Understanding Christ: Dignity, Eternity, and Purity

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Christ has become the source of an eternal salvation. Salvation from sin and guilt and condemnation and death and hell and Satan and life of meaningless labor. Christ is the source of Everlasting or Eternal salvation. It will never ever cease. We are now in Christ and will be forever saved from all these destructive forces. [00:02:41]

Dignity means worthiness of honor, and the best way to get it across to kids and adults is to say that dogs have more dignity than ants do, and the proof of that is that stores sell ant poison and not dog poison. If you kill all the dogs in your neighborhood, you'll be in big trouble because dogs have more dignity than ants do. [00:03:55]

You have eternity if you didn't have a beginning and won't have an ending. If you exist now and you're going to stop existing, you don't have eternity. If you didn't exist and then came into being like everything but God, you don't have eternity. If you never had a beginning and never have an ending, you have eternity. [00:05:46]

Jesus, through His suffering, remained pure, never succumbing to sin or self-pity. His purity is essential because it qualifies Him to be our perfect sacrifice, unblemished and wholly acceptable to God. This purity assures us of His sufficiency as our Savior and enables us to have a personal relationship with Him. [00:06:25]

The main point of the text is verse 9: Christ has become for us the source of Eternal, NeverEnding salvation from sin and guilt and shame and death and hell and Satan. The way He has become the source of Eternal salvation is by virtue of His dignity as the Son, His eternity as the priest like Melchisedek, and His purity in suffering. [00:07:08]

You need to know why Jesus is a suitable savior to die. We all love the death of Christ; it is our death, it is our life, it is our forgiveness, our acceptance, our foundation. It's everything to us. But you got to know why He was a suitable Savior, and if you don't know why, you're not going to be as confident in His salvation. [00:09:51]

Without knowing Jesus, you can't have a personal relationship with Him. Sometimes we have a kind of cloudy, airy, subjective notion of how to relate to Jesus as a person. The Bible and texts like this are written so that you can know the Dignity of the Son, the Eternity of the Son, and especially the purity of the tortured Son. [00:11:22]

The way a relationship happens is that you listen and you watch and you see where He's coming from and where He's going and what qualities He has and how strong He is and how long He lasts and how He responded to suffering and what He said and how He prayed and what He did in the midst of crisis. [00:12:29]

I get up Sunday mornings ready to get my heart ready to do this, and I say to the Lord as I open my Bible, "You living God, speak, because if you don't speak, I can't speak. If you don't assure me that I belong to you, if you don't assure me this morning that my sins are forgiven, if you don't establish my call again to the ministry of the word this morning and address me as a living person and relate to me in this little corner of my study, I cannot and will not go into that pulpit." [00:12:49]

I have a relationship with God. He talks to me in the Bible very powerfully because in Jesus Christ, you can know that what He addresses to His Covenant people, He addresses to you. You don't have to shut your Bible and ask for some vibrations. All the vibrations you want will come out of the Bible if the Holy Spirit is on you and on that reading of the Bible. [00:14:34]

When you struggle and you wrestle Friday and Saturday with about seven verses, you meet Him, you meet Him, and He speaks, and you know Him, and you relate to Him. I called Noel into the study yesterday about 3 in the afternoon. I was really struggling because I don't know if you diagrammed these verses. [00:15:18]

I could preach a sermon on every word in this text. This text could go for one year. What am I going to do? And you wait and you trust that having prayed and having worked as hard as you know how to work to determine the structure of the thought, you make choices, and you believe that God is in it. [00:17:00]

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