Why Jesus Came to Die

We're gonna have 2 readings this evening.

The first will be from Isaiah 53. But the second 1 is from Romans chapter 8, which is on page 1 1 5 of your bibles on the tables. So maybe stick a finger in there first and then turn to page 7 4 1 7 4 1 for Isaiah 53. 2 places. We've got ezekiel chapter 36.

Verse 24 to 28, and then we will flick over to Titus chapter 2 and verse 11 to 3 verse 8, which Sarah will come and read to us. For I will take you out of the nations, I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.

I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors. You will be my people, and I will be your god. And then flick over to Titus For the grace of god has appeared that offers salvation to all people.

It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age while we wait for the blessed hope. The appearing of the glory of our great god and savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own eager to do what is good. These then are the things you should teach, encourage, and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you. Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good.

To slander no 1, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle towards everyone. At 1 time, we too were foolish disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy being hated and hating 1 another. But when the kindness and love of god, our savior appeared, he saved us. Not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior. So that having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy saying, and I want you to stress these things so that those who have trusted in god may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. These things are excellent and profitable for everyone. Evening everybody.

My name is, Thomas. A member here at Cornerstone, if we have not met. It's great to be with you all this evening to preach. We're gonna be continuing, a series in a book written by, I called John Piper called 50 Reasons Why Jesus came to die. We've been going through different chapters in that book, throughout our evening services.

And tonight, we've got 2 of the chapters that we've kind of lumped together because they are sort of they're related. And the 2 chapters we've got are to create a people passionate for good works and to cause us to sorry, to call us to follow his example of loneliness and costly love. And so, before I begin, let me pray. Father god, thank you so much, for this evening for gathering us together your church, to hear your word, and to hear it preached, I pray father you would help us to listen and that you would be at work, this evening by your spirit father to transform our hearts, amen. If you're making notes, I'm gonna be making 5 points, this evening.

The first point is we need new hearts. Well, I'm not sure if many people here know or are even interested in what I do for a living. But I am a tax adviser. Oh, it's much more much more lively response than I was expecting. I was expecting everyone to just sort of switch off, especially as it's so hot.

But whether or not that interests you or not, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But my job is essentially to provide advice to companies on how tax law applies to them. And I've been wondering recently what that job has to do with the gospel. Because if there is a god and the Christian gospel is true, Then everything we do and everything that we see around us must fit into the story of the Bible somehow. So what does tax and my job have to do with it?

Well, I think if we take a step back, taxes form a part of the structure of the society that we live in. So we have written laws that govern the way that we should behave. We have police that deal with the consequences of breaking those laws, we have things like banks that safeguard our money, and taxes kind of force us to contribute financially in order to keep all of those systems and structures running. And so tax and my job, they form part of all these institutions and structures that we have in place that to regulate our behaviour and to hold our society together. Well, In 20 11, some of you may remember that there were riots in many towns and cities across the country, but especially in London.

So what started out as a protest soon devolved into violent disorder, arson, and looting. There's there's something about a crowd that once it's formed, people begin to believe that there are enough of them together that they can resist the law enforcement, and they affect effectively become beyond the confines of our laws. Maybe it's because they think with all the people around, they can effectively hide in plain sight, or they sort of, they they adopt a kind of crowd mentality where they see other other people doing things like looting, and they think, well, why can't I join in? And so people in those sorts of situations started to behave very differently when they're in a crowd than they would, sort of if you took them out of that situation. Or if you another example would be if you look at people like Jeffrey Epstein, who's been in the news a lot recently, he was a he's a very rich and very well connected man who did an awful lot of terrible and horrendous things that we don't need to go into.

But he was because of how rich he was and how well connected he was, more importantly, able to kind of behave as if he was effectively beyond the law for a very long time. And if that is how people behave when they believe that they are beyond the law. Imagine what it would be like if there were no laws or no societal structures at all. We do note that what it was like because the book of judges in the Bible tells us. So the book of judges chronicles the early history of the nation of Israel when for a long time Israel had no king.

And without somebody to lead them and to move them to keep god's laws, the Bible tells us that the result was this. In those days, Israel had no king. Everyone did as they saw fit. Now I'm not saying all of this to make some kind of political point. I'm sure lots of us in this room will have many different opinions on the various institutions and structures that we have in place in our society.

You may think that taxes are too high or they're too low. You may think certain laws are good and others are bad, but my point is that regardless of what you think about the way our society is currently structured. I think we can all agree. There has to be something in place. There has to be something to regulate the human condition and stop people simply doing as they see fit.

But all our laws and institutions, all the ways that we have fought to build a civilized society and bring our natural tendencies under control, they're merely a kind of painkiller, a sort of salve to dampen the symptoms of an itch of an illness, but never actually cure it. As I've just illustrated, for all our laws and institutions, we cannot regulate the human condition entirely because laws cannot make us good people. Paul says, in the book of Romans, in reference to the law of god, if we could have it up, please. Thank you. Therefore, No 1 will be declared righteous in god's sight by the works of the law.

Rather, through the law, we become conscious of our sin. Now in the same way, All the laws and the structures that make up our society only show us the problem with the human heart and the extent of its tendency to evil. They prevent us from doing things that we would otherwise do. Now some of you listening are thinking, well hang on a minute. Just slow down.

What about all the good people in the world? That leads me to my second point. Even the good we do is tainted by sin. Now it is true that despite the chaos that we see every day on the news, there are people that do good things in our world. But listen to what Paul has to say in Romans again.

There is no 1 righteous, not even 1. There is no 1 who understands. There is no 1 who seeks god. All have turned away. They have together become worthless.

There is no 1 who does good, not even 1. Because if the standard for goodness was just paying taxes, giving to charity, helping out in the community, then sure the world is full of good people. But to evaluate whether or not a work is good, or not. We need to evaluate it not by our societal standards, but by god's standards. And god's standards of goodness search deeper than our actions.

They search into the world of motives. Because god is not interested only in what we do, but he's interested in why we do what we do. And often the good we do is not motivated by pure selflessness. And by that standard, there are probably even fewer people that we can think of who we can set who who we can say are actually good people. Cause who can we think of that many people who do who always do good things only for pure reasons?

Often, the good we the good things that we do, we do for things like our own reputation. We'd want to be seen to be good. Sometimes we do good so that we can feel accepted into a pick particular community or into a family. Sometimes we do good because we feel guilty. You wanna find some way to absolve ourselves of that guilt, find a reason to feel good about ourselves.

We so often do good things because we think that by doing it, we kind of earn ourselves something later on. But god's standard of goodness is actually even higher than that. If you look at Romans again, there is no 1 who seeks god. God is primarily concerned with what we think of him and how we treat him, whether we love him, value him. And when measured against this standard, no 1 can claim to be good.

Who can say they have always done good things, that they have always done those good things for good reasons, and that in all that they have done and thought, they have perfectly sought god. Because god demands perfection in all areas, including how we have sought him, and that demand is a crushing weight. Even the best people we can think of are imperfect in god's eyes, and they fall short of god's standard, because there's nothing we can do to meet god's standard. So the Bible solution to that problem is not that we need better laws. It's not that we need to be taught better morals to be able to behave just in a better way.

Bible says the problem lies in our hearts. And that we need complete transformation. We need to be given new hearts. So my third point is that Jesus died to transform our hearts. You see, god is not happy with the state of this world.

He's not content to have a people who just do as they see fit. A world will be have to force people through the law and the threat of punishment under the law is not what sorry, fair punishment under law is not the kind of world that god has in mind for his new creation. Something has to change. And god goes after the root cause of our sinful condition. Goes after our hearts.

Look again at that verse from ezekiel that we had read earlier. It says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone. Give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

1 of the reasons that Jesus came to die is to solve our heart problem and fulfill this promise in Azikael. If you were here last week, you remember that Tom taught us that the human condition I have just described is a result of us amputating ourselves from God. God then sends Jesus to die to bring us back to him, and he accomplishes that at the cross where Jesus is banished, cast away from god, and that puts us on a trajectory back towards god. Because Jesus obeyed god's law perfectly. He met the standard that god demands.

He then takes the punishment we all deserve for not meeting god's perfect standard. And in so doing, hands over to us his record of righteousness so that we can be counted righteous in god's eyes. But Jesus' achievement at the cross does not stop there. It's not enough for god to simply make atonement for our sin and put us back into some kind of neutral state. Most phones have this feature where you can completely wipe all the data from your phone, and then restore it to the way it was when you bought it new.

And that is not the effect that the cross has for us. It's not like a factory reset for human beings. We don't go back to factory settings with a clean slate where god says, okay, you've mucked it up the first time, try again. Because if that's all that happens, what's comes next? As I explained, humans are by nature, sinful.

We'll just go on sinning. We'll just sin again. And god is not content to leave us in our sinful nature. So god gives us a new heart as promised in ezekiel. So look at a verse from Titus, again, that we had read earlier, it says, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself, a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

Jesus came to die to purify for himself, a people eager to do what is good. So Jesus met god's perfect standard. He never fell short, At the cross, we receive Jesus' perfect record as he receives our sin so that when god looks at us, he sees Jesus' perfect record. Our status before him, therefore, changes so that we are no longer condemned, but justified, declared righteous under god's law. But that status change before god must be followed by heart change within us.

Jesus came today to give us new hearts so that we might be transformed into his likeness. Therefore, good works are the evidence of salvation. John Piper, in his book, he in in the chapters that we're looking at, he puts this concept very well, because it can be very easy to get confused here. And it's very important that we understand the order in which these truths apply. So here are a few ways that he puts it, that are quite sync.

Good deeds are not the foundation of our acceptance, but the fruit of it. Good works are the effect, not the cause of our acceptance. Imitation is not salvation, but salvation brings imitation. It's important to caveat here that that doesn't mean that we are going to be instantly changed once we become saved. We will only be completely restored when we reach glory.

This verse in 1 John is helpful on this point. It says if we could have it up. Thank you. It says, dear friends. Now we are children of god, and what we will be has not yet been made known.

But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is, all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. So we will continue to sin in this life. There may even be temporary periods of prolonged struggle with certain sins, but over the long term, the mark of the Christian believer whose heart is being transformed is steady progression as the spirit purifies us and refines us and makes us more like Christ. As John says, in the new creation, we will see Jesus perfectly.

But because we see him perfectly, We will be like him, and we will not sin. So the new creation is a place where there is no more sin. So as we travel through life from here to the new creation, We are transformed and purified steadily as we go through life. Because when we get to the new creation, there will be no more place for sin. We go through life where we see Jesus imperfectly, but the spirit transforms us as we go, as we go until boom.

We see Jesus perfectly, and sin is gone. We have to be transformed. Okay. So our world and its structures, they show us how broken and far from god we are and our need for transformation. Christ comes to give us new hearts and bring about that transformation.

So when we talk about this eagerness for good works that flows from a new heart, what do we mean? My fourth point is that Jesus died so that we might serve the church. So when the Bible talks about the good works of the Christian believer, it does not only refer to paying taxes or sweeping the streets or treating people kindly. 1 of the primary contexts in which the Bible calls the Christian to do good works is the church, and that is the 1 that I wanna focus on in this sermon. Because Jesus says this in Matthew.

Then the righteous will answer him. Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go and visit you, and the king will reply. Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for 1 of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

Jesus died to make us eager for good works. And 1 of the chief ways that we carry out these good works is by serving our church If you are someone who has put their trust in the saving death of Jesus, Christ did not only die to take away your sin, but also to move your heart to follow his example of costly love. And the lord places us in churches where we are surrounded by brothers and sisters and says, what you do for the least of them, you do for me. Now there are many ways that we can serve our church. And I think 1 of the main ways I wanna call out that we can serve our church is to be present, turning up to church, greeting people, making them feel welcome, speaking encouragement to them.

We encourage and build 1 another up simply by coming together. Now, the Mackis, the whites, and the Lees are all great examples of this. If you don't know who they are, they all typically come to our morning service, and they are all of an of an age where, well, put it this way, you won't see them stacking chairs. But each week, they are present at church. And by that, the church is served and pointed to Christ.

Because faithfully and continuously, over so many years, they turn up to church. They sit under god's word. They want to be with Christian people. They come back over and over again to behold Christ in his word and in his church. And that just encourages us to do the same.

So the beauty of adopting the character of Christ in the way that we serve our church is that our imitation of Christ points people back to him. So when Dave sings, even though he can't, or when Eddie's taken out the bins or when Karen gets up early to set up church on a Sunday morning or when Josh is operating the live stream and fixing all the spelling mistakes, And when Louise speaks an encouraging word to you after the service, they're all imitating Christ, and his service and love for his brothers and sisters, pointing all those around them back to him. Causing us to behold Christ. Now there are so many ways that we can serve our church. So why not if you are able, throw yourself into a ministry and be involved in pointing your brothers and sisters back to Christ and showing Christ's love for them by serving them.

Because remember what he says, what you do for them, you do for Jesus. And is there any higher honor than that? Can there be anything more worth doing than serving Christ? The 1 who died to save your soul, who rescued you from your sin, and the destruction that it leads to. The 1 who died to give you a new heart and to transform you into a true humanity.

This is 1 of the things that Jesus died so that you would go and do. So go and do it because there is no higher honor. There is no better thing. And to serve your lord Jesus. And that is so important, I think, because the ultimate goal of our transformation is to make us like Christ.

So my final point is that we need to behold Jesus. So if you want to become more like Jesus in character, you need to behold him. You need to get to know him. And that means being present at church surrounding yourself with his people to receive the blessing that they bring and to serve them, to be pointed to Christ as they serve you, and to point them back to Christ as you serve them, and to hear Christ preached in the word of god. Because when you see how Jesus lived, it will necessarily inform the way that we live.

You just want to imitate him because when you see Christ in his word, you see just how beautiful for his. You see him, you think I just wanna be like that. I want to be like that man, but you cannot imitate him if you don't know what he was like. You want to know humility? See Jesus washing his disciples feet?

You want to know patience? See the disciples arguing over who is the greatest and constantly misunderstanding Jesus' mission. And then Jesus who never utters a harsh word. If you want to know love and sacrifice, see Jesus, the maker of the world, going to the cross, dying for sinners, Saturate your life with the person of Jesus, and you will start to imitate him. I was talking to Marcos about this the other day, and he put it very well, He said this.

He said, we look to Jesus and put our trust in him to be saved. We keep looking at him so we we can be transformed into his likeness. And we behold him in his word and in his church. So if you're not a Christian here this evening, then my plea to you is the same. Come and behold Jesus at church and in his word.

See who he was and how he lived, and what he did for you on the cross. Cause maybe you feel weighed down by things that you have done. Maybe you are keenly aware of your insufficiency. Maybe you're frustrated that every time you do something that you know you shouldn't do and that you regret, you just go and do it again. Maybe you are longing for some kind of transformation.

You are longing for something in you to change. You know that there is some kind of true humanity, some kind of ideal that our culture portrays, so often in books, films, and in other parts of the culture, something that we seem to be striving towards but we just can't get there. No matter how hard we try, we just can't get there, and you understand something has to change, it has to be some fundamental transformation. We'll come to Jesus, and he will give you a new heart. Let me pray.

Barbara, thank you so much for sending your son Jesus to give us new hearts and to transform us into his likeness. Thank you for how beautiful your son Jesus is. And how we want to imitate him. And I pray that we would imitate him, father. I pray that it would come to you and receive a new heart.

Oh, man.