This Is The Payment for Our Sins
Text: John 19:17-30 Speaker: Pastor Matthew Ude Festival: Good Friday
Audio Sermon
John 19:17-30
This is the payment for OUR SIN
This is the PAYMENT for our sin
We are going to keep it short today because there is only one thing we need to know and think about, Jesus died for our sins.
I think it was about a week ago. I was tired. I was about to go to bed and a thought occurred to me and all of a sudden I couldn’t sleep anymore. It disturbed me that much. The thing that troubled me was Lot’s wife. You remember Lot’s wife. She turned to look behind and the Lord turned her into a pillar of salt.
Here I am trying to teach and preach the love of God. Here we are trying to tell the world that God is love. But then there is this. This is nothing, she turns to look. She isn’t Stalin. She isn’t Hitler. Why does God smite her but leave them. What she did was barely even a sin.
But that is the problem, that word barely. It is a relative term. Man thinks of sin as relative. There is good and bad and there is so many different shades of grey. Man grades on a curve.
God says no, there is no grey when it comes to sin. There is sin and there is righteousness and there is nothing in between. Lot’s wife turned back and that was sin and therefore she died.
The cross of Christ also reminds us. God will not overlook sin. This is the punishment for our sins. This is the punishment of lying. This is the punishment of talking back to our parents. This is the punishment for sins.
It is as though God is quality control on an assembly line, except his standards are absolute perfection and every human that comes down the line with even a single mark is thrown into the fire.
So then why are we still here? Why aren’t we a pillar of salt? Because, this is the punishment for our sins. God will not overlook sin BUT Jesus accepted that punishment in our place and therefore we live.
We are going to leave today in silence. After the service as much as is possible don’t talk, just go. We will leave in silence as is appropriate to think about our sin, but in our hearts we will rejoice because the payment is made and our sin is forgiven in Christ Jesus our Lord.