The title of the message today is The Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let's begin reading in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 beginning with verse 1. Let's read together the word of the Lord. In memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

Let's pray. Father, we are not ashamed of the gospel. It is not only the gospel by which our souls were saved, but it is the gospel as we just read wherein we stand. It is the gospel by which we were justified and are sanctified, and in one day we'll be glorified. It's the gospel by which we live and die and will live again.

It is our ultimate hope, our greatest treasure, O God, our highest joy. And O Lord, we look to the gospel this afternoon once again, and we ask O God that the message of Christ and Him crucified and risen from the dead might break our hearts anew, burn away dross, shatter pride, melt hearts, O God, that have grown cold, that it may convict us, O God, humble us to the dust, comfort us, encourage us, thrill us, and lift us to heaven. For we ask it, O God, in the name of our blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who suffered and died for our sins and rose again. Amen. Amen, let's be seated.

The Bible says that Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day. But what does that mean? And why should you care? When the Bible tells us that Christ died for our sins, it's talking about Jesus, Christ, God's Son, Jesus, of course, which means Savior. He will save His people from their sins.

Christ, the anointed of God. It's talking about Jesus Christ, God's Son, who came into the world from the Father to save sinners, to save guilty sinners like you and me from our sins and the penalty do us for our sins. You know, few people will admit that they are sinners before God and even fewer that the sins of their lives are deserving of eternal punishment. You'll hear people say, for instance, well, the God I believe in is a God of love. And I don't think that a God of love would send anyone to hell.

The problem of course is that the same source that reveals to us that the God of heaven is a God of love is the same source that reveals to us that he is a God of justice. And that there's a day of judgment coming, and that there is a place called hell where many will spend eternity. The same Bible that tells us that God is love in 1 John 4, 8, tells us in Romans 1, 18, that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And Jesus said people should quote, this is Jesus speaking, fear God who after he has killed has power to cast into hell. And he asked the most religious and outwardly moral men of his day, how can you escape the damnation of hell?

That is, that's in Matthew 23, 33, that is what makes you think that you're not going to end up there. It's serious matters. And then in Acts chapter 17 verse 31 God says that he has appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained, speaking of Jesus Christ. And that he has given assurance to us, that is to all mankind, that in that he has raised Christ from the dead. That's how you know that there is a judgment coming.

That there is a day when we will all stand before the righteous judge of all the earth. Jesus has no grave in Jerusalem. So yes, the God who created all things and He created you and me is a God of love. In fact, He is love itself. And in love, he sent his only begotten son into the world to save sinners.

But he is also a God who will judge the world one day in righteousness, that is, with perfect justice. When we talk about the gospel, the gospel means good news. But for there to be good news, of course, that means there must also be bad news. And one of the things that we have to understand, the first thing that we have to understand, is that the God who created the heavens and the earth is a holy God. And because he is holy, infinitely set apart from all creation and infinitely separate from any taint of moral impurity or creaturely defilement he can have no fellowship with sin.

He is a holy God. He can have no fellowship with sin. Psalm 5 4 says He is not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, neither shall evil dwell with Him. Neither shall evil dwell with him, that is in his presence. And the prophet Habakkuk says in Habakkuk chapter one in verse 13 that God is of purer eyes than to behold evil.

That is to countenance it or to tolerate it. For God is light and in him is no darkness at all. First John one five and the second thing we need to understand is that the God who made all things and who made you and who made me is also a just God. He is a just judge. A just judge whose very nature demands that sin be punished.

In Psalm 9 and verse 7, we read, He has prepared His throne for judgment, and He shall judge the world in righteousness, and He shall bring every work into judgment, along with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. Because God is just, his very nature demands that he punish sin. Theologian Lewis Bettner, quote, for God to fail to punish sin would be for him to remove the penalty against it, to consent to it, or to become a partaker in it, and therefore to violate his own nature and to destroy the moral order of the universe." The Bible tells us that every one of us came into the world sinners, that every one of us was born with a sin nature, that we were actually alienated from God, even from the womb, and that all go astray as soon as they are born speaking lies. That's Psalm 58.3. Anyone who's ever had children knows that children don't have to be taught to sin.

The Pelagian doctrine was the tabula rasa. We come into the world a blank slate, a blank sheet of paper, and then it's written on with sin. In other words, we come into the world innocent and morally pure. But anyone who has ever had children knows that children don't have to be taught to sin. They don't have to be taught to lie.

They don't have to be taught to disobey their parents. They don't have to be taught to take something from another child that isn't theirs in order to gratify themselves without any thought for the one that they took something from. It's built in. Our children inherited their sinful nature from us. And we from our parents, going all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Dr. Sproul, we're not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners." We sin because we have a sin nature that we inherited from our first parents. That's the reason that we sin. And so scripture says, quote, there is not a just man upon the earth who does good and does not sin.

Ecclesiastes 720. And yet, you know, we go out, we do street ministry. You young guys here, you do street ministry. You go out into the world and you ask nine out of 10 people, maybe 99 out of 100 people. If you ask them, they'll tell you that they're basically good people.

Are you a good person? Yeah, I'm a good person. Yeah, I'm good. The Bible says in Romans 3 10, there is none righteous, no, not one. There isn't anyone who understands or even seeks after God in the state in which they're born.

Every one of us, it goes on to say, have turned aside to his own way, the apostle says. There is none who does good, not even one. Romans 312. It is a universal indictment of mankind. The law of God is broken by all of us, writes Spurgeon, and we break God's law constantly, and we all deserve to be punished, close quote.

You know, I say, well, I don't break God's law constantly. Well, what about the law of God that says you're to love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your strength and all of your mind all of the time? None of us has kept that law one second of his entire life. We haven't loved God with the whole heart, soul, strength, and mind. And you know what?

We haven't loved our neighbor as ourselves. Every time we're hungry, we don't say, I wonder if anyone else is hungry, get them food before me. We break the law of God constantly. And Romans 3.23 says, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That is, everyone is a violator of God's commandments and everyone has fallen infinitely short of God's standard for a perfect obedience.

That's what God requires in his word. And because we have not, the justice of God demands satisfaction. The justice of God demands satisfaction. We have lawyer in this room. The courts demand satisfaction, right?

There has to be satisfaction in these cases. That's why they go to law. The justice of God demands satisfaction. Sin is a debt owed to God by every one of us and none of us has the currency with which to pay. And Romans 623 tells us that the wages of sin is death.

What does it mean? Well, it's talking about eternal death. Every one of us, yes, will physically die because sin came into the world and we inherited a corrupted sin nature that we inherited from our parents, our physical bodies will die, but it's talking here about eternal death, eternal separation from God, and everlasting punishment and destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power as we read in 2 Thessalonians 1, 9. What's our problem? What's your problem?

What's my problem? The problem for every one of us is that the law of God demands a perfect righteousness, And not one of us possesses that. The bad news for mankind then, it's really twofold. First, none of us has kept God's commandments and perfection as His law requires. Galatians 3, 10, according to the Old Testament, cursed is everyone, everybody familiar with this passage?

Cursed is everyone who continues not in all things whatsoever are written in the book of the law to do them. That's God's law. The curse of God, eternal death coming for everyone who does not continue in everything that is written in the book of the law to do them. None of us has done that. None of us has kept God's commandments and perfection as this law requires.

And second, None of us can even begin to pay for even the least of all the sins we've committed against God. The good news of the gospel is that God's Son, Jesus Christ, did both. That God sent his son into the world to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. To live that life of perfect obedience that we couldn't live. And to die a sacrificial death that we couldn't die.

To live a life of perfect obedience to the law of God that we couldn't begin to live and to redeem us from the curse of the broken law, the law that we've broken by becoming a curse for us. Galatians 3, 13 tells us. The Bible says that Jesus, who never sinned, bore our sins in his own body on a cross 2000 years ago and that on that cross, the sins of God's people were taken off of Him and placed off of us and placed onto Him. That our sins were removed from us, the sins of His people, and transferred to his account. The Bible word is imputed.

Our sins were imputed to him, reckoned to his account, counted as though they were his sins, laid on Jesus. And then Because he was bearing our sin and our guilt, he was treated, please don't miss this, he was treated as though he had committed every sin that we have committed. Think about that for a minute. Every sinful word you've ever spoken, every wicked thought you ever thought, every evil thing that you have ever done, Jesus was treated as though he had said and thought and done all of them. Children, have any of you ever told a lie?

On the cross Jesus was treated as though he told that lie. Maybe you lied many times. Can you see Jesus hanging on the cross being punished for every lie that you've told. Don Stubblefield, former elder here before he died, told me this. When he was five years old, a neighbor took him to church and the preacher was preaching from Revelation 21 8, which says all liars will have their part in the lake that burns with fire, all of them, with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

That is, all liars go to hell who die apart from Jesus. Little Don, you know, he knew he was a liar, he just couldn't seem to tell the truth and his parents would talk to him about his lying but he just kept on lying. It was like the truth just couldn't come out of his mouth until that day when God's Word hit him hard and he came under conviction and he was sorry for his sin before God and he confessed his lying to God and he says that the seeds of the gospel were planted in him that day when he heard those words and eventually brought him to trust Christ to save him and he did. On the cross Jesus was treated as though he had told all the lies that we've told, engaged in all the drunkenness that we've engaged in, committed all of the sexual sin that we've committed, lived in sexual immorality and impurity, moral impurity, treated as though he had been the one who lived in bitterness towards others, that he was the one with the unforgiving heart against others, that he had been the one who was envious of others, that he was prideful, that he was the one who had that lying tongue.

It was all laid on Jesus. And he was treated in our place as though he had done all those things himself. Before I get back to the point there, people you know who don't know Jesus, they know that they're living in sin but they go on in their sin with No conviction, no turning, even when others bring it to their attention. God forgives those who turn from their sin to Him looking to Jesus and trusting in Him. First John 1, 9 says, if we confess our sins to God, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

That's what Christians do. They confess their sins to God, looking to Jesus on that cross, dying for their sins, being treated as though he had done all the things that they've done and trusting his word that he will cleanse them. They cast themselves at the foot of the cross, trusting in God's mercy, promised to all those who trust in Jesus. The unbeliever, the unregenerate, the person that's on their way to hell, the person who is in rebellion against God, they say, I don't have anything to confess. I have no sin to confess.

First John 1, 8, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins. What does He mean He's faithful? He's faithful to his word to do what he said he would do. And he's just.

How is he just? Because he punished our sin in the substitute he provided in his son. See, every sin is either punished in the sinner himself or in the substitute that God provided in his son, but every sin will be punished. Every sin will be dealt with. Your sin, every one of your sins, will be dealt with one way or another, either in you or in the substitute that God provided.

Every sin. When is the last time you confessed something to God? People say, why should I do that? I believe in Jesus, I'm saved, I'm on my way to heaven. Because that's what God said to do.

And it's what Christians do. It's what truly saved people do. I'm praying for this lady in the memory care place that I visit every week. So amazing when you, and this isn't limited of course to nursing homes and all, but it's so amazing how you can see the work of God in so many of these ladies' lives. So many of them just have just this radiant joy and they have peace.

And when you talk about Jesus and what He did, they melt. They just melt. You can see their countenance, their expressions, they just melt. Doris, and Amy, and Edie, and Robbie, and Kathy, Garnita, all of these precious souls, they love Jesus. And His work, you can see, has been going on in their lives and so you just see a softness and a tenderness.

But then there's a few others, one that I'm really praying for. She doesn't know Jesus and His love and forgiveness. His love and forgiveness doesn't radiate from her, but it radiates from these other women as they sit there in their wheelchairs full of love for God and others, and they're content, you know. They may wish things were different, but they're content. But the ones that don't know the love of God in Christ, there's a hardness there.

There's just a hardness and there's bitterness and there's disdain for others in the place and it rolls off their tongues. They can't help themselves. And I'm praying for one in particular, never a kind word, so hard, so bitter, so full of herself. What about you today and what about me when we sin against God? Do we confess it to Him in brokenness and hate our sin and long to be more like Jesus.

When you sin against others, do you humble yourself and go to that person and say, I'm sorry for what I said, for the way that I said it, for what I said, for what I did. Have you ever gone to someone recently and said, I'm really sorry? Have you ever gone to anyone and said, I'm really sorry? Have you? It's not a good sign if you haven't.

It's not a good sign. That was a good sign, though. A good sign that the devil's trying to interrupt what I'm doing, right? It's not a good sign if you haven't. Sister, please forgive me.

Mom, please forgive me. If it was someone out here who did that, I'm not calling you the devil, by the way. I accidentally put it on there. Mom, please forgive me. Son, please forgive me.

Brother in Christ, my dear wife, please forgive me. Husband, that's what the Spirit of God in dwelling a person produces. You hear what I'm saying? That's what it produces, a softness, a tenderness to the sin in your life and a willingness to confess your sin to God and to humble yourself before others. That's what the Spirit of God working in the life of a true believer does.

That will be evidence in your life and you'll see it. And if you're hard, you're cold, and you're bitter, and you're angry, and you're upset, and you can't forgive, and you can't say I'm sorry, repent and believe the gospel. But it's evidence that you're saved when you're sensitive to the sins you commit against others and hardly notice the things that others do to you. Hardly notice the things that other people do to you. I'm really concerned about my sin, but I'm not all that concerned about yours against me.

I'm really concerned about my sins against you, but I'm not all that concerned about your sins against me. Go back to the passage. Jesus was treated as though He had done all the things we've done, and the cup of God's wrath that we deserve to drink for all eternity in hell was poured out upon him in our place. You realize on that cross that Jesus drank down the cup of the wrath of God. Think about it for a moment.

All the eternities of the hells that we deserved to endure, He endured on the cross in that space of three hours, infinite suffering, infinite unimaginable suffering, Bearing my sin, bearing your sin, the guilt of our sins, the shame, the shame of our sins in his own body on the tree. And the wrath of God was poured out upon him in our place, the cup of God's wrath, and he drank it down to the last drop and died. Friends, Jesus was forsaken of the Father on the cross because he was bearing your sin. He had to be forsaken. See him hanging there.

Elie! Elie! Lama sabachthani! My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Because your sin, He was bearing.

My sin, He was bearing. He was forsaken because he was bearing my sin, your sin if you're a believer here today. He was forsaken so that we might not be forsaken of God for all eternity. Christ Jesus who never sinned died for our sins. The Bible says the just for the unjust to reconcile us to God.

Friends, as Jesus was dying just before he died, he said, it is finished. In the Greek it means debt cancelled, sin debt paid in full, Jesus paid it all. And after he died the Bible tells us that Christ rose from the dead the third day, Proving that his sacrifice was accepted of God on our behalf. And then he ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having accomplished everything necessary to save sinners like you and me. What does God require of us?

To repent and believe this good news. To turn from our sins to God and to put our trust in Jesus alone and what he alone has done to save us. Friend, if God has brought you to the place where you see yourself as a ruined sinner without any hope of saving yourself, where you realize that all your works, even the best of them, the best of your shiniest good deeds are nothing but filthy rags in the sight of God to merit his favor. If God has brought you to the place where you have no other hope, no other hope but that Jesus died for me, only what he did for me in his life of perfect obedience and his death for my sins, If nothing in your hand you bring but simply to his cross you cling, you can trust God on the authority of God's Word that you have passed from death unto life, that you have inherited eternal life, that you are forgiven of God, that you are absolved of all of your sin debt, that you are eternally saved, that your sins are blotted out, that your slate is clean and that you are now clothed in the perfect righteousness of God's Son, clothed in Jesus' perfect righteousness, faultless to stand before the throne.

If that's you today, glory in the person and the work of Jesus Christ who died for your sins and rose again from the dead and then go out and tell someone else about the mighty things that God has done for you. For God so loved the world that he didn't leave the world without a savior, but he gave his only begotten son that whosoever, whosoever, whosoever believes on Him should not perish eternally but have everlasting life. Amen. And amen. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you that you sent your Son into the world and that He willingly came and took our sins upon Himself who never sinned, paid the penalty for our sins, bore the curse to our sins, suffered the wrath to our sins, died for our sins, and rose again the third day. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for giving your life a ransom for many. Thank you, God, for giving your only begotten son to save sinners like us. We praise you and we thank you, God. We ask, Lord, that there would be no one who would leave this place today who has not come to put their trust in the person and the finished work of your Son.

For we ask it in his holy name in Jesus name. Amen.