OPEN: Several years ago I was flipping thru the channels on my TV set and came across a scene of a well-known sitcom of the day. It was a courtroom comedy that I really didn’t like all that much, but what I saw on the screen at that moment caught my attention. The judge was sitting alone in his chambers, twirling a basketball in his hands, and having a monologue discussion with God. He spoke of the uncertainties of his own life and spoke with thanksgiving of what he had seen God do. It was riveting TV - open, honest and reverent. Then, at the end of his soliloquy, the judge took his basketball and tossed it up through a hoop… that was mounted on a wooden cross situated in the room.
It was a comedy. It was supposed to make me laugh - but I was infuriated.
As I was preparing this morning’s message, I got to thinking back on that scene, and it occurred to me that this sitcom’s writers were trying to make a statement. They were trying to say that they believed in a god… but not the kind of God we believe in. They were offended by Christianity and by Jesus.
It offended them that Jesus claimed "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6
It offended them that Christians would believe that “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12
To those TV writers all religions were equal. All faiths would lead to God. But Christianity offended that belief, and so this sitcom sought to find a way to offend Christians.
(pause)
Last week, The Final Four came to an end. March Madness came to a close. What had started out as a major competition between 64 men’s college basketball teams ended with a match-up between Ohio and Florida.
Just by way of disclosure: I was rooting for Ohio. Since Indiana didn’t have a dog in the fight, it seemed only right to cheer for a neighboring State.
However, as good a team as Ohio had, they lost a well fought game to a better team. Their match-up was the final competition of the season. The winner of that game was proclaimed the champion - the best team in the nation.
Now, champions of the Final Four change from year to year… but the articles by sports analysts the next day were almost unanimous in saying that Florida State not only had the best team of this particular season… in their opinion Florida’s was best team to ever compete in the history of the Final 4.
It was the quality of the team as it worked together.
It was their history of accomplishments throughout the year
And it was the comparison of Florida statistics - with all the teams that had gone before that made it obvious to these commentators that this was the best team ever. There were OTHER great teams… but in the final analysis it all came down to this:
By their works, Florida proved they were the best.
APPLY: There are those who try to tell us that ALL religions are the same. They try to tell us that Christianity is only one of many good ways to please God. But in the final analysis… it all comes down to this:
By the cross Jesus proved that that type of thinking was wrong.
By the cross Jesus proved that faith in Him is the best.
By the cross Jesus proved that He WAS the way, the truth and the life and that no one is ever going to be acceptable to God without Him.
It’s at the cross - we see the advantage Christianity has over all other world religions.
The Bible tell us “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” Roman 3:23.
Every individual in every culture on the face of the earth understands this. It’s what’s known as a universal truth. And every world religion tries to deal with that truth.
Some call it “Karma”. Karma is the teaching that our suffering in life is due to “bad” Karma (bad deeds). And the objective in all the world’s religions is to counteract that bad Karma (the bad things I’ve done) by doing an equal number of good things. Most world religions supply their followers with a moral guideline that helps them determine what constitutes this "good" and "bad" Karma.
ILLUS: It helps to visualize this. (I had a “balance” scale on a table nearby).
What these world religions teach is that every bad deed I do throws my life out of balance (I placed a few items on one side of the scale causing that side to drop down to the table).
They teach that what I need to do is balance things out. (I placed an equal number of items on the other side of the scale) I need to do enough “good” deeds to bring my life back into balance.
(Then I placed a much heavier object on one side) The more evil my deeds, the more good (I placed an equally heavy object on the other side) that I have to do.
Now this seems to make sense to most people... but, there’s a couple of problems here.
First: The teachings of all these religions never say that my good deeds “remove” the bad, and so my sins are still there. Thus, I’m constantly adding more and more weight to both sides of the scale. If I add enough weight… what’s going to happen to the scale? It’s going to break. That’s what causes many people to “break down”… when they have too much weight from the past burdening their lives.
Secondly: this type of theology would leave me to doubt whether I’d done enough good to outweigh the evils of my past.
If you were to ask the followers of these world religions…. whether it be Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or whatever… if they had done enough good deeds to outweigh the bad the best they could tell you would be “I hope so”.
“I don’t know… I’m not sure… but I hope so.”
They all seem to sense a barrier between themselves and holiness.
A wall between their sin-stained lives and the sinlessness of God.
A curtain separating them from the hope of being acceptable.
And their good deeds are an attempt to
… break down that barrier.
… to scale the wall
… to open the curtain
But when all is said and done they have no PROMISE that the barrier had been removed.
(…pause…)
ILLUS: In the Old Testament, God told His people how to build place of worship - His temple. Now, the temple had two rooms (Show a graphic of Temple layout…)
The first room (the Holy Place) held the lamp stand, a table with bread on it, and the altar of incense. Every priest was allowed to enter this part of the temple on a regular basis to perform his duties.
However, toward the back of the Temple there was a 2nd room called the Holy of Holies. This was the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. This was where the presence of God was. And only the High priest was allowed to enter this room… once a year… to place the blood of the sacrifice on the mercy seat of the Ark… and that blood was to cover the sins of all the people for that year.
Between those two rooms there was a massive curtain. In the Temple of Jesus’ day, this was curtain 66 feet high 33 feet wide and about 4 inches thick. It’s weight was somewhere between 4 to 6 tons (depending on the materiel used) and the Talmud taught that it took about 300 priests to carry it.
This curtain formed a barrier between a holy God and a sinful people and its massiveness demonstrated the enormity of the gulf between us and Him.
What the Bible taught was
– there is no way for us to tear open that curtain
– there is no way that our puny efforts can ever penetrate that barrier
– there is a wall that exists between God and man… and we can’t break it down
(pause)
But then, Jesus died on the cross and everything changed. (We showed a graphic of the veil being torn)
Look again at Mark 15:37-38
“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”
.
When Jesus died on the cross the barrier between sinful man and sinless God was torn open.
And it was torn from the TOP to the bottom
No human hand could have torn that curtain open
And even if they could have… it would have taken an army of men. And had that army of men succeeded in tearing open that barrier… the curtain would have been torn from BOTTOM to TOP. It was 66 feet tall. There was no way human hands could have torn it from the TOP to the bottom… only the hand of God could have done that.
In the cross, GOD tore the barrier open that had existed between Himself and us. Or as Ephesians 2:14 tells us: Jesus “…destroyed the barrier…”
If we belong to Jesus… if we accept Him on His terms
Ø if we believe that He died or our sins
Ø if we accept that we can’t do enough good deeds to be acceptable to God
Ø if we’re willing to declare Him to be the Lord and Master of our live
Ø and if we’re willing to be buried in the waters of Christian baptism
THEN there is no longer wall between us and God.
Hebrews 10:19 tells us that once we become Christians, we have “… boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus”
Many movies and plays about the life of Christ end with the cross. There’s something about a resurrected Jesus that they find uncomfortable. Now, if the story had stopped there… at the cross… what I’ve just told you would be VERY nice theology. But that’s about all it would be.
The torn curtain illustrates the way in which God broke down the barrier our sins create but it doesn’t prove it. Many religious people have died a martyr’s death for what they believed in. But their martyrdom doesn’t prove that what they believed was true.
ILLUS: The great artist Michelangelo apparently noticed this himself. On one occasion, he scolded some of his fellow artists:
“Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures on the theme of Christ in weakness, Christ on the cross, and most of all, Christ hanging dead? Why do you concentrate on the passing episode as if it were the last work, as if the curtain dropped down there on disaster and defeat?”
You see… Jesus’ death on the cross torn down the barrier, but His resurrection from the dead proved that this wasn’t just a nice theology, this was the power of God to live a life freed from the burdens of sin. That’s why all the Gospels end with the story of Jesus’ victory over death.
Mark 16:6-7 "Don’t be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’"
That’s why one of the major reminders of our salvation CENTERS on this teaching of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. If you have your Bibles… TURN WITH ME TO ROMANS 6
Vs. 1 “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?”
What Paul was saying was that God loved us, and loved to forgive us. So (playing the devil’s advocate) Paul reasoned: if God loves to forgive us… why don’t we sin a lot so that He’ll be really happy? But the next verse says:
Vss 2-3 “By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
Just as Christ died on the cross for our sins… when we became Christians, we died to our past sins. Now if something dies… what do you do with it? You bury it. In like fashion when we’re baptized, we’re BURIED in water.
Vs. 4-5 “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.”
When we baptize people… do we hold them under the water??? NO! Of course not! We put them under… but then we raise them out of the water as out of a grave.
But Romans doesn’t stop there. It goes on to say:
Vss. 6-11 “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
You see… it’s in the resurrection of Christ that we have the power to live a moral life. We’re freed from the power of sin in our lives.
Now, the followers of OTHER religions try to live moral lives too… but they are shackled by the tragic knowledge that their sins still exist. None of their good deeds will ever remove the existence of their past.
By contrast, when we rise from the waters of baptism… our old life is gone. It no longer exists.
The prophet Jeremiah tells us of Gods promise to bring a New Covenant into the lives of His people when the Messiah would come:
“…I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." Jeremiah 31:34
They’ll be removed from us as far as the East is from the West
He “…will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” Micah 7:19
It’s forgiveness from God – by the blood of Jesus that frees us from the pain of our past. It frees us from the guilt and the shame of what we’ve done and said and thought. God does this so that we can start over again – in God’s eyes - with a clean slate.
Someone once said that when we become Christians we become JUSTIFIED… It’s JUST AS IF I’D never sinned.
CLOSE: At a great parliament of religions, held at Chicago many years ago, practically every known religion was represented, and many learned discourses were delivered.
During one session, Dr. Joseph Cook of Boston suddenly rose and said: "Gentlemen, I beg to introduce to you a woman with great sorrow. Bloodstains are on her hands, and nothing will remove them. The blood is that of murder, and nothing will take away the stain. She has been driven to desperation in her distress. Is there anything in your religion that will remove her sin and give her peace?"
A hush fell upon the gathering as the speaker turned from one to another for an answer.
Not one of the company replied.
Raising his eyes to heaven, Dr. Cook then cried out, "I will ask another the question. John, can you tell this woman how to get rid of her awful sin?"
The great preacher waited as if listening for a reply. Suddenly he cried,
"Listen, John speaks "The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son cleans us from all sin (I John 1:7).
