I was a lot like Martin Luther. I was confused about it as I was when I went in. Maybe more. I don’t understand this mystery, but by the way, I will tell you this too. If you demand to know every mystery about God, we will be visiting you in a rubber room someplace.

My finite mind cannot understand the infinite, and it won’t even understand the infinite fully when I’m in heaven. The great God, who is omniscient and understands all, understands this when I can’t. My God, cried Jesus, my God, why have you forsaken me? He paid that price and suffered my judgment and the judgment for all who will believe on Calvary’s tree. Perhaps that answer is not enough for you, but I hope that it’s a reminder again that there are mysteries about our infinite God that we will never, never comprehend. And that takes me to the last thing, and that is my life is not my own. My life is not my own.

The full chorus reads, I cling to Christ and marvel at the cost. Jesus forsaken, God estranged from God, bought by such love, my life is not my own. My praise, my all shall be for Christ alone. What does Paul say here in 1 Corinthians 6 concerning the demand for our full commitment to Christ? He says, you are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. I’m not my own. You’re not your own.

We were bought with a price. The terminology here is really slave terminology. You buy a slave for a price. Christ even spoke to that very issue when in John 15, 20, he said to them, remember the word that I said to you, a slave is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, They will persecute you. If they kept my word, they will keep yours also. He speaks in slave terminology.

And I’ve been reading out of the LSB. I got permission to do that. I hope that’s okay. But I want you to understand that Even if you take the word doulos there and say that’s a servant or whatever, a bond servant, even if you try to water that down a little bit, you can’t water down the master part. And master is slave terminology.

So we’re not our own. We were purchased with a price. And that price was the awful, hideous, unimaginable sacrifice of Jesus Christ. When one considers the person of Christ and the awful price he paid for our salvation, can we do anything but give ourselves to him? Can we foolishly involve ourselves, as in this passage, with an adulterous relationship? He bought us. He, the perfect, holy God-man, paid an unimaginable price for sinners. And so believer, he paid that unimaginable price for you.

Remember how we started? God hates sin. And when Jesus Christ became sin for us, in his hatred for sin, God poured his wrath out on his own son, so that you and I could be forgiven. We deserve nothing of the good things the Lord has given us in this life, much less eternal life in Christ.

And yet he paid that price. He deserves me. Not that I’m valuable, but he deserves me as his slave. But that’s not the only motif in Scripture, remember. He desires me as the one who is a part of his body, and the one who becomes a part of that mysterious heavenly bride. You know, the one thing, when MacArthur wrote the book Slave years ago, that was great, and it pointed out something that I think the church needed to understand, but understand this too, there are a lot of other motifs that the scripture uses to describe the bride of Christ, and the children of God, and so forth, and it’s not the only thing he says, and it’s a loving, wonderful, relationship and he brings us into that though we deserve none of it. Now I stated earlier that I want to encourage you in your worship. When you sing his ropes for mine I want you to think about the words and that’s true of every other song. So I want to close with this Psalm 150.

Praise YAH. And sometimes the Old Testament shortened the word Yahweh to Yah. It’s not in any way flippant. Praise Yah. Praise God in His sanctuary. Praise Him in His mighty expanse. Praise Him for His mighty deeds. Praise Him according to the abundance of His greatness. Praise Him with trumpet blast. Praise Him with harp and lyre. Praise Him with tambourine and dancing. Praise Him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise Him with resounding cymbals. Praise Him with clashing cymbals.

And then these words, let everything that has breath praise Yah. And that includes me and it includes you. Praise Yahweh, praise the Lord. It is so interesting to me that this admonition to live a morally pure life is based in doctrine, the doctrine of the atonement. I’ll leave you with one last thought. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that doctrine is not practical. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your word.

Thank you for this time to be with this church body, pastor who has become A wonderful friend, and Lord, we pray that you will minister to your people here through your word as it has gone forth today. May we truly worship the Lord Jesus Christ and draw, we ask, anyone who does not know him into a saving relationship with the one who sacrificed himself, who paid the price that we should have paid for our sin. For it’s in Christ’s name that we ask it.