Hallelujah!  Amen!  The Lord is good and His mercies endure forever.  Let’s turn to Isaiah 53, the passage that we so love, and it is full of the great truths of God’s mercy and His grace to us:  while we were sinners Christ died for us; amen?  The prophet spoke the heart of God here in this fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, and verse 4 says, “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.  But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  “The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  Aren’t you thankful for the great substitutionary work of Jesus?  That song from a number of years ago, “He paid a debt He did not owe; we owed a debt we could not pay”; amen?  And the thing we want to encourage ourselves in today, all of these years later, we still can’t pay it, we are debtors.  For the rest of your life, you are a debtor to Him who purchased you with His own blood.

So, all of our ambitions, all of our plans for the future…  When we love Him and appreciate that substitutionary work as Paul said in Corinthians, “Him having been made sin with our sin that we might be made righteous with His righteousness” (amen?), theologians call that the Great Exchange:  we are the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ.  Can you say, “Praise God” for that?  You know, as we see that word, having to deal with our righteousness, the Bible says that we are justified.  And that word “justified” literally talks about the fact that we’ve been rendered just or innocent, we’ve been declared to be righteous.  And so, we want to talk about that different aspect of what this word “justification” is trying to communicate to us:  we have been rendered innocent.  Can you say, “Praise God”?

Maybe you weren’t that innocent today.  How are you doing?  How did you do today?  “Well, man, I had an A+ today.”  Praise God.  What about yesterday?  So we’re walking through this life and most of religion evaluates itself by its performance, by its works, and in the mentality of so many people, most people on earth today believe that if there is, in fact, some kind of a god and there will be some kind of a day of reckoning, that we’re going to be dealt with according to our performance; and if we have more good than bad, then we’re going to make it, hoping that God grades on the curve, and that mentality is ingrained in the Adamic nature.  And because of that, we believe we can pay our way.  We believe that we are obligated to work as hard as we can to be right, to be morally right, to do unto others as they would do unto us and sometimes, we can pull that off.

The problem is, it’s not the visible, it’s the invisible that’s being judged; amen?  The heart—out of the abundance of the heart, the Bible says, proceed all of these different evils.  This heart of mine is deceitful, it’s desperately wicked and I don’t know it, and one of our problems comes when we begin to think we’re doing better.  And we get proud of ourselves, and in doing so, not realizing it, we become weaker the better we become in our eyes.  Anybody else, besides those two, who would like to say “amen”?  And so, we want to look at the fact that though we have been legally placed before God as righteous by the finished work of Jesus Christ, we are still that man that Paul spoke about: “In me, that is in my own abilities; in me, that is in the eternal evaluation, the spiritual evaluation; in me dwells no good thing”; amen?