INTRODUCTION
Please turn in your Bibles to Colossians chapter 2. We’ll read verses 13-14 this morning as we continue in the letter to the Colossians.
Just to refresh our memories, the reason Paul was writing this paragraph in which we find ourselves was to protect the believers from following false teaching. There were people circulating ideas about how to really relate to God and the spiritual realm in the appropriate way, how to do it right and be truly wise and on the right path.
But these teachings were not according to Christ as Paul put it in verse 8. And being very wise himself and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he knows how to undermine the appeal of these alternative gospels. He does it by explaining to them – and to us - just how great we have it as believers, and we need nothing more than to walk in the goodness of what God has already done for us through Christ.
So in verses 9-15 he tells us what God has done in us and what he has done for us through Christ. We dealt with what God has done in us a few weeks ago. We have been filled in him – that is, in Christ we have everything we need to be complete or fulfilled because we are connected to the fullness of God himself. We were circumcised …by the circumcision of Christ (verse 12), meaning that the old sin-enslaved person that we were, is gone, put to death when Christ died on the cross. And we were made alive together with him, meaning that in place of the old self is the new self that is empowered by God to love and serve him.
That’s what God did in us as believers. Now in verses 13-15 Paul tells us what God has done for us, or outside of us, that made these other realities possible. We’ll look at the first one today in verses 13-14. Next week we’ll look at the second one in verse 15.
READ COLOSSIANS 2:13-14
PRAY
This text is about the forgiveness of sins. To forgive means to release someone from liability to suffer punishment or penalty for wrongdoing. It’s the decision not to hold an offense against someone, to not count it against them, to not let it be a barrier to friendship.
According to Paul, indeed according to the Lord who inspired Paul to write this, believers have been forgiven their trespasses, their wrongdoing, and are released from their liability to suffer punishment or penalty from God for it. God made us alive together with [Christ], having forgiven us all our trespasses (verse 13).
This morning we’re going to consider what God has done to forgive us, to forgive all who belong to him by faith in Jesus Christ. And it is important to see that something does need to be done, because it would not be uncommon for a person to think that God can forgive our sins by simply saying, “Let’s just forget your sins and be friends”; to think that because God is merciful he will just sweep our sins under the rug and decide not to do anything about them, but instead give us his love without any conditions.
Well, God is merciful. Without that there certainly would be no forgiveness. And he does give us his love and decides not to count our sins against us. But it doesn’t come without any conditions. Something needs to be done about our sin in order for God to forgive us. Paul describes it as …canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.
We’re going to spend our time considering what that debt is and on how it is cancelled, leading to the forgiveness of sins. And may the Lord use it to make us freshly amazed at what was accomplished for us by the cross of Christ; and freshly humbled by the necessity of the cross of Christ on our behalf.
We’ll go about this by first defining the debt that Paul writes about, the debt that each of us owes to God; and then we’ll see how that debt is paid, and close with application.
Let’s begin by defining the debt.
1. THE DEBT DEFINED
Paul speaks of a record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. What is this debt that he is talking about?
Well we know what a debt is when it comes to money. Let’s say you want to buy something that you don’t have enough money to pay for. It could be a college education, or a house, or a car. So you go to a bank or some other financial institution and you ask them to loan you the money. Let’s say it’s $10000. That $10000 is now your debt. It’s what you have to pay back someday. And you sign papers saying that you’ve received this money. That paper is your record of debt.
And because you’ve entered into this debt, the bank has a legal right for you to pay it back. They have duly appointed authority to lend you the money (they haven’t stolen it, they have the money by due process), so you have legal obligation to pay them what you owe. The loan papers that you sign say that you will pay it back on a certain schedule. There are legal demands for you to repay your debt.
Paul says we have a record of debt to God, a signed IOU note if you will. And it has legal demands for its repayment. The debt is what we owe God because of our sin. Our trespasses have put us in debt to God.
In order to understand how that works, we have to understand the role of God as the sovereign Lord of the universe. He is our Creator, and as our Creator, he has rights over us. He has the inherent authority to impose obligations on us, to give us commands on how to live. And as his creatures we are under obligation to carry out those commands.
And we have no reason not to obey God’s commands because they are always good and acceptable and perfect according to Romans 12:2.
So if we don’t do the things God commands us to do, then we take on a debt to God. We have withheld from God the obedience that belongs to him by right. Sin makes us debtors to God because God has a legal right to have that obedience that we did not give him. We owe him our obedience.
So let’s ask a question. How big is that debt? Well, how big is our disobedience? Every act of disobedience adds to the debt, it’s one more thing we were responsible to give to God. So how often do we do that?
Well to find out how often we withhold obedience from God, we just need to look at God’s requirements in the Scriptures. What has he called us to do? What obligations do we have toward him?
Well, if we were to flip through the Bible and count all the things there God calls us to do we’d have a long list. But let’s just look at one Scripture. Someone wanted to know what the greatest commandment was. And Jesus said in Matthew 22:37-39, here’s what it is:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
What would it mean to obey this command? Jerry Bridges helps us think through what that looks like in his book, The Gospel for Real Life. Here are just a few points he lists.
To love the Lord your God with all your heart … soul and… mind means…
• Your love for God transcends all other desires (as in Exodus 20:3 “you shall have no other gods before me”, there is nothing that you love more than God himself at anytime).
• You always delight to do his will, regardless of how difficult it may be (as in Psalm 40:8, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” Not just obeying God, but doing it with delight at all times, never out of duty.)
• A regard for His glory governs and motivates everything you do – your eating and drinking, your working and playing, your buying and selling, your reading and speaking—and, dare I mention it, even your driving. He references 1 Corinthians 10:31 “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
• You are never discouraged or frustrated by adverse circumstances because you are confident God is working all things together for your good (according to Romans 8:28).
How are we doing so far? How are we measuring up to that standard of obedience? And that’s just the first commandment. What about the second commandment. What does loving your neighbor as yourself involve? Jerry continues. It means…
• You cherish for your neighbors the very same love that you bear toward yourself.
• You take a genuine interest in their welfare and seek to promote their interests, honor and well-being.
• You never resent any wrongs they do to you, but instead are always ready to forgive.
• To paraphrase 1 Corinthians 13:4-5, you are always patient and kind, never envious or boastful, never proud or rude, never self-seeking. You are not easily angered and you keep no record, even in your mind, of wrongs done to you.
How big is our debt by those standards? How long is our record of debt to God? I think we can see from God’s word that it is very long indeed. It contains many thousands of times when we have not obeyed these commands. In fact, I think we can confidently say that not 5 minutes go by on any day when we do not violate some aspect of these commands.
Even as I’m preaching this sermon, I know that I’m falling short of God’s command to be only motivated by a concern for his glory—there’s always some aspect of desiring to please man and win approval mixed with it.
Jesus said in Matthew 5:48, You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. That’s the standard. Perfection. That’s what we are obligated to give God. Our debt is enormous.
And it’s not just enormous because of the number of sins, but because of the value if you will of the sins we commit. Even in our legal system, we have some reflection of this. The price to be paid if for breaking the law goes up depending on how serious we think the crime is. If a person attacks a neighbor, that’s serious. But if he attacks the president of the United States, we consider that to be more serious, and there’s a greater price to be paid.
All of our sins against not the president of the United States, but against the almighty, eternal, all-powerful and all holy God who holds us together by the word of his power.
We incur a very high debt indeed to God when we sin against him. And that is confirmed by the Lord himself.
In the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, Jesus teaches Peter why we should forgive our brothers. He describes two men, one a servant who owes the king 10,000 talents, and one a fellow servant who owes the first servant 100 denarii, or 100 days wages. In the parable, the servant who owes 10,000 talents represents us and our debt to God. It is vastly greater than the debt anyone owes to us when they sin against us. A talent was equal to 20 years wages. So the first servant owed the king 200,000 years of wages. It’s a number beyond reckoning. A staggering debt. That’s what our record of debt to God is like.
Now, why dwell on this? Why talk about our sin debt. Here’s why. I want to suggest two reasons. One is to battle self-righteousness.
I don’t think most believers would disagree that before they were converted & regen-erated by the Holy Spirit they were in sin & in debt to God. We believe that. But over time a believer can start to think that because he or she is now performing the deeds of the Christian life, they are now meeting the requirements of God, that they are not contributing to that debt very much anymore if at all. & this leads to being self-righte-ously critical of others who do not appear to be performing at the same level they are.
But an awareness of God’s actual requirements and of our failure to meet those requirements for even 5 minutes humbles us. It teaches us that at every moment we are in need of God’s grace and God’s forgiveness. The last entry on our record of debt was not the day before our conversion. We are continually adding to it. We are in need of forgiveness even on our best day.
And that is humbling. We don’t wallow in that fact, but we do need to acknowledge it if we would defeat self-righteousness.
That’s the first reason to dwell on this debt. The second is this: when we understand the crushing weight of the debt our sin creates with God, we’re in the right position to be affected by the news of the payment of that debt.
And that is what we turn to next.
2. HOW DOES THIS DEBT GET PAID?
Well there are two ways to pay off a debt.
The first way is to actually pay what you owe. You give that which you are legally obligated to give.
If we’re talking about money, it’s pretty obvious how you pay the debt. If you borrowed $10000, you get $10000 and give that to the bank or financial institution that you borrowed it from in the first place. Maybe it takes a while, maybe it takes years, but you work and save until you can pay it off.
That was my experience with my college loan. When I graduated in 1986 I think I was about $17000 in debt. And as a graduation present from the lending institution, I was given a coupon book (not the kind you can spend in stores!). The coupons showed how much I needed to pay each month to retire that debt. I think it took about 5-7 years, but I finally got it paid off, one payment at a time through working and saving.
Can we do that with our debt to God? Can we pay God the obedience that we owe him, which we have withheld from him every time we’ve sinned? Can we put in overtime and extra good behavior on weekends, and somehow store up some obedience merit points that we can use to pay down this debt of sin that we carry?
No, we can’t do that. And the reason we can’t is because God’s requirement, what we are obligated to give him, is 100% perfect obedience all the time. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. If we never sinned again for the rest of our lives from this moment forward it would only be what we are already required to do. The only thing that would do is not put us further in debt. It would not work off a single act of disobedience in our past.
What’s done is done. Perfection is the standard and we’ve already blown it; not just once, but tens of thousands of times. We can’t go back in time and do it all over again. And we can’t do anything to make up for lost time. This sin debt is impossible for us to pay off. Paying our debt by good performance is not an option.
So is there any other way?
Well, there is another way to pay a debt so to speak besides paying back what you owe. You can pay the penalty for not paying what you owe. That is, you can accept the legal punishment for your non-payment.
Let’s say a person has a ten million dollar loan from a bank. And that person can’t pay this debt because of bad financial dealings. They’re broke. Now they’re at the mercy of the court. The legal system is going to decide what the penalty is going to be, since they can’t pay the debt. It may include jail time. When someone completes a prison sentence we sometimes say that they “paid their debt to society.” They didn’t pay back the ten million dollars, but the requirement of the law for their non-payment was met, and the record of debt is cancelled. They can now go free from the debt.
Is there anything like that when it comes to our debt to God? Is there a penalty to be paid when we can’t pay off our debt of sin? Yes there is, but it’s not one that any of us would want to pay, because it’s the most horrible thing we can imagine, and it’s a penalty that we would never finish paying.
We could find this penalty described in many places, but I think just one text will serve the purpose. Galatians 3:10 says it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them." …Cursed. The penalty is to be cursed. What does cursed mean?
RC Sproul explained this movingly at the Together for the Gospel conference last April, and I want to summarize his explanation here.
To be cursed is the opposite of being blessed.
There’s a famous benediction in Numbers 6:24-26, The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. This is a description of blessing. To be blessed is to have God keep you and smile upon you and be gracious to you and give you his peace.
To be cursed is the opposite of that. To be cursed means to have God forsake you and turn his face from you and give you judgment without grace and remove his peace from you. That’s the penalty for our sin debt.
And according to 2 Thessalonians 1:9, if we were to pay that penalty, we’d be paying it forever, because there Paul describes the outcome of those who are not saved, but who carry their sin debt to the grave: They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord… God turning his face away from us forever. Cursed.
And that’s what is reflected in the statement Paul makes about our record of debt. He says that it stood against us with its legal demands. This record of debt shows us to be liable to the curse for our failure to give God the obedience that is due him. It testifies against us and shows us to be guilty and the sentence against us deserved.
So where does that leave us? How do we escape the curse? How does the penalty get paid for our sin debt?
Let me read the good news beginning from verse 14. God has forgiven us all our trespasses…
…by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.
God the Father cancelled our record of debt – that means he eliminated it, wiped it out, invalidated it completely, and removed it as a witness against us. How did he do that? By nailing it to the cross. Or to say it another way, by nailing Jesus to the cross.
God considers our debt to be cancelled in the death of Christ. He considers the legal demands to have been met and the debt to have been satisfied.
Now how does that work?
You may remember something that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. He said in Matthew 5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” And when we read that we generally think of how Jesus lived a sinless life of perfect obedience to the Law of God, which he did. But he also fulfilled the Law in another way, in the way that enabled us to have our sin debt cancelled.
He fulfilled the requirement of the Law to curse the one “who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law.” As Galatians 3:13 says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us--for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree"—
Jesus fulfilled the curse requirement of the law for us on the cross. He was hanged on a tree, a wooden cross, cursed with our curse. There, hanging between heaven and earth, between God the Father and sinful man, God forsook Jesus and turned his face from him and gave him judgment without grace and remove his peace from him.
Jesus cried out the cry of the cursed, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And the answer is, to satisfy the legal demands for the sin debt of his people. It was to pay the debt by having Jesus pay the penalty of the curse. And when Jesus said, “It is finished” the debt was paid in full for all who would believe in him for salvation.
We might ask how a penalty that we couldn’t pay in an eternity of punishment could be paid by Jesus in just a few hours on the cross. There’s mystery there. Certainly it has to do with the fact that Jesus was not only a man but also God the Son, so his bearing of the curse was far more significant than ours.
Ultimately it’s not a question we can answer completely. But we don’t have to. We have God’s own declaration of what happened on the cross. And his declaration is that there he cancelled the record of debt by nailing it to the cross.
And as a result of that he has forgiven us all our trespasses. He has released us from having to pay a penalty for any sin. All the sins before our conversion and all the sins after our conversion; all our sins past, present and future were on that record of debt. He has forgiven us all our trespasses.
Now, rather than cursing, we who are in Christ by faith are to be blessed, the Lord will keep us and cause his face to shine upon us and be gracious to us and give us his peace.
CONCLUSION
Now, I want to conclude by bringing this truth home to where we live.
It is possible that there are those among us this morning, who have thought that God, if he even really exists, will forgive you for your wrongdoing because you are basically a good person, or because he’s a loving God who simply decides that your sin doesn’t matter, that he won’t hold you responsible.
Well he is a loving God. But as Paul said earlier in the letter to the Colossians, it is only in Christ that we have forgiveness of sins. To receive forgiveness of sins you must place your trust in Christ, and believe that your sin debt is only paid by him bearing the penalty of the curse for you. I pray that you will place your trust in Christ this morning, because otherwise, you will bear the penalty of the curse yourself. And we don’t want that to happen to you.
It is also possible, and I would say probable, that there are others here among us this morning, who have placed trust in Christ, whose sin debt has been paid, but who are still trying to pay it off any way through their performance.
That is a tendency and temptation in my own life, and I’ve seen it in the lives of others also.
Intellectually we know that salvation is not by works. And yet functionally, at the level of where we live, many of us in practice are still trying to pay off our debt to God that way.
I had a friend in college who became a believer at about age 20. He said he wanted to live to be at least 40. I asked why. He said, “Because I want to serve God for as many years as I didn’t serve him.” Now he was a sincere believer and lover of Jesus and I don’t question his heart. But behind that statement was a belief that living 20 years for Jesus somehow balanced out living 20 years opposed to Jesus.
And we have our own ways of thinking that way as well. Have you ever felt really discouraged about sin in your life, and while in that state of mind, did you ever think, “If only I were doing better in this area, I wouldn’t feel so bad. Then I would know that God approves of my life. Then I could walk with confidence in the smile of God upon me.”
I’ve had that scenario play out many times in my life. But do you know what that is? It’s a belief that we can pay off our sin debt by better obedience; that we can earn the smile of God by our performance. Why else would there be relief and an expectation that God is satisfied because you’ve started to perform better? If we have a good stretch of obedience we sometimes feel like we’ve made up for a bad stretch of obedience. It cancels out. We’re back to even with God in our account.
But the truth is, no stretch of good obedience, not even if it lasts the rest of our lives, makes up for a single act of sin. The debt is not reduced one iota that way. The good news is that we don’t have to reduce the debt. God cancelled it on the cross in the death of Christ. And now, if you are in Christ by faith, you have the smile of God. You don’t need to make up for anything to live in that smile.
You may be here this morning and are so used to basing your acceptance before God on your performance and not on Jesus who cancelled your debt that this message is hard to take in. It hits you like a commercial for a luxury vacation in Hawaii – a nice idea, great for some people, something you’d like to have, but it’s not the real world, it’s not the world you experience.
I just want to encourage you this morning that if you are a believer in Christ, though you may not be experiencing that world, it is your reality. Your debt is paid. God’s legal demands for your sin were met when Christ was cursed for you. Now you are the object of his blessing. Now you can serve and obey God out of love for him, rather than out of a desire to pay down your sin debt.
We’re going to end our time this way. I’m going to ask the worship team to come up now and lead us in a song that celebrates what we just learned. And while we’re singing the song, I want to encourage you to come up and stand here in the front if you are one of two kinds of people.
If you want to place trust in Christ as the one who paid for your sins, please come to the front while we’re singing. Or if you have already done that, but you want to ask God for more freedom from the treadmill of trying to pay off your sin debt, and you want to live more in the good of your debts already paid in full, please also come to the front.
And when the song closes I’m going to pray for you and then we’ll be dismissed. I’m going to ask the servant leaders to come to the front now so that they can be here to minister to any who comes and who want to talk and pray more.
People stand
Worship team plays Jesus Paid it All
PRAYER
