Why He Died

Easter Sunday is known all over the world and will be celebrated as the remembrance of the day that Jesus was raised from the dead. The basic chronology is that he was crucified on a Friday and then, counting Friday and Saturday and then Sunday, Saturday being the Jewish Sabbath, he was raised from the dead sometime on Sunday. There are moments in the Bible that are kept hidden and kept secret, along with the appearance of Jesus Christ, which we'll mention in a moment.

There's no record of any suggestion of how tall he was, how much he weighed, the color of his hair, the color of his eyes, the way he walked, his stride, nothing. And that is purposely so, because people would be tempted to then draw images of him and then bow down and worship an image instead of really knowing him in reality, worshipping in spirit and in truth. There are other moments in the Bible that we don't know about, like the moment that Mary was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and conceived and was found to be with Shaul.

We know nothing about that. As if it was too sacred, there's like a veil hung over it. We know a lot about what happened on the cross, but we don't know the exact moment that Jesus was raised from the dead and the stones that were put to block the tomb were rolled away.

There's many moments in his life that we know nothing about, but everyone knows that this Sunday, today is Easter Sunday, and we're remembering his resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is preached about a lot more than it is today in the contemporary Christian church. If you study the messages in the book of Acts, and if you study about Christ, and if you study the epistles, which we're reading through like Galatians right now, we're just finishing up, the resurrection is the major point.

He's alive. He not only died, he not only died for our sins, not only did God love the world that he gave his only begotten son, but this Jesus could not be held by the grave, but he rose again, and he's alive. Then he ascended after about 40 days to the right hand of the Father, and he's in heaven now, the Jesus.

The Jesus, who very interestingly, in his resurrection body, which we don't know exactly, it could go through walls, yet it could eat and have food. That's one of the proofs that the Bible is true, because it says these things when it would have been better not to say that. It would raise all kinds of questions, but the gospel writers just said, this is what happened.

We're told that sometimes he would appear, and people's eyes would be like beholden, and they wouldn't know it was Jesus. How did he do that? Doesn't say. Why did he do it? Didn't say that either.

These are proofs that the gospels are true, because if you're going to collaborate and make up a phony story, you wouldn't have things like that in there. But the Bible tells us that as the early church preached that Jesus was alive, there were two main reasons for that. Number one, the resurrection proved that Jesus was the Son of God.

He wasn't like an ordinary person who sinned and whose body then lies in a grave. No, he fulfilled the promise of the Psalms, a prophetic Psalm, that you won't let your holy one see corruption in the grave. That was speaking not of David, who died and was corrupted, his body, but it spoke of Jesus.

So that was important. Also important in that same vein was the fact of the apologetic aspect of that. People who are dubious or don't believe or are hostile toward Christianity, you just make up that story.

None of this ever happened. How do you know those documents are real and all that? But this we know. Four different people named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote an account of Jesus's life.

They wrote it separately. And yet their stories, although having some seeming contradictions on the surface, they all can be resolved. And here they all told the same story about his life, his death, and then his resurrection.

Paul, who saw Jesus in another way by Jesus appearing, tells us in one of his letters that the risen Jesus not only appeared to the disciples, he appeared to Peter privately, he appeared to his brother James privately. What happened there? It's one of those moments of silence. And the rule is where the Bible is silent, you be silent.

Don't try to figure out what happened because if God wanted us to know what happened, he would have told us. Amen? But Paul also says he was one day seen by 500 people on a road. Where? What 500 people? Doesn't say.

But notice he said that and the early Christians would preach and say to the people who didn't believe, you know he's alive, show me his dead body. Show me the tomb where his body is. We got people who saw him.

They're willing to say they saw him. Why would they make up such a story? Why would 500 people say, yeah, one day we just saw him on the road, but we didn't really see him. No, they saw him.

Going further than that, this message of the resurrection is what got all the early preachers in trouble. In other words, it was by saying that Jesus died and rose again from the dead and was the Messiah, is the Messiah of Israel, is the son of God, the Christ. That's what got them persecuted.

They lost their jobs. Some of them lost family members and some of them had to give their life and like Peter, tradition tells us, was crucified upside down. He was going to be crucified regular, but he said, no, that's the way my master was crucified.

I'm not worthy of that. Turn me upside down. Be that as it may, why would you die for something you made up? Now that's a very strong proof that Jesus died and rose again from the dead.

That people who saw him and believed in him didn't make money out of it. Like unfortunately, Christianity can become business today, but they gave up money and lost their lives. And all they had to do to get out of it was say, it's a joke.

I just made that up. I never saw him. I know they clung right to death.

The other reason why it's important that Jesus rose from the dead, which proves that his work was completed and accepted by God, that he was sent, that his mission was done perfectly, and now he was raised back to go back to be with his father where he came from. Now, I want to take a little different approach to this. Jesus only was raised from the dead because he was dead.

You can't be raised from the dead unless you're first dead. So the question is, how did he get dead? He got dead because he was crucified. Everyone agrees to that.

Even there's historical references that this one Crestus or Christ was crucified under the Roman authorities. So you might ask, well, I know how he died. But if you do your Ws and Hs, especially Ws, why, who, I mean, why, where, when, and who, and so on, you get Jesus crucified.

And then you ask, why was he crucified? Well, the historian or the person who just lived back then would say, I know why he was crucified. I'll tell you exactly. You see, he started preaching and doing miracles.

And the religious leaders were jealous of him. Did you know that it was because of envy and jealousy that Jesus was delivered up and plotted against. Next time you're tempted to be jealous of someone, just remember that's a root sin that put Christ on the cross.

When they brought him to Pilate, the Roman governor, who was the only one who had the power of capital punishment, the Bible tells us Pilate knew immediately in Matthew that it was because of their jealousy that Jesus was being handed over. He saw that Jesus was innocent. And his wife called, either texted him or called him on his cell, whatever, and said, have nothing to do with this man.

Don't mess with that man because I spent a terrible night and had terrible dreams because of that man. But Pilate gave into the crowd, wanted to stay popular, and heard the crowd saying, crucify him, crucify him. So Pilate fake washed his hands as if you can kill someone and ascent to their death.

And then by washing your hands in water, somehow be absolved from guilt. So you could explain it that way. People plotting, the religious establishment jealous of him, then Pilate giving consent, and then you got to go to the soldiers who obeyed Pilate's orders and had him crucified.

But of course, the Bible says while that all happened, that had almost nothing to do with his death, because he was going to die somehow sacrificially the day he was born. When he was an infant, he was already marked for death. He didn't come to teach and do miracles only.

He came as a lamb. And lambs only meant one thing in the Jewish culture. They were to die, to absolve sin as a substitute, as a sacrifice.

So for literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, innocent lambs were brought to the altar in the temple. Before that, the tabernacle, they were slit right here, looking right at you. They don't make any noise.

The Bible says, Jesus opened not his mouth, like a lamb led to the slaughter. He never said a word. That's an amazing thing.

When you read the story, they're doing all these horrible things to him. He never says one word like, get out of here. Let me, this is wrong.

I want my lawyer or something like that. So the Bible tells us all those other details I gave you, they're really not to the heart of the matter. To do God's will, Jesus had to die.

So God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish and be punished for eternity, but have everlasting life. But to believe in Jesus, you don't have to, you can't just believe that he lived. You have to understand why he died.

Now, I want to take you back, not only to 2000 years ago, to a verse that we read this week in Galatians. I want to take you back 650 years before Christ was born. I want to take you back to the most famous passage, most maybe important passage, I would nominate it, the most important passage in the Old Testament to understand, to show you why and how Christ died.

So let's look at Galatians first. Galatians says, Paul writes, Christ redeemed us, saved us, us, who's us? Believers, the church there, from the curse of the law. What's the curse of the law? The soul that sinneth shall surely die.

The wages of sin is what? That means not physical death only, it means eternal death, separation from God. He saved us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse. Jesus became a curse.

Why? For us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who's hung on a pole or a tree. So what that verse means is, there it is, there's the substitution of it. Jesus, wearing our sins, took the curse that was due you and me.

Look at me, you deserve it. I deserve that curse because we all know we've sinned. Who's going to stand up here today and say, no, I've never sinned.

I am totally an innocent human being. I've never violated my conscience. I've never done anything in secret that I wouldn't want everyone to know about.

Who's going to say that here? So I've never thought evil, never spoke evil, never performed evil. No one's going to say that. So we deserve the curse of the law.

We've broken the law and now the law has to act. But God loves us so much to save us. He put Christ who was innocent, couldn't have any punishment on him.

No, he put our sins on him and then struck them down so that you and I, instead of being cursed, we could be blessed. Now, 650 years before Jesus was born, a prophet had the Holy Spirit come on him and began to speak about the coming Messiah, the Savior. Prophets, for those of you visiting or not knowledgeable about the Bible, prophets were people who spoke for God.

They received messages from God, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and they spoke messages to the people that were coming from the heart of God. Sometimes they predicted things. Sometimes they just said, this is what God is saying to you.

This is how God feels about how you're living. But it came with an authority. It came with an anointing of the Holy Spirit, right? Now, when they predicted things, they usually predicted things about Israel and what was going to happen to a king or to this one or that one.

Sometimes they were lifted up by the Holy Spirit and they started to look through the centuries. And they began to see things that God's purpose would bring about that were way, way, way out there. And this is the most famous prophecy of that kind.

It's talking about the Messiah who was to come 600 years before it happened. Notice the detail that was fulfilled in Christ. And yet this was written more than 600 years before he came.

So Isaiah 53, who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? Let's just hold that. Who has believed our message? That's a strange way to start a sermon. And what the prophet is saying, he includes other prophets with him.

And he's saying, what I'm about to tell you, what God did to save his people, what God is going to do, you won't even believe this. Oh, there'll be a Messiah coming. There'll be someone to get that load of guilt and shame and sin off of you.

But who in the world is going to believe this? What I'm about to tell you, who could believe this? And who has understood, to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? What does that mean? The arm of the Lord in scripture speaks of power. Usually the right hand speaks of power. The arm of the Lord speaks of God performing his purpose.

So God is going to perform his purpose. God is going to now send the Messiah. But the prophet is already warning us, you will not believe how this went down.

You will not believe what I'm about to tell you. In fact, people are going to reject it because they're expecting God to do something along their thought pattern. But what God is going to do, he's going to do it according to his plan and his purpose.

And it's going to be totally different. And now he starts to describe the one who's going to come and save us 600 years before he came. Look, he grew up, who's he? The Messiah, the servant, the suffering servant that God is going to send one day.

He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He grew up before him, who's him? God, the father. He grew up before Jehovah like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground. What does that mean? So here's a big tree that was once here and it's cut down and this is the stump of the tree.

You know what a stump is. And then coming out of the stump, sometimes there's this little shoot. It ain't nothing.

It's just a little shoot, just a little something. That's what he's going to be like. He's going to be a nothing.

He's going to be a shoot growing out of a stock that people would just kick at or just bypass and say, that's not a majestic redwood. That's not a big leafy elm tree. That's just a little sprig.

That's nothing. That's how he's going to be when he comes. And he'll grow up like a root out of dry ground.

Things don't grow out of dry ground. So what's the prophet saying? He's going to grow up with no benefits, no advantages. He's going to come out of nowhere.

He's going to be born in a stinking manger. Palace, no. Trained by the best educators, no.

Lots of money, no. He'll have influence with the government, no. He'll grow up in Jerusalem where all the religious leaders grow up and the famous rappis, no.

He'll be trained in MIT, no. He'll live up in Galilee where people make fun of their accent, where all the farmers and the yokels live. And like, you're from Galilee.

Get out of here. You're just like, you're from nowheresville. That's where he's going to come from.

Who's going to believe that? Who's going to believe that almighty God is going to save the world through that? But more than that, look, he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. No, the Messiah, when he comes, the Jewish nation thought, he'll ride on a white horse. He'll look more powerful than Julius Caesar.

He'll have people with him. He'll have flags furled and blowing in the wind, and he's going to have an entourage. He'll have a posse.

This is going to be impressive. No, he'll have nothing to attract you to him. Nothing.

Now, the commentators are divided on this. Does this speak of his physical appearance? Again, we have nothing, no account of that. Or is this just speak that he was so plain and unnoticeable that it was shocking? There's no hint that he was ugly, that he was homely or not nice looking.

But what it's saying here is that the beauty that he had was not of physical nature. You had to understand his heart to know how beautiful he was, because he had nothing to attract us to him. Charismatic personality? No.

This aura? No. In fact, when he was in his twenties, can't you see him in downtown Nazareth, walking in the town square, and someone bumps into him and says, excuse me? And Jesus says, that's okay. You're excused.

And the guy walks away and he said, did you know who you bumped into? I just bumped into a guy. Just a guy. He's nothing guy.

I just, I looked at him and nothing. I just robe, nothing. He's nobody.

I bumped into a nobody. Why are you asking? He was a nobody. The world looks for grandeur and prowess, but who has believed our report? God says, no, I'm doing this different.

He'll be a nobody. Had nothing to attract us to him. This is before he's beaten.

This is not speaking yet of what they're going to do to him. This is just speaking of who he is. Wouldn't it be better if we looked at people and try to discern their heart rather than just look at the outside? Let me say amen to that.

Because the real beauty of a person is who they are inside. Men remember that before you get married, no matter how good she looks, it ain't going to last forever, right? Nobody, same with you. But the inner person, that's the beauty that nobody can take.

So now they lay their hands on them. Watch what happens. He was despised and rejected by mankind.

A man of suffering or sorrows and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised and we held him in low esteem. You know, he was a man of suffering.

You see that? A man of sorrow, a man of suffering. Isn't that strange? Why doesn't it say he was a man of power? He was a man of dignity. He was a man of miracles.

He was a man of even love. He was a man of this. No, the way the prophet sees him is he was a man of sorrows.

He suffered a lot. Probably looked older than his age. You know why? Because he was hated and hate will put years on you.

He just wasn't hated. It's hard enough to be hated. We've all been hated by someone.

You ever meet someone who hated you? Everyone who's met someone who hated them, just put it up real quick. Just jump it up there. If you didn't raise your hand, you never know.

But how about if you love somebody and you're not just rejected by them? The worst pain that you can feel as a human is when you love someone and they don't love you back. That's the worst pain. But how about to be hated by the person you love? That's going into a very deep place.

Wouldn't you agree? Mankind sized them up and it's like the Bible says in another place, because he testified that people lived wrong, they hated him. If you stroke people and tell people everything's fine, you'll make more friends. But Jesus wouldn't like that.

He was perfect love, but he never hid the fact that he came as a savior because people were in trouble, but people don't want to hear they're in trouble. People want to hear everything's fine. And they'll he preachers and teachers to tell them that and pay them good money.

Just tell me I'm good to go. Jesus didn't say that. So he was despised.

He was rejected. That's another pain to be rejected. It's hard enough to have a crowd of people who don't want you around and they let you know it.

We don't want you here. That's pain. But how about if you came to your own world, the world that you built, that you created? What if you come as the scripture says, he came unto his own, but his own received him not.

He came to his own people and his people said, get out of here. We don't want you. But now it gets deeper.

So let's read. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted.

The people were so out of whack, which includes you and me, we would have done the same if we were back then. They were so underserning about who he really was that when he was arrested and beaten and put on the cross and all of that, people shook their head and went, he must have been some evil guy to have God have this, do this to him. Talk about not discerning.

People agreed together and said, you know, this guy's evil. You remember, of course, when he healed people and he delivered people and set people free from demon powers. You remember what they said about him? Do you think they bowed and said, this is wonderful, Jesus.

You're such a great deliverer. No, they said, you know how he does it? He's a demon himself. He's in league.

He's in cooperation with Beelzebub, the prince of demons. Now that would hurt any of us, but what if he had a pure, perfect heart like Jesus? How'd he get through it? I read something interesting this week. Some commentators said that in the garden of Gethsemane, to go along with that verse, Sylvia, in Hebrews, where it says that with loud, strong crying and tears, he cried to the one who could save him and he was heard.

That wasn't on the cross because he gave up his life on the cross. Some commentators believe that his heart was so broken by what he endured from people and the beating that he took later, but mostly from people that in the garden, he was afraid he'd die before his time. Before he could get to the cross, he thought he would die of a broken heart.

You know, people die of a broken heart. You ever hear about couples who live together for 50, 60 years, then one dies, the other one goes in a second, the heart can't take it, they're broken. So when all this stuff was happening to him, people weren't saying, oh, Povercito, we got to help him.

No, they were saying, this dude was evil. Look what's happening and God permitted it. You know, you and I got to be really careful when we see hardship come on people or disasters because I've grown up around this all my life.

People love to go when they hear something terrible is going on with someone, wow, what did they do to deserve that? Come on, haven't you ever heard that? People think like that. That's how people thought with Jesus. What did he do to get a beat down like that? Dude must've been evil.

And now we cut to the chase. Most famous verse may be in the Old Testament, but he was wounded. The word means pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. Now we're going to get to why he died. Forget Pontius Pilate, forget the Jewish leaders, forget the soldiers and forget the spear and forget the crown of thorns.

You want to know why he died? Because of you and me. He was pierced. The word means to be cut, to be broken into skin, soul, mind, heart.

He was pierced for our iniquity. That's why they hurt him because he took our place and said, I want these people to be free who will put their trust in me. I want their hearts to be clean.

I want their sins to be forgiven. And there's only one way to do it. And my father sent me and I'm going to take the blow for them.

I'm going to take the pounding and the beating. There's a debate on how he was beat when it says he was scourged. They had leather whips, which they then put pieces of metal in, little piece of metal, so that when they would strike him on the back or anybody, it would not just whip them, it would cut open a lot of flesh.

But then there was another thing that they had. They would take the hide of an ox and they would roll it up so that it became like a whip, different strips of the hide of an ox. And then they would take bones of an animal and mix the bone chunks in with the ox hide.

And that would do a number. Some people never made it to the cross. They died from the scourging.

They weren't strong enough. Publicly shamed. All those piercings were for our iniquities.

Just think of that. I've been pondering that verse like now for 24 hours. He was wounded for Jim's symbolist transgressions.

Can you put your name in there too? Say amen if you can. That's why he was wounded. Forget railing about who did it.

Oh, those terrible soldiers and all of that. No, it's me. It's you.

Sin is so serious that the only way God could absolve it and resolve the problem was to have his own son shed blood, take suffering. Remember what we read in Galatians? He became a curse so we could be blessed. He didn't get sin on him.

He got all the sin of the whole world on him. In fact, there were so many sins. It says he became sin.

He didn't just have sins. He became sins. What sins? You know, they talk about a perfect storm.

Remember that one? They made a movie about it, I think, when that ship went out and this storm hit this storm and it all came and the ship was in the middle of that, right? No one survived. Well, this was a perfect storm. All the sins that had ever been committed from Adam all the way up to Jesus, all of them were transferred.

All the sins ever been committed, every vile thing was put on him. But then all the future sins, because God had to look and see us, see my miserable little heart and your life, and all the sins of the future were put. What a storm.

Talk about a perfect storm. All came together at one second on one person and the Father could only do one thing. And this was the real pain of the cross.

He punished his own son and Jesus, in a way we don't understand, again it's silence, but he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? All the sin. Imagine how precious his blood is that God will forgive sin because of the blood of his own son. That's how he died.

He was pierced from my transgressions. He was bruised or crushed. That word means crushed for our iniquities.

This is all, of course, we're just guessing. We don't know what he really went through because who knows what it is to pay for the sins of the whole world? Who can figure that out? And it wasn't the pain of just being hated and rejected. It wasn't even just the pain of the crown of thorns and the spear and all of that because remember, other people got crucified.

Jesus wasn't the first or last ever to get crucified. No, it was the mysterious pain when God punished him. Hey, listen, have you ever sinned and felt bad? How many here as a Christian, your heart's been cleansed? I've had that happen so many times.

You do something that you know is wrong and you feel this pain inside. Lift your if you know what I'm talking about. How'd you like to feel the pain of every sin that was ever committed? The punishment that brought us peace was on him.

Do you have peace today? Do you have peace with God? Do you have peace in your heart because you're a Christian? You know what the price for that was? He was punished. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him and by his wounds, we are healed. The writer here is probably seeing sin here as a disease, although we're culpable.

We make the decision. It's like a disease. It's like cancer.

You can't stop it. Spreads until Jesus comes. He heals the person who's trapped.

He helps the person who's in condemnation. So let me close. What does this mean to us today? What's it all mean? Well, number one, I'm going to give you a chance because I'd love to pray for you and if you're across the street, if you do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ and you're not a Christian Christian, not churchgoer, not Catholic, not Protestant, not Baptist, not Brooklyn Tab groupie, I'm talking about a real personal relationship with Jesus where you know, Pastor Jim, listen, my sins are gone.

I've been born again. I'm a new person. I'm not what I used to be.

If that hasn't happened to you, please, please listen to me. Don't go outside these doors until you get it right. After this, you're going to reject that.

You know, people tell me all the time. It's true of all of us. We're looking for love.

Where are you ever going to find a love like that? Even if your husband loves you, he can misinterpret you sometime and be cranky and nasty and hurt you and your wife can do the same and your parents can do the same and your siblings and your friends and a lot of people we think love us. Yeah, they love us as long as certain conditions are met and then you even turn, you'll find out how much they love you. But this love, this love, how many have found like me, he loves us so much that even when we mess up and fall away from him, we don't reach for him first, he reaches for us.

How many have found that, right? He speaks, he draws, he warns, he's wooing us, he's doing this, he's sending people to us. So if you're here today and you're not like a Christian, you know what? Nah, you got to be so careful. And this includes you visiting from different countries.

Easter draws a lot of people who are pseudo-Christians, make-believe. They come at Christmas and Easter. That's true.

I met a guy yesterday, had dinner with a pastor. He told me, I said, so he said, pastor, help me, I need some advice. So he told me his church has about 240 people, 250.

So he said, now tomorrow, meaning today, he said, I'm going to have 500. I said, how do you know? He says, it's every Easter. He said, but three weeks later, it'll be 240.

Well, what happened to all those people? If Jesus is real, if you really have a relationship with Jesus, why wouldn't you want to worship him every week? Why wouldn't you want to learn about him every week? Why wouldn't you want to be with the people you're going to spend eternity in heaven with every Sunday? What do you think, by stopping in here, this is going to give you some good luck for the week? Oh, come on. You need Jesus. You need Jesus at the center.

Wait, the center of your life. Yeah, okay. Let's clap then.

You need Jesus at the center of your life. It can't be an Easter Jesus, Christmas Jesus, funeral Jesus, wedding Jesus, baby dedication Jesus. That's how a lot of people live.

How many know that's true? Baby dedications, funerals, weddings, Easter, and Christmas. Oh, he bore those sins on the cross. Yeah, it's so sad.

Then off to the races. No, listen, don't do that. Number two, if you're a Christian like me, and you've messed up in your life, when the enemy brings up your mess ups, your sins, your rebellions, your wanderings, your weakness, when he brings that up, you better remember what I told you about what Jesus did.

He bore your sins. The devil cannot accuse us of our sins because Jesus paid the price. Come on, let's say amen to that.

He absolved us. He forgave us. He forgot us.

I heard somebody say recently, and it's good. Jesus not only says in his word, God will not only forgive us of our iniquities, but their iniquities, I will remember no more. Someone made a good point.

I think I read it somewhere. Why are you remembering things that God forgot? Why are you forgetting things that God remembers? He remembers the blood. Why do you forget that? He doesn't save you because you're good or make promises.

He saves you because you're under the blood of Christ. On Passover night, when they put the blood on the door, God said this. When I go through Egypt and bringing punishment on the firstborn, but when I see the blood, I will what? Yeah, but what if you were inside with your wife and having an argument? He would still spare you.

What if you were weak? What if you had a lot of difficulties and you were battling temptation? It didn't matter about that. One thing matters. Are you under the blood? Do you believe in what I just talked to you about? So don't live in condemnation.

There's therefore now no condemnation. Don't live in guilt. I don't care what you did.

I don't care what I did. It's under the blood. It's gone.

Praise God. How many are happy it's gone, forgiven, forgotten? Last thought. When you hear this, doesn't it make you not want to sin? No, I didn't get a big amen from that one.

You know, like this guy who years and years ago wrote some famous songs, sang in our church a couple of times. He had one song that was fascinating. He had a unique mind for songs.

And the name of the song was this. Does he still feel the nails every time I fail? This is not to like get legalistic. We're saved by grace.

But after you hear what Jesus went through, and if you do love him and care about him, you and I shouldn't want to hurt him, should we? You're going to go back. Do you want to go back and do the stuff you used to do before you knew him? When it cost him that much to get you out of it, you want to go back. You want to run with the same people.

You don't want your life to be different. You want to hang out in the same clubs, do the same kind of things you did before. Is that what you want to do? That's how little you understand what he did.

That's why the Bible says, come out from among them and be separate. Why do you have to be separate? Of course. What do you think? You can have the mud and the Savior at the same time? The sin and the Savior at the same time? No, the Bible says those people, turning the grace of God into a license to sin, there's a special doom on them.

Oh, I'll do this sin because I can always repent later. No, no, you don't want to be there. Let's not sin with our mouth.

Let me say amen. Because he died for gossip. He died for cursing.

Every curse, you know, he's not supposed to curse. Put away all filthy language, all unforgiveness, all racial prejudice. What are you going to practice that? You're going to hang on to that? You're going to be a white militant, black militant, or Latino militant, or whatever? You're going to do that after Christ said, no, in Jesus Christ, there's neither male, female, any races now.

There's no islands. There's no West Indians. There's no anybody.

We're all one in Jesus Christ. Or do you want to just hurt them again? You know, my mom, I think might be here next Sunday, a hundred years old, been through her hip replacement. When I'm around my mother, you know, there's one rule I have, obviously.

And so does my brother or sister. I'm never going to say anything to hurt my mother. Doesn't matter how she reacts, what she doesn't hear, what sentence she comes up with.

That's my mom. Don't want to hurt her. You can punch me in the shoulder, but don't let my mother cry because it's something I do.

I'll take the shot, but don't let my mother cry. How many follow that? Just say amen. Right.

Well, shouldn't we be that way with Jesus? Not in order to be saved. We are saved, but in order to make him happy, you can make them happy today. You can make them sad.

Obviously I want to make them happy. Are you with me? Join hands with the person next to you. If there's anybody here who said, pastor, I won't go into the details.

I just need for you to pray for me before this meeting ends, either to receive Christ or to get away from this condemnation. But I see it different now. I need Jesus either in my life or I need Jesus closer than I need.

You don't have to explain it to me. I'm not a priest. You have a high priest named Jesus.

You tell him. But there are moments where God brings crisis and he brings a moment where he brings you into a building or a certain place where you hear certain truth. And then he said, now, what are you going to do with that? And I say to you gently, lovingly, what are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with that? So if you're here today and you just like me to pray for you in the end, whether you're across the street or here, just break hands with the person next to you.

Don't be embarrassed and stand up and just say, what you spoke on was for me. That's it. Just break hands, stand up.

Two of you, 200 of you. What does it matter? If God is speaking to you, just break hands and stand up. Thank you, sir.

Anybody else? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Better to stand now for Jesus than to find out, oh, it's too late and I never stood for him the right way. Anybody else? Just stand. Thank you.

Up in the balcony, across the street. I can't see you, but they'll help you. Dear God, we confess our sins.

I'm going to pray for these people as if I was one of them, but I am one of them. Forgive us of our sins. Forgive us for taking the cross of Christ lightly.

Forgive us for not reading your word enough to know what really went down for Jesus Christ and how he went down so that we could go up. We need you, Jesus. We put our trust in you today.

We're not making any promises. We're too weak. What we do say is we believe in our heart and we confess with our mouth that Jesus is the son of the living God, that he died on the cross for the sins of the world, which include mine, and that he rose again on the third day.

And as of this moment, he is my savior. I don't trust in my track record. I'm not trusting in trying to live a good life.

Jesus is my righteousness. Jesus is my salvation. I don't have anything separate from Jesus.

Now, Lord, be with these people. Help them to walk through this. And if they're from here, help them now come Tuesday, come this afternoon.

Just be in church, be growing, be reading, be praying, be making new friends. Just help them, Lord. You know every situation.

And if there's anyone here, Lord, who's trying to live a double life, I pray in Jesus' name, you will break that and you will cause them to be all out for you in their faith. Jesus, we pray that you'll help us all day today to speak for you, live for you, trust in you, walk with you, stay close to you, watch over us, give us traveling mercies, make this three o'clock last presentation glorious to behold so that Jesus is glorified, not a church, not a minister. Bring people off the streets, draw them in, bring in people that are suicidal, bring in people that are just ready to end it all, bring in confused people, bring in poor people, bring in rich people, bring in every race, every background, just bring them, Lord, so we could tell them about your love.

We pray this in Christ's name. And everyone said, stand up and hug three people. Come on, everybody stand up, no handshakes, hug somebody.