No Condemnation Part 4
This
week, we continued our “No Condemnation” series. This week, we began looking at
the connection between grace and faith. We must learn to receive those things
that are gifts from God without injecting our own self-righteousness.
Romans
10:3 says that with ignorance of His righteousness, we seek to establish our
own righteousness. When we do not fully realize that He has made us righteous,
we will still feel un-righteous and seek to fix it by creating our own form of
righteousness. We can even do this in
trying to receive a physical healing. Frequently we hear or maybe even have
thought or said ourselves that someone who has been so faithful in serving the
Lord and giving and doing all the right things can’t seem to get the answer to
their prayer for healing. We lament how unfair it seems that God must be. That line of thinking is actually based on an
“ignorance of His righteousness.” The two are not connected. In fact, we easily
fall into the trap of thinking that we deserve something from God because we
have done so many good things. That is simply not how God operates.
It
is like saying that you can’t believe that all the work of crawling on your
hands and knees for 3000 miles on gravel roads to get to New
York City didn’t get you to Disneyland .
All the commitment to that work was fruitless because you don’t get to
Disneyland by crawling on your hands and knees to New York Anaheim
We
receive from God entirely by the grace provided by the blood of Jesus. Your
faithful service is very good, and it is profitable, but it does not earn you
anything from God that is provided through grace. The works are the wrong
currency. Jesus’ blood is the currency.
We
also examined Hebrews 10:1, where it tells us that the law was merely a shadow
of what was to come and that it was not the reality of the promise. So, we should put the model together – the
law is a shadow (that means the law has no power). A shadow has no substance;
it is merely an absence of light. There is something between that shadow and
the light source that causes the shadow.
The light source is God. 1 John 1:5 says that God is light and in Him
there is no darkness at all. If God is the light, and the law is the shadow,
what is the object creating the shadow? Well, the author of Hebrews in this
context was speaking about the past. The thing that was to come was the cross.
The cross was the object that the light hit and cast a shadow through.
What
is interesting is the fact that the tabernacle of Moses’ day was designed by
specific and detailed instruction from God. It represented the practice of the
law, and it was where the sin offerings were made – offerings that never
forgave sin, but merely covered it for the next year. If you were to look at an
aerial image of the layout of the tabernacle, it formed the shape of the cross.
From the sacrificial altar to the laver, to the Holy Place
Hebrews
10 goes on to say in verses 11-12 that the priest in the tabernacle had to
continue offering sacrifices because there was always more sin. His sacrifice
was not about eliminating sinful actions but about Him eliminating our guilty
conscience. The prior sacrifices were
unable to clean the guilty conscience, but then Jesus came and made the final
sacrifice, and now He sits at God’s right hand.
In
the instruction for and building of the tabernacle, there was one piece of
furniture conspicuously absent – a chair. The priest could never sit because
the work was never complete – but Jesus completed the work. If we choose to
continue on by law and self-righteousness, we will never be finished and never
get to sit down. “In Christ” we are seated, and we cease from the work of
trying to sacrifice for our sin. Instead, we enter into the rest of the eternal
sacrifice.
To listen to the entire sermon go to http://ahwatukeechurch.com/media.php. To learn more about Living Word Ahwatukee,
visit http://ahwatukeechurch.com/.
