Forgiveness, Resurrection, and Eternal Life

The Bible informs us that not a single soul will escape the accountability of a holy God, though I know that that tends to be obscured in our culture and people don't like to talk about last judgments and so on. But you cannot have an intelligible understanding of the preaching of Jesus.

If you skewer that central motif of judgment spans the apostles Creed states. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting men today I'm Renewing Your Mind. We returned to Dr. RC's ProSeries basic training is been teaching us the fundamentals of the Christian faith by taking his line by line through the apostles Creed and today we seek the good news the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let's look then at that first of the last triad, the forgiveness of sin. Not too long ago I listen to a theologian complain about the fact that theology sometimes gets lost in abstract theories about what God has done in his sovereignty, and in the atonement and we have a doctrine for this to Dr. for that and he said where is the accent of what all of these doctrines mean for us personal.

He said where's the message of the forgiveness of sin, which is a very personal matter and yet it's where the heartbeat of Christianity is far I know identify can this be personal and experiential for second when I go back to my own conversion experience to Christianity from experiential perspective from feeling dimension and emotional dimension. If you will what my experience was was an overwhelming awareness of the forgiveness of my set and I think that more than anything else in terms of my own psychology and my own emotions is what turned my life upside down. I we call that an experience of grace and we can talk about it abstractly, but there's something very, very real about because every human being has to deal with the fact that he has fallen short of what God has called them to do.

And sin is the most common denominator that we have within our humanity, and I remember oftentimes being involved in intellectual discussions with unbelievers and debating apologetics and people coming out believing God or they don't believe in Christ, enlistment, and we argue through the cosmological arguments into lifeguards and all that business, but one of my favorite questions to ask somebody after we discussed all of the intellectual class is to look him straight in the eye say but what you do with your guilt and I've never heard somebody I am sure people do it in print and empty, but in a personal, honest conversation I've never had somebody like many, I say I don't have any guilt because everybody has guilt and everybody experiences guilt and guilt is something real something objective, we can distinguish between guilt feelings and the objective state of guilt and sometimes we confuse them.

Sometimes people will say well I don't feel guilty, therefore I'm not guilty but we know that in the law court that defense of murder would not get very far.

If the only defense was will I couldn't have committed a crime because I don't feel guilt.

Guilt is a matter of an objective relationship to standards and to law when we transgress the law of God. We incur guilt and that creates a problem for our lives for the quality now. I think that there is a rationale for the connection of these three elements of the creed forgiveness of sins resurrection body and the life everlasting. Because forgiveness of sins is immediately thrust into a future perspective and biblically the most significant dimension of forgiveness of sins is not merely to assuage the paralysis that guilt feelings place upon our personalities in this world. We talked popularly about people having guilt hangups, and we know that guilt problems can cause all kinds of emotional and psychological paralyses which inhibit the quality of our life in this world.

And so there is a sense in which people are concerned to get relief from guilt.

Now here in order to be liberated for a higher quality of happiness in this world and I don't mean to suggest that that's unimportant or that the Bible considers an important, but the central significance of the problem of guilt biblically has to do with our future because the Bible teaches, and Christ taught on equivocal that every human being will stand accountable to God for his life. Though I know that that tends to be obscured in our culture and people don't like to talk about last judgments and so on. But you cannot have an intelligible understanding of the preaching of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus. If you skewer that central motif of judgment.

In fact, he saw his own mission as bringing about crisis, which is the Greek word for judgment. Croesus is the Greek word for judgment. Jesus brings about a crisis by his very appearance on this earth, and he talks again and again and again about a value system of being careful to be prepared for that last is what shall it profit a man. He says if you gain the whole world here but luger so have you noticed that when the New Testament talks about the final judgment. There is a uniform description of the response of those who are to be judged there with that uniform theme is that runs through it almost every time Jesus or the apostles speak about man standing before the tribunal of God.

What is the human response signs that when someone accuses you of something you're guilty of what's the normal human response protest for to say you're making too much of it, we become defensive. We give our excuses our mouth is going a mile a minute to explain why we do it. Yes, I did it but try to minimize the heinousness of whatever it is that we have done in other words, our models are filled with excuses or with pleadings for familiarization of the situation. Jesus tells us in the apostles tell us that at the final judgment every mouth will be stopped.

Why why think analogy comes out of the book of Job after Job is protesting with God and God comes and interrogates him for several chapters and after God interrogates Job was one rhetorical question after another.

Finally, Job repents and when he repents, he says, I repent in dust and ashes. I will place my hand upon my mouth and speak no more.

There's a sense in which when we stand before God. We are for the first time in our life is going to get a perfect and impeccable, and infallible evaluation of our performance. We can never cry file that God's evaluation of our lives is prejudiced unfair and unjust it will be perfect and we will know what we will know so the one hand, it would be useless. The protest on the other hand, be absolutely foolish. The protest, the evidence will be so overwhelming will be so clear that words would be totally inadequate as a defense are miles will be shut. One thing the man desperately needs his forgiveness. I mean, what good is an incarnation of virgin birth, a crucifixion of burial of resurrection and ascension. I return in glory.

If there's no forgiveness but the bottom line for me is that what Christ has done.

He has made it possible for me and for anyone who has violated the standards of God's righteousness to be restored to a righteous relationship with God, to be reconciled to be justified, and that comes about through the forgiveness of sins which is real, how many times as a pastor. I've had people come to me and say I committed the sin and I'm just tormented by guilt and I don't have any piece, and I read in the Bible where the Bible says if you confess your sins, God is faithful and just to forgive your sins and to cleanse Yvonne righteous. They say I know all of that and I've repented of my sin and I confess to sin 17 times to go but I still feel guilty.

I don't have any piece what connected and ice of what you need to do is repent and they get angry at swimming repent. I have repented 17 kinds of repented for this accident as to repent for the sin I went to the repent for asking God twice to forgive you of the same sin is sorting. I said you realize how you slandered God. Did God say that if you confess your sin, that he would forgive you.

Yes, this godlike no exit of God says I will forgive you if you repent and confess your sins and you do that once and then you'd get up off your knees and you're still feeling guilty so your say because I feel guilty. I'm still guilty.

The allow your feelings to have the final authority over what God himself has promised and declared I said that's arrogance. That's the sin I want you to confess the sin of arrogance, get back underneath and ask God to forgive you for your unspeakable arrogance of assigning to God the same kind of inconsistency and lack of truthfulness that characterizes our own lives were course, this is kind of like shock therapy or why couldn't somebody were to have the board to get their attention, but in reality the person is in the sense trying to justify themselves. This a look being forgiven by grace.

That's okay for you folks but not for RC Sproul. I me my sins are so bad that even Christ did not atone for them only. RC spoke of my gramophone, it's my duty to feel miserable.

The rest of my life and the repent in dust and ashes, not once, but 17 times for the same activity not course, if you commit the same sin 17 times in a row you got confess a seven-day geyser on site about repeated confessions and repentance over the same actual individuals that reveals a lack of trust and confidence in this article the creep, but as a Christian we say hyperbole in the forgiveness of sin. I believe that when I come to God than confess my sins.

He forgives that's the joy of the Christian life. That's like Christian pilgrims progress to get that ugly, obscene, dreadful burden of weight.

That's what's weighing down on the back, get it off the view and swallow.

I know what it means is that when God says I forgive you. He holds it against you no longer now as for those who are in Christ. The apostle says there is no condemnation for those who are crises that doesn't mean that we don't have to go through an evaluation, but those who are in Christ, the forgiven people will never be condemned by the wrath of God. That is the greatest benefit and blessing that a human being can ever ask for is why there are lots of things in this world that I would like to have that I don't have. I would like to have $1 million. I really would.

I would like to have perfect health. I can see people in this world suffer far greater than I do. But you know as human beings we can also see people who apparently are better off than we, and it's easy to covet something is having all things being equal, I like to have financial security. I'd like to have absolute sound health. A good job. All those thing but what do we pearl of great I healed and restored relationship with our Creator that lasts forever. Yet the body suffers the body they may kill the head, as Luther said I remember Karl Barth in his latter days in his last couple of years of life he would write personal letters to his friends into his former students and the pastors of the theologians and they were all writing inquiring about the various illnesses that he had endured near the end of his life and he talked about my friend body friend body. Is it my body's not quite what it used to be, but he had this perspective of what yes my body is falling apart. The outward man is decaying, but the enemy is being renewed day by day and it's no fun to be sick, and it's no fun to grow old in the sense of losing functional capacities in the body. Things that you formally took for granted. You know what it's like when you pass a certain age now when you get a stomach ache you're not sure it's the flu like when you were eight years old. The body is a very important part of our lives, and it is on a one-way ticket to destruction. We know that, but because of forgiveness, we can say resurrection. The onus kindness. I believe in the resurrection of the body. God doesn't just promise me a restored soul or peace of mind which in and of themselves are the pearl of great price, but he promises us a new body and their loss at Kaiser.

I think hey you know that's what I need new body because the old is wearing out in the old one is falling apart. But God says that we will be given new bodies in the resurrection, glorified bodies, bodies that are immortal bodies that are indestructible bodies that function without pain without disease, without the K without death. When the Christian stands up and says I believe in the resurrection. What have noticed some people think that what they're saying when they say that that their firm in the resurrection of Christ know when we say we believe the resurrection body whose bodies returning hearts are owned by that.

That's the result of the resurrection of Christ, and it's a bodily resurrection of Christ. That's why we look for a resurrection of our body. This is what differentiates the Jew and the Christian from the Greek, the Greeks sought redemption as being redemption from the body. The old Platonic categories where the body was what's wrong with me in the body is the prison house of the soul, and death then liberates the store, the spirit of man from that prison house, but the Christian doesn't believe in redemption from the body, but redemption.

What the body the last point here. Pascal the great mathematician and philosopher and theologian, Pascal called man the supreme paradox. If you recall the reason why Pascal saw human beings as being so paradoxical was this, he said man is the creature of highest grandeur and at the same time of the most misery. Man's grandeur is found in his ability to contemplate to reflect to sink.

Not that the other animals were being stone have some brain capacities and everything but it's obvious isn't that the human capacity for reflection and thought far transcends anything else. We see on this planet and that's the greatness of man natural man can produce the world that he is produced and do the things that he got and it Pascal says that's at the same time, the basis of his misery. Our ability to contemplate is also our misery. For this reason that man in his ability to reflect and contemplate always has the capacity to contemplate a better existence than he presently enjoys or is able to bring about so that we always living with our hopes frustrated. I mean I can conceive of a life without pain without suffering without death. I can't make it happen.

I can't stop the aging process. I read the little plaques in the stores. They are from the Pennsylvania Dutch. We get too soon old and too late smart right I why it doesn't seem fair that just when I begin to understand what life is all about. My body won't let me do what I would like to be able to do because I'm getting old and when their bodies are in its most robust. Our minds are so undeveloped you know you have that problem. We can always think of a better situation we now can't bring about, and some say that's the very basis for religions being established.

The people just project their dreams and ideals into some future state what the Bible says is not wish fulfillment or wish projection, but Jesus Christ has conquered death and he says to us that there will come a time because of the forgiveness of sin that our bodies will be raced and we will have everlasting life.

May we do everything in our power to continue the life that we now enjoy most of us would rather bear those hills. We have a Shakespeare said the flight of others. We know not up. I don't want to die. I want to hold onto a life that is marked by tears by failures by pain and sickness, death. I still want to live but the life that we are promised in the resurrection of the body is an everlasting life that our Lord says is in the situation where he personally will wipe away every tear. There will be no more pain, no more sorrow no more death no more soon. That's the cost.

You can call a pie-in-the-sky, but I want a ticket to that feast and I don't want to lose my appetite for that pie because that's the pie that every human being puts but begins with the forgiveness of sins that rests on everything else in the creek of one who is God the father Almighty, the one who made the heaven and the that one is the one who sent his spirit of holiness to quicken a virgin so that she would conceive and have a child and it was that the sovereign God of heaven and earth, who brought that second to a destiny of judgment under Pontius Pilate, so that he was crucified so that he died so he was buried.

So you send the hell Sally was raised from the dead, so they ascended into heaven, so that he sits at the right hand of God right now and he says it Sunday from there.

He's going to come to judge everybody that lives in the dead is the one who is the basis of our forgiveness is the one who sends the Holy Spirit who creates a community called the church and promises us the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The message of the New Testament in an outline and it captures the essence of Christianity. I think that says something for the riches of the creed and whiteness persevered so and I'm sure will continue, and with that we wrap up the series that we call basic training.

Yes, Dr. RC Sproles look at the fundamentals of the Christian faith as stated in the apostles Creed I believe Webb and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Thank you for being with us today would like to send you the DVD containing all six messages from the series is contacted us with the gift of any amount you can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343 can also go online to make a request and Renewing Your Mind God word, they can readily tell that if you teach a membership or catechism class in your church if you homeschool or lead a Sunday school class. This series is helpful, but even as we heard today. It is wonderful at any stage in our walk with Christ. To be reminded of these great truths. So did with your donation of any about the later ministries we will send you the series again.

It's titled basic training.

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Dr. Sinclair Ferguson joins us to continue talking about the basics of the Christian life is Christianity simply an ethical system or a set of doctrinal beliefs or is it something more.

Dr. Ferguson will show us what it means to be in Christ, I hope you'll join us. Beginning Monday for Renewing Your Mind