Allen Jackson - Jesus' Perfect Provision - Part 2
The gospel is based on three simple facts, I’ll show you from the Scripture in a moment. Christ died for our sins, he was buried, and he rose again on the third day. Those are the facts that give you and I a hope for both time and eternity. It isn’t theoretical. It’s not about joining a movement or a part of a congregation or a theology, you’ve got to grapple with those facts. Do you believe Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God? It’s important what you decide about that, it isn’t irrelevant. But the fundamental facts was that he died for our sins, he was buried, and he rose again.
Look at 1 Corinthians 15: «What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures». Now, those are points of fact in the presentation of Scripture. Faith is what you do to appropriate those facts. You see, you can believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born, that he was a 1st century character. You can believe he had a healing ministry. You may believe he appeared before Pontius Pilate. You may believe he died on a Roman cross and was buried and resurrected to life again. You can accept those facts and sit in hell.
Faith is when you appropriate those facts and incorporate them into your behavior. Faith leads us to accept, believe, and act upon those facts. You see, the equation changes dramatically when you say, «Jesus, be Lord of my life». Now you’re no longer simply a historical character. You’re not some shadowy figure from some point of antiquity. You’re not some person that’s been written about and preached about. I have asked you into my realm of existence, Jesus of Nazareth, be Lord of my life. I’ll yield my will to you, that’s what being Lord means.
You see, if Jesus isn’t Lord of your life, if you haven’t yielded your will to him, you shouldn’t imagine you’re a Christ follower. It’s that act of faith where you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord that changes everything. And then after facts and faith come our feelings. I don’t make those decisions. In fact, my feelings are usually screaming, don’t do that. Some of you are having one of those little fact, feeling, faith battles right now volunteering to serve children. Your faith says, «I’d like to do that, I think,» and your feelings go, «What are you thinking? Have you lost your ever-loving mind»?
After facts and faith come our feelings. You see, it makes all the difference in your life and your eternity if your faith is based on facts or feelings. It changes everything. I interact with people a lot, you know, and they’ll say to me, «Well, I just can’t believe God would,» and then whatever is their version of God. And they’ll disconnect it completely from Scripture, and they will base their model of God on how they feel about something. Now, feelings are legitimate. God created us with the capacity to have feelings. They enrich and enhance our lives, but they make lousy cornerstones because feelings change with the weather. Feelings change with how much water weight we’re carrying today.
Feelings change with whether your seat you prefer at church is vacant or occupied and who occupied it, in the house of God before we worship. Feelings are remarkable, they’re just not good rudders for our lives. And to receive God’s provision for rejection in our lives, there are two facts that we have to, we must appropriate for our own lives. I’ll give them to you. I’ll support them from Scripture. I didn’t write these out in your notes, but the Scriptures are there. The first is we have to believe, we have to accept that God did not make multiple solutions for all of the challenges which face human beings. He didn’t create a menu of responses for us. Instead, he made one all-inclusive provisions for the need of humanity.
You know what it is? The sacrificial death of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus’s death, his burial, and his resurrection, God made provision for every need that we will ever face. The second thing that we have to believe is that what took place on the cross was a divine exchange, and here’s the punch line, which God himself had planned. I’ve said it to you many, many times. It’s not original with me, I don’t pretend it is. It comes as derived from Scripture, but on the cross, a divinely ordered exchange took place, whereby the perfect, sinless, obedient Son of God took upon himself all of the judgment that was due by divine judgment, my rebellion and my godlessness, so that I might receive all of the blessing that was due his perfect obedience.
You see, in that divine exchange, Jesus exhausts the curse of sin so that you and I might receive the blessing of his obedience. Look in Galatians 3:13: «Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it’s written: 'Cursed is everyone who’s hung on a tree.' He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit». Jesus became a curse for us. The language is important, the language of an exchange. Look at 2 Corinthians 8:9: «You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich».
There’s that exchange again. You see, we’ve had a diminished presentation of the gospel. I’m not saying that it was wrong, I’m telling you it’s incomplete. The gospel that we have heard preached predominantly in American evangelicalism is that if we’ll confess our sins and forgive those who have sinned against us, we can be forgiven and we can be welcomed into the kingdom of God. I understand that to be true scripturally, but I understand it to be incomplete. The Greek word that’s translated most frequently saved, sozo, I can’t do it in this session, but it’s also that, that same word that’s translated «saved» through the Gospels is translated to be healed, to be delivered.
It has for every, that salvation includes every aspect of your person, body, soul, and spirit. That we can be healed physically, that we can be delivered from every tormenting spiritual force or influence. That we can be healed, not just physically but emotionally. All of that provision for us was included in that divine exchange on the cross. But because we haven’t had that total message presented to us, we’ve preferred to have seminars and have arguments over whether God still does miracles or God still heals, or whether we believe unclean spirits could have any influence on a believer or not. It’s an amazing tactic of our adversary, to engage us in debate about the clear teaching of Scripture and keep us from benefiting from it.
Hebrews chapter 2 and verse 9 says, «Jesus suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone». Can you see the exchange in these verses? He took our poverty that we might have his abundance. He exhausted the curse of sin that we might have his blessings. He suffered death so that we might have the grace of God. We could walk through a myriad of other passages with this, but this exchange has implications for our shame and for our suffering that emerges because of the rejection that touches our lives. And again, it’s universal and it’s not unique to a season of your life.
You know, I listen to the language that we direct towards young people, because we spend a great deal of energy around that. And there’s this great fear that a young person will have an encounter that will shape their whole life. Rather than be frightened that they’ll be bullied, let’s teach them about God’s provision in Jesus, and they’ll have a power greater than the words or the intimidation of a bully to overcome rejection. You see, we can’t protect our children from every expression of evil in the world, it’s impossible. Because when it’s their turn to go adulting, they’re gonna have to face those things. And rather than try to put them in some sort of a bubble where they never encounter those things, what if we gave them the tools to overcome all of those attacks of the adversary?
Let’s introduce them to the fundamentals of spiritual realities and the provision of God to equip them to be triumphant. Somehow, I don’t understand, we don’t have the whole narrative on Joseph, but Joseph was undeterred. He’s not so emotionally bound up by the hatred of his family of origin and the evil behavior or the betrayal in Potiphar’s house or the betrayals in prison that he can flourish. I promise you if he’d been bound by hatred and resentment, he could have never become the person who brought deliverance to his brothers later in his life. You see, we grieve things for our children because we haven’t learned them for ourselves. And because we’re still living with the pain and the shame and the disappointment, we’re still muttering the phrases and hiding behind our facades, we think, well, we have to protect them from those things.
When in reality, to the degree we find freedom, we can teach them how to live in freedom and they can overcome all the attacks of the enemy. This is a possibility, church. It’s a different cadence, it’s a different response. It’s a response rooted in the gospel, it’s not a response rooted in the secular self-help. Look at Isaiah 61:7, it says, «Instead of their shame my people will receive a double portion, and instead of disgrace they will rejoice in their inheritance; so they will inherit a double portion in their land». In the place of shame, they can have a double portion of God’s grace. Hebrews 12, some prefer the New Testament, «Let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame».
Jesus could see joy in the face of humiliation. In shame and hungry, thirsty and naked, in need of all things, hung on a cross like a common criminal with a… and he could see the joy on the other side of it. You see, we can’t eliminate, if we’re gonna make our journey through time, we’re going to engage inappropriate behaviors, inappropriate responses. We’re going to have encounters with evil, it’s a part of the journey. What we can do to prepare ourselves is understand God’s provision. You believe it about forgiveness, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us believe it about rejection. Isaiah 50 is a Messianic prophecy, Isaiah is writing about the Messiah.
Describing Jesus, he said, «I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I didn’t hide my face from mocking and spitting». Could we call that rejection? I think so. You see, the promise that if we took those simple passages, the promises that joy, honor, and glory are offered in place of shame and humiliation. So we may walk through circumstances that are humiliating, we may walk through experiences where a response apart from God would seem to be an invitation to shame in our life, but the promise of Scripture is that Jesus exhausted those things so that you and I might find joy and honor and glory in the midst of those circumstances.
That we’re not covered with shame because the God we serve has a plan for us, and at the moment, we may be walking through a shadowed valley or the shadow of the cross, but God will bring us through triumphantly. He’s bringing us out of that tomb. It is such an important message to put in your heart, Jesus suffered rejection. He was rejected on two levels, he was rejected both by men and he was rejected by God himself. In Isaiah 53, again, Isaiah is talking about Messiah, and he said, «He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not».
See, Jesus should have been celebrated, he should have been received. He raised the dead and he made wine out of water, you would think he could get a party invitation, and instead he was crucified. But his rejection didn’t stop there. In Matthew 27, there’s a little window, there’s a little portal into Jesus on the cross. It says, «From the sixth hour until the ninth, darkness came over the land. In the ninth hour Jesus cried out, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? '» He didn’t know that feeling of being separate from God. «Some standing near him, they said, 'He’s calling Elijah.' And immediately they ran and got a sponge and filled it with vinegar and put it on a stick. 'Leave him alone, let’s see if Elijah comes.' When Jesus cried out in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit and the curtain of the temple was torn in two».
Do you know what that’s referencing? The temple was divided into segments. There’s the outer court where anybody could come, even the Gentiles. But as you move towards the temple, it was consistently limiting the audience, first only to Jews, and then only to Jewish men, and then the temple proper only for the priests. In the innermost section of the temple was the holy of holies, and the only person that could enter the holy of holies was the high priest, and he could only go once a year with the blood of the Passover lamb. It was in that holy of holies where the ark of the Covenant was to dwell. And what separated the holy of holies from the next outer chamber was this thick curtain. And when Jesus said, «It is finished,» that curtain was torn in two from the top to the bottom. It was a message, it was a symbolic declaration that the way into the presence of God had been opened for all of us.
In the book of Hebrews it says we can come boldly before the throne of grace to find mercy to help us in our time of need. That’s a powerful passage. It’s not in your notes, I didn’t have any room. I made the font so small I couldn’t read it already. But it says we can come boldly before the throne of grace to find mercy to help us in our time of need. Not in our time of triumph or our time of righteousness, but at those low points. At those points of failure, at those points where we feel like a failure, we can come boldly before the throne of grace, why? Because Jesus exhausted the curse.
We have lived below what Jesus sacrificed for us to have. We have bore the wounds and the shame and the mark of our journey through time, when Jesus made a sacrifice that we could have greater freedom. Look at Ephesians 1, Paul’s writing to a church, to believers. He said, «Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who’s blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him». Did you hear that? He chose us. Have you ever been left out, not selected, overlooked, bypassed? You need to meditate on this, God chose us. You can leave me off your stinking team.
If God chose me, it’d be all right. And I don’t mean that in a haughty way. But you need to meditate on that a bit, you need to walk around with that. You need to think about that. You need to spend a few days walking around, God, I just wanna thank you that you chose me. You know the worst things about me, you know things about me that if those people at church knew, they’d never sit next to me again. God, there’s nothing hidden from you, and you chose me. I thank you that you chose me. Oh God, thank you. I thank you that you chose to show favor to me. You could have shown punishment to me, anger to me, discipline to me, you chose to show… thank you, God.
See, that’s not an excuse for sloppy living, folks. If you truly believe that it will bring more uprightness to your life than any message on grace I know, «He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight». There’s no way. We are neither holy nor blameless, only in Christ could that be our story, «In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he’s freely given us in the One he loves».
You see, God’s eternal purpose, from the opening chapter of Genesis, is that you and I might become his children, in all of our rebellion and our godlessness. When Jesus bore our sins and suffered our rejection, he made possible our acceptance as sons and daughters of God. So now we have a choice to make, what will we do with the experience of rejection? Are we gonna build walls, we’re gonna get angry, we’re gonna give in? What are we gonna do? Are we gonna give it to the Lord and celebrate joyfully the fact that he accepts us?
You see, if we can believe that, it changes everything. Do you remember the story of the prodigal? The young man that came to his father and demanded his inheritance, and the father gave it to him and the young man spent it in the most ungodly ways. He finds himself destitute, he finds himself feeding the pigs and the only thing he has to eat is the slop he feeds the pigs. Now for a young Jewish man, that’s about as low down as it goes.
And it says that he came to himself and he said, «I’m gonna go back home and I’ll say to my dad, 'I don’t deserve to be your son.'» But his servants are living better than I’m living, maybe I could be a servant in my father’s house. You know the story, it says, when he was still a long way off, the father saw him and he ran to meet him. And he said, «Put the signet ring back on his finger, reinstate him in the family. Put a robe on him, because my son that was dead is alive». If you can believe that God will accept you, then you have something to process. Are you going to give yourself the luxury of hatred and resentment and bitterness, or would you dare to believe that God chose you? God chose you. If you can believe that, there’s a freedom that comes to our life.
I brought you a prayer. My time’s up. I’m gonna ask you to read it with me, why don’t you stand? It’s a prayer I would give to you, not just for a moment at church, it’s worth making a part of your devotions for a few days. I’d read it morning, evening morning, noon, and evening. I would take it like spiritual medicine. I would treat it as if it were more potent or more powerful than any pharmaceutical you could ingest. I believe it holds greater potential to change your future than any chemical you could put in your body. This is not a joke. Spiritual forces aren’t some mystical, they impact us physically and mentally, emotionally. They shape our family systems and they write our futures. God’s made complete provision for us, but we’ve been very ambivalent. Let’s pray together.
Heavenly Father, I thank You that You love me, that You gave Jesus to die on my behalf, that He bore my sin, that He took my rejection, that He paid my penalty. Because I come to You through Him, I am not rejected, I am not unwanted, I am not excluded. You really love me. I am really Your child. You are really my Father. I belong in Your family. I belong to the best family in the universe. Heaven is my home. Thank You, thank You.
You know, you may have, I mean, one half a beat and I’ll let you go. You know, you may have unhappy memories of an earthly father, many people do. But there is good news, you have a heavenly Father who loves you, who accepts you, who welcomes you, who wants the best for you, who will never reject you or abandon you. If you’ll welcome him, he will write a new future for you. God bless you, we’ll pick this up next time.