Why Mortality Matters

Well, good morning Church on the Move. Good to see everybody this weekend. If you're new around here, my name is Whit, and I am the pastor here. Let me also welcome anybody that might be joining us online this weekend. Couldn't be here in person. Glad to have you wherever you may be tuning in from. And also, we have churches and prisons. One at Dick Connor, which is a men's prison, and Eddie Warrior, that's a ladies' prison, and we like to welcome them every week. So let's put our hands together. If you have a Bible, would you open it, and I hope you're bringing a Bible to church, would you open it to Psalm chapter, or Psalms chapter 90? We're gonna be looking at Psalm 90 this weekend. And I'm gonna read the whole thing to you here in just a second, 17 verses. If you don't have a Bible, you can follow along on the screen. And here's what it says. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth or ever you had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You return man to dust and say, return, O children of man, for a thousand years in your sight, or but as yesterday when it is past,

or as a watch in the night. You sweep them away as with a flood, they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. For we are brought to an end by your anger. By your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are 70, or even by reason of strength, 80, yet their span is but toil and trouble. They are soon gone and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Return, oh Lord, how long? Have pity on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us and for as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us.

Yes, establish the work of our hands. This is the word of the Lord and we all said, thanks be to God. You know, the older I get, the more aware I become of my own mortality. To put it plainly, the more aware I become of the fact that I will one day die. When you're young, you don't think much about death. You have your whole life in front of you. Death is nothing more than a faint shadow on the seemingly infinite horizon of your life. But then one day you wake up and you're 50 and your kids are grown and your back hurts and you say to yourself, where did the time go? Life has a way of moving on whether we want it to or not. This is the human condition. I celebrated my 50th birthday this year in April. We had friends and family over. My parents were there. My sisters were there. My brother wasn't able to be there. Had close friends there. It was a beautiful evening spent on the back porch of our house in April. Just a nice evening grilling burgers. It was kind of a perfect evening. You ever have those? Just sort of a perfect night where everything is right in the world and my heart was kind of overwhelmed,

just filled to the brim with love and feelings of gratitude for having everyone that I loved around me. But this is what's changed. The older I get, the more that joy is also tinged with a hint of sadness because I know that it won't always be like this. It's part of what it means that we are mortal, that nothing stays as it is. Try as you might to try to wrap your arms around the present moment, you can't. And I was standing there thinking there will be days and there will be birthday parties in the future where I will wish that some who have gone on will still be here. I will say goodbye to my parents. I will say goodbye to. to everyone in my life, because that's the nature of the mortality of human beings. We just, this is life. We experience it in lots of different ways, little losses, bigger losses, yes, death, but also just the changing of the seasons of life. This last year, I dropped my son off at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona, and it was hard, a lot harder than I anticipated it would be. Found myself in the weeks after just breaking down in tears in restaurants with friends, feeling like an idiot that I couldn't control my emotions, but I was sad. My son wasn't there anymore. His room, empty. This is the change of life. You live long enough, you face these things. You experience them.

I suppose the first time I kind of became aware of all this was when my grandfather, my mom's dad, died several years ago. He wasn't the kind of man that you could really particularly be relationally close to. He was of a generation that was hard to kind of get to know, and so we weren't like tight. I respected him. I loved him. The last few years of his life, he suffered from Alzheimer's. That's how he died. I hadn't seen him for probably two to three years, at least, when he died. He wouldn't have recognized me if I'd had. He lived here in Tulsa in a memory care facility. They had moved from West Texas to Tulsa so that they could be closer to family, as is the case often. You want to be closer to your family when you need help. When he passed, the funeral was held in the small West Texas town that I was born in, Canadian, Texas. I'd spent many summers there, many Thanksgivings there. We would make the five-hour drive from Tulsa to Granny's house. I loved going to Granny's house, all the wonderful times that we got to spend there. The funeral was held in Canadian. It was a nice service. We're driving back, making the familiar drive back to Tulsa, Heather and I. And I was just kind of overcome, haunted, I guess you could say, by feelings of sadness. It may seem obvious to you, you're grieving the loss of your grandfather, but I knew it wasn't just that. I mean, I loved my grandfather, but effectively, in my logical mind, I knew that nothing had changed. I mean, I hadn't really seen him in a few years, and he didn't know me, and I didn't know him anymore, and it wasn't like we were super close.

So why was I feeling sad? And as I thought about it and reasoned as I was driving down the road just there in silence, it dawned on me what it marked was the end of my childhood. Even though I was into my 30s, it was the end of us going to West Texas. It was the end of us running around my grandparents' land, playing with my brother and my sisters and my cousins, building forts. It was the end of Thanksgiving at Granny and Papa's house. Like, it was never going to be the way that it was again, and I knew that that was gone, and I missed it. I wanted it to come back. That's how it is when you get older. You watch time pass. You want to press pause. Even in, like, everyday things. I was just taking the trash to the curb with my youngest daughter, B, a couple of months ago. We were wheeling the cans out to the curb on Wednesday night. It's what we do. It was nothing special. She was skipping back into the house in front of me, and all I wanted to do was just say, pause. Don't grow up. I don't want to have to say goodbye. I don't want you to move. I don't want things to change. I want them to be like this. And yet, life, our mortality demands that things move on. Try as we might to keep everything the same, it doesn't. You can't. Things change.

Death makes life pass. It's challenging. It's hard. We wrestle with it. That's what we find here in Psalm 90. It's one of the things I love about the Bible. It doesn't shy away from the hard stuff of life. If you thought the Bible was just a book of religious anecdotes to encourage you, make you feel good when times are bad, it's so much more than that. It's an unflinching look at the reality of what it is to be human. Here, Moses is writing, Moses is the author of this psalm, it's the only psalm that's attributed officially to Moses. There are others that we think maybe he wrote, but this one we know for sure that he wrote. We don't know the occasion upon which this psalm was written, we can guess, it's probably near the end of Moses' life, he lived a pretty long time. He watched an entire generation die in front of his eyes in the wilderness. And I wonder if Moses is kind of at the end of his life, nearing the end, and he's reflecting on what it is to be human, the short temporal span of human life. And he says in verse 12, it's where the whole chapter hinges on this one verse, look at it again, so teach us to number our days, it's a prayer, it's a strange prayer if you stop and think about it, teach us God, help me to number my days that I may gain or get a heart of wisdom. For Moses, considering meditating on the fact that you are mortal, that you will one day die is not just a morbid curiosity, there's wisdom to be gained from considering these things. And in fact, it's actually a sentiment, a prayer through the whole of the Scriptures. In Psalm 39, for instance, David would write this, verse 4, O Lord, make me know my end, and what is the measure of my days? Let me know how fleeting I am. Ecclesiastes 7.4, David's son Solomon, a wise man, wrote this, it is better to go to

the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind and the living will lay it to heart. Put simply, it's better to go to a funeral, there's more wisdom to be gained from a funeral than a feast. In verse 4 of the same chapter, he puts it like this, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. Throughout Christian history and the saints of the past, they've made it a regular part of their discipleship practice to consider death, their own death. In fact, monks would keep a skull, a human skull, on their desk to remind them that they too would die. The Latin phrase, memento mori, perhaps you've heard of it, simply means remember that you will die. It's been part of Christian discipleship practice to reflect on one's death. The great Jonathan Edwards, wonderful pastor, theologian, preacher, one of the greatest minds America has ever produced, was said to often think about his own death. Again, not in a morbid kind of way, not to depress oneself, but rather to gain the wisdom that can be gained from reflecting on one's own mortality. The truth is, we try to avoid death. We try to avoid talking about it, we don't want to think about it, we'd rather not even bring it into our minds. We spend most of our lives trying to distract ourselves from the fact that death looms on the horizon. But here, Moses calls the people of God to pray and asks the Lord to teach us that we might gain the wisdom that comes from reflecting on our own mortality. Here's the question I'd like us to ask this morning. What wisdom is there to be gained from thinking about your death? What wisdom can one gain from considering our own mortality? Three things, I think, that show up in this passage that I'd like us to meditate on this morning. What does our mortality remind us of?

Number one, it reminds us of our limits. There's a striking contrast in Psalm chapter 90, maybe you noticed it when I read through it just a few moments ago. How God is described and how man is described. God is described as being from everlasting to everlasting. He is eternal. Before the mountains were formed, you are, were God, Moses writes. In contrast, he refers to man as dust. Verse three, you return man to dust and say, return, O children of man. Mankind is like grass that greens in the morning, but by evening it fades, withers, is gone. Mankind is described as a dream. It seems so real. and so vivid when you're in the dream, but then you wake up and you soon forget this is life. In contrast to God's eternal nature, for him, a thousand years are but yesterday when it is past, but for us, our lives go by in an instant. It reminds us that though we are eternal beings, spiritually speaking, we are temporal in this life. That we are finite, that we are not God. That we do not possess his kind of eternal, limitless nature, we are not all powerful, we are not all present, we are not able to be in more than one place at a time, we have limits. We're more fragile than we'd like to imagine. And when you're young, you don't really think much about that, but the older you get, when your body starts to break down and you begin to experience decay, you recognize that you are limited.

Life forces upon you limits, you can't do the things you used to do. And part of understanding yourself, in fact, I told you this last week, that the only way to properly see yourself is to see yourself in relationship to your creator. The only way you'll know who you are is to see first who God is. God is eternal, God is all powerful, God is all present, God is all knowing. We, on the other hand, are creatures. We are not all powerful, we are not limitless, we are limited. And the only way to properly be a human being is to embrace the limits with which you have been made. The trouble is, we try to get beyond our own limits. We try to become like God ourselves, being all powerful, controlling our own world and future and destiny, but you only have to go through some hardship and difficult times to realize that you're in a lot less control than you think you are. I heard this week, it's a crazy story, but a guy, I think his name is Brian Johnson, some of you may correct me if I get that name wrong, he's a tech CEO, or was. I think he was the CEO of Venmo for quite some time, sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars, he's like a biohacker, I think is the technical term, or the term that we use for this. His goal is to try to hack death.

Stated goal, to make death optional. He spends a crazy amount of money, something like $3 million a year on his body, making himself absolutely as healthy as he can possibly be. He's said to be the healthiest person living on the planet. His goal is to get to 160 years old, and this week he announced that he suffers from an incurable autoimmune disease. Try as you might, with all of your resources and your power and strength, you cannot control even the most basic things about life. I've watched the most athletic, strong person I've ever known, his body waste away from cancer. All of his strength and athletic ability could not stop that disease from taking his life. This is the human condition. We are not God, we are limited. And it's learning to embrace your limits that makes you more human, at least human in the light of who God is. Now I wanna say something, just so that we're really clear here. What I'm not suggesting today, I want you to hear me clearly, I'm not suggesting that Christians oughta just lay down and let death and sickness and disease just walk all over them. Just go ahead and die, it doesn't even matter. That's not what Moses is saying, that's not what I am saying.

What I'm saying is that in our limitations, we recognize our need for God. That's why limitations are wonderful. Our limitations point us back to the one who we rely on. That's why when Christians encounter hardship, we can rejoice. It reminds us, we're not thankful for what we suffer, we're thankful that we can turn to the one on whom we rely. He is the great shepherd, he is the creator, he is the eternal one, he's the one that we rely on. I love this quote from J. Todd Billings, he puts it like this. When preoccupied with my own worries, boy, it's easy to get preoccupied with your own worries, your own story, your own circumstances and troubles. He says, I make my actions the center of what. It's happening in the world, but they are not. The Lord is the center. The central actor in the drama of the world. I have only a small role. I'm among the creatures on the dry land that the Lord has made. I'm not a shepherd heroically saving my flock from danger. I am among the sheep of God's hand. This is what it is to live with limitations. It's to realize that you're not the center of the whole story. That you are a part of God's story.

And I gotta tell you, there's a wonderful liberty in accepting your limited role in this great story. One of the things that I see a lot, and you're seeing it too, is pastors failing more and more. Moral failure happening more and more often. You hear of pastor here, pastor there, making stupid decisions that blow up their family and blow up a church. And maybe you've asked yourself, why is this happening? Can I tell you, I think it's our obsession with success and making a name for ourselves. I think that's what happens. Pastors, unfortunately, have been told that the church rises and falls on the strength of their sermons and their leadership. I pastored that way the first few years of my pastoral tenure here at Church on the Move. And let me tell you, it's a miserable way to live. You feel like everything depends on you. It's awful. I hated living and pastoring like that. The church goes up in attendance, your ego gets inflated. The church shrinks in attendance and you feel worthless. It's no kind of way to live. And what happens then is pastors, they work themselves to the bone, trying to become the greatest preacher, the greatest leader that they can be, believing that somehow the church rises and falls on the strength of their leadership.

And they burn themselves out. They get exhausted. They're so tired that they have no wherewithal, no willpower to resist temptation to the very sins that they regularly preach against. They become hypocrites because they've forgotten their limits. Can I tell you what freedom looks like? Freedom looks like trusting that this church belongs to the Lord and whatever he wants to do with it, he will do. When I finally turned to the Lord and just said, look, if I'm here to pastor 100 people, then that's what I'll do. I don't care anymore. All I want to do is please you. And when that happened, ironically, the church started to grow. Here's what I know is true. One day I will retire. And there'll come a generation of church on the movers who probably won't know much about Whit George. And one day I will die. And by God's grace, this church will carry on into the future. And church on the movers will forget my pastoral tenure. And you know what? That's exactly how I want it to be. Because my goal is not to be remembered by men. I'm not living for the applause of people.

I am living to hear the Lord say, well done, good and faithful servant. So my job isn't to be successful, to build the biggest, most awesome, impressive church so that I can somehow feel significant and good about myself. My job is to be faithful to the assignment that the Lord has given me. Can I tell you, there's a wonderful liberty in that. It's a limit. I'm not God. I'm not building his church. This thing was going before I got here. Guess what? It will continue long after I'm gone. If the Lord wants to. Freudian slip, who knows? The Lord can raise up from the stones, the rocks themselves, voices to cry out and give him praise. He doesn't need you. He doesn't need me. He chooses to partner with us. I want to. I wanna hear well done, good and faithful servant, but make no mistake, he's not relying on me to get his plan done. It's the sovereignty of God. There's a wonderful liberty in that. It doesn't absolve you of responsibility It doesn't absolve you of responsibility.

In fact, it's just the opposite. It ought to make you work all the harder. I want to serve the Lord. I want to please him, but I know my limits. That's why I don't have to work myself to death. People come up to me all the time and they're like, I want a little piece of my time and they're like, I'm sure you're so busy, I'm so sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, I know you're busy, I know you're probably crazy busy. I'm not. I'm not. I chose a long time ago that I'm not going to give every part of my life to this place. That I'm not going to burn myself out, that I'm not going to be an absentee father because I'm giving myself to this church. I love this church. I'd do anything for church on the move, but I have a life outside of here. I don't need this to make myself significant or to be somebody, I'm simply fulfilling the task that the Lord has given. There's a wonderful liberty in that. It's embracing your limitations and we, through technology and all types of different ways, we're trying to get beyond our limited humanity. I wonder how many of us are trying to live in two places at the same time by dividing our presence between the people that are standing or sitting

in front of us and who we're talking to on our phone. Can I tell you, you can't divide your presence. I'm as guilty of this as anybody. You can't be in two places at once. Only the Lord can do that. You are a limited human being. Be present with the people that you're with. Put the phone down, look them in the eye, spend time with the people that matter in your life that you're closest to. I just, I wonder how much of our modern life is an attempt to get beyond our own human limitations, to be more than what we are, rather than just accepting what we are, which is fragile, frail, limited human beings. I don't even like saying those words. I wanna be strong. I wanna be capable. I want to endure. But my frailty and my weakness remind me how much I depend on His strength. Remember, you are limited. That's what our mortality reminds us of. Number two is this, our mortality reminds us of what's truly important. I think you know this already. I think you know this already. Death has a way of refocusing our priorities, have a brush with death, and suddenly the things that you thought were important

yesterday aren't important anymore. We want to last. We want to endure. And it's a rather, it's an interesting thing. Ernest Becker, who was an anthropologist, American anthropologist, not a Christian, but an observant, wise man. He wrote a book in 1973 called The Denial of Death. So Freud, I told you last week, kind of posited that human beings were driven by what he believed to be repressed sexual desire, thus sexualizing human identity. And Freud won, essentially. That's the way we think of ourselves in our modern day and age in terms of sexual identities. It didn't exist before Freud. And it's because he believed that the fundamental kind of governing desire of human beings was sexual in nature. But Becker disagreed with Freud. He believed that there was a deeper drive than sexual desire. He believed that the fear of death actually animated human action more than we realize. He said that human beings were kind of dualistic in nature. On the one hand, we are aware that we will die. I don't know if you've thought about this before, but we're the only creatures on the face of the planet that are aware of our own death. I have three dogs.

They have no idea that they're gonna die one day. It's not on their mind. They don't think about it. They don't worry about it. There's not a thought that goes through their brain of death. But human beings, we are aware that we will die. Contrast that with our deep desire for immortality. There's something inside each one of us we want to last. We don't like the idea of kind of how death renders all of life insignificant, so we look for ways. Becker called them immortality projects. You could call them ego projects. Or to use a biblical term, a Tower of Babel. Do you remember what happened at Babel? The people gathered together to build a tower that would stretch to the heavens, and their motivation was to make a name for themselves. See, the truth of death is that you will be forgotten. Life moves on. And you will be forgotten. Your life, in the face of death feels insignificant. So what we do, Becker reasoned, was that we throw ourselves into political activism. We pour ourselves into a religion. We pour ourselves into a career. We pour ourselves into some kind of family legacy so that we can feel like our lives make a difference,

that they matter. And I actually think that's biblical. I think we're hardwired to want and to desire immortality. C.S. Lewis had this notion that if you have a desire for something, it's only because that something exists. You don't desire things that don't exist. In other words, if you're hungry, it's because there's food, right? If you're tired, it's because there's such a thing as sleep. If you have sexual desire, it's because there's such a thing as sex. But what if you have a desire for immortality? Against all physical evidence to the contrary, no one lasts. Death bats a thousand, and yet every single one of us, man, woman, boy, girl, we want to live, and we want to live forever. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3 said it like this. He, speaking of God, has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart. The desire for eternity, the desire for immortality is God-given. The question is how will you go about achieving it? Basically, the way that our world gets immortality is to be successful or to be beautiful, to try to preserve yourself,

to fend off death for as long as possible. You see this, quite frankly, in the way that people disfigure themselves in an attempt to look forever young. We've all seen this. People who look, let's be honest, weird. I wonder, do they think we don't know? You look like a duck. What's wrong with you? It's a fear of death. We can't accept age, because age means breakdown. It means to be forgotten. It means to be insignificant. So we go about trying to attain some measure of immortality by any means necessary. We buy a really big truck. I am more than what you see me to be. I mean, I'm just doing a little analyzing here. It's just a thought. But perhaps there's something in this that is an ego project of some kind. I'm not saying this is a sin. I drive a truck myself. The point is that we're looking for ways to last. We want to be successful. We want to be healthy. We want to be famous. We want to be well-known. These are all ways to try to make something of ourselves

in the face of death. But it's interesting what Jesus said. He said, if you try to save your life, you'll lose it. Try to make something of yourself and it won't work in the end. Tim Keller, in his book, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, put it like this. This is hard to hear, but it's true. No matter what precautions we take, no matter how well we have put together a good life, no matter how hard we have worked to be healthy, wealthy, comfortable with friends and family and successful with our career, something will inevitably ruin it. No amount of money, power, and planning can prevent bereavement, dire illness, relationship betrayal, financial disaster, or a host of other troubles from entering your life. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic. Let me just tell you, the promise of Christianity is not become a Christian and life goes really easy for you. Become a Christian and you'll never have to face anything difficult again. Become a Christian and you can avoid decay and death. No, that's not true. The promise of Christianity is not that you can avoid these things, it's that death has lost its sting. That you can find true eternity and immortality

in the face of death, how? Well, Jesus said it like this. He said if you want eternal life, lose your life, lay it down. Give it up. Rather than trying to build a name and a tower for yourself, lay yourself down. He said it like this. He who builds his house on the sand. foolish person, right? They build their house on anything but Christ. They try to build it on career. They try to build it on their name. They try to build it on their wealth. Whatever it may be, they try to build something that will last, but eventually the storm comes and wipes it all away. But the wise person, he said, is like somebody who builds their house on a rock. What does that look like? He said, it looks like obeying my commands. That's fascinating. Moses prayed here, establish the work of our hands upon us. Twice, he said, establish the work of our hands. That's how the chapter ends. Establish means to fix, to make permanent. How can you ensure that what you're giving yourself to every day will last? How can you be sure that it will have any kind of eternal significance or value? Can I tell you how? You do it in service of the King. That's what it means to establish the work of your hands. I live my life for the Lord. I do his will. I follow where he leads. I do what he commands. And in so doing, Jesus said, your life is established. It's an amazing thing to think about. It's a crazy thing to think that Jesus would be so bold as to ask you to give your whole life up, all of your dreams and ambitions, and come and bow your knee at his feet. Crazy. And yet he said, that's the path to eternal life. You want to last. You want immortality. You want forever. This is how you get it. Not by trying to make a name for yourself. Not by trying to be successful, healthy, beautiful, or wise. But rather, by following me. Lay yourself down. And in so doing, then and only then can you truly last. By giving yourself up. That's what it is to focus on the important things. I no longer live for myself, for my own ego, for what I hope to attain in my life so that I can feel good about myself. But rather, I live at the pleasure of the one who saved me. I've offered my life to him, and in so doing, I get life in return. That's what it is to live for what's truly important,

is to give myself up for him by dying. Then and only then can I truly live. The last point is this. Contemplating one's mortality, one's death, reminds us that we are sinners in need of a savior. It's interesting what Moses wrote. He didn't just write about the short lifespan of mankind, but he framed it in a particular way. Verse 7, we are brought to an end by your anger. By your wrath, we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins, in the light of your presence. For all our days pass away under your wrath. We bring our years to an end like a sigh. Verse 11, he says, who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you. What Moses is rightly recognizing here is that we have a problem greater than just physical death. Physical death is not mankind's biggest issue. Spiritual death is. Franz Kafka, 1914 to 1915, finished a manuscript. Actually, he didn't finish it. He just came to the end of what he wanted to do with it. He gave it to a friend named Max Brod with the instructions that upon his death, he was to destroy this manuscript. Kafka died, and Brod didn't destroy it as he asked him to. He actually published it. It's now known as The Trial. It's a book, one of the more influential books of the last century. It tells the story of a guy named Joseph K. In the beginning of the book, Joseph K. is arrested. He doesn't know what for. No specific charge is given. He only knows that charges have been filed against him. He's not taken into custody. In fact, he's just told that the case will proceed against him, but that he should just go on living his life as normal. You can imagine how difficult that would be. Initially, he's indignant. How dare they? I've done nothing wrong. I'm an innocent man. What could they possibly have accused me of? I have no idea what I have done. But the longer he lives under the looming threat of judgment, the more his confidence and his innocence erodes into In the end, he finally resigns himself, that he is guilty. I think that's a striking portrait of human nature. We like to think that we're innocent, but I think if we're honest and we consider the fact that one day we will stand before a righteous and holy judge, I think that confidence begins to erode, and each of us realize that we're not nearly as good as we like to think we are. That if we were to stand before a holy and righteous God, we would become immediately aware of our brokenness and our sin.

Our righteousness would be, as the scripture says, like filthy rags. We like to think ourselves good people in the here and now, but I think if you get quiet, and maybe in the quiet moments of laying your head on the pillow at night before you go to sleep, you're aware of that. I know I am. What justifies you to stand before a holy God? Here Moses says that we come to an end under the wrath of God. The wrath of God is part of God's judgment against sin, so is death. Not just physical death, but spiritual death. Paul writes about this in Romans chapter 6. He says that the wages of sin is death. Spiritual death is worse than physical death, for it is separation from one's maker, separation from the God who formed us, fashioned us, and made us. That's the second death, according to the scriptures. And it is the judgment for every sinful human being. It's what awaits us except someone intervene on our behalf. We have a much greater problem than merely physical death. We face the judgment of a righteous and a holy God. And yet God in his grace and mercy has deferred. For thousands of years he deferred that wrath and judgment. He pushed it off. He held it off until he would come himself. And in a staggering turn of events, God Almighty would take on the limitation of flesh and blood. He would subject himself to everything that you and I go through. He knows what it is to be human. And rather than allowing us to take the punishment that we deserved for our sin, he took our place. This is the message of the gospel, that though we are sinners, Christ died for us. The wrath of God was poured out on Jesus.

God cannot just turn a blind eye to sin. He doesn't turn a blind eye to sin. He poured his wrath out on himself so that you and I could be made righteous. Jesus got our sin and we get his righteousness. This is what Isaiah 53 says, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him. The iniquity of us all. Do you know what this means? It means that as a believer you no longer have to fear death like other people do. It doesn't mean that death doesn't carry with it loss. It doesn't mean that we don't grieve. Scripture tells us in fact that we do grieve. We just don't grieve like those who have no hope. We know that death has lost its sting. That while there might be temporary separation in the here and now, at the end death will finally and fully be defeated. That all that has been lost will be undone. We don't just escape to some spiritual immaterial world, but that this very world and our physical bodies will be resurrected to a glorious new reality where death cannot touch us. Where we will no longer decay. Where there'll be no more sickness and disease. There'll be no more goodbyes. There'll be no more tears. No parties. No feasting with a tinge of sadness underneath because we know that this world will last. Because Jesus has defeated death once and for all. It's in that hope that we rest. It's in that hope that our future is secure. Though outwardly, Paul said in 2 Corinthians, our bodies are wasting away. Our final hope is secure.

Not because of anything that you've done, but because of what Christ did on your behalf. And all you need do is just say, yes, I receive it. Put my faith, my trust. In you, what a glorious future awaits us. No more fear of death, no more fear of standing before the throne of God and being found wanting. It's not your righteousness that makes you pure, it's His. Man, I'm so glad it doesn't depend on me. I know who I am, I know what I've done, I know what secret thoughts have gone through this mind, I know about the secret sins and iniquities of my life, and there are some that even I don't know about, but the Lord knows, and yet I stand before Him justified and complete. Why? Because of Jesus. Death is defeated. Though we grieve now for a little while, we know that this is not the end. That our God has defeated death once and for all, that we no longer have to fear it in the way that we used to, that it has lost its sting and that one day its effect, every, every bit of its effect, down to the last fiber and molecule of what has been corrupted in God's good creation will be resurrected, restored, and made new, and we will be resurrected, restored, and made new to life everlasting. This is true Christian hope. Thank you, Jesus, for winning such a great victory that we could not secure for ourselves. Would you bow your heads? Close your eyes. I know this isn't exactly the most fun message. It's a sobering word. It's one we need to hear. I love that the Scriptures are truthful enough to tell us what we need to hear, even when maybe we'd rather avoid it. And yet my prayer for us today is that we'd be encouraged, seeing the Lord for who He is, us for who we are, and resting, resting in the simple...our simple role and identity as just being a creature of a good, good father. Lord, you're good. Father, I pray you'd help us to see you clearly, to know your goodness. I pray that the truth of this word and the imperfect way that I've delivered it would reach into the hearts of your people. I'm so grateful that your spirit goes beyond my limited words and capacity. I fumble through this, and Lord, you do so much more than what I can do. And I'm grateful that you're speaking to the hearts of your people in a way that they need to hear. Lord, we're listening.

Remind us of what truly matters. Help us to abandon things that are of no importance, as Psalm 119 says, turn our eyes away from worthless things. Help us to pursue what really matters, to be about our Father's business, to live with the confidence, the security that you have defeated death, that its sting is truly gone, that though we grieve now for a little while, we don't grieve as those who have no hope, that our hope is in you. We look forward to the day when you return and that creation will be renewed and restored and that we will not say goodbye anymore, but that there will be a feast for eternity, joy, celebration, no more tears, life, life to the full, forever. We look forward to what you will do. Thank you for winning a victory we could not win for ourselves. In Jesus' name, amen. As we close today, our prayer team is going to be down front as they are every week. They'll line the front of the stage. If you have a prayer need, maybe you're going through something, you're facing something heavy right now, and you'd like someone to pray with you, we'd love to be able to minister to you in prayer. And if you have questions about your relationship with God, would you come forward? We have this book. It says, What Does It Mean to Be Saved? That's what we've titled it. We wrote this. It's free. It's a resource to you in your journey with Christ. Maybe you're starting to take your relationship with the Lord seriously. Great. Come grab this. We would love to be able to resource you with this. We're not trying to rope you into coming back here every single week. We just want to be able to help you walk with the Lord and know him for yourself. So our team will be down front. We would love to be able to minister to you today. Stand to your feet. We're going to close with this blessing out of Numbers chapter 6, and we like to say it out loud together. So words are on the screen, so you can join in. Here we go, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. God bless you, I love you. We'll see you next week, you're dismissed. Thank you so much for watching this message from Church on the Move Tulsa. We really hope it encouraged you to take a step toward Jesus. Church on the Move is a family of churches in Northeast Oklahoma, each with its own in-person pastor. We love our Bibles, learning a community and taking steps toward Jesus. If you live in the area, we would love for you to join us in person. For more information, check out our website at churchonthemove.com or we've got a few videos we think you might like. Check them out here. We'll see you next week. God bless you and keep you. The Lord bless you and keep you. Church on the Move. We'll see you next week.