Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Last week we started this sermon series looking at salvation, looking at how we come to God, the relationship that we have with God through Jesus Christ, one that leads to a better life.
[00:00:16] I was looking at Matthew, chapter 11, and last week I looked at the last part of it.
[00:00:22] The verse says, come to me, all you who are weary and. And carry heavy burdens, and I'll give you rest.
[00:00:29] And we looked at the relationship between those of us. Like, what does it mean to be weary and heavy laden? And what does that rest look like?
[00:00:38] That relationship is salvation. What generates that weariness, that heavy burden, that enmity between us and God that makes us less than who we were created to be?
[00:00:50] We are in the.
[00:00:52] We are surrounded by a world generating sin, and from inside of us, we are generating sin. That does create a weariness inside of us. We have a. We are in the midst of a life that is not fit to human consumption. It's not fit to how we were actually meant to live. And it creates a weariness in it. And salvation is the rest that God offers when we submit our life to him and we live in Him. We looked at that last week. This week I want to look at an earlier part of this verse. He says, come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens. And I want to look at that relationship between me and people with heavy burdens, me being God. Jesus. Jesus says, come, come to me. I want you to come to me. Not because I want to have, like, a bunch of followers, not because I want to be important. I want to be an influencer. None of that stuff. Come to me because you've got something that's killing you, and I can help you with it.
[00:01:58] This relationship is the reason that we will often call Jesus our Savior. He's literally rescuing us, saving us from the burdensome life of sin. There's.
[00:02:12] There is a crassness, like something that's, like, not right in our spirit, that we can feel it. We're not right with what's going on with the people around us. We're not right with God.
[00:02:24] And that thing is something that many of us come to decide that we need help.
[00:02:32] We don't want that anymore. We want a life where that's not a part of us. We would like to be rescued from it.
[00:02:40] If you don't want to be rescued from sin, then God necessarily cannot be your Savior, because that is what he rescues you from.
[00:02:51] It's like, if you don't wish to be rescued from a fiery. From a burning building, then a fireman isn't going to be your Savior, either that he exists.
[00:03:03] The reason he would be there is to protect you or to rescue you from a fire.
[00:03:08] Jesus said, I have come to rescue you from these burdens that have been created as a result of your sin. I am here to rescue you from that. And if that's not what you want to be rescued from, then I'm not going to be. The relationship that I have with you won't be one of Savior and saved. I didn't come for those that are healthy. I came for the sick. If you don't identify yourself as one needing his help, he won't be help to you. His gospel, his message, the thing, what he offers for help won't feel like help to you if you don't believe you need the kind of help he has to offer.
[00:03:41] So I want to look at this.
[00:03:45] What does it mean for God to be Savior?
[00:03:50] All throughout the Old Testament, we see specific examples of God as Savior. Not just.
[00:03:58] Not just like generic. Like God saves us from sin. But we see stories where people are saved specifically from the results of sin from a sinful world. And the relationship that they have with him is very specific to that salvation. The salvation that they experience generates in them a very specific relationship with God and even a different name for God that comes out of the saving that they experience.
[00:04:25] I want to look at a few examples of those.
[00:04:27] First example I want to look at is this tender story out of way back in early Genesis, Abraham is told that he's going to have many descendants, but it gets really old and he still doesn't have any. And him and Sarah start getting. Sarah specifically gets really wigged out by this. I'm still not having kids. What's going on? And she says, maybe it's not. Maybe it's my. Maybe it's my servant that would still be my servant, so it would still count. So go ahead and have children. My servant Abraham does. And then Sarah gets very jealous and starts treating her servant Hagar very poorly. Hagar ends up running away and the story picks up and says, angel comes to Hagar and says, where have you come from and where are you going?
[00:05:12] She says, I'm running away from my mistress Sarah. And angel, the Lord says to her, return to your mistress and submit to her authority. Then he added, I will give you more descendants than you can count.
[00:05:23] Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to God who had spoken to her. She said, you are the God who sees me.
[00:05:32] This is the first time that. That. And it's Only twice, I think once in Psalms, that God is kind of referred to this way, the God who sees me. This was a specific relationship that she had with God where she felt for the first time that she was seen, she was known, she had worth and value. She had been mistreated by Sarah to the point that she felt like who she was didn't matter. But she understood as a result of this that she did matter to God. She was known by God. He saw her. And literally, one of the names that we have for God, when we think about who God is, the character of God, and what his salvation looks like, one of the words, one of the names that we have from God comes from this relationship.
[00:06:16] God, God's Savior. For her, saving her was to be seen. I am known.
[00:06:23] That was for her an important aspect of her salvation.
[00:06:29] Later in Genesis, Abraham, who finally does have a son with Sarah, is told by God, look, you need to go ahead and sacrifice your son. Which is like, literally his whole reason for existing is this kid.
[00:06:43] So he goes up to sacrifice his son. And it says, Abraham raised his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by the horns. And Abraham went and took the ram. God had told him to take the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in the place of his son. And Abraham said, call this place the Lord provides or the Lord Provider. As it is said, on this day on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided as a result of his relationship. The name that we have, like Lord Provider, is a fundamental way that we understand God's salvation.
[00:07:27] He sees us, he provides for us.
[00:07:31] But it isn't just like generically us.
[00:07:34] For Abraham, it was me, my salvation, what I needed, he provided for me, he saw me.
[00:07:43] Hagar said Psalms 23 starts with, the Lord is my shepherd. David, who is on the run, he grew up a shepherd.
[00:07:55] He gets to the point that he is a threat to the king. And the king is like, has him on the ropes and, you know, his life is on the line. And when he considers who God is to him, what God's salvation is to him, he sees himself not as the shepherd, but the lamb. And he sees God as the shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, and I won't be in need. He lets me lie down in green pastures. Even in the midst of insane anxiety and stress that he's under, constantly on the run.
[00:08:32] He lets me lie down in green pastures.
[00:08:34] He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.
[00:08:40] He is for me like a good shepherd is to his sheep.
[00:08:47] This wasn't just like, a theory. Like, I'm not just considering, like, what is the character of God like? And if things are like that, what would they be like? This is something that David needed. This was a. He is in the midst of struggle. He needs saving.
[00:09:02] And so God was to him a shepherd. Not.
[00:09:06] Not just the shepherd, not just the Savior of the world, but the Savior of David. He saved. It was a personal relationship with him, not just a generic relationship with the world, but a personal relationship.
[00:09:20] Exodus 15. Moses has just led the people out of Egypt. They've just crossed over the Red Sea. Says, Moses led the Israelites from the Red Sea. And Moses said, if you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight and listen to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which have. Which I put on Egypt, for I am the Lord who heals.
[00:09:46] He was to the Israelites the healing God. And I.
[00:09:50] You know, he's talking about diseases here, but, gosh, you talk about the healing that needed to happen for a people that all they were for generations were slaves. All they knew was to be slaves. What does it mean to become a kingdom, a kingdom of God, a royal priesthood, people that matter what healing had to take place for them. He was the God that they needed to heal them.
[00:10:15] Not just like the idea of healing, but like the way that I am currently suffering and the fears that I currently have.
[00:10:23] I needed him to heal me. That was my salvation in Leviticus 20.
[00:10:30] This is deeper into Scripture. And the Israelites have experienced salvation from God from. From oppression over and over again.
[00:10:41] And they have constantly turned their backs on God and it's caught up with them.
[00:10:47] He says, God says, I will turn against those who commit spiritual prostitution. This is such a. The language that God uses when he describes what it means to turn his back on him is visceral.
[00:10:58] It's not just like, you know, you abandoned me, you didn't fulfill your promise.
[00:11:04] It's like, you were an adulterer.
[00:11:06] Like, you turned to prostitution instead of your own wife, or, you are the prostitute.
[00:11:14] Those who committed spiritual prostitution by putting their trust in mediums or in those who consult with the spirits of the dead.
[00:11:22] Specifically, a lot of Israelites were turning to magic. There was this idea that they could manage the chaos around them. Instead of turning to a God who generates order out of chaos, they were looking to use the chaos itself. That's what magic was in that culture.
[00:11:38] I will cut them off from the community.
[00:11:41] So let yourselves so set yourselves apart and be holy, for I am the Lord your God. Keep all my decrees by putting them into practice.
[00:11:50] For I am the Lord who makes you holy.
[00:11:54] If there was a word that came to dominate or a concept that came to dominate, what it meant for God to be their God, it was this Lord who sanctifies or who makes them holy.
[00:12:09] Pretty soon, before Jesus is born, the Israelites finally got to the point that they said, it is exceedingly important that we are a holy people, that we're different, that we're set apart. Holy just means that we have a.
[00:12:20] Anything that's holy is set apart. It has a specific purpose. It has a purpose that's meaningful. It's different than the things around them. And for the people of God, it shows up in the laws that they were given. And all those laws talk about the relationship between three things. Have faith in God. Have worship God. Have worship of God. Worship God.
[00:12:41] Love your neighbor like yourself, like brothers and sisters, like, care for their good, will their good as much or more as you will your own good and manage your resources. Don't look to your resources as your savior, but as the tool that you have to function as an ambassador for God in the world. You're managing your resources, you're not trusting your resources.
[00:13:03] This relationship between God, people and stuff was different set apart than the people around them. They were called to be set apart. The law showed them how to be set apart.
[00:13:13] And so for the Israelites, this is really important. But they got to the point that the law itself became what they thought was, we are oppressed again by the time of Christ, they're oppressed by Rome.
[00:13:26] And if we can just get to the point that we keep all the commandments just right, God will save us from Rome.
[00:13:32] God, if we. If we can sanctify ourselves, if we can make ourselves holy and set apart, then we will be saved from this external thing that we want to be saved from. When they looked to the Old Testament, they saw their ancestors being saved from Egypt, being saved from pestilence, being saved from all these external factors.
[00:13:51] What they missed was that God was saving them from who they were becoming as a result of those external factors.
[00:14:01] What he was saving them from was the sin that was being generated in them. He was constantly working to make them a different people, a renewed people, people who could be different even in the midst of trials. He never, historically, God never got to the point that he made it so that the Israelites didn't have any oppression or trials. But they looked to those examples and said, oh yeah, that's what I need. That's what I need salvation from. I need salvation from, from all that stuff out there. I need rest. I'm not the problem. The world is the problem. And I need rescued from all of that.
[00:14:36] They ignored this last example that God is one who makes holy. Fundamentally, what we need help, what we need to be saved from is what is happening inside of us. Jesus says this.
[00:14:52] Jesus said that it's not what goes into the cup that makes you unclean, but not what comes into you that makes you unclean, but what comes out of you that makes you unclean.
[00:15:04] It's not the oppression that's coming into you, it's what's happening to you as a result the person that you're becoming.
[00:15:10] And so he says, sorry, I'm missing my point here.
[00:15:16] All of you listen and try to understand. It's not what goes into your body that defiles you. You are defiled.
[00:15:23] What comes out of your heart when, when God said, I am here to make you holy, this was it. He was working to make you a person who is set apart and different.
[00:15:37] No matter what your experience, no matter what's happening in the world around you, this, Jesus said, is what I have come to save you from. And really, this is what God has always been saving us from. He has always been saving us from sin.
[00:15:54] Now, having said that, it's important to recognize God is always saving us from sin. But the way, just like in the Old Testament, how each individual is giving God a different name based on the way salvation looked for them, what it means for you to be saved from sin will often look very different than what it looks like for me to be saved from sin.
[00:16:16] Your rescue from sin might look or feel like a humbling of arrogance.
[00:16:26] That might be a primary thing that you experience like you experience like a proper smallness and place to God in the world, you find your place that fits correctly a deep humbling that is salvation from sin for you. It might be a sense that you have no worth, that you don't recognize that you are made in the image of God, and that there is no one out there who is more significant than you. It's true that you're not more significant or important than anyone else, but also no one is more important or significant than you. God has given you purpose and meaning. And when you stifle that there is a beauty in the world that he intends to show up through you, that's not happening because you don't see how glorious you are. And so salvation for you might feel something like a. Like a blossoming of who you are. Right? So for these two people, they might have very different words. This is the God who humbles. That is salvation for this person. This is a God who creates flowers in the garden. That person would probably be very artsy. I'm thinking that person that has that angstiness, they would probably have, like, poetic language that they would use for it. And both of those examples, they might even look on their face diametrically opposed. This person is saying, God humbles me. This person is saying God releases me. And it's the exact same salvation into people who are affected by sin very differently.
[00:17:50] Because our salvation is personal.
[00:17:53] When we say that we have a personal relationship with God, what that means is you are not saved into a group of a bunch of precepts that are fit for every single person. The law isn't for you some. The law of Christ isn't for you some like a list of things to check off and make sure that you get just right like everybody else. It those things, some of those will happen in your life with or without Christ. Just because it doesn't.
[00:18:21] Why would I ever kill my neighbor? Like, you know, like, there's certain things that you're like, that's.
[00:18:26] Thanks. I don't. I didn't need a law for that one, you know, but for somebody else, they needed that law.
[00:18:32] Okay, look around.
[00:18:37] So I'm just saying those laws exist for a purpose. And the way that Christ saves you is very personal to you. And if you were careful about it, if you thought about it, you might even have a name for God. He is the God who Jesus Christ came and he saved me from my sin bracket. That he saved me from what?
[00:19:01] Jesus, the Savior of my right. That will be personal to you. That will be a way that God doesn't just save you theoretically, but saves you practically. He literally strips away the burden.
[00:19:17] You who are. Who are weary and have heavy burdens, your weariness, your heavy burdens. He will relieve you from that personally, not conceptually.
[00:19:33] After he says, he says, oh, first Timothy. I'm sorry, I got first Timothy 1:15.
[00:19:43] This is Paul describing to his protege Timothy, who he loved like a son.
[00:19:50] He says, this is a trustworthy and deserve a saying. This saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance. What's interesting is this saying shows up several times in the Bible. And it seems like it's something that Christians just said a lot. Like Chris. It was like something that Christians just said about Jesus pretty often it's a saying about him, like, within 20 or 30 years, it's just a saying that Christians have about Jesus.
[00:20:14] Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Like, it was like a phrase that for them, for us, that might be like, well, sure, because we've heard it so much. It's like a trustworthy saying that's like normal for us, but for them, they would just repeat this. He came into the world to save sinners. He came into the world to save sinners. Now think about this necessarily, if this is something Christians are saying, if I'm saying that Jesus is my Savior, I'm saying, I am a sinner.
[00:20:43] I am one who needs his salvation.
[00:20:45] They weren't just saying something about Jesus. They're saying something about themselves and the relationship that they have with him. Now, just before this, in First Timothy, he describes these sinners and he's got a few lists like this. They're never like, don't look at this and say, like, whew, I'm free because I'm not on that list. Like, you'll have something on this list. But then he's got. This is just a partial list of things that are normative anyway. He says, we know that the law is good, that Old Testament law, the law that we would look at and say from that law, we can see laws that say, faith God this way, love your neighbor this way, manage your resources this way. All those laws help steer us in the direction of a normative life around faith in God, about being holiness, sanctified or set apart. If our culture was exactly like that nomadic Israelite culture back then, we would do.
[00:21:42] Those laws would be exactly fit to help us know how to faith God, love our neighbor and manage our resources. We have to figure out how to apply that in the existing world. The example I use all the time is there's a law that says, go out of camp, dig a ditch, and do your business out there when you have to defecate, right?
[00:22:01] I don't do that. I don't follow that law. Because now that law was intended to help there not be disease in the camp.
[00:22:10] It was a serious law. If you didn't follow that law, you might cause disease, you might cause death among your neighbors. Now what I do is I use the bathroom, I flush, I wash my hands. You know what I mean? There are things that I do now that fit that law.
[00:22:25] That law is still something I follow.
[00:22:28] We have to figure out how to follow all the law, all of those Laws remain beneficial. Maybe the technology that we use to fulfill it is different, but those laws remain beneficial. So he says, we know that the law is good if someone uses it legitimately. We use it for the purpose of faith in God, loving our neighbor, managing our resources, realizing that the law is not intended for a righteous person, but for lawless and rebellious people. Again, who are we in relationship to God? The law is not for me if I'm not a sinner, he said, for lawless and rebellious people, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and the profane, for those who kill their fathers or their mothers, for murders, for sexually immoral people, practicing homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, perjurers. In fact, any who live contrary to sound teaching.
[00:23:18] You read that list and some of them might sound more significant than you to others.
[00:23:23] You might think like, you might think, man, I know some people that they checking off a lot of boxes there. Not me, maybe one or two.
[00:23:33] I'm a little bitty sinner.
[00:23:37] But I love this. We go back to that passage where it said, just after this, where he says this trustworthy saying, christ came into the world to save sinners. The very next line he says, and I am the worst of them.
[00:23:50] Paul has just recited this list of things that he is actually not on. Paul is not one who is engaging in murder, practicing homosexuality, sexually immoral. He's not a liar or a perjurer. He hasn't kidnapped. He's. Look that list that he's just given there. He could look at that list and say, among sinners, I'm doing okay.
[00:24:12] He actually said, I am. I can't think of a person who needs the salvation of God more than I need it.
[00:24:21] He didn't look at that list and say, you guys need salvation from God. He thought about what it means to be a sinner. And he said, I can't. I have not met a person in this world who has needed Jesus more than I have.
[00:24:38] I currently. Not just for my past sins, currently today, I am the worst of all of them, and I need him. And I don't know specifically what was in Paul's mind when he thought about what his life would be like without God.
[00:24:52] He sees. He sees his life with God. And it certainly. It has involved beatings. It's all involved imprisonment, a loss of all kinds of. Like, he was. He was kind of. He was kind of vip. Like, he was. Like. He was treated very well. People respected him.
[00:25:10] Even among Christians, he doesn't seem to get a lot of respect Sometimes, like his life, you would look at and say, I think a lot of people would look at his life and say you were less, you had less burdens and less problems before Jesus was your Savior than you do now.
[00:25:32] But that must mean that the things, and I'm looking externally at his life, the things I'm identifying as a problem, aren't as significant as the things he sees in his life that he knows he needed more than that. He even says, I count all of that stuff that I had before as refuse, as trash compared to the glorious knowledge of knowing Jesus Christ as my Lord.
[00:26:02] He doesn't say exactly what name he would have given God, what the salvation was for him. He does say he had a. He's dealt with his life with this thorn in the side. I don't know what that was exactly, but he was quite aware of something in his life that without being saved, his life would be significantly worse than it was.
[00:26:30] And Jesus saved him.
[00:26:32] He was saved by him personally.
[00:26:39] Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden.
[00:26:44] The one that you come to is, in some ways it's the same God. I'm not trying to pretend like it's the same God in the Old Testament, but for you, the one that you come to is dependent on the way you are weary and heavy laden.
[00:27:03] And if you aren't aware of your sin, of your illness, of your need, then it's hard to be aware of how Jesus can save you, what it means for him to be your Savior.
[00:27:20] There's some self awareness that goes into this.
[00:27:23] Do you need a Savior?
[00:27:27] What do you need to be saved from?
[00:27:31] Who could God possibly be to you?
[00:27:36] What does it mean for him to be your Savior?
[00:27:42] I don't know.
[00:27:44] I. I don't know what you need saving from.
[00:27:48] But I've seen too many examples of people saved from dramatically different things in their life, from my life, things that I don't deal with, that they have.
[00:27:56] And I've seen the way God has saved me from things in my own life.
[00:28:02] You're just not that different and unique. If he saved all of them, if he saved me, he can save you too. I promise you that.
[00:28:11] Next week we're going to look at those first two words. First two, that very first phrase, come to me.
[00:28:18] We've talked about what that salvation is like. We've talked about the relationship between the Savior and the saved.
[00:28:25] Next week we're going to look at what it means to come to the Savior. If that's the relationship I can have with him that he can save me not from a theoretical life of sin, but from your specific sin, that he can be a personal savior to you from your sins. How do you come to him?
[00:28:42] How do I have a relationship with God in which he can be my savior?
[00:28:48] Come to me. We'll look at that next week, Father God, as we unpack this good news that you've provided, Lord, that we don't have to be told that there's something wrong in this world, that there's something wrong in us, God, something that could be better than it is. And there's a lot of messages about good news out there, but there's something specific about your good news that seems to be very different.
[00:29:17] You're not just pretending that we need to be saved from something outside.
[00:29:21] But we know that what we need to be saved from is inside of us. And you get right to the heart of that matter.
[00:29:27] We trust you in that, Lord, as we come to place our trust in you and live a life with you as our savior. Lord. As sinners needing saving, God, I pray that we experience the liberty and the release that can only come from that proper relationship with you.
[00:29:45] We love you. Amen.
