Good Friday - Oliver Linley

(gentle music) - Today's reading comes from John chapter three verse 16 to 36. I'm reading from the English standard version. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because He has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world and people love the darkness, rather than the light, because they work so evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, less His works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that His works have been carried out in God. After this, Jesus and His disciples went into the Judean countryside and He remained there with them and was baptizing. John also was baptizing at Inan near Salim because water was plentiful there. And people were coming and being baptised for John had not yet been put in prison. Now a discussion arose between some of John's disciples and a Jew over purification. And they came to John and said to him, "Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness, look, he's baptizing and all are going to him." John answered, "A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and years him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true, for he who God has sent at is the words of God, for he gives the spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. This is the word of the Lord. - Thanks, Steph. Good morning, everyone. Good to see you all. It's such a wonderful joy to be worshipping with you this morning on Good Friday. At this morning, we remember, we're just so deeply grateful for the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross. That's what we are gathering to remember today. We remember that for a good man, one might dare to die, but God shows his love for us and that while we were sinners, the Bible says Christ died for us. While we were dead in our sins and without hope, the Lord Jesus went to the cross and our state to die the death that we should have died so that we might live to God and die to sin. So this morning's passage is one of the most succinct gospel passages in all the Bible. It's just loaded. There's so much in it that we can talk about, but we're going to focus on God's costly love, our current problem and our only hope. So God's costly love, our beautiful text today is one of the most famous in the whole world. If you Google and you can test this, but if you Google Christian Bible verse, you will see John 3, 16. This is going to come up first. Do you know how much companies pay for that kind of organic Google search result? It's not even SEO optimized. They're like, "Wow, that's crazy. Placement is so good." So although you might see it on like coffee cups and journals and stuff, this is part of a long flow of thought, actually. That's started at the beginning of 3, chapter 3, which is what we did on Sunday. So there's a little bit of context here that might be good for us to chat about, but if you want a deeper dive into what's going on, Jane did a good job of unpacking that. So take a listen to that on the podcast. But verse 14 and 15, that precede our text here, say, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, "so must the Son of man be lifted up "that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." Okay, so the context is that Jesus is meeting with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Okay, so he's like a religious teacher and says that just as when many of the Israelites were dying from these poisonous snakes that had infiltrated their camp and were biting a whole bunch of them because of their sin, and they were miraculously healed when they looked up to a bronze statue of a serpent that Moses had made. So we can be saved when the Son of man, Jesus, is lifted up and we look to him, we're saved from death because of our sin. That's the picture. Jesus must be lifted up like the serpent and then whoever believes in him can have eternal life. So it's a very old testament reliant passage, isn't it? That picture is just, if you don't know Exodus, that doesn't make sense. So take a deeper look at that if you want. But I share that with you to say, our verse 16 actually starts with the word four, which is quite important because it helps us to understand it's because of this reason, right? That's what he's trying to say. So whoever believes in him may have eternal life, four, God's so loved the world. So what we're actually seeing in our passage is how it's possible that anyone might have eternal life through believing in Jesus Christ. So anyone can be saved by believing in him because God loved the world that, because God loved the world. So it's true that we do read God loved the world so much, definitely, but we should definitely read this as God loved the world in this way. That's also the way this text is supposed to be read. God loved the world in this way. If you've got your ears with you, you'll notice there's like a little footnote and it says God loved the world in this way. And many of the other more literal translations translate it like that too. God loved the world in this particular way. And the reason why that's important is because it's describing the kind of love that God had. So it's not just saying this is a wide love, but it's an incredible kind of love. But I don't want us to move too fast because it says God loved the world in this way. So it's not just a love that God has in general, but God has a love for the world or cosmos is the word that John uses. And every time he uses it, he's referring to the fallen, sinful world, the world that's alienated from God and rejects him and is hostile to him. So it's not just a verse about scope, you see, how wide. It's a verse about the nature too. It's about the kind of love that God had. It says that God loved a dark world that was hostile to him and rejected him. I think this kind of love would have surprised Nicodemus, the religious teacher. I think the love that God has for a dark world for sinners and that way beyond the bounds of just the Jewish people, God's historical people, to a love that includes people from every tribe, tongue, language, nation, without needing them to actually become Jews first, would have been quite challenging to Nicodemus. You see, without needing them to go through all the religious ceremonies and practices so that you become just like us, I think that really would have been stretching for him. And I think a lovely example of this is in the book of Acts where the apostles hear of the first non-Jewish converts. And they have this moment where they look at each other and you can almost hear the tone in their voice where they say, "So salvation has come to the Gentiles too." You know, they're like, "Wow, we didn't expect this." But this is amazing. I do think it's rather easy to be unimpressed by this kind of love though. That God loves sinners, people hostile to him, you know, the Bible says. Because we hear about it all the time. And I think when you hear about something so often, you kind of just get a bit numb to it. But ask yourself, do you ever see this kind of love? I'd put it to you that you don't see this kind of love anywhere at all. We don't really love people who are hostile towards us, or people who hate us. I don't know if you've ever had someone really angry with you in the traffic. Maybe this has happened to you. Maybe you cut someone off by mistake. Maybe you was at that little round of odd in Newlands going to the highway. We just think, why do the rules on this round of odd? No one knows. And you make it. some decision and then someone gets really angry with you and then and I can tell you right now that when that happens, it's just a hypothetical scenario of course but but if that would happen, I can tell you right now that my reaction to that person who displays that kind of hostility towards me is not immediate love. Do you want to read? I don't just think like, oh God bless you man, you just you know, I do my best to just say sorry and stay calm but there's like a temperature that rises in my chest. Do you know what I mean? It's like my head is saying just chill bro it's traffic and my chest is just furiously disagreeing and then the Ford Ranger is just driving so close behind me and I'm like just chill, yeah, so crazy. I certainly don't feel love towards that kind of hostility you know towards me, it just gets so defensive. Hostility is not the hot bit of love. The thing is, the love that God has for this dark world is not love towards a world who for a moment like the driver that I cut off displayed hostility like this towards him and then it was gone. But the love that God has is for a world that acted like that, felt like that every minute of every day you see and he loved that dark world. He loved the dark world despite its hostility. You might not feel like that's the way that things actually are to us. We reflect on it, I think it's very easy to think like well, I don't know if you I would say the world is hostile to God. It's like quite a heavy word but we'll explore this a little bit more but let me just say this at this point. My wife came to me the other day and she said to me, you know when I brought up this one issue with you the other day, you got quite defensive and I said no I didn't and she said you did. I said I did not and so she had to slow me down in that moment and to help me see that actually I had been defensive and maybe just maybe in this moment I was being defensive too. It's just so crazy and the funniest thing for me is do you know how easy it is to see when someone else is being defensive? Like this happens all the time. I don't know if you brought something up with someone and then you think like wow I did not expect this conversation to take this turn. This person is getting very angry with me and I'm not quite sure why I think this is defensive. You know like I can see it so easily but I needed my wife to help me see this behavior that is obvious to me and everyone else and yet I couldn't even see it on myself. And I've got front row seats to myself. And so I needed my wife to slow me down and help me to see if I had been defensive show me something that I presumed would be super obvious. And this is one of those areas where it doesn't feel like we're hostile towards God, like the world is hostile towards God. But we need the Bible to help slow us down in these moments to show us maybe this is actually what's going on and we're just a little blind to it or we're turned off to it or I just can't see it that clearly. And so we'd presume that it would be super obvious to see but maybe it's not and we need the Bible to shed some light on that. We're going to come back to that. But it says God loved the world in this way that He gave. The important thing to see is that God's love is not sentimental, right? It's not a feeling. God's love is not just an emotion, right? It's a demonstration. God's love is a tangible show because the Father gave His Son. The Father's love is a giving love. He gave the Son. That is, He didn't loan the Son. He didn't send Him with strings attached. This word gave literally means freely give, you know, decisively, completely. The Father gave the Son permanently and sacrificially for a world that hated Him. And He gave His one and only Son, His unique Son, His promised Son. That's what the phrase means, is one of a kind Son. There is no one like Jesus. Now in the Old Testament, in Genesis, right at the beginning of the Bible, Abraham offers up Isaac, his one and only same word, his one and only Son, his God promised Son on the altar. And he was spared by God providing a round in the thicket, which he then sacrificed in Isaac's place. In Christ, the Father offers up His unique, promised, blameless, innocent, righteous, holy Son as the sacrifice for sinful humanity, but no ram was provided to save Him. You see, the Lamb of God was sacrificed. So the Father gives the Son to be the sacrifice for us. In that passage that Anna read earlier, Isaiah spoke of Jesus' death 700 years before it happened and it goes on to say, "He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief." That is a humbling thought. That the Son of God was not spared for me, but died in my place, even when I was an enemy of God. And the letter to the Romans, Paul says, "For while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." It's not beautiful. So verse 17 says, "Even though the world is dark, the mission of Christ, the intention of God in sending Christ was a saving mission, and a saving intention." You see, so he sent the Son not to condemn the world, but to save it. So that doesn't mean that Christ will not judge the world at all. He will. In 2 Corinthians 5, 10, Paul writes, "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, but the mission of Christ was a saving mission." That's what he came to do. And Christ's mission means that if we will believe, we will not perish but have eternal life. So our current problem is laid out from verse 18, "Whoever does not believe is condemned already." So this is a strong statement about our current position. Our current legal standing before God. We're all condemned before God. The gavill has come down already. The verdict has been handed down. The sentence has been given. The date of punishment has been set, and we all stand now as guilty before the Lord. This is not saying one day, if you decide to consciously not believe, then you will be condemned. As if we're all on the road of life, and then at some point there's a fork in the road in which you have to choose between belief and unbelief, and then your eternal fate is sealed. You know, it's saying, "No, we are right now from the get-go under the heavy sentence of God." Which is why verse 36 says that, "Whoever does not obey the sun shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him." Remains means it's on you now, and it's continuing. It's resting on you. If verse 18 tells us about our legal standing, verse 36 tells us about our present reality before God. We are all under the wrath of God. I think that the idea that God has any wrath towards us is so deeply disturbing and displeasing to us, especially in our 21st century world. I think there might be many reasons as to why, but two that I would suggest or offer to you this morning would be, I think firstly, it's almost too terrible to be true. The idea that we or anyone that we love or anyone on earth would be under the wrath of God is too terrible to be true. And so it's better to believe that it's not. And I think secondly is that our world has frequently communicated God as something similar to my grandmother. I think we kind of just see God as someone who just thinks I'm amazing. Just thinks I'm smart and kind and handsome. Just thinks I can't do any wrong on at all. There's nothing on earth that he could hold against me because he's just sweet and kind and naive and maybe if anything like my grandmother, slightly batty and out of touch. But the real question is, is that the way he is? That is the question. Is that really the way he is? And is that really the way he sees us? Because if it's not the way he really is. But we under the impression that he's like that. Then are we just being comforted by obliviousness? Are we just being comforted by ignorance? Just because we think God won't judge us doesn't mean he won't. God's not like my grandmother. He's not naive. He's not losing it ever so slightly. You know, he's not out of touch with reality. He's very in touch with reality. He's absolutely in touch with reality. He knows every thought that's ever passed between your ears. He knows everything you've ever imagined, everything you've said or done. He knows everything that you've tried to hide and best believe he is a good judge and a good judge doesn't let anything go unpunished just because he feels sorry or something for the person who's being judged. God has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and very specifically in our text as a God who punishes sinners. But He's also revealed Himself as the God who makes the way out through the death of Christ. That's why it's called being saved. It's not like it's some dramatic word to just catch our attention. You know, we are actually saved from an eternal fate. That's why this is good news. The news is not just God loves you or you believe. The good news is God has sent His one and only son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. Let's look at this in some more depth because verse 19 shows us why we are judged and condemned and under the wrath of God. It says, "And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." So in chapter one John says of this of Jesus, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. And the true light which gives light to everyone was coming into the world. So the light is Jesus. He's come into the world. The judgment is that people loved the darkness rather than the light. Isn't that fascinating? So people are judged because they loved the darkness rather than the light. But I thought it was because they didn't believe because he literally just said it's about believing. So what is going on? I think what John's reflection is here that is so profound is that we are taking belief out of the realm of just intellectual ascent and dropping it into your heart. Making it a matter of the heart. He's saying you believe or don't believe because of what you love, not just because of what you know. Does that make sense? So believing then is like the fruit of the vine that grows out of the love of your heart. Believing is not primarily intellectual. It's not first about your mind. That's what he's saying. He's saying believing is firstly about a matter of your heart and it's secondarily a matter of your head. The light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light. If we love the darkness, you will never choose the light because by choosing the light, you're going to choose the death or the loss of the thing that you love. Imagine you just love sitting in the dark room. You will never go and flick on the light because if you do that, you lose the dark room which is the thing that you love. Okay, stick with me. That's what Jesus is saying here. He's saying what you love dictates what you choose. What you love determines the choice you make with your mind. I do think this is literally the opposite of the way that we think we make decisions. Right? I mean, we often feel like we are rational and intellectual beings and we survey the evidence and we choose from our minds and sober and considered. But I think we choose what we want all the time. Here's what I was reflecting on. Think of the person you love most in the world. Your husband, your wife, your mother, your father, your children, your friend. Think of the force of the love that you have for that person. And ask yourself, could I right now, in this moment, decide to stop loving them? Could you just choose to turn it off? No more love for that person I'm done. Could you do it? I mean, of course you can't. It's like a ridiculous thing to even get you to try and imagine. But why is it ridiculous? The reason you can't do it is because your love constrains you. Because your mind is subject to your heart, not the other way around. Love has this way of capturing us, you see? Of controlling us, of restraining us. Love like gets into your bones, it becomes part of who you are, such that there's nothing that I can do to just turn off the love that I have for my wife, my parents, my brothers. That's just the way it goes. In fact, I think it's the evidence that you love someone that you can't stop loving them even if you wanted to. Even if they did something terrible to me. My heart would be broken for the exact reason that I love them. And it would be so much better for me to just turn it off and walk away. I don't love you anymore, I'm done with this, I'm out. And my heart's completely unaffected. That's Cloud Cookyland, isn't it? It's because I love them so much that I'm bound to continue loving them. Do you see? And I think that is precisely what our text is saying about why they reject Jesus and why we do today. It's not because we don't understand, it's not because we're not clever enough, it's not because we haven't gone through the right life experiences or something. We don't come to Jesus because we love the darkness. And so we don't choose the light. Love for the darkness is the love of being our own king. Living life by our own rules, living life with no reference to Jesus. It's not obvious that we living in the darkness most of the time, I think, or that we love the darkness. But I think this is one of those moments of clarity. Like my wife, show me something that I thought would be obvious, but didn't see. I think the Bible is shedding light as it were on this issue to help us see that we do love things that are not God. And that love keeps us from turning to Him. I think it's a weird way of putting things to our 21st century years. But the Bible frequently says that we love our sin. That's the language. We love our sin. It's why you don't have to put time in your diary to sin. It just happens. You just end up choosing it. You're just like, "Oh, I don't know. I love it." We do it because we love it. It's the force of our love for not God that keeps us under the wrath of God. Remember that? The wrath of God remains on Him. It's the force of our love for the darkness that means we're condemned already. It's not a moment later. I love the darkness now. It's the force of our love that means that we don't believe in Him because to believe in God means to come to the light, which is the opposite of what we love. So to come to the light means we're going to be exposed to the text says, no one wants that. So what's our only hope? Four times in this text, 15, 16, 18, and 36, we are told that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. That is an invitation that seems to just trumpet forth from this text. Whoever believes in Him will have eternal life. That invitation, I think, is so profound. It's so powerful. It's so deep. Anyone who believes in Him, anyone will not perish, will not be condemned, will not be subject to God's wrath, but will have eternal life. The life of God here and now, that's what it means. The fullness of the life of God and the life to come right now. So we're in a hole. We're in a hole, basically, because we love the darkness so we don't believe. But I don't believe so I'm condemned. So what do I do? Because I'm told believe in God and live. So it's impossible. How are you supposed to go from loving the darkness to loving the light like that? Do you remember when Jesus was asked what's the greatest commandment? What does he say? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, so on string. So how do you go from hating to loving? And the answer is we need a miracle. That's what it is. We are in a position we cannot get ourselves out of. We need a miracle. If my heart loves things that are not God, then I need a new heart. I need new desires. If I love my sin, then I need the most fundamental parts of who I am to be completely overhauled. I need to be born again. That's what Jesus said to Nicodemus just a few verses earlier. You've got to be born again. That's a miracle. A work of God that brings about a new life. The New Testament says, you are a new creation of you're in Christ. Why is that language so stark and so severe? Born again, new creation. It's also a language like I was blind and now I can see. Why is it so stark? Because it's a miracle. I need God to do what only God can do in my heart. I cannot save myself. I need God to do this work in me. The Bible says that he takes out a heart of stone with all its world loving desires and gives us a heart of flesh filled with love for God. The miracle. I can't do that on my own. I'm looking to God to do something that only he can do. So do you see how deep then the grace of God reaches down into our hearts? God is not standing far off and saying, you have to love me with all your heart and then sort of waiting to see if you can do it. He gives you the heart to do exactly what he's commanding you to do. Isn't that amazing? So he doesn't command you, just love me. And you don't have any of the means to do it. He gives you the heart to do the loving. He gives you everything that you need. You see that. Our thing that we bring to God, our request, our society. response is, throw ourselves at the foot of the cross. That's what it is. It's surrender to God, saying, "God, I can't save myself. I can't do it on my own. Can you come and do this work within me?" I want to turn briefly to look at the end of our passage, the story about John the Baptist. So John, the writer of this gospel, uses this story as a contrast to the story at the start of the chapter, the story about Nicodemus. It's like two bookends of this chapter, but he uses them so effectively to show us something really beautiful. So in this chapter, we start with Nicodemus, Jesus and Nicodemus. And Nicodemus is the educated guy. He's on the religious inside. He's a teacher, but he doesn't believe. He doesn't receive Jesus. When Jesus talks to him about being born again, it literally makes no sense to him. And he responds to this almost like condescendingly, almost hortily. He says, "How can a man be born again when he's old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" I don't think he's genuinely asking this question. I think he's trying to say, "That's ridiculous." In many ways, Nicodemus is the person on the inside who you would most expect to know God and recognize him. Because this was a guy brought up in the Old Testament scriptures. His whole job is to be a priest and teach Israel about God and now he is face to face with God and he misses it. And then the chapter ends with a second character, Jesus, with John the Baptist now. And John the Baptist is certainly not a religious insider. He is out in the wilderness. He is proclaiming that the Messiah is going to come. I think people think he's a little cook-oo, but he's got a lot of attention. He's not a part of the religious establishment, but he does believe. He receives Jesus. And although there's so much in these two stories for us to look at, what I want to point out to you in this moment is look at his desires here. Look at his heart. Because his disciples come to him. And they ask him what he thinks about the fact that Jesus is baptizing up the river from where they baptize. But all the people who were going to them are not going to Jesus. So what does he think about that? And he doesn't get defensive. He doesn't get puffed up. He doesn't get frustrated. In fact, he's not even nonchalant and uncaring. He takes joy in the fact that people are going to Jesus and not to him. He loves the fact that Jesus is being made much of. And he says, "The joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease." It's not a beautiful line. That is a set of desires, a heart that is new and fresh and delights in God being glorified. John, in many ways, models to us what receiving Jesus looks like. Joy in Christ, willingness to decrease, to be humbled, a heart that wants to see God exalted. That's what a born-again heart is like. That's what the born-again heart loves. It's a completely different set of desires. You see, he must increase and we must decrease. More of God less of us. So if you think of chapter three as two stories, Nicodemus and then John the Baptist, after each of these stories there's a little section of reflection where it's almost like John the writer of the gospel takes a step back and he shares with us what it all means and what we should take from these two interchanges. And although both of them are rich and dense, I'm sure we could spend weeks in John three. They both end in the same place. Whoever believes in him has eternal life. That's the message of this passage. That's the message of these interchanges. In many ways, the entire message of Christianity, God loved the world in this way that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish for a heavy eternal life. God loved the dark world, a world in which everyone wants to live life on our own terms by our own rules with no reference to God. And the Bible tells us that that world is hostile to God. And it's into that dark world that he sends his unique only son. He gives him freely and Jesus Christ lives a perfect life and is lifted up on the cross. And the condemnation that this passage says we face, the wrath of God that our passage says we face is poured out on him. He suffers in my place. He dies in my place. And then he rises again. He rises from the dead to life. He's raised up. He's lifted up again. He lives so that I can live eternal life, then, as offered to us through the life of Christ. Edward Kling puts it like this, God loved the world by giving Jesus to die in its place. There was nothing the world needed more than for God's wrath to be asswaged, nothing more valuable to the Father than Jesus. There was no greater length to which anyone could go to show love, no way for greater love to be more convincingly demonstrated, than for ultimate value to be sacrificed for ultimate need to accomplish ultimate salvation. And so let's end with the affirmation that this text continues to put to us again and again, whoever believes in Jesus will not perish, but have eternal life. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Friends, I can absolutely assure you today that our message today, where this passage is trying to share with you, is not like some kind of guilt trip to get you to join our church, or to just hear about this threat so that you become a Christian or something. I really want you to hear this, especially if you're not a Christian this morning. This is not some cosmic threat to try and get you to agree with us and just become one of us. If it was, this would be the most manipulative way that you could do that. But if it's true, if what the Bible is saying, that because of our love for the darkness, we are now under the wrath of God. And through belief in Christ Jesus, our sins are taken away, and eternal life is offered to us. Isn't that the best news? Isn't that genuinely good news? And so what God is holding out to you today is life itself. And that's not just living, you know, like continuing to live, but to experience the very life of God, the fullness of joy, love, and peace and God right now. Our text isn't just saying, believe in me, and you won't be in trouble anymore. You know, it's saying, if you believe in Christ, then eternal life, or the love of God is given to you now. God doesn't promise you something when you die, but your life remains the same now. So you don't know the difference, you just hope it works. He's promising you something profound right now. I've experienced a depth of love in my innermost being, unlike anything else in the whole world. I love that satisfies all the desires of my heart. I've experienced the freedom and weight of this feeling of guilt, the feeling that something was wrong, taken away in a moment, and replaced with a joy and a lightness that words really fail to express. And I have to admit that before then, I didn't know that I was walking around with this weight, but the moment it was lifted off me, I realized I'd lived my life under it, because I realized it was gone. And I became, I felt so free. That's the condemnation being lifted. You know, that's that. The wrath of God, that judgment on me being lifted. And love took its place. If you talk to any true Christian here today, they'll say something similar. They're going to start grasping for language to put into words the depths of the riches of the eternal life that they experience now. It's not airy, fairy stuff. It's real. If you believe in Jesus, if you put your faith in Him, you will receive that too. That's all you believe, and you will receive this life. Full, real, wonderful life of God right now, the chains of your guilt fall away, and a freedom unlike anything else will take its place.