Amen. Well, good morning church. How is everybody? Hey, man.
Good. This series, exchange life. We take off the X. Has it changed your life?
No? All right. Well, if it had, you didn't go back and listen because we were saying some things that should change your life, right? All right.
So open your Bibles to Isaiah 53. We're going to go to verse 10, but we're going to just hold your place there because I'm going to talk about a few other things first. But Isaiah 53 tends where we're going to take the text from today. But I want to start off with this.
Second Peter, or second Peter one verse three says this, as his divine power has given us everything that we need for life and godliness, everything that we need. So there is nothing that we need more in our life. You know, I know every day you're like, pan, I just wish I had another hour or I just wish, you know, we had another day in the week or I just wish I had more of this or more of that. God has given us everything that we need for life and for godliness.
Amen? Do you believe that? Come on, everything that we need. So through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, we have been given everything we need to be successful in life and to bring honor and glory to God the Father, everything that we need.
It is finished. We've been talking about the last words of Christ said on the cross, right? It is finished. To tell a style is that word is that Greek word that he used as he was hanging on the cross.
And you know, I refuse to believe that Jesus went out with a whimper, right? I don't believe that he was dying and he just kind of barely lifted his head and said, you know, to tell us die. I don't believe that's how it happened. Because he just in what he was doing on the cross, he gave the world the biggest victory that has ever received ever.
Amen? So when he was hanging there on the cross, I fully believe he shouted to tell us die. Come on, it is finished. It's completely complete.
It's perfectly perfect. I've done exactly what God the Father sent me here to do. I've come to come to achieve victory for you and I have done it. It is finished.
That's what Jesus, that's the way Jesus went out. Amen? So in this exchange, we're talking about these nine different exchanges. I want to just kind of sum it up into one big statement.
This is what's happening when Jesus Christ died on the cross. We all say, yes, he died for our sins. Yes, he did, but he died for much, much more than just our sins. Amen?
So this, I want to read this to you, read along with me. And it says, this is the exchanges all wrapped up into one statement. All the evil, say it all the evil, all the evil due to come on us because of our rebellion came on Jesus so that all of the good, say all of the good, all of the good that was due to Jesus because of his sinless obedience would become available to us. Oh, that's good news.
Amen? All of our evil, all of our sinfulness, all of our filth, all of the dirtiness that is us before Jesus was put on Jesus. So that we could get everything good that was meant for him. That's good, amen?
That's good news. So nine very distinct, very different, very incredible exchanges happened on the cross. And that's what this series is all about. In week one, we learned that Jesus was punished so that we could be forgiven.
Who loves the forgiveness that God has given to them? Come on, amen? The next week, we learned that Jesus died our death so that we might share his life. And then last week, Patrick, Chris shared with us about how our old man dies in Jesus so that the new man may live in us.
And you know, one of the questions that I've been asked is, you know, they keep saying the word might. So this might happen. You know, Jesus died so that we might have. And can I tell you something?
It's not might as in, well, I don't know, it might happen to me. It might not. I mean, if I do this, it could. The only reason there's a might is because you have a choice.
And so if you don't choose to believe what God says about you, if you don't choose to believe what Jesus died to give you, then you probably might not get it. Amen? That's the might. It's up to us.
But if we choose to believe and we believe who God says we are and we believe in the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross, I promise you, every single one of these exchanges is happening in your life. Amen? Amen. So come on, let me say the Isaiah 53 verse 10.
And this is what it says. It says, yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days. And the will in some versions of the Bible say his pleasure, the will or the pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
So exchange number four today. This is what it is very simply that Jesus was made sin so that we may be made righteous. Come on. Come on.
Just to show hands, how many of you are born again? Okay, that's good. Those of you who aren't raising your hand, we can talk later, right? You need to be born again.
Okay. So those of you who are born again, how many of you are righteous? Okay, not as many hands, but that's okay. By the end of the day, we're going to know that you're righteous.
Amen. And you will raise your hand. It should shoot up every single time. You shouldn't question it.
You shouldn't ask. You shouldn't think what did I do this week? It doesn't matter. You're righteous.
Amen. We're going to cover that. So Father God sent his one and only perfect son to live on this earth and to die so that you and I would be rid of sin in our life and that you and I could become righteous. Let that sink in a minute.
He said it's only son, his perfect son, so that we could become righteous. There's a commentary, David Guzik, he says this about Isaiah 53 10. He said, Jesus was no victim of circumstance or at the mercy of political or military power. It was get this.
This is powerful. It was the planned ordained work of the Lord God prophesied by Isaiah hundreds of years before it happened. This was God's victory, not Satan's or man's triumph. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
The Father and the Son worked together at the cross. Though Jesus was treated as if he were an enemy of God, he was not. Even as Jesus was punished as if he were a sinner, he was performing the most holy service to God the Father ever offered. This is why Isaiah can say, yet it please the Lord to crush him.
In and of itself, the suffering of the Son did not please the Father, but as it accomplished the work of reconciling the world to himself, it was completely pleasing to God the Father. He wasn't happy that Jesus was being beat. He wasn't happy that Jesus was dying on the cross. He did not enjoy the suffering of God, I mean of Jesus, but he was extremely happy.
It was pleasing to God that what Jesus was going through was going to accomplish what it was for you and I. Oh, come on. Why was Jesus made sin on the cross? Why was this completely pleasing to God?
Because he loves us that much. He loves you so much and he so desires to have a relationship with you. Outside of Jesus Christ, it's not possible because we're sinners, amen? But because of Jesus Christ, we can now have a relationship with God the Father.
We can't approach his throne boldly like it says, and we are no longer sinners, amen? Come on, do we sin? Yes, but we're not sinners. Well, how does that doesn't make any sense?
Yeah, it makes perfect sense, because Jesus died to take the penalty for that sin. That's not just a penalty, but the sin itself. So that we wouldn't have to suffer the consequences. So when God looks at you, he doesn't look at you as a sinner.
He looks at you as perfect and holy and righteous. Amen? Oh, come on. Jesus, we're going to look at two key points out of this out of Isaiah 53 verse 10.
Two key points. And the first one is this. Jesus was made sin. Jesus was made sin.
See, in the Old Testament sacrificial system, we all know about it, right? That existed under the Old Covenant. We understand that the Old Covenant system was just a type and shadow of what was to come and what Jesus would fulfill in the imperfection in the new covenant. So the Old Covenant system worked like this.
If you and I sinned, there were very specific instructions on what was to happen when we sinned. So when we sinned, we would take the appropriate animal. It could be a bull. It could be a bird.
It could be a goat. It could be a lamb, whatever. We took that animal and we took it to the temple and we met with the priests and we confessed our sin to the priest. And he would hold that animal and we would lay our hands on that animal and it would transfer your sin to that animal.
Somebody has to pay the price, right? So that's where the sacrifice happened. The priest would sacrifice the animal because the penalty for your sin was exacted on that animal. And that is a picture of what Jesus Christ did for you and I.
That's exactly what he did on the cross. So all of our sins, all of your sins, all of my sins, all of each and every one of our sins, Jesus paid the price on the cross. I want you to think about this. Think about Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, perfect, no sin, purer without blemish, without staying.
He was holy. He was pure. He was holy to God. He was white as snow.
Think about that Jesus hanging on the cross. And now I want you to think about this. Just picture the cross standing right here in the middle of the room. And what if I asked all of you to just line up, just line up right here, go around the sanctuary, go out the doors, however long the line has to be.
And each one of you come up here and lay your hands on the head of Jesus Christ and give him your sin. Transfer your sin to him. That's what happened. That's spiritually what happened at the cross.
And listen, not just my sin, not just your sin sitting here in this room. They estimate that 117 billion people have lived on planet earth since Adam. And that number is growing. So 117 billion people lined up.
That's a long line. Somebody chapped GPT after the first service. And they told me that it said if 117 billion people were lined up shoulder to shoulder, it would circle the earth 133 times. How they figured that?
I don't know. But hey, that's what chapped GPT is for, right? So 133 million times people are circling the earth, right? And each one of them come to Jesus Christ and lay their hands on his head and transfer their sin.
All of their sin. Every single person. And not just 117 billion that have lived, but have remaining more are going to live until the day Jesus comes back, transfer their sins too. That's what happened to Jesus.
So he willingly hanging on the cross, let you lay your hands on his head. And he said, you know what, I'll take that. I'll take that sin. And I'll take your sin.
And I'll take your sin. And I'll take your sin. And I'll take your sin. And I'll take that sin.
You're hiding from me that you think I don't even know about. I'll take that one too. I'm going to take everybody's sin. So that no one has to suffer with sin anymore.
Not the consequences. Come on. We don't even have to sin. But as wonderful as that truth is, we have to remember this.
We cannot miss this because this will determine how frustrated a Christian life you will live or how glorious a Christian life that you will live. You have to remember that Jesus did not just simply take his, our sins upon himself. He became sin. He was made sin.
He didn't just take them upon him and put them on like a robe so that he could take them back off. The Bible tells us it was so much more than that. The Bible tells us that he became sin. Everybody say that.
Became sin. Jesus became sin. He was made sin. You got it?
I don't think you do. I'm going to beat this dead horse just in case you don't know. So we're going to be here a while. Amen?
All right. So this is extremely important for us to get. Okay. And I'm going to explain why.
He was made sin. And I'm driving this point home because you have to understand that the exchange is always perfect. The exchange that Jesus made when he took our sin and he took it perfectly. In other words, there's none left behind.
We don't have any left. Amen. When you gave your life to the Lord and you said, I accept your sacrifice. I accept what you did on the cross.
You gave him all of your sin. So you guess how much then you have left? None. Even if you sinned on the way to church this morning.
Guess what? No sin. Oh, come on. Do you believe that?
Come on. No sin. The exchange is always perfect. So he took all of our sin and gave us all of his righteousness.
Oh, wow. He became sin. And you and I became righteous. Oh, you got to get that.
I don't think you I don't think a lot of you did. Or maybe you're just kind of stunned that. Oh my gosh, this really did happen. Maybe that's why it's so quiet.
He became sin so that we could become righteous and look a lot of Christians have lived their life looking at this the wrong way. And that's the problem. We look at it and we think he put a robe of righteousness on me. And listen, that is scriptural.
We'll talk about that in a little bit. That is absolutely scriptural. But what it is not is this robe of righteousness covering up our filth covering up our mess covering up how dirty that we are. That is not what it is.
That is not what scripture says happened. Scripture says something much, much more wonderful, much more much better for us than just covering up our sin. He became sin. And in the exchange, you and I became righteous.
Oh, come on. He became sin. And we became righteous. He was made sin.
And we were made righteous. I know some of you are like, okay, I got it. Let's move on. No, I don't think we got it yet.
I'm going to beat it a little bit longer, right? There was a worship song back in the 80s and it said in the song, I'm covered over with the robe of righteousness that Jesus gives to me. And that is scripture. Like I said, there are scriptures that talk about us being given this robe of righteousness.
But there are other scriptures that give us much more detail and are much better for us. And then things that we need to hold on to and get and understand is that we weren't just given a robe of righteousness. We were made righteous inside and out. That robe doesn't cover anything other than the rest of our righteousness.
Amen. We need the whole story. We need to understand that we actually became righteous inside and out. Come on, I became righteous.
You became righteous. Are you getting it? How many in here are righteous? Still not all the hands.
We're not done yet. Come on, I haven't convinced you yet. Come on, it's not just a robe that you put on when you go to life group on Wednesday night. Come on, you don't just get the robe out, put it on.
Say, I'm going to act righteous because I'm going to be around my Christian brothers and sisters. They need to see that I got my stuff together. That's not the robe. We don't put that on.
You don't put your robe on before you come to church on Sunday. I got to act righteous. I got to see people got to see me as righteous. Come on, whether you have the robe on or not, you're righteous.
Come on, it's not something that's on you. It's in you. Oh, we got to get this church. Second Corinthians 5, 21 said, God made him who had no sin.
That's Jesus. He made him who had no sin to be sinned for us so that in him, in him, we might become the righteousness of God. Come on, God made him sin so that in the exchange, you and I could be made righteous. Come on, he became sin.
Think about that. He became sin. Romans 5, 19 says, for justice, through one man's disobedience, that's Adam. Many were made sinners.
That was you and I before, right? So also through one man's obedience, that's Jesus Christ. After you accept him, many will be made righteous. Come on, you know what?
It's not just any old form of righteousness. It's the very righteousness of God himself. Wow. He didn't give us a mini version of righteousness, some watered down version of that.
He took all of our sin. It's nasty and filthy and dirty as it was. You know what? He took all of it.
And in return, we got all of his righteousness, of his purity and his holiness. Come on, we became it. We don't just wear it. We became it.
We were made righteous. If you're born again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is who you are. Oh, come on. If you're living in any way, not believing that you're righteous or not living righteously, can I tell you something, you're living something less than what God would have you live?
Come on, you're not living by who you are. You're living by who you believe or think you might be. Oh, come on. Why don't feel righteous?
That's the problem. You don't have to feel it. Amen? We still mess up.
We're not being righteous. Doesn't mean we're perfect. Amen? Come on.
If you go by feelings, rather than what God's word says about you, then you're going to struggle and be frustrated in your Christian walk. Maybe when you talk about what righteousness is. How about that? What is righteousness?
What does it mean to be righteous? It means simply this, that we are in right standing before God. And can I tell you something? We didn't get that way because of who we are and how good we are and how perfect we are.
We got that way in one way and that's Jesus Christ dying on the cross and making this exchange for you and I. That is it. So because of Jesus, we are now right standing before God. We are right standing.
We have been acquitted of all of our sins. No guilt, no shame. Oh, come on. We should be like waving hankies and running around the room and right?
That is good news. When you know that you know that you are righteous that way, the way God sees you, the way God made you, the way Jesus died for you to become, we can stand before God in confidence without fear of judgment. Come on. We can go right before God and say, you know what?
I messed up again. I know, but I am righteous and I want to be better. I want to be more like Jesus Christ. First John 1, 9 says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from some unrighteousness.
Is that what it says? No. What does it say? All unrighteousness.
You know what? If he purified us from all unrighteousness, how much unrighteousness do you have left? None. That makes you righteous.
If you have no unrighteousness, you have to be righteous, right? Oh, come on. If the Word of God is true, and it is, if there is any doubt in your mind, if the Word of God is true, then you have no unrighteousness left in your life. You are as righteous as Jesus himself.
That's for me. No. It's the Word of God. God looks at you and he says, that's my righteous son.
That's my righteous daughter. Come on. It's a nasty, legalistic, religious belief that you've had or you've been taught that's robbed you from the reality of what Jesus did for you at the cross. Come on.
You are the righteousness of God. Can you say that about yourself? Are you sitting there? Are you still kind of uncomfortable with it?
Yeah. You don't know what I did this week. I really don't care what you did this week. You're still righteous.
It doesn't say that you are righteous unless, the only unless is if you just don't accept it, right? You're still righteous. It's not about that. The truth of the matter is until you start to believe what the Word of God says about you, you're going to continue to have more and more issues and less and less victory in your life.
You're going to have a difficult time getting victory over those things that have been plaguing you for years and years until you believe it. Come on. If you don't believe me, listen, the Word of God says, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. So whatever you believe about yourself, whatever you think about yourself, that's who you're going to be.
That's how you're going to act, right? So the way I see myself is the way that I'm going to act that out. There are some times where you can vary for a very short time, live inconsistently with how you see yourself and who you believe yourself to be. For instance, if you go to a men's conference like crossing rivers and taking cities, or you go to a women's conference like feminine appeal, or there's ladies at BMW this weekend that are getting their life transformed by the presence of God.
I promise you, it's happening. But if you leave and you really don't believe what you learned, or you really don't believe what you heard from God, or you really don't believe what God says about you, can I tell you something? These things have a high leakage rate. And you get home on Sunday afternoon, and by the time you get the life group on Wednesday, you're right back to where you were, where you think you are, who you thought you were, not who God says you are, right?
You come here on Sunday and you get this incredible teaching that I'm delivering to you right now. And you live here and you walk down, you're like, I'm righteous. And when you get to a life group on Wednesday and you're like, oh, you know not so much. Come on.
If the way you see yourself doesn't change, then you will constantly be bouncing up and down all around your Christian life, never excited, never experiencing the life, the abundant life that Jesus Christ died to give you. And if you like living there, go ahead. God will let you. But come on, you need to understand that you're righteous.
And when you do, you will live differently. Your life will look different. Come on. Listen, there are Christians out there that are, they say, oh man, I'm just not praying hard enough.
Yeah, you are. I'm not reading the word enough. You might not be, but you probably are. But listen, this is not stuff we can just do.
We can't become righteous on our own. We have to believe that when Jesus died and He took our sins, He gave us His righteousness. Therefore, I am righteous. Come on.
You will live differently. You'll walk differently. You'll be happier. You'll experience abundance like you've never done before.
Come on. It's so much easier to live in religion. Thinking you're filthy and dirty and unworthy and oh, come on. That's not what Jesus did not die so that you could live the rest of your life thinking those bad things about yourself.
Amen. Come on. That would take away exactly what He did. But it starts with believing who you are and what and who God says you really are.
Come on. When you believe you're the righteousness of God, when sin, when temptation comes in front of you, you're going to be like, no, I'm not that person anymore. I'm righteous. I have the righteousness of God.
I'm not going to do that. That doesn't even interest me anymore. Come on. Right?
Now, how many of you are righteous? Come on. Almost there. Luckily, I got more.
Come on. It's not about what happened on the way to church. It's not about how you yelled at your wife earlier this week. It's not about what you did last week or last month or last year.
The Apostle Paul writes this under the leading of the Holy Spirit. He said, righteousness is a gift. It's a gift from God to you through Jesus Christ. He's the one that brought the gift to you.
That means guess what? You didn't do anything to deserve it. You can't do anything to earn it. It's a gift from Father God.
It's just like our salvation. There are some Christians that believe you have to do things to be better and to earn your salvation. You cannot. Salvation is a gift from God.
And that's exactly the same thing that is true when it comes to your righteousness. It is a gift from God. You are righteous because it was given to you by Jesus Christ in the exchange that He made on the cross. You are righteous because He gave it to you.
Well, I had a bad week. You're righteous. Well, I had a bad day. You're righteous.
Well, I, you're righteous. Well, you're righteous. It doesn't matter. Amen?
Oh, come on. When you get that, it will change everything in your life. I promise you it will. As far as righteousness is concerned, read this with me.
It says, I don't work to get it. I got it. So I live it. Come on.
You can't work to gain righteousness. Come on. I have it. It's in me.
I am righteous. So I live that way. I live out my righteousness. Come on.
You are righteous. Come on. I want you to say that. I am righteous.
Everyone say it. Come on. You are righteous. All right.
The second key thought. Hallelujah. Amen. Right?
My wife tells me all the time, she'll be down there. If I'm beating a dead horse, she's down there like going like this. But I warned her. I said, I'm beating a horse for a long time.
So just be ready. Amen. All right. Second key thought.
Jesus was made a guilt offering. Okay. Jesus was made sin and Jesus was made a guilt offering. And this is sometimes, this is hard to understand.
And when you just glance at it at first, but this is father, he said, I say it said, you, Father God, make his life a guilt offering. So Jesus became sin, right? He was made sin and he became a guilt offering. So not only did he take our sin and become sin, but he also took our guilt and he took our shame.
So there's anything you've done where you're living and you feel guilty or there's anything that you've done that's brought shame to you and you just live in this shameful state of mind all the time. Jesus took that too. Come on. If you realize that you're righteous and you realize that he took all of your sin, you have no sin left, right?
You have no unrighteousness left. Then we should not feel guilty. We should not feel shameful. It doesn't matter what you did.
He died for all of it. Amen. Come on. Satan tempts us because Satan knows where we're weak.
If you think that if there's any guilt or shame in your life, Satan will point it out all the time. He will come back again and again and he will keep coming at us until we get victory in that area of our life. Are you ready? How many of you've been suffering with something for a while and you want to get rid of it in your life?
Just me and my wife? Okay. Those things went a lot slower than some of the other ones, right? Come on.
All you have to do is believe who God says you are and you will get victory in these different areas of your life. You won't feel shame. You won't feel guilt. You will understand that you are righteous.
Every single one of us, when we do something that's sinful. What happens is we begin to think, oh man, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have reacted that way. I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have said it in that manner. You know, I'm embarrassed by what I did. I have guilt in my life. I have shame and we try to hide.
And it just doesn't work. Guilt and shame are the primary weapons that Satan uses to defeat Christians. And the only reason it works is because we don't believe the truth of what God says. That's it.
One of Satan's great weapons is keeping you and it is that shame and guilt. It keeps you and I from going where God wants us to go and getting what God wants us to get. Come on, it holds us back. And there's no reason for that because Jesus died for that too.
If we're going to live a victorious life, how many hands are going up there? Who wants to be victorious? Come on. That should be every hand, whether you know God or not.
I want to be victorious. I want to have a life that's abundant. I want to live that way. We're going to, if you're going to have that life, if you're going to live victorious, or you're going to have abundant life, then you have to win at the front door.
And let me explain what that means. Every day, Satan comes knocking at the front door of your life. And you open that door and guess what's sitting there waiting? Temptation?
Sin? Satan saying, hey, come on. Don't you remember how much fun this was? Come on.
It could be something visual. It could be something mental. It could be something that he wants you to click on the internet and open up that you know you shouldn't open. It could be a drink.
It could be a drug. It could be money. It could be popularity. It could be power.
It could be anything. And he comes and he knocks at the front door. And we have to get very good at the front door. Amen.
When you open the front door, if you're going to be a victorious Christian and you hear Satan knocking and that knock comes as thoughts or whatever it is. As soon as you open the door, you need to tell him, Satan, I am made righteous. That is not who I am anymore. I don't think that way.
I don't act that way. I don't do those things anymore. I am the very righteousness of God. And you slam the door in his face.
Amen. Come on. But here's the problem. Satan's a sore loser.
So when you slam the front door in his face, guess what? He tries to come in the back door and you open the back door. And what does he say? You're still thinking about what I told you, huh?
You're still thinking about that, sin. You're still thinking about that thing. See, what kind of Christian are you? You're not righteous.
You're not holy. You're not pure. Come on. You call yourself a Christian.
We know who you are, right? You've got those people at church rule, but we know. Come on. That's what he's going to do every single time.
So here's what I'm proposing you do. Once you defeat Satan at the front door, he knocks that first time, you open the door, you say, no, that's not who I am. You slam the door in his face, turn around and go to the back door and open it up and wait for him. And you seem coming around the corner, you know, I knew you were coming.
I knew you were coming. I know you were coming. I know you were sore loser, but guess what? I'm still the righteousness of God, and I'm not going to do that.
Just be ready. Amen. Come on. We can do this.
It's not as hard as we make it out to be, but most people are defeated at the back door because they haven't yet believed that they were made righteous, that Jesus was made sin and he took it all from us. He was made a guilt offering. So we have no more guilt. We have no more shame over those things we've done wrong.
Come on. Tell the devil, you know what? I whipped you at the front door. I'm going to whip you at the back door and just get used to getting whipped, right?
Come on. That's how we live a victorious life in Christ. Amen. Come on.
What about my past? Ooh, that comes back to haunt you a lot, doesn't it? It shouldn't. It shouldn't.
You know why? Because Jesus died for that too. Remember, Matt, and he put us up here on the stage and he said that the sins you have committed, the sins you're committing right now and the sins of your past, all of that has been wiped away. Those things should not come back to us.
But let me tell you, when it does, and they will, they will come back to your mind. And it's usually Satan throwing one of his fiery darts saying, look, remember who you are? Remember what you did? Well, can I tell you something you need to get a pair of red-tinted glasses and put them on.
And that's how you should view your life. When Satan tries to bring something up from your past, you look through those glasses and you say, you know what? That's covered by the blood of Jesus. That thing you reminded me of last night, that's covered by the blood of Jesus.
That thing that you think I'm going to do tomorrow, that's covered by the blood of Jesus. Everything you should look through should be seen in that way that it's covered by the blood of Jesus. Amen? Come on, it doesn't matter what you've done.
That's under the blood. And this is another thing you can tell him to say, you know what, Satan? Thank you for reminding me of that. Because now I know I need to go back to God and say, you know what?
Praise you, Lord, from delivering me from that. Praise you for the victory that I have in that area of my life. And it doesn't bother me anymore. Amen?
Because I tell you what, if every time Satan comes to you, it reminds you to praise God, Satan's going to leave you alone after a little while, right? He doesn't want you praising God for anything. So why in the world would he come back over and over and over again if every time it leads you back to the feet of God? Oh, come on.
Come on. You are righteous. You have no guilt. You have no shame.
Jesus died for all of that. He took all of that from you. And I want to close by saying, talking about this, in Zechariah chapter 3 verses 1 through 5. Let me kind of set the stage and tell you what's going on.
Zechariah is a prophet and he takes him up into heaven and he's standing there with the high priest Joshua. This is not Joshua who was around with Moses. This is the high priest at the time that Zechariah was the prophet for Israel. And this is what it says, Zechariah 3 verse 1 through 5.
It says, then he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord. And Satan standing at his right side to accuse him. You know that's how Satan does what that's to? Right?
We're in the throne room of God. We're right before God, the Father, Satan's at our right side, accusing us. And this is what the Lord says to Satan. The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you, is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire.
Oh, come on. That's us. I mean, I'm glad that you were a burning stick, a burning stick snatched from the fire. Come on.
Amen. Right? Some of us are a little charred than others, but that's okay. Nevertheless, we were a burning stick that he snatched from the fire.
And now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, take off his filthy clothes. Then he said to Joshua, see, I have taken away your sin and I will put rich garments on you. Come on.
This is not just a picture of what's going on then. This is a picture of what's happened to us. Amen. He took away our sin.
He's put rich garments on us in and out. And then it says, Zachariah, he said, I said, put a clean turban on his head. So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him while the angel of the Lord stood by. This is a picture of what Jesus did for you and I.
We stand accused before God and Jesus because of his sinless life, because of his obedience, because of him dying on the cross, he exchanged our sin for his righteousness. He exchanged our guilt and our shame. He took that from us so that we could live righteous and upstand and right standing before God. And God said, take those filthy garments, those sins that we had, take those filthy garments off and put on these rich white pure garments.
Oh my gosh. And Zachariah is watching this. He's watching this take place and he's realizing, oh my God, this isn't just for now. This is for all eternity.
And he sees what God is doing and he jumps in and he's excited, right? Put a turban on his head. So they put this beautiful raiment upon him, beautiful shiny white garments. They bring this turban and they put it on his head.
And this is a picture of how the high priest would dress on certain occasions. And this turban wasn't just a white cloth or a towel wrapped around his head. It had a gold medallion, a pendant that hung down from these gold chains and it was positioned right over the forehead. And that pendant said, holy to the Lord, when you approach God, you have a white turban on your head.
And you have a pendant that hangs over your forehead and it says, holy to the Lord, that's who you are. That's who Jesus died to make you. Holy to the Lord, Jesus was made sin so that we would be made righteous. Come on, why don't you stand with me?
Just close your eyes and bow your heads. This is between you and God. How do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as righteous?
Do you see yourself as holy to the Lord? God sees you as righteous. He sees you that way because he made you that way. He sent his son to die for that very thing.
And to think of ourselves as anything less, to think of ourselves as unholy or unworthy or too full of shame, we're living less than what God would have us live. He wants you to be successful in everything that you do. That's why he provided everything that you need. If you're struggling financially, it may not be more money that you need.
It may be that you need more God. If you're struggling emotionally, physically, it may just mean that you need to turn your life over to Jesus. Start living as the righteous, holy to the Lord person that you are. And your life will change.
And it'll all be good. Father God, we thank you. We thank you that you sent your son, your perfect son, to die on the cross, not just for our sins, but for everything that he died for. Father, forgive us for living as anything less than you made us.
Father, we are righteous. We thank you for your righteousness. Father, we are holy to you. Thank you for your holiness.
Thank you for ridding my life of not only sin, but the consequences of sin. Thank you for these exchanges that you made. Thank you that I can live freely and run into my destiny with you by believing who you say I am. And thank you, Jesus.
Thank you, Jesus, for doing what you did out of obedience so that we could live abundant lives. We thank you, Lord. In Jesus name, His church says, Amen. Amen.
Have a great week.