Who Exposes Darkness

Tom Shrader examines the fundamental problem of human sin, tracing its origin from Adam's fall in Genesis 3 and its universal impact on all humanity. He explains that Jesus, as the light of the world, exposes the darkness of sin that permeates every aspect of human nature. The teaching emphasizes that all people are spiritually dead in sin and need salvation through Christ alone.

“It's not that they're sinners because they sin, it's because they're sinners that they sin.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Who is This?

Recorded: 2012

Duration: 45 min

Themes: sin, darkness, light, salvation, death, fall, grace, redemption, struggling with sin, feeling condemned, questioning salvation, new believer, seeking purpose, doubting faith, feeling hopeless, experiencing guilt

Scripture: John 3:19-21, Genesis 1:31, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, Matthew 21:10, Mark 4:39-41, Luke 5:21, John 12:34, Romans 5:12, Romans 3:10-12, Romans 3:23, Ephesians 2:1-3, James 2:10, 1 John 1:5-10

Theological Themes: total depravity, human sinfulness, original sin, fall of man, spiritual death, christology, soteriology, salvation by grace alone

Full Transcript

If you get a Bible for us, it's page 536. Though this is technically week two of this series, it kind of feels like week one. The series is titled, Who Is This? Let me remind you, study guides are available. You can purchase them over in the bookstore for $5, or you can download them free online. The reason we do both is we find a lot more people tend to want to have this, hold this. We don't make money on it, but it is just something we provide for you. So if you want to grab those over in the bookstore afterwards, feel free to do that.

The whole idea of this series, Who Is This?, are the encounters with Jesus. We're going to look at encounters that appear in all four Gospels, and more than once in each Gospel. There's a moment in the life of Christ where somebody, or a group of people, are asking the question, who is this guy? Who is this Jesus? It's typically after He's done something amazing, in terms of really reversing or bending the laws of nature, or forgiving sin, or some public declaration.

It's not always asked in the most positive light. It's asked by His disciples, by strangers. But they ask, who is this? What Jesus does, and we see that in the Scripture, is He does not leave neutrality as an option. Jesus says that you're either for me or against me.

Seeing with the Eyes of Your Heart

At one point in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus talks about seeing they do not see. When we talk about that, what we speak of here is not just physical eyesight, not the eyes of your head, but the eyes of your heart. We talk about that again in the study guide. I found myself using the study guide a lot this week. I really recommend it. The study guide's going to be a very helpful tool in the study.

One of the quotes from that, when we speak of seeing Jesus, we don't mean seeing with the eyes of our head, but the eyes of our heart. The Bible says we walk by faith, not by sight. He is not here to see physically. He's in heaven until He comes again to be seen by everyone. But the Bible does say that we may see Jesus in another sense. It speaks of "the eyes of your heart," Ephesians 1:18. It speaks of seeing the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who's the image of God, 2 Corinthians chapter four, verse four.

Jesus Himself spoke of two kinds of seeing. One kind is physical eyes seeing, and the other is spiritual eyes. When we see with our spiritual eyes, we see the truth and the beauty and the value of Jesus for what they really are. Therefore, a blind person today may see Jesus more clearly than many who have physical eyesight.

So that's our hope in these encounters. We look at Jesus in a variety of settings and we see this question posed.

Four Gospel Encounters

Let me just do that from each of the four Gospels. It begins in Matthew chapter 21, verse 10. It's page 536. It's the triumphal entry. Jesus has come into town. The group has preceded Him, Hosanna, Hosanna. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna's in the highest. Matthew 21:10 says, "When He entered Jerusalem, all the city stirred and was saying, 'Who is this?'" Who is this guy that generates this sort of a response?

Mark's Gospel, this is one of my all-time favorites. Mark chapter four, verse 39. What's happened is Jesus is on a boat in the sea and there's a storm that comes along. Jesus is asleep. The disciples awaken Him and say, don't you really care that we're going to perish? And He says, oh you of little faith. Verse 39, He rebukes the wind and says to the sea, "Hush, be still." And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm. And He said, "Why are you afraid? You still have no faith?" And they became very much afraid.

I want you to see, they were afraid. Now they're very much afraid. It was really scary when the ship was being thrown all over but now the sea is calm and now they're faced with something more powerful than that storm. They're filled with awe at the One who controls the storm. They became afraid and they said to one another, "Who then is this? Who is this guy?"

Luke chapter five, verse 21, page 559. Jesus is faced with the paralytic. There's some men around and they're trying to find ways. Can he be healed? And Jesus says, get up and walk. And then Jesus says, your sins are forgiven. Verse 21, the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason and they say, "Who is this man that blasphemes?" In other words, claims He can forgive sin.

The last one is in John's gospel. John chapter 12, verse 34, page 585. Just another snapshot from the life of Christ. Leading up to it, Jesus has been teaching and He talks about the idea that He will be lifted up from the earth, verse 32, and draw all men to Himself. But He was saying this to indicate the kind of death He must die. And the crowd then answered Him and say, "We have heard out of the law that the Christ is to remain forever. How can this be? The son of man must be lifted up. Who is this son of man?"

A Legitimate Question for All Time

It's a legitimate question for all time and hopefully it's one that all of us are going to be able to answer by the end of the series for sure, maybe even a bit by the end of today. Now, most of you in this room are going to say that Jesus is God, come in the flesh to die on the cross to save His people from their sin. But it would be naive to think that that's everyone.

I said technically the series started last week. When we introduced the series, it's like some movies or TV shows or plays that you've seen or books that you've read where the book or the play or the movie starts with a scene that chronologically is the last scene and then the story builds up to it. So we asked the question on Easter morning, who is this that rose from the dead? Now, let me give you the answer, Jesus. We approach it in a very matter of fact way.

The Reality of the Resurrection

This was my 21st or 22nd Easter, and these are just hard messages. But I've morphed from a position of trying to defend the resurrection to simply proclaim the resurrection. I say here's what the Bible says, and to be honest, it's what history says. Now, especially with internet and Google and so many tools, it's easy for me to say you go home and do the work. You go home and Google resurrection facts. You look at just the facts.

I think to the mind that's open and fair, you'll see this overwhelming evidence that if you sit fairly, logically, honestly, you're going to look at it and conclude this: at very least, on that first Easter morning, the tomb was empty. Seems to me very hard to deny that. Now, that doesn't in and of itself prove the resurrection. That only proves an empty tomb.

What the Bible also tells us and the evidence tells us is that then Jesus appeared, that Jesus is alive. All of the theories that try to explain away the resurrection - and many of you are familiar with so many of them - make no sense. Somebody stole the body? The Jews don't want the body gone. The Romans certainly don't want the body gone. The Christians, if they stole the body, are not about to go die for a lie. These are the same guys - Peter, the same guy that's intimidated by a little servant girl. I don't think he's going to go and die for a lie.

The Absurdity of Alternative Theories

The swoon theory may be one of my favorites, because that one really takes faith. That's the one that basically says Jesus went into a coma. So He'd been beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, all the things, shoved the spear aside, wrapped, put in a tomb, and then Jesus was in this sense of coma, hibernation. He comes out of it, shakes himself out of it, regains all of His strength, and then in this very difficult condition picks up this 2,000-pound stone. If He did that, you ought to fall down and worship Him, really.

It seems to me there's a way in which that takes more faith than what really happened: Jesus was raised from the dead. Now, the point I love to make is, if that's true - and it is - then you ought to go, whoa, there's something special here. There's a big deal. Because evidently, He is who He said He was, the Son of God. But more importantly for us at this moment to grasp, we are who He says we are.

Coming to God on His Terms

What's lacking so much in the world we live in today is we have this idea of coming to God on our terms, conforming Him to our image, rather than us conforming to His image. He's an objective truth, not a subjective truth. A lot of this discussion, especially today, is going to sound very much like the lessons that we just had from the book of Galatians.

I started reading a book this week. The girls and I flew to Columbus, Ohio on Monday, then drove up to Worcester, Massachusetts, and visited a friend and his father, then drove nine and a half hours to see my mom. On Wednesday, my daughters came in, and the three of us were visiting my mom and my brothers. In this process, I was reading a book commenting on the next Christians, the mindset that's present now, and the world we live in, and the uniqueness that we face. There is open hostility toward God, yet more and more people are willing to talk about God in their own terms, as they define Him, rather than God as He really is.

You get to things like the resurrection, or you get to things like sin - like we're going to talk about today - and people have their own wild theories that they've put together, rather than to go, no, this is what the Bible says. Here's what I've discovered, and when I say discovered, I didn't invent it at all. I simply saw it over and over again. It's that pattern you see in Isaiah 6: when I begin to see God for who He really is - Jesus rose from the dead - all of a sudden I see myself for who I really am. Then I understand God is the one who defines the terms of the relationship we have, the depth of the relationship, the fact that we are at war with Him, and that the only way of reconciling is on His terms.

The Terms of Surrender

When I stayed at my brother's house, I called it the Lincoln bedroom. He has one bedroom that's got all this Lincoln stuff and paraphernalia and U.S. history stuff, but there's a picture of Grant receiving the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. On that day, Lee didn't dictate the terms of surrender - Grant did. When you come to God, the terms of reconciliation aren't defined by you; they're defined by Him.

So we answer, who is it that rose from the dead? It's Jesus. Today marks now the beginning of the questions we're going to look at over the next four weeks. Who exposes darkness? By the way, this is going to be great. Jesus is the answer to all of these. Hopefully you knew that. Some of you are going, really? Yeah, so we always have to reinforce that. Who is it that exposes darkness? Jesus. Who is it that knew no sin? It's Jesus. Who is it that takes away the sin of the world? It's Jesus. Who is it that is God, and Savior, and King? It's Jesus.

The Condition of Man

So who exposes the darkness? What we're going to talk about today is the condition of man. Not necessarily in an economic sense, or an intellectual sense, or even a physical sense, but a spiritual sense. We want to go back and look at the condition of man. We're going to talk a lot about sin, and what is sin, and where did it come from, and what are its effects, and how does it affect us?

We tend to think about life after death, for sure. But what about this life that we have now, and is there a solution? So I want you to go to page one of your Bible, to Genesis chapter...

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, Genesis 1. There's a story through the balance of chapter one of God creating heaven, earth, and all that goes with it. In verse 31, the Lord saw that all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. As God has created, and God has designed, and God has moved through creation, God creates, and He sits at the end of it, and He looks back, and He assesses it, and He says it is very, very good.

Chapter two gives us a little more detail of the creation of man and woman. Chapter two of Genesis ends with Adam and Eve naked in the garden and unashamed. The picture of nakedness there is innocence, it's transparency, there's nothing to hide, there's nothing that they're ashamed of in the midst of all of that.

Then jump over to chapter four, and you see Cain and Abel. I get to Genesis chapter four, and here's strife, and jealousy, and anger, and lying, and murder, and bitterness, and all sorts of evil. You have to step back and go, what in the world happened?

The Fall Changes Everything

What happened in that story of creation is what affects mankind for all time. Ray Stedman, writing in Genesis chapter three, writes this: It explains over a hundred centuries of human heartache, and misery, and torture, and bloodshed. If you remove this chapter, Genesis three, from the Bible, the entire book becomes incomprehensible. But the most striking thing about it is that we find ourselves here. The temptation and the fall are reproduced in our lives many times a day. We have all heard the voice of the tempter, felt the attraction of sin, and we all know the pangs of guilt.

All of a sudden, Genesis three really becomes important for us to be able to understand the world around us. God tells us in the story that Adam and Eve are in the garden. They're given a restriction, and frankly, though it sounds really severe, depends on your perspective, they're in the garden, they're in paradise.

I always had this kind of picture of them more in heaven than anywhere. Then God says, don't eat from that tree. They're in paradise. Here's this whole orchard of trees and all that they want. He said, but don't eat from that tree. Then the tempter comes, and Eve is deceived and Adam sins.

Understanding the Nature of Sin

Let me give you just a couple of broad definitions of this idea of sin. I'm going to give you J.I. Packer, then Wayne Grudem, and then Tim Keller.

Packer writes this: sin may be comprehensively defined as a lack of conformity to the law of God. Lack of conformity in act, habit, attitude, outlook, disposition, motivation, and mode of existence. Dr. Grudem shrinks that down. He says, sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature. Tim Keller simply says, sin is slavery to anything other than God.

What happens is, sin comes into the world. All of a sudden, this innocence and this light now moves into darkness. Who exposes that darkness? Jesus does.

Jesus Exposes the Darkness

Turn to John chapter 3. It's page 577 in the Bible we gave you. When we talk about John's gospel and we say John chapter 3, your mind immediately spins to what is clearly the most familiar passage, I think, in all of Scripture: John 3:16. We come a little bit after this.

Jesus tells us that, in verse 19, this is the judgment. By that, He means, here's the verdict. Jesus comes. He is the light of the world. This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world. This is Jesus. And men love the darkness rather than the light. Why? Their deeds are evil.

For everyone who does evil hates the light, does not come to the light, for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the light, so his deeds may be manifest as having been wrought in God. He said, those that are in sin are those that are in darkness. The darkness hates the light. The light comes, and the light begins to expose it. Jesus said, here's the fear. They run away from the light because their deeds are evil, and they don't want those deeds to be exposed.

An Illustration of Light Exposing Darkness

When I'm home, every time I'll do the same thing. I'll go for a long ride, and I'll go through all the places. Here's the house that I lived in when I was born. Here's the first house. Then that house we lived in, we lived in two houses primarily most of our lives. Little stops along the way. Here's where we used to shop. Here I remember my mom sending me to this store to get some bread, and I remember losing the change on the way home and my dad beating me for a quarter.

There was a bar I used to hang out. Now, bar, the term has been lost in our culture because now you have something like Postinos. This isn't a bar. Those aren't bars. Oregano is not a bar. A bar is a bar. One of the characteristics about a bar, it's how you know it's a bar, is it is dark.

I think of the bar I used to hang out back home, place called the Circle Tap, and there were windows, but we were a Pabst Blue Ribbon bar, classy guys, so everything was filmed in this blue Pabst Blue Ribbon, so there were windows, but you could only see out enough to know that it was daylight. I remember going in there one day when we were still a Pabst Blue Ribbon bar, but they were converting from old Pabst Blue Ribbon to new Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I'd never seen the windows were all open and clean and the doors were open, and I was stunned at what a dump this place was. I was stunned. If we used to eat, did we eat here? That's what the light did.

So you're that dumpy little sinful place, your heart, and along comes Jesus,

He's the light, and He exposes that. He's the one who exposes it. He's the one who reveals who we really are. Sin comes along, and it doesn't show us reality.

Reflecting on Reality and Truth

One of the things I do almost every time when I'm home is I graduated from St. Ambrose College, now St. Ambrose University, and almost always I'll go by the bookstore and see if they have any new stuff. Is there a new shirt or something I want to get or a gift for somebody? I thought of a couple of things, but what I was reflecting on, because St. Ambrose has just taken over the neighborhoods there. The school has just grown. But I was reflecting back to my college years.

I was there three terms, Nixon, Johnson, and I was there a while. Our mascot was the bees, striking fear in the heart of our opponent. The center of the college was Memorial Hall, which was obviously called the Beehive. I remember, this was in '71, '72, '73, '74, '69, '68, a lot of years. But I remember on occasions being in or around the Beehive in a contemplative mood with other students, contemplating, what is reality?

Well, once you get to Genesis 3, you can't find reality. Because what sin does is distort, distorts the truth. Eve doubts God's word. It distorts morality itself. What's right? She trusts her own judgment, her own identity. She puts herself above God. Well, that's what sin does. So in comes this sin, this distortion.

How Sin Entered the World

When I'm talking about sin, what I'm talking about is I'm here, God, You're here. Now, how did it begin? Well, obviously, we have some indication. You got that already by Genesis 3. But turn to page 612, or it's Romans chapter 5.

Romans chapter 5, Paul is writing, and he simply says this. "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sin." What the Bible teaches us is this, that we were in Adam. He was our representative, and that when he sinned, that sin is now passed on to all people who have ever lived or will ever live.

I took the girls over to the John Deere, not to the factory, not to the headquarters, but downtown. There's kind of a museum in the John Deere store, and the girls always, especially Sarah, she's always going to pick up something, some John Deere stuff for the girls. There's a display in there. There's these two bins, and it's kicking out kernels of corn, and it's showing world population and population in rural areas. That corn's coming out like this, and there's little ways where you can go and see the world population in 2020, 2050.

I'll tell you what's interesting is to go back and see what it was. When I was born, the world population was about 2 billion. It's now 7 billion in all shapes and sizes and nationalities. But the one thing all of us have in common is if you could go up to Salt Lake and trace our ancestry back far enough, we'd all end up with two people, Adam and Eve. And from that, we inherited sin. That's what He says. Death comes into the world. That's how we know. How do we know that all of us have sinned? Because all of us die.

The Importance of the Virgin Birth

That's why, by the way, the virgin birth is important. Let me take you back to the beehive again. I remember being in there one night, and there was a Dutch Catholic theologian, so a priest, and he was there. I was never a smoker. I never smoked cigarettes. I like cigars. I love the smell of a cigar, a pipe. There was a guy. I picked the girls up at the hotel Friday morning. There was a guy out there smoking a pipe. You don't smell that smell much anymore. It's a great smell.

And this guy, he would just suck on his cigarettes. And he said, "Gosh, I'm coughing. I'll be all right." And he sucked on his cigarette. He said to us, "What's important, the virgin birth or the product of the birth? The virgin birth, the process, or Jesus?" And I remember at the time going, "This is profound." Yeah, it's profoundly stupid is what it is because the virgin birth is critical because if Jesus isn't born of a virgin, then He's a sinner like you and me, and at this point, we might as well die for each other. That's what makes Him the perfect sacrifice.

The Universal Nature of Sin

How did this all begin? It began through Adam's sin. Sin comes into the world, and I guess this is important, the point I want to camp on here for a while is it affects all of us. In Romans 5, just turn to the left, Romans 3, because it's declared there in 5:12, but kind of the verse that we identify most often with it is Romans 3:23. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." That's a condition of all of us without exception.

I used to work for a guy who was a wonderful guy, but theologically just a little odd, and he had all sorts of theological views that were based on nothing but his own impression, and one of the things that was really key to him was reincarnation. Now, before you mock him, you need to know that approximately 40% of the people in this country believe in reincarnation. Now, let me define reincarnation for you. If at first you don't succeed, die, die again. That's reincarnation.

The Problem with Reincarnation

I remember talking to him one time. He's giving me this whole thing about reincarnation, and in the process of this, I said to him, "Explain to me why you come back, and you come back, and you come back as a lower life form. What's that mean? Live in Tucson?" So you come back as a lower life form. So you can become that higher life form. And then eventually you become perfect, and in this process of becoming perfect, he said, then you spin off and you have your own whatever it is you have.

So I said to him, "Have you ever seen one of these perfect people?" And he said, "No, I haven't." And I said, "Why do you think that is?" And he said, "Well, you know, all these people in the world." I said, "No, it's because they

There is none righteous, no not one. We know this instinctively. We say it all the time: "No one's perfect."

Go back just a little bit earlier in Romans 3, verse 10. Paul says, "There is none righteous, no, not one. There's none who understands. There's none who seeks for God. All have turned aside, and together they've become useless. There's none." Here's the definitive statement of every person that's ever lived: "There's none who does good, not even one."

Now, we want to push back at that and say, "No, no, no, no. I know certain people who do good. They'll cut your lawn when you're gone, or when snow comes, they'll shovel your driveway. There's this little old lady who bakes you cookies." What God is saying is, "Well, you're looking at the action. I'm looking at the heart of the actor." The problem is a heart problem.

The Reality of Total Depravity

The term we use to describe this is depravity and total depravity. Now, hang in here for a minute. This is really important. Tyler has a great way of saying this. He says, "If sin were blue, we'd all be Smurfs."

What he's saying is total depravity doesn't mean we're as bad as we can possibly be. Hitler didn't kill his mother. But it means we're as bad off as we could possibly be. When sin came into our lives, it touched every area of our life.

J.I. Packer says, "Total depravity declares there's no part of us that's untouched by sin. Therefore, no action of ours is as good as it should be. And consequently, nothing in us or about us ever appears meritorious in God's sight. We cannot earn God's favor no matter what we do."

Sin's Impact on Every Life

What's important is to see that all of us are impacted by sin, and the wage of sin is death. It's separation from God. Sin has an impact on us, not just in terms of eternity, but in terms of life here.

You may be 98.6 degrees. You may have blood pressure that's 120 over 70. You may be picture perfect health physically, but you're dead spiritually. The barometer for this becomes very important now. The barometer for this is God's definition, not yours.

I mentioned I flew into Columbus. I drove up to Wooster, Ohio, which is a branch of the Ohio State University. It has something to do with their agriculture. One of the things the students were doing while we were there, obviously preparing for fields, is they were literally measuring using infrared. One of the things light does when the light comes into the world is it's a measurement. Jesus said, "Here's the measurement: it's perfection. How are you doing?"

The Universal Condition

All of a sudden we realize this is the condition, not just of some people, but this is the condition of all of us. We're as bad off as we can possibly be. Our heart is desperately wicked.

That two-year-old that you placed in the nursery today—as you begin to raise him or begin to raise her, you don't have to teach them to lie. You have to teach them to tell the truth. They instinctively hide. Why? They're in the dark.

This is not just a fancy phrase. You have to grab it. It's not that they're sinners because they sin. It's because they're sinners that they sin. All they're doing is showing you who they really are.

Dead in Sin

If you want to understand the consequences of sin in our life, turn to Ephesians chapter two, page 634. Your Bible's almost starting to fall open to this section. Paul is writing to the church at Ephesus, and He's speaking about our life now. He's talking about their life apart from Christ.

He says, "You were dead in your sins and trespasses, in which you formally walked according to the course of the world, according to the prince of power and the spirit that's working in the sons of disobedience."

You could circle three sections in this passage if you want: dead in verse one, sons of disobedience in verse two, children of wrath in verse three. He says, "That's how you were. You formally walked that way."

The Fruit of Our Nature

When we studied Galatians five, we saw that we produced the fruit of the flesh. In our life, all the things we saw back in Genesis four appear: strife and jealousy and pride. We're more concerned about us. "What about me?"

When Jesus comes along and says, "Love your neighbors as yourself," you go, "That's not going to work for me because I love me. I love me too much to love my neighbor. The only possible reason I'd love my neighbor is if I thought somehow it was going to benefit me." That's what sin does.

When I was in college, there was a bumper sticker that was ubiquitous. It said, "Question authority"—rebellion. "Nobody's going to tell me what to do." That goes all the way back to the garden. That goes all the way back to Genesis three, when Eve said, "I'm not going to have anybody put any rules on me, any restrictions on me."

The Unmanageable Nature of Sin

I've been getting a lot of emails lately about, "Boy, be careful with the politics. You're getting too much politics." Then I'm getting other people saying, "You need more politics." Frankly, you need to understand something: I don't care. That's not going to matter a lot here. I don't care.

But I can tell you this: this country is not manageable. You can give it to Mitt, you can give it to Barack, you can give it to whoever you want, but you have 330 million people in special interest groups all saying, "What about me?" You have conflicting wants. I don't know that anybody could lead this mess.

It's true of a homeowner's association. It's true of a country club. It's true of anything. "What about me?" I see it in my homeowners association. I do not understand these dogs. There are dogs everywhere. I do not understand it, and I don't understand how you can have a dog that barks. I can't—it's beyond my comprehension.

If I were to confront that person, they would say, "But it's my right to have a dog," and I'd say, "But it's your right to have a dog, but I shouldn't know you have it unless I see you walking it." We're like this in a homeowners association over a dog, and now you're going to manage the world? What is that? Sin.

I want me. It's the consequences. Now relationships are broken, everything's distorted. That's what happens here, but afterlife, Paul tells us in Romans 2:5, we're storing up wrath. To be absent from the body for the believer is to be present with the Lord. To be absent from the body of a non-believer is to be separated from God forever.

Living Like There's No Tomorrow

I'm home, and my mom—we moved my mom from her condo, and it's only about a mile away, into a very nice... it isn't even assisted living. I don't even know what it is. It's kind of like an apartment complex for older people.

Very nice, fun to watch. They have Friday—my mom didn't realize it—Friday night is happy hour there. So my brother and I discovered that. So we said, "Let's go down." My mom and I and my brother are playing cards. If you put "free" in front of anything, old people show up. So it's like free... Now, they're going to go over there and eat the dinner they've already paid for, but they get nachos here.

There was a lady, and free wine. I guess wine was free, I don't know. There was a lady, and it was so cool. I said to my brother, "Look at that chick." She had a walker and a glass of wine in both hands. That was awesome. It was everybody in there.

But I mean, none of these people are doing a lot of long-term planning. You're old, you're going to die. What the Bible says is once you die, you're either in heaven or you aren't. Not based on what you did, but based on whether you accept the gift that God extended to you of life in Christ.

There's the illustration of a group of monks, and I understand it's a true story, that every morning they would gather around a grave that was dug. They had prayer and meditation. Then the next monk that would die, they'd bury Him in that. They'd dig a new grave, and then they'd repeat that. They could do this at this home. I mean, these people are old.

The Reality of Judgment

When I die, what the Bible says is that this sin, if not dealt with, means I'll spend eternity separated from God in a place called hell. I had a friend who came to a Priority Living study, and He had a son who was five or six, and His mom—so the boy's grandmother—died. He was trying to deal with this, and we had to deal with that some with Susan and the boys. Braden's kind of old enough, and the others. How do you deal with that?

So He was trying to explain to that, and of course He was asking about where is Grandma? Yale had a great line the other day. He said to Haley, "Mom, can't Nana just come back for my birthday, just for my birthday?" She said, "No, honey, she's with Jesus right now. One day we can go see her." Perfect.

So He's explaining to this boy, and the boy goes, "Is Mom in heaven, Grandma in heaven?" The father's having a real problem because He's pretty confident she isn't. But how do you tell a six-year-old boy, "Hey, Grandma's in hell"?

So the boy started to say—now the boy just deduced this from what the boy knows, what the boy's been taught. "Well, Grandma didn't love Jesus, did she?" "No." "Grandma didn't go to church, did she?" "No." "Grandma didn't read the Bible, did she?" "No." "Grandma didn't care about any of these things, did she?" And here's the boy's conclusion: "Grandma is in hell, isn't she?"

Stripping Away Sentimentality

See, I love that because it strips away all that sentimentality about Grandma and Grandpa. "Poor old Nana." Well, poor old Nana is in hell. Because she wasn't just poor old Nana. She was a sinner who hated God all her life, though she covered it up very well.

How many sins does it take to separate us from God? James 2:10: "If I keep the whole law and stumble at one point, I'm guilty of it all." In other words, it's one. We're separate. That's all of us. And the wage of sin is death.

Max Lucado writes about Jeffrey Dahmer, and writes about, "Here's what bugs me about Jeffrey Dahmer," He writes. "Not that He raped innocent boys and young men. Not that He killed these boys that He raped. Not that He cut them up, and not that He ate them. What drives me crazy is that apparently three months before He died, He came to Christ in repentance and faith. He was baptized, and was saved by grace. That doesn't seem right. But here's a problem: Jeffrey Dahmer, you."

I remember one time I was posing this question, and trying to put it in some sort of language we'd get, and I said to the guy—I don't remember now who it was—I said, "You know the difference between me and Adolf Hitler?" And here's what the guy said: "Yeah, one little mustache." Meaning we're all in that boat.

Our True Condition

How many sins does it take to separate us from God? It only takes one. And yet we're wonderful at kind of pushing that away. John points this out in 1 John chapter 1 verses 5 through 10. He said, "Listen, if you say you don't sin, then you're a hypocrite. If you say you don't sin, you're deceiving yourself. If you say you don't sin, you're calling God a liar, because He says all of us sin." Now, if you confess your sin—if you agree with God about what it is—He's faithful, He's just, He'll forgive you, He'll bring you into His kingdom.

That's really where this whole series is driving us, is to see ourselves for who we really are. I wrote this this morning: I can imagine someone saying, "I came here today hurting, needing a word of encouragement. The world is so negative and you made it worse." That's not easy to do. This is a gift. But I get it.

Hope in the Darkness

But here's what I need to understand: though things are, on my own, helpless and hopeless, they're not helpless and hopeless if I come to Christ in repentance and faith. That's the darkness, that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

short of the glory of God, that eternal life is found in Christ and no one else.

Now, you may be sitting there today going, "Give me more, give me more, give me more." That's where we head in the rest of this series. But you may not need to wait for more. It may be when this service is over, you need to come to the front to talk to the men and women that'll be in the front, either over in the conference center or here in the chapel, and they'll be here to talk with you. They'll talk about you when you leave, but they'll talk with you now. Look at that one. That one's more messed up than any of them. No, we don't do that.

But that's the answer. The answer is Jesus. That's what we looked at next week. Who is He who knew no sin? Well, that's Jesus. When I said everyone who's ever born was born with a sin nature, the exception, you got that in the middle of the message, is Jesus.

The Purpose of Jesus

Why? What did He do? Why did He come? What was the whole purpose in His being here? We're going to talk about that next week.

Now, if you're over in the conference center, Brian's going to come and close your time together. If you're here with us in the chapel, Jake's going to come, and he's going to lead you in a time of communion, and then the band's going to come back and close our time of worshiping the Lord through song.

A Message for Everyone

But I hope that what you heard today, though it may be, for some of you, brand new stuff. It may sound very harsh or judgmental. It isn't harsh or judgmental. I'm saying we're all in this. This is every one of us. That's our spiritual condition. That's who you are.

You know what? You know it, don't you? You really know it. You kind of mask over it. You play a game, but deep down inside you know something's wrong. That's okay, because it can be made right through Jesus.

It's a story that you saw. One of the dangers, I think, in the story that you saw with Bill, is you look at it and go, "I'm not a heroin guy. I didn't rob anybody. I guess I'm not that bad." The point is not, here was Bill. The point is, circumstantially it's different, but substantially it's all the same. We were lost. We needed a Redeemer. It's Jesus.

Let's pray. Father, thanks for that amazing truth. Familiar in a way to many of us, brand new to others. To those for whom this is new stuff today, God, I pray that You would let us hear that message and respond. God, don't let us ever grow weary of Your grace, Your mercy. Father, thank You for Jesus Christ. We pray in His name. Amen.