Jesus' Authority

Amen. That is awesome. The Lord is great, isn’t He? Man, don’t you just see God show up time and time again in your life? Man, when you’re in the midst of something frustrating, you’re just like feeling buried under the weight of whatever it is that you’re battling, and you see God come in and move in your situation. It might be in the middle of a health crisis. It might be in the middle of a family, just catastrophe and conflict or a personal need. And you see God just kind of flex on your situation. It’s like, man, God, You are so great. Man, I love to serve an awesome God like that. That’s the reason that we spend a portion of every single Sunday morning worship service just praying to Him. Man, because God is great. And we trust that Al, myself, the other leaders of the church, man, we could knock our heads together and come up with some okay ideas every now and again. But what we know is that God is great, and what He does is great. So what we’re interested in is not what me and Al and other folks here at Sauldam could do. What we are interested in is what God, our great Lord, can do.

So this month we are praying for our deacons here, as well as a staffing need. We want to thank God. So far, we’ve had four guys come forward and put their names forward to be considered as deacons as we go through this nomination cycle. I’m super grateful for that, super grateful for the work of the Holy Spirit to work in these guys’ hearts and in their minds. Yeah, and to give them that desire to come forward. So we just want to pray that God would give the church council a lot of discernment as we are working through this and that He would speak through the congregation and putting these men into place, just like in the book of Acts. But we’re also praying that God would provide for a staffing need for us. Sauldam, I’m so grateful for this. Our church life is just getting more complex than me and Al are able to manage, and that is a great thing. So we are looking to hire a part-time associate pastor, someone who would take over our student ministry. Becca, you’ve done an awesome job, but as we are coming to recognize, man, it’s time for Becca to hand that baton to somebody else. So we’re looking to hire somebody who would lead our student ministry and take over a couple other leadership responsibilities. And I trust that God already has that person picked out. We may know them. We may not know them. But God knows who that is. And God who exists outside of time, who does not look at the days and the weeks the way we do, God already has this person. So we’re just going to pray that God would reveal this person to us and that we would be unified as a church in hiring them and putting them into this position of leadership.

So what I want to invite you to do, if you’re comfortable, you grab a neighbor and pray out loud, asking God to continue to work in the potential deacons that are going to come into those leadership positions, and that God would also reveal who is going to join our church as a staff member. If you’re not comfortable praying out loud, that’s fine. All you need to do is close your eyes and bow your head, and people could be like, wow, that guy’s really spiritual, and they’re not going to bother you, okay? All right, so you take it away. I’ll put a bow on it here in a second. Thank y’all.

Holy Spirit, good morning. I want to say thank you for how You work. Thank you for what You are doing here at Sauldam Baptist Church. 185 years of incredible history and legacy that You’ve already accomplished here. Lord, from starting other churches to raising up pastors and missionaries, being a light for the gospel in this community and blessing folks, helping usher in hundreds and thousands of people into Your kingdom. God, thank you. I trust that the next 185 years, God, will be filled with more of the same. More churches being started. More pastors and missionaries being called out. More lost folks meeting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. More benevolence to our community. I trust that Your visions and Your dreams, Your aspirations for Sauldam far exceed ours. And You’re going to bring the right leaders and the right servants to this congregation for You to accomplish what You Want to do. Lord, I thank You for the men who have already put themselves forward to be considered as deacons. I trust that You’ve got the right guys already selected for that. Lord, would You give us eyes to recognize who they are? Lord, I trust, too, that You’ve already got the right associate pastor picked out for us. Father, would You introduce us to him? Would You help us to receive him well? Lord, over the next few minutes, as I share from Your Word, I’m also asking that You would help us to receive it well. Starting with me, Lord, would I receive this message? Not just deliver it, please. God, I pray that we would all walk out of here loving You more, living a little bit more like You, treasuring Jesus Christ even more deeply. For anybody in the room who doesn’t know You as Lord and Savior yet, would You please use these next few moments to bring their soul to life? And for the people in here who do know You, Jesus, as Lord and Savior, would You please bring them a little further along in their journey with You? Help them understand one more step of faith to take, one more step of devotion and discipleship unto their Master. Please. Holy Spirit, for anything I say that’s not true, that’s not helpful, that’s not pure, I pray that it would just pass right through our ears undetected. But for anything that is good, for anything that is right, anything that is loving, anything that is pure, would You let it be? Just let it stick. It would change us just a little bit more. Great are You, Lord. You are worthy of glory and praise. It’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.

Well, if you have your copy of the Bible, go ahead and open up to John chapter 5, verses 17 through 30. John chapter 5, verses 17 through 30. I want to kind of put you in the text. Imagine that you live in Jerusalem. It is A.D. 25, 28 or so. You get up every morning, and your first waking conscience thought is, how in the world can I please the God of the universe today? What sort of sacrifice does God want from me today? How can I obey Him today? How can I treasure His Word today? And you’ve gotten up, and it’s the Sabbath day. Your mom, your grandma, your aunt, all of your female family members, they spent all of last night preparing a bunch of food. Y’all sat around the fire telling stories of God’s great works. You know, obviously, the story of God calling Abraham and making your tribe out of nothing, and then you proceed to the story of the Exodus, where your people were trapped in bondage to the Egyptians, and God freed y’all through the ministry and leadership of Moses, and He planted you in the promised land. You remember the awful times where Solomon’s sons were fighting and bickering, and where their foolishness and their sin actually tore the kingdom of Israel apart, and how God disciplined your people by sending your people to Assyria and to Babylon. And ultimately, Persia came in and resettled you guys. And now, and now here you are again, a few generations back in the land. And you’ve determined we’re not having that again. We are not going to be in this place where God is so frustrated and fed up with our sin that He has to literally evict us from the promised land and send us to foreign nations again. We will never do that again. Whatever God says, we are going to do. We are going to obey these rules. So, out of this heart of deep devotion and this fear of consequence, you say, you know what? It’s not enough that God would have 600 and some odd rules. Let’s create our own rules so that we, if we break our own rules, maybe we’ll still be protected from breaking God’s rules over there. So, that’s how you live your life. You’re following all these extra rules to make sure that you don’t break God’s big rules. Again, it’s the Sabbath. You’ve gone to the temple to hear the reading from the Old Testament. You’ve gone to hear the rabbis explain and hear them talk about what God has done. You’ve gone to sing a couple of the Psalms, man, the Psalms of David. They can’t be topped, can they? But then there’s some commotion over off the side where the room of the temple opens up to the little courtyard where there’s these pools. You know, all the poor people gather there, all the invalids, the Disabled people, the people just looking for some handouts. You know, you pass by them, you give them a couple coins when you’ve got some change to spare. There’s some commotion starting up. There’s a guy walking. Not a big deal. But he’s carrying his bed mat. And you remember, hold on, you’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to carry anything from one place to another on the Sabbath. That’s one of the big rules that we created to make sure that we don’t break God’s real rules. And all these other rabbis are gathering around him saying, “Hold on, hold on, man. You can’t be doing that here. You can’t be moving your bed mat from one place to another.” He’s like, “Hey, man, I’m just obeying the—I’m just obeying the guy that told me to do this. Don’t you recognize me? I’m the one—I used to lay by those pools over there waiting for a healing. Remember, I’ve been there for 38 years. You know who I am. Come on, I’m John. You’re Samuel. Come on, man. We know each other.” This guy finds Jesus in the crowd and says, “Him. That’s the one that did it. That’s the one that told me to pick up my mat and walk. If you’re upset with me, you just take it up with Him. I’m just obeying His orders. I’m going to go on home.”

That’s the scene. Jesus has come into Jerusalem, come into the temple, healed a man who’s been disabled all of his life, broken some of the big rules. What would give Jesus the authority to do this? Jesus makes His defense and He says this in chapter 5, verse 17: “My Father is still working, and I’m working also.” What? Verse 18: “This is why the Jews began trying all the more to kill Jesus. Not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal to God.”

So that’s where we are. There’s this guy named Jesus traveling around, teaching this new law with authority, unlike anybody else, doing these miracles unlike anybody else. But the way He’s doing them, man, you are not so confident about because He keeps breaking the rules, including the rules about the Sabbath. Why can Jesus do this? Why can Jesus walk into the temple and start breaking the rules? It’s because He says, “My Father is still working and I am working also.” In fact, go down to verse 23. Jesus adds on: “Anyone who does not honor Me, the Son, does not honor the Father who sent Him.”

The Jews understand what Jesus is doing. The Jews understand that Jesus is saying He is equal to God. Bingo. Another big rule broken, Pam. God Himself says, “Listen, Israel, the Lord is one. The Lord is your God. You shall have no other gods besides Him.” Jesus comes on the scene, says, “I am God.” What would give Jesus the audacity to do that? In a few moments, we’ll look at four equalities that Jesus gives between Himself and the Father, and what we ought to do with that.

But I want to take a few moments before we get to any of that. And I want to hone in on this word out of verse 23. And we’ll read it all in a second. But in verse 23, Jesus says, “Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.” Honor is a funny word. It’s only used 21 times in the entire New Testament. Multiple of those uses happen here in this chapter. To honor somebody is to actively respect and esteem them, is to give them the presence and the weights that they deserve. It is honestly to kind of orient your life around them.

We have a trampoline, and we like to—I like to go and play with the kids on the trampoline. And something I’ve noticed about it is: if I am the heaviest object on the trampoline, I kind of create my own little gravitational pull. And for some reason, my gravitational pool, Sam, gets heavier and heavier every year. I don’t really understand what’s going on there. And whenever, like, the kids roll a ball on the trampoline, it tends to come and rest beside me. I have become what is honored on the trampoline. Make sense? When we honor somebody, it’s like they are the heaviest thing on the trampoline of our life. We just start gravitating around them, we orient toward them. Jesus says, anyone who does not orient toward Me is not orienting toward the Father. Anyone who does not respect Me is not respecting the Father. Anybody Who does not actively esteem Me does not actively esteem the Father.

For us, in 2026, Charleston, South Carolina, the idea of honor is kind of interesting. We do not grow up, strictly speaking, in a culture that values honor and shame above all else. We have grown up in a culture that values guilt and innocence above all else. Whenever somebody comes at you and you say, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I haven’t broken the rules. I am innocent until proven guilty.” That’s how we operate in America. That’s how we typically think. For Jesus, 2,000 years ago in Israel, and for many people around the world still today, they operate according to honor and shame. So it’s less about are you keeping and obeying all the rules? It’s more about are you actively esteeming and respecting somebody through how you live. Jesus understood if people are not actively esteeming and respecting Jesus, they cannot be actively esteeming and respecting the Father.

Honor in that time can be ascribed, which means given to somebody, or it can be acquired. I can give my children honor if I live honorably myself and they are simply my kids. They grow up under the honor that I have earned for them. Or my kids can go and make incredible achievements in life, and they can earn their own honor. And whenever you honor somebody, typically you expect them to reciprocate that back to you through their own helping to you, through their own financial gifts. So, oftentimes, in the ancient Near East culture or Greco-Roman society, which is what Jesus was in, whenever there was someone in charge, someone who lived with honor, people would orient around them and people would do their bidding so that that important person would protect them through their own status, their own prestige, their own wealth. Are we starting to get the idea of honor?

We typically dishonor God in three main ways. I want to give this to you. And hey, when I say this, this is the part of the sermon I’m nervous about. I should offend everybody in the room with one of these three things. So, for the next five or so minutes, you should not like me. Hopefully, we get through on the other end, and you think I’m okay. We typically dishonor God in three main ways.

The first is outright disobedience. Anyone else ever opened up the Bible and it’s super clear: it tells you to do something, and you just choose not to do it. Am I the only person that’s ever done that? Man, that’s dishonoring God. Like when the God, when the Bible tells us to love our enemies and I choose to hate my enemy instead, I’ve dishonored God. When the Bible tells me to respect my marriage and only have eyes for Becca and I lust after another woman, I have dishonored God. When the Bible commands us to do things and we go against it, we just choose to not obey, we have dishonored God. We have said, God is not worthy of respect. God is not worthy of my esteem. God is not worthy of me following Him. That’s what we’ve done. When we open the Bible and outright disobey it, we are dishonoring the God of the universe.

Here’s the second way we dishonor God: misplaced allegiance. You see, in that time, to honor somebody was to pledge allegiance to them. It was to say, you are in charge of me. That’s what this was. God is the King of kings. He is the Lord of lords. Is not God great and worthy of praise? Is God not the King over all things? Is God not the Ruler over all rulers? Yet, whenever we put God beside anything, or better yet, whenever we raise anything beside God in terms of importance, we have dishonored Him. This is the part that makes me really nervous. I’ve got to say this because no one else will tell you this. I love the country I live in. I love the freedoms afforded to me by the Constitution. I love being in America. But anytime we bring anything up beside God as something else that we also say is our ruler, our authority source, we’re actually dishonoring God. This is where you’re not supposed to like me very much. Thank you. Who said that? You’re my friend. I don’t know your name. Thank you. Again, that is not to denigrate our country. That is not to say that America isn’t awesome. It is. I love our country. I love raising our kids to love our country. I love seeing our country, man, whoop people at the Olympics. I love this stuff. I want what’s Good for our country. I’m going to vote on Tuesday. I’m going to vote in the best interest of our country. But I know this: one day, America will end. God’s kingdom will not. As great as America is, it is but a tool in God’s hand to accomplish His purposes in the world. And whenever we take the tools of God and put it up beside the person of God, God says, “Hold on now. That tool’s good, but it’s not Me.” There will come a time for you when you will have to decide: is your ultimate allegiance to your marriage, to your job, to a friend, or to your country, or to America, or—sorry—to God. You’ll have to decide which one you go with. When we live with ultimate allegiance to anything but God, we have dishonored God.

The final way we dishonor God—for everybody else I haven’t hurt yet—is through our religious hypocrisy. That was the Pharisees. Man, they loved those rules, Pam. Goodness gracious, they loved all those rules to protect them from breaking the big ones. Yet God would send His prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. He would send John the Baptist. He would send Jesus Christ to say, “These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.” They’re doing so well obeying all these rules. Man, they tithe. They even tithe their spices. Man, we bought cinnamon this past week. I know that because we use it every Saturday morning for those pancakes I told you about last Sunday. We bought cinnamon. You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t take 10% off the top, put it in a little baggie, and drop it in the offering plate this morning. That’s what the Pharisees were doing—buying their cinnamon, all their stuff, whatever. Man, they were so good at obeying the rules, but their hearts, Mary Lou, were so far from God. Jesus said, “God doesn’t want your hypocrisy.” And you know what? Neither does your neighbor. Neither does the lost cashier at Publix that you want to invite to church. She doesn’t need your hypocrisy. Your family member who also grew up in church, they don’t need your hypocrisy. What they need is you to love God more than anything else and for you to be honest about your failures at loving Him.

We dishonor God when we disobey Him, when our allegiance is to anything but Him, and when we are hypocritical towards Him. To honor Jesus is to recognize Jesus’ supreme worth and His rightful authority, to give Him the allegiance He deserves and to live in a way that reflects His greatness, even when doing so costs us the approval of others.

So, how can we honor Christ? Man, if you’re a follower of Jesus in the room, please listen up. One of the ways you can honor Christ is to read His Word and do what it says. Man, wherever you are right now in terms of reading the Bible, I just want you to take one more step toward doing this. Please develop a daily habit of getting in this Word and be found a doer, not a hearer only. Something that I’ve learned over the past couple years through this Lifeway study—Lifeway is an organization from the Southern Baptist Convention, whom we are joyfully a part of—is that when somebody intentionally reads the Bible four times a week, their life starts to change. Man, they become more kind, they become more loving, they become more pure, they become more generous, more gracious. They’re more likely to bring up Jesus with their coworkers and their family members. They’re less likely to take their lives off the rails through substance abuse and social dysfunction. Man, when you get into the Bible, you will see that this has the effect of filling your life with God’s life and straightening out your paths. You can honor Jesus by this week—set a timer on your phone at a time that makes sense for you and just put “read the Bible.” And if nothing else, just reread the text I’m about to preach from. And you will honor Christ. Read the Bible and obey what it says.

The second way you can honor Jesus is that when following Jesus tests your allegiances, go with Jesus. Side with Jesus. Man, when it comes to a point where you have to decide, am I going to protect my social clout or am I going to follow Jesus? Am I going to keep all of my money or am I going to tithe and follow Jesus? Am I going to keep my mouth closed and not be thought of weird or am I’m going to bring up Jesus. Every chance you have for those conflict moments, side with Jesus. Go ahead and settle it in your heart and in your mind right now: Jesus is number one. Go ahead and settle it, and every day settle it again. When you wake up, you say, “Jesus, You are number one.” When you go to bed, you say, “Jesus, You are number one.” When you are going across the way, you say, “Jesus is number one.” When you’re taking your kids to school, you tell them, “Jesus is number one in our house.” When you come back from work at the end of the day, you say, “Jesus is number one.” When you are making that business deal and you could—man, you could cheat that client into giving you more money, or you could be honest to them—you tell yourself, “Jesus is number one.” Settle it. There can only be one number one: Jesus or something else. And Jesus tells us, anybody that is ashamed of Him in this life, Jesus will be ashamed of them in the judgment to come. Who’s number one? Man, there’s a room full of, I think, believers in Jesus Christ. Who is number one? Let’s live like it. When you get to the fork in the road of “Jesus is number one” or something else, may you choose Jesus. And you go ahead and settle it in your mind right now.

The third way you can honor Christ this week is to refuse to practice loveless religion. I put it this way: there’s enough hypocrites in the church today; it doesn’t need one more. If you don’t plan to love Jesus as you follow the commands of Jesus, stop trying to follow Him. You’re just bringing shame onto the name of Jesus Christ. Just stop. Man, I got to this place in my life as a 15-year-old. I had been baptized when I was eight, and ever since then had been following my own way, getting as deep into sexual sin as I possibly could, and had a happy accomplice. But the whole time I thought I was a Christian because I had been baptized. I had done the ceremony. I had gotten my get-out-of-hell-free card. I had done the thing. And I had a good buddy that loved me enough to tell me, “Jeremy, you can follow Jesus or you can live for the world, but don’t you dare try to do both.” And God used him to stab my soul with the good news of God’s grace: that He sent Jesus Christ to die for me so that I could be transformed into a new creation, that I could actually love God. Man, God has sent His Son for you to rescue you from your hypocrisy, to rescue you from your sin, to rescue you from your misplaced allegiance. Who’s number one for you? Jesus said, “I am number one.” There’s four reasons why.

Jesus responded to them, “My Father is still working, and I’m working also.” This is why the Jews began trying all the more to kill Him—not because, or not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal to God. Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on His own, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things. The Father loves the Son. He shows Him everything He’s doing. And He will show Him greater works than these so that you will be amazed. And just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom He wants. The Father, in fact, judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all people may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.”

Jesus shows four equalities. If you’re a note-taker, write these down. Jesus shows four equalities between Him and the heavenly Father. The first one is this: Jesus does the same things as the Father. Man, if you watch my kids, you will see that they do similar things to me and Becca. They—man, like our nature, our mannerisms have been imprinted on them. Jesus is the Son of God, and He does the same things as the Father. The Father and the Son are totally united in their purpose and their activity. So what we see the Father doing in the Old Testament, Jesus is just doing those same things. And even live in the ministry and The life of Jesus, He, through His man, His divine awareness of the work of the Father, He would just go find what the Father is doing supernaturally and specially and go join the Father in it. Jesus is equal to God because they do the same thing.

The second reason Jesus is equal to God the Father is because the Father loves Jesus and discloses everything to Him. Disclose. It’s this idea of intentionally revealing, like setting up a presentation for the middle school science fair and running the teachers through it. Revealing, displaying, explaining, opening the curtains on. The Father so deeply loves the Son that He was doing this for the Son. There is this perfect mutual love between the Father and between the Son. And it is shown through this intentional insight from the Father to the Son. Jesus says, “I am equal to Him because everything He knows, I am knowing. He loves me perfectly, and I love Him perfectly.”

The third equality: the Father gives life, so does Jesus. It’s really clear in the Old Testament there is one life giver. Started at creation where God would give life to the cosmos by speaking. Then He would look at Adam and Eve and He would make them come alive. He would look at Abraham and He would birth a nation through a single man and his wife who were too old to be able to have kids. And then He would look at these people of Israel, and every time they would choose the deadness of their sin, He would give them life by bringing them back to Himself. And in the ministry of Jesus Christ, very literally, Jesus would look at dead things and dead people and call them to life. In the same way that the Father is life and gives life, the Son is equal to Him because Jesus is life and gives life. The Father and the Son are equal because they both have life in and of themselves. And the coolest thing that I know about God is that God, while He could have hoarded life to Himself, freely gives life. I mean, He bestows life, He just pours life, He’s just shoveling life at us, trying to bury us in life.

The fourth equality is that Jesus judges in the Father’s place. Verse 22 and 23, the Father, in fact, judges no one. He’s given, He has granted, He has given the permission of judgment to the Son. When you die and you appear before God for judgment, you won’t appear before the Father. You’ll appear before the Son. And Jesus will look at you. Say, “Ed, did you honor me before men? Becky, did you choose my way when you could have chosen yours? Philip, did you live for me or did you choose me for me?” You’re going to appear before Jesus one day and have to answer that question. It’s extremely sobering for me and now. We’re going to appear before God one day and have to give a testimony for how we’ve pastored y’all. The things we allowed, the things that we did, the things that we said, the things we didn’t say, it’s terrifying, right? The Father has granted this judgment to the Son. That’s the final equality between the two.

So if I could give you a sermon in a sentence, I’m going to start wrapping up here. It’s this: Honor Christ and gain eternal life and perfect freedom. If you honor Christ, then you will gain eternal life and perfect freedom. I’ll say it one more time. If you honor Christ, then you will gain eternal life and perfect freedom. “Truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life and will not come under judgment but has passed from death to life. Truly, I tell you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God,” i.e., that’s my voice, “and those who hear will live. For just as the Father has life in Himself, so also He has granted to the Son to have life in Himself.” Verse 27, “He has granted Him the right to pass judgment because He is the Son of Man. Don’t be amazed at this, because a time is coming when all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come out. Those who have done good things to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked things to the resurrection of condemnation. I can do nothing on my own,” Jesus says. “I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will, but”

The will of Him who sent me. If you honor Jesus Christ the way He deserves, if you live with Him in first place, if He is the biggest voice in your life, if He is what you orient around, if He is who you esteem and respect and live for, He will grant you eternal life and perfect freedom.

Man, we are looking for life in all the wrong places. Trying to have a perfect family, trying to make all the money and buy all the toys, living for control and power over people, living for comfort or approval, trying to find life in drugs or alcohol, trying to find life through TV or social media, trying to find life through friendships, may even trying to find life through religious activity. None of this gives life because none of this is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only one who can give us life, and He loves to give us abundant life. He loves to resurrect souls right now and to resurrect our bodies on a day that the Father has appointed.

See, only Jesus can give you eternal life because only He has life in Himself. Jesus is life. His life is the light of men, and His life is truly eternal, having no beginning and no end. Jesus gives life to all who embrace Him, who honor Him, who love Him. And this eternal life is available to anyone who would call on Jesus for the forgiveness of their sin and the ransom of their souls.

Friend, you do not have to wallow in the mud of this world or your sin or your religious performance. You don’t have to persist in eternal death today and into eternity. You don’t have to do that. I mean, you can have life right now, life that will never be taken away from you. You can have that right now. Man, stop looking for life in boyfriends and girlfriends and careers and social media. Stop living or looking for life in your 401k or the next meal. Stop looking for life in these things. Look to Jesus. He is life.

And not only does Jesus offer life, He offers us perfect freedom. The one who has the power to raise dead souls to life, who can raise dead bodies to life, has the power and the authority to declare even the guiltiest lawbreaker, the grossest sinner, completely free and innocent. Hear this: There is no sin, mistake, failure, broken law, or moral misstep that the blood of Christ can’t wash you of.

In fact, let’s take this seriously and personally. Please. Everybody, bow your heads and close your eyes. I’m not going to goat you into anything for our visitors. You’re not going to out yourself. Nothing like that. I just want you to participate, okay? Close your eyes, bow your heads. What’s that deepest, darkest secret that you’re not going to tell anybody? What’s that biggest failure you committed? You’re still ashamed of. What’s that big mess up that you’re still trying to cover for that you want freedom from? Picture yourself before a holy, perfect God. He’s high and exalted on His throne. He’s pure. He’s lovely. He’s never done anything wrong. And that mistake that’s in your mind is written across your forehead. And standing between you and God is your mistake, your failure. What can wash you of that? What can cleanse you? What can erase that guilty record? What can take away that sin? Who is the one that can declare you innocent? It’s not you. It’s not your kids. It’s not me. It is Jesus Christ.

Man, do you believe that Jesus can declare you innocent of that deepest, darkest, grossest part of you? Because He can. He can. He can come up to you. You are sitting in the defendant’s booth of that holy courtroom before a holy God. And Jesus, remember, Jesus is the judge. He is the one high and lifted up. He is the one that’s always been perfect. And Jesus gets out of His judge’s bench. He brings His gavel to your defendant’s table. He comes up right next to you and He bangs that gavel: innocent. And you can look at me as Jesus is looking at you and He says, “You are washed clean. That mistake and that failure do not have to loom over you anymore. You’re free. You’re perfectly free.” That’s what Jesus wants to do for you. If you would but honor Him. If you would but recognize that He is number one. He would take that grossest part of you that you will never tell me and make it like it never happened. He can excavate the soil of your soul and find that Thing and throw it away. How? It’s because Jesus, in His incredible glory and His holiness, and His perfection, did not stay in heaven looking at us in anger or derision. But Jesus left His throne and He said, “Oh, yeah, I know what Jeremy’s going to do. That guy’s messed up. He is an idiot. But I love him. And where every time he fails, I’m going to give him My perfection. And every time he dirties up the shirt of his soul, and there’s this crud all over him, I’m going to pour My blood out to wash that. So that when I look at him, I see a spotless child of Mine.”