The Lamb Who Takes Away Our Sin
Tom Shrader preaches from John 1:19-34, centering on John the Baptist's declaration in verse 29 that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He walks through the Old Testament backdrop of blood sacrifice and explains that humanity's core problem is sin, not economics or education, and that no human effort can cure it. The teaching calls listeners to accept the gospel — that Christ died, was buried, and rose again — and to receive forgiveness as a free gift of grace rather than something earned through religious effort.
“God loves you in spite of you, not because of you.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Scottsdale Bible Church
Recorded: 2015 at Scottsdale Bible Church
Duration: 44 min
Themes: forgiveness, sin, grace, sacrifice, gospel, salvation, repentance, faith, seeking forgiveness, new believer, struggling with guilt, feeling unworthy, spiritual seeker, young adult, returning to faith, questioning christianity
Scripture: John 1:19-34, John 1:29, John 1:23, John 1:27, John 1:34, John 1:38, John 1:41, John 1:49, John 3:16, John 14:6, John 20:30-31, Malachi 4:5, Isaiah 40:3, Romans 3:10, Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, 1 Peter 1:18, 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, 2 Corinthians 5:14
Theological Themes: atonement, substitutionary atonement, soteriology, saved by grace, blood sacrifice, justification, imputation, lamb of god
Full Transcript
Introduction to John the Baptist and His Witness
Open your Bibles to John's Gospel. We are in a series called "I Believe," and we are continuing in that series with a vignette from the Gospel of John. Jamie has chosen one word as the title for this part of the series, and that word is forgiveness. The passage is John chapter 1 beginning in verse 29, which starts with the phrase "the next day."
The moment you see "the next day," you understand it is a continuation of an idea. To get the full picture, we go back to chapter 1 verse 19: "This is the testimony of John." We need to pause here, because we have two different people named John. There is John the Gospel writer — the disciple, the one who wrote the Gospel of John, the epistles of First, Second, and Third John, and the book of Revelation — and he is writing about our chief character today, who is John the Baptist.
The Delegation from Jerusalem
In verse 19, John the Baptist receives a delegation. "This is the testimony of John the Baptist when the Jews sent to him priests and Levites from Jerusalem." This is a delegation from the Sanhedrin coming to pay a visit to John the Baptizer. John is a maverick. They are unhappy with him. He is outside the norm, and they ask, "Who are you?" — with an intonation that really means, "Who do you think you are in all of this?"
He answers plainly: "I am not the Christ. I am not the Messiah." There were already some who were wondering whether John the Baptist might be the Messiah, since the people had been waiting for this figure. So they press further in verse 21: "Are you Elijah the prophet?" That question may seem odd to us, but at the very end of the Old Testament, in Malachi 4:5, God says, "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord." They wanted to know whether John was the fulfillment of that promise. He said no.
They push again: give us a name — who are you? John's answer comes from the book of Isaiah. In chapter 1 verse 23, he says, "I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord." In effect, he is saying: if you want to know who I am, read the Old Testament, read Isaiah — that is who I am. He is here with a simple message, and that message is repent.
The One Coming After John
John unpacks his role further in verse 27: "It is he who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie." There is one coming after him who is far greater. The text tells us all of this took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan. The old name for Bethany was Bethabara, which means "a place of passage." Tradition holds that this is the very place where the Israelites followed Joshua into the promised land — Joshua being, in the Old Testament, a kind of prototype or picture of Christ.
It is against that rich backdrop that verse 29 arrives: "The next day" — that is where we pick up. John saw Jesus coming and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." In verse 30 he continues: "This is he on behalf of whom I said, after me comes one who has a higher rank than I, for he existed before me." John is saying: here is Jesus, the one I have been speaking about. Though I am chronologically older, He precedes me — He precedes all of us. We saw this established at the very beginning of the Gospel, back in chapter 1, where we are taken all the way back to the beginning itself.
Behold the Lamb of God
In the beginning was the Word — that's Jesus — and the Word was with God and the Word was God. John says in verse 31, "I didn't recognize him, but so that he might be manifest to Israel, I came baptizing in water." He says it again in verse 33: "I didn't recognize him." Now understand what he's saying here. John and Jesus are cousins. They in all likelihood would have hung out together, known one another, and done family stuff together. What John is saying is not that he didn't recognize him in the sense of not knowing his mother or his father. He said he didn't recognize his mission. He didn't understand what was going on until he baptized him and the Spirit descended like a dove on him.
John's summary statement is there in chapter 1, verse 34: "I myself testify this is the Son of God." This is God come in the flesh.
The One Big Idea
At Redemption Church there are nine congregations, and every Sunday nine different men are teaching at those congregations. They gather the previous Wednesday for what they call a collective. Because all the men are teaching the same passage, the whole point is to collectively approach it — to see what God might reveal, what insights emerge, what the language yields. Someone will have done the Greek, and they work through it together. They always try to come away with the one big idea — what is it that if someone ran into you on Monday and asked what the sermon was about, you could tell them in a sentence?
The big idea today is verse 29. Here is this moment in John chapter 1 where all this chaos is going on around John, and John looks over and says, "Right there — that guy right there." Can you imagine the scene? He says, "There is the Lamb of God." That would have been startling, and for us it is probably hard to get our arms around, a little confusing even — but that is the Lamb of God, the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.
One author writes: "This is a verse which ought to be printed in great letters in the memory of every reader of the Bible. All the stars in the heaven are bright and beautiful, yet one star exceeds all the others. So also all the scriptures are inspired and profitable, yet some texts are richer than the others. Never was there a fuller testimony born to Christ on earth than the one which is born by John the Baptist: Behold the Lamb of God." Another author writes: "In one sentence we have the essence of the Christian message. It is difficult for western ears to appreciate the power of John's announcement, but these words brought an avalanche of meaning to the minds of the Jews."
The Title No One Else Uses
John is the only one who uses this title — Behold the Lamb of God. John uses other titles to describe Jesus elsewhere in chapter 1: Rabbi in verse 38, Messiah in verse 41, the Son of God in verses 34 and 49, the King of Israel. But this is different. This is the Lamb of God.
The Old Testament is filled with sacrifices and blood offerings that by and large are unexplained. There were sacrifices in the morning and at night and on the great holidays. What the Jews understood was this: no forgiveness of sin could be granted by God apart from the shedding of blood, apart from the sacrifice. While there had been all sorts of ceremonies, pictures, and types in the past, this is now the Lamb of God.
That is the big idea. If someone asks you tomorrow what Tom talked about, the answer is: Jesus came, lived, died, and paid the price of our sin. He takes away our sin. Peter writes it this way in 1 Peter 1:18: "You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot."
Christ Is the Savior
Let me give you four sub-points of this big idea, borrowing here from J.C. Ryle. The first is this: Christ is the Savior — meaning there is not any other. It is what Jesus says in John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, the life, no one comes to the Father but through me." Jesus did not come to the world to be a great teacher or a great role model. He did not come for you to admire the way He lived. He came to die. And His work is complete — it is done. He did not merely make it possible. He cried out on the cross, "It is finished."
Think about it this way. When a couple is expecting a baby and they gather their friends to announce it, the first question people ask is whether it is a boy or a girl. Once they answer that, the next question is always: what are you going to name the baby?
The Name Above All Names
Jesus and Mary didn't have the challenge of naming their child because the angel came to Joseph and said, "Mary's going to have a boy and you're going to name Him Jesus, and the reason is He's going to take away the sin of His people." Jesus' work is complete. He did it. This isn't such shocking stuff to us — He is the Savior of all mankind.
This is staggering to the Jews, however, because they would say, "Wait a minute, there's a Messiah coming and He's coming for somebody other than us?" I'll put myself in this boat — you don't need to climb in with me unless you want to. I'm so American-centric that sometimes I just forget that right now, around the world, there are billions of people from all different tribes, shapes, sizes, and colors who are worshiping the same Savior that we are — Jesus.
His Work Is Perpetual
His work is also perpetual. J.C. Ryle writes this: "Jesus takes away sin. He is daily taking away from everyone that believes on Him, daily purging, daily granting, daily applying fresh supplies of mercy. He did not cease to work for the saints when He died on the cross. He lives in heaven as a priest to present His sacrifice continually before God. In His grace as well as in providence, God's work still."
So the summary of the big point is simply this: from all races, from all ethnic groups, regardless of gender and economics and all that goes with it, God comes and is our Savior. He provides for us what we really need.
Our Fundamental Problem Is Sin
Our fundamental problem is not economic. We had a man just this week sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, and he has a $40 million contract with the New England Patriots. So his problem wasn't economics, was it? We have a group of about a dozen educators who are in the process of being tried — likely to be convicted, as they're already being offered deals — who were cooking the books in education. Their problem wasn't education; they had PhDs.
Your fundamental problem is not educational or economic. It's not that you're too short or too tall, too fat or too thin, or that you have too little hair or too much. Your fundamental problem — everyone's fundamental problem — is sin.
Two Kinds of People in the Room
Here is what makes a message like this difficult. There are two extremes in the room right now. There are some of you for whom this is brand new. You got here today and you're asking yourself even now why you came. You'd been bugging somebody — "Will you go to yoga with me?" — and finally they said, "You go to church with me, I'll go to yoga with you," and now you're stuck here. The songs were unfamiliar, it's a little intimidating, and you're thinking you sort of get it. My hope is that the Holy Spirit allows us to connect with you.
Then there's the other side of the coin, and this is a far more difficult group to reach. Those of you who have been around this forever — who were here in the old building thirty years ago. You've heard all of this before, and when I say "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" and start to unpack it, all you hear is background noise. You're thinking, "Come on, get to the heavy stuff. I want depth."
Here's my problem: I've got both groups at once. But here's what happened when I put this lesson together — I started preaching it to myself. I thought, I need to go back to this yet again. This is the basic. So whenever someone speaks to you, ask the question: What did he say? Is it true? So what? That's what I'm going to try to do.
What the Bible Actually Says
There's a bumper sticker that says, "The Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it." That middle line is a waste of ink. It doesn't matter what you believe or I believe. I presume you're not here curious what I think. The Bible said it, and that settles it.
Here is what the Bible says: you and I desperately need forgiveness. "Behold the Lamb of God" — that is our fundamental problem. The Bible describes all of us in inclusive terms. Romans chapter 3, verse 10: "There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have become useless. No one does good, no, not one."
That is an important thing to get your arms around — no one does good. And immediately something in me wants to push back. I want to say, "Well, that's not true. There's my neighbor — we go away in the summer, and in the heat of that summer he cuts my grass. I don't even ask him to. Certainly that's good." But we have to ask: that might look good on the outside, but why is he doing it?
The Corruption of the Heart
This is my favorite illustration of the corruption of the heart. On Thanksgiving Day, all the local networks will be downtown at the food bank, and there will be...
The Heart Behind Our Good Deeds
Picture a family of four down at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, scooping out mashed potatoes and green beans. Someone comes up and says, "Oh, did you come down here on Thanksgiving? That's terrific. We've been doing it for years." And then comes the question: "Why do you do it?" What is the answer? Every time, they say, "It makes us feel good." That reveals the heart. We are not feeding people because they are hungry. It makes us feel good.
There is no one good. Paul says it this way in Romans 3:23: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." That is every person who has ever lived. "Oh, but Nana—" Well, you did not know Nana when she was young. Nana was a rounder. That is everybody. Everybody who has ever lived.
Sin Is Natural, Not Taught
I have Sandy here today, and I have eight grandkids. Haley's youngest daughter, Harmony, has something that is more important to her than anything else in the world, and that is her blanket. It is her prized possession. Harmony had six days this week without her blanket because she refused to stop throwing fits during the day.
Sandy is here today with her sisters and her mom, and they are going to go meet the kids. The kids can pull off about thirty seconds of "It's nice to meet you, it's a pleasure to meet you," and then after about thirty seconds they are whacking each other in the head. Watching Haley raise those girls and boys, I have noticed she has not yet had to teach them to lie. They seem to do that on their own.
Four Responses to Guilt
Here is what Paul is saying: all of us have sinned. We have sinned against God, and the wage of sin is death. We are separated from God, and there is nothing we can do about it. There are moments where you feel guilty, and you feel guilty because you are guilty. So how do you respond to that guilt? There are four things you can do.
The first is you can deny it. That is what the rich young ruler did when he came to Jesus and said, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said, "Keep all the commandments," and he said, "I have done that." You may not be quite that arrogant, but you might say, "Yeah, I've sinned, but it's not really a big deal. I mean, I'm not like the Ayatollah or anything. I didn't kill anybody." So you feel guilty, and you deny it.
The second thing you can do is accept your guilt and be filled with despair. This is truly the most tragic response. The biblical character who represents this is Judas, who came face to face with his sin and then concluded there was nothing he could do about it, and he went and hanged himself. If you look at Judas and look at Peter, they are functionally in the same situation, but Judas is filled with despair.
I had a man come to my study one time during the week after a service. He was there for the first time, and he was just weeping. He said, "I've really sinned. I don't think God can forgive me." I said, "Well, God can forgive you." He said, "Here's what I've done," and he just started going. I was thinking, let me get a cup of coffee, because he did not stop. He kept saying, "That's nothing—here's what else I've done." And each time I said, "God can forgive you." As he walked away, I could hear him say, "God could never forgive me." You may be sitting here today thinking the same thing: I realize I am guilty, and God cannot forgive me.
The third reaction is to accept it and decide you are going to fix it. That is called religion. In other words, "I know I've messed up, and I am going to fix it." It is a moral realignment. "I'm going to work harder. I'm going to help with childcare. I will earn God's favor." But the fundamental problem is that sin has contaminated the heart, and so any sacrifice made from that heart is contaminated. That is precisely why a perfect sacrifice is required.
Saved by Grace, Not Works
The fourth option is to accept it and believe the gospel. Believe that the Lamb of God came to take away sin—and to personalize it, to take away your sin. We are saved by grace. Many of you in this room come out of a religious background, and all of a sudden you are confronted with grace, and you feel so impotent because there is nothing you can do. You know you are separated from God, you know you have sinned, you want to fix it, but you cannot. It demands a perfect sacrifice. It demands the Lamb of God. I am saved by grace through faith, not as a result of anything I could do.
I have told this story many times, but I have never identified the other person in it until last night. The other person was my dad. My dad and I are walking along at Granite Reef, near a McDonald's, and he is saying, "Tell me about this again. Give it to me one more time." I said, "You believe." He said, "No, there has got to be more to it than that. There has got to be something I have to do." My dad would say, "I'm at Mass every day, I'm in church every day. Certainly that counts for something." I said, "If I were keeping score, it does. But God does not see that as sufficient to cure your problem, which is sin. You are saved by grace. You simply believe."
We kept walking, and he stopped and said, "All right, let me ask you this. If I say I believe Jesus died for me, and then I go kill somebody tonight, am I still going to go to heaven?" I said, "Well, we do not recommend that. That is not our strategy. It is not part of our discipleship program. But the answer is yes." And it was a sweet moment for me, because at that moment I knew he had gotten grace. He said, "Wait a minute—get this." See, here is the thing: God knows everything you have ever done, everything you have ever said, everything you ever will say, and He saves you anyway. That is the gospel.
John — The Lamb Who Takes Away Our Sin
Part 5 of 6
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The Gospel in a Nutshell
Larry Wright used to call it the gospel in a nutshell. 1 Corinthians 15, verse 3: Christ died for our sins. Verse 4: they did with Jesus what they do with dead people — they buried Him. And on the third day, He rose from the dead. For 23 years I did Easter messages, and essentially every one of them was the same: Christ rose from the dead, and that's a big deal.
I became a Christian in 1980, and it was shortly after that — I can't give you the day — I was sitting right here on a Friday night, Saturday morning when Josh McDowell was here at SBC doing a miniseries on the resurrection factor. By the way, if you can find it, it's a wonderful little book. It covers the factual case for the resurrection. My Easter message used to be really simple: Christ rose from the dead, and there is overwhelming historical evidence for it. You really do have to shut off reason not to see it.
If Christ rose from the dead, that is truly impressive. It means He is who He said He was. And it means you are who He says you are — you are a sinner. Now let me tie it all together in Romans 6:23: "The wage of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus."
If I am still trying to work my way to making God happy, I never know if I have arrived. How much is enough? How happy? How many things? How good? He doesn't say that. He says believe. It can't be that easy. It is that easy. I didn't make the rules — He did.
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Why John Wrote His Gospel
The wage of sin is death. Because I have sinned, I have been separated from God. But if I believe — and that is precisely why John wrote this gospel. I said at the 5 o'clock service last night that I read a lot of books. I need to correct that: I start a lot of books. And in almost every book, in the introduction or the first chapter, there is a section — a purpose statement, an aim, an arrow — where the author declares his or her intention. Here is what I want you to get.
For John, the gospel we are in, he places that statement at the end of the book. John chapter 20, verse 30: Jesus did so many other miracles and signs. This gospel does not contain everything Jesus did. These are some, hand-selected by John under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit — verse 31 — so that you would read them and believe that Jesus is the Christ, and believing, you would have eternal life.
So the fundamental question to ask at this point is: do you believe? This is staggering. You have sinned — every one of us has. That sin has separated us from God, and there is nothing we can do to fix it. But behold the Lamb of God. He did what we could not do, and He takes away the sin of everyone who would believe in Him, who would put their trust in Him. The heart of that message is that I can find forgiveness in Him.
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God's Motive: Love in Spite of You
What I want to spend the last few minutes on is God's motive for all of this. The Gospel of John is filled with very familiar passages, and the most familiar to the whole world around us is John 3:16: "For God so loved the world." And again, I want to bring that close — it is you. God so loved you.
Now, that word love is a hard word for us, because we tend to think about it in such conditional terms. I will admit I am in a phase with Sandy right now — we have been married a while, and our anniversary is coming up next month. I am in this kind of tingle phase. When I see her, I get excited. She didn't come in for the first hour of this service, and when she walked in I was talking to somebody and I saw her and just lit up. I will be talking with her sometimes and I will just look at her and think, wow, isn't that something? But how do you not love her? She is really pretty. She is really smart. She is incredible with the kids. I keep telling her I don't want her to be my caregiver and my assistant — but then I ask her whether she can give me a ride to the doctor tomorrow. I mean, she just does it.
Here is the shift I want to make. All the time we think about love, it comes across as a conditional thing. So when we hear that God loves us, we map that same conditionality onto it. I am not trying to manipulate you here — I could, and I don't want to do that. But I hope something inside you goes, "wow," because I say this often and I feel like it never quite sinks in: God loves you in spite of you, not because of you.
I look at Sandy and I say I love her unconditionally, but if I am honest — not really. God, however, looks at you and does not see someone who is cute, or handsome, or clever, or smart, or good with kids. He looks at you — a sinner covered in guilt and sin, resistant to Him, so resistant to Him that you will create your own gods to worship. And He says, "I love you." He knows everything you have ever done, everything you have ever said, everything you have ever thought, everything you are ever going to do, ever going to say, ever going to think — and He loves you anyway. You are not on probation. You are His child.
We sang a line earlier: He took orphans and made us sons and daughters. Why? Behold the Lamb of God.
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The Love That Controls Everything
2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 14 says it is the love of Christ — His love for us — that controls us. Some translations render it as the love of Christ that compels us. Here is my hope for what that phrase does in you. Let's say you go on a trip and you rent a car — a Ford Fusion. You had never even noticed a Fusion before. The only time you ever noticed one was if it got in the way of your Mercedes. But now you drive the Fusion, and when you come back home and you are driving down the street, every car you see is a Fusion.
I hope the phrase "the love of Christ" or "the love of God" becomes like that as you read through scripture — that you begin to see it everywhere. "What can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus?" His love for you. Nothing. He has a hold of you forever.
Behold the Lamb of God
I have felt good. Better than I did. And as you well know, one of the low points of my teaching career was here when I couldn't finish, and I was a mess. But I feel pretty good. I even saw myself on the big screen and kind of admired that. I still have that little poodle look going in the back that I can't get rid of, but I look good. And you know what? I'm going to die. And to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. How do I know that? The love of Christ.
So here is the big idea for today. Behold the Lamb of God, who came to this world not just to be a great teacher, not so you could get a T-shirt with His picture on it, not so you could have some clever sayings — but that ought to touch your heart.
Jonathan Edwards and Religious Affection
I want to show you a picture of a man who was born in 1703 and died in 1758. His name is Jonathan Edwards, and he looks a little more welcoming on the screen than he might otherwise. He doesn't look like a riot. He doesn't look like somebody you're going to fill out your March Madness bracket with, cook brats, and hang out with. And yet many scholars — and by that I don't mean only Christians, I mean scholars and thinkers broadly — would say he is the greatest mind America ever produced.
In 1746, he wrote a treatise on religious affection. And what he said is my wish for you: that our forgiveness is understood both intellectually and emotionally. I am here to advocate that there should be times when you are overwhelmed by the idea of God's love for you.
SBC is a really good Bible-teaching church with a long heritage of that. But here can be the danger — this can become very academic. So I ask someone, how are you doing spiritually? And they tell me what they just read. Now, I am not saying shut off your brain. I study. I read. You study. I understand that. But if that is not connecting with your emotion, something is missing. There should be times when you are overwhelmed by the love of Christ. That is what it means when Scripture says the love of Christ compels us, drives us, moves us.
God loves you in spite of you, not because of you. And He has given you what you need more than anything else — forgiveness and eternal life. Isn't that amazing?
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for that awesome truth. God, thank You for forgiveness. Thank You for what we really need — that in spite of us, You forgive us. You declare us holy and righteous. And God, that kind of stumps us, because we know ourselves pretty well, and we are neither holy nor righteous. But it is not based in us. It is based in Christ, that Lamb who took our place, who died so we could have eternal life.
God, thank You for a place like SPC that teaches that, and a group of people who live that. And now, Father, we become extensions of Your forgiveness to the world around us — to those who are here today or at the other campuses, who may be thinking, I'm not sure exactly what just happened. What did he say? Will You give them the courage to talk to the people who invited them, or to the ones who will be at the front of the room after the service?
And for many of us — probably most of us — we know this truth. God, can You light our hearts on fire as though we were hearing this for the very first time? May we be overwhelmed by our sin, not to a point of despair, and not driven to try to fix it ourselves, but to accept the sacrifice You made, Jesus, so that we can have eternal life today. Thank You for Jesus. We pray to You in His name, amen.