2/8/2012– Wednesday Night Series: “Core Values of the Dover Foursquare Church” – Audio message available at http://doverfoursquare.org/5/sermons.html
There is much to study when we examine the Scriptures concerning Jesus as our Savior. We could study His incarnation, His perfect life, His perfect fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, His perfect sacrifice as the Lamb of God on Calvary, and how He alone is able to be the Mediator between God and man. Yet to understand how great and wonderful our Savior is, we must first discover how great our need is for this Salvation.
The greatness and preciousness of the “cure” can only be comprehended to the degree we are willing to see how God describes the seriousness of our “sickness”!
When someone is lost and needs directions, there are two important questions that must be asked: “Where are you right now?” and “Where do you want to go?” When both of these are answered, a third question should also be asked: “To make it to your destination, is what you have sufficient?”
“Where do you want to go?”
God’s Plan of Salvation is directly related to His Eternal Purpose for man. When Adam disobeyed God, he was put out of the Garden of Eden. He was no longer living in God’s original purpose. Our destiny, therefore, is enter back into all that God has intended for man. Now if this Plan of Salvation only includes the forgiveness of sins and cleansing by the Blood of Jesus, then man’s needs would be fully met. Truly the thief on the cross could not have been more satisfied to hear Jesus say, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Yet the real question we should be asking is: Does it fulfill God’s need? Salvation will satisfy man’s need, but more importantly it goes far beyond man’s need to satisfy the original longings of God’s heart! The Psalmist said: “Salvation belongs to the Lord” (Psalm 3:8).
“Where are you right now?”
This question can be answered by discovering just how far man has fallen out of God’s Eternal Purpose. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). The Greek word for “fall short” means: “to come short, to be impoverished, to be devoid of, to be destitute”. In other words, Adam did not just stumble and scrape his knee in the garden! His one act of disobedience caused all mankind to be completely destitute of God’s glory. Scripture makes it clear how every descendant of Adam is utterly devoid of all that God intended for man (Rom 3:10-12, 19, 23; Isaiah 64:6; Psalm 86:12-13; 1 Timothy 1:14-15; Jeremiah 17:9).
Not only is man sinful and unclean, he is dead (Eph 4:1-3). In the Garden, God told Adam: “From the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Gen 2:17). Now Adam’s body did not die in that same day, but something far more important did! God created man in His own image and likeness and breathed His own breath or “spirit” into Adam’s nostrils. This is what set Adam apart from every other living creature. God created man for His own fellowship! When Adam sinned, it was his “spirit” that died. Adam and all his descendants (including us) are born “dead” towards God and are totally devoid of even the remotest possibility of fellowship with God. “There is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God” (Rom 3:11 NASB).
It is so easy for us to look at all the other “descendants of Adam” around us, do a bit of calculating, and come away feeling we are just not that bad after all. What a mistake! One honest glance into the mirror of God’s Word quickly dispels such thoughts! James tells us that there is a great danger of deception when get too far away from that mirror: “For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was” (James 1:23-24 NASB).
“To make it to your destination, is what you have sufficient?”
Jesus spoke about the need for us to “first sit down and calculate the cost” (Luke 14:28-32). Realizing where we are – our fallen, impoverished, destitute state – and how great a distance we must travel in order to return to God’s Eternal Purpose, do we have sufficient for such a journey? No way! The cost is extreme and totally out of our reach. No matter how we calculate it, everyone of us comes up short.
Looking at the Cross, we can see the desperate measures God took to provide the only cure possible for man’s impoverishment. The Cross truly is the “Great Equalizer” – regardless of our background, our IQ, our economic or social status, the Cross wipes away all distinctions and declares: “…that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God” (Rom 3:19). It is in this revelation of where all of us stand that we can see just how great and marvelous God’s Salvation is! “How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” (Heb 2:3)
The Salvation Jesus purchased for us is completely free. There is nothing we could ever do to purchase such a grand gift. But we must be very cautious not to make the serious error of equating “free” with “cheap”. The Greek root word for Salvation is “sozo” and it has the following meaning: “to save, to deliver, to preserve, to bring safely, to heal, to restore, to make perfectly whole”. All of this and more is included in this wonderful Salvation.
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor 5:17).
This is God’s plan – a plan of complete metamorphosis – through Christ’s complete work of redemption, God offers to transform us into an entirely New Speciesthat bears the image and likeness of God!
“And we…are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory…” (2 Cor 3:18 NIV).
Listen to how Peter explains it: “Seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3-4 KJV). This is God’s Plan of Salvation and included is all that we need to be made “perfectly whole” as God intended us to be!
Being so much more than just forgiveness of sins, this Salvation provides for our total restoration back into the Eternal Purpose of God. When Zechariah, was prophesying over his son, John the Baptist, he made a very interesting declaration: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; For you will go on before the Lord to prepare His ways; To give to His people the knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins” (Luke 1:76-77 NASB). In other words, the forgiveness of sins is just the getting on point – the beginning of the journey back into God’s Eternal Purpose! Of this wonderful journey Paul said: “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:14).
As someone once said,
“God loves us just the way we are,
but He loves us too much to leave us like that!”
What a Great Salvation and what a Wonderful Savior!
