MAY 23

OUR PERSONAL PROMISES

Romans 10:9

“that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Psalm 80:19

“Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; Cause Your face to shine, And we shall be saved!”

1Corinthians 1:23 -25

“but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness,  but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

Proverbs 1:7

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Proverbs 3:35

“The wise shall inherit glory, But shame shall be the legacy of fools.”

Psalm 14:1

“The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God…..”

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We will be reading from a book by Erwin Lutzer, President of Moody Bible Institute.  It’s a short book about Christ’s sacrifice for us.  It’s called simply, “For Us.”

Isaiah Chapter 53

“Who has believed our report?  And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?   For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,  and as a root out of dry ground.  He has no form or comeliness;  and when we see Him,  there is no beauty that we should desire Him.  He is despised and rejected by men,  a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.  and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;  He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.   Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;  Yet we esteemed Him stricken,   smitten by God, and afflicted.  But He was wounded for our transgressions,  He was bruised for our iniquities;  the chastisement for our peace was upon Him,   and by His stripes we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray;   we have turned, every one, to his own way;  and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.   He was oppressed and He was afflicted,   yet He opened not His mouth;   He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,   and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,  so He opened not His mouth.   He was taken from prison and from judgment,   and who will declare His generation?   For He was cut off from the land of the living;   For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.   And they made His grave with the wicked—  but with the rich at His death,  because He had done no violence,”  Nor was any deceit in His mouth.  Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him;  He has put Him to grief.  When You make His soul an offering for sin,  He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,  and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied.  By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,  For He shall bear their iniquities.  Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,  and He shall divide the spoil with the strong,  because He poured out His soul unto death,   and He was numbered with the transgressors,  and He bore the sin of many,   and made intercession for the transgressors.”

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“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise.”  When He said those words, Jesus didn’t look much like He could fulfill them.  Isaiah 53 paints a graphic picture:  crushed, stricken, with no beauty or majesty in His physical form.  We can only imagine the blood matted into His hair, the raw flesh, the struggles for breath.  He was “numbered with the transgressors.”  And the crowd thought He deserved it.

No wonder the cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.”  Who would expect –or respect – a Messiah like that?  But the repentant thief cried out to Him right in front of that mocking crowd.

Our world would like us to believe the story of Christ’s death and resurrection is silly, only for the ignorant.  They’d like us to be ashamed of Him.  And it would be a strange story, if we had only the wisdom of man.  Thank God we have His wisdom through the Holy Spirit, to see how far His grace outstrips all understanding!

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