Reflecting on What Matters Most
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Benjamin Kreps:
Hey everyone, and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace churches with our executive director. Mark, as we record this podcast, it is the week before the week of Easter, the week before Holy Week, but the podcast will be dropping during Holy Week, Lord willing, on Monday after we record this or this Thursday, it drops a few days later. And so when guys are checking out the podcast guys and gals, they will be right in the thick of one of the most wonderful weeks of the year, the unhurried reflection upon, meditation upon, celebration of the cross. And of course, that is not unique to Holy Week as a family of churches, we seek to build our churches around the gospel of the crucified and risen friend of sinners. But in fact, you've been reflecting on something more fundamental even when it comes to who we are as a family of churches. And that is during Holy Week. The reality is during Holy Week, we remember the reason why we exist as a family of churches at all. And you wanted to talk to us about that.
Mark Prater:
I did. I mean Holy Week. I love Holy Week for so many different reasons. And one of them is that slow reflection, that's a good term, of the death and resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, who is a friend of sinners, as you said. And as we reflect on that this week during Holy Week, it's a good reminder of why we even exist as a family of churches. Apart from the events that occurred in Holy Week; Monday, Thursday, good Friday, resurrection Sunday, Sovereign Grace would not exist at all. And because we exist, we exist to advance that gospel. We exist to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ by planting and strengthening churches throughout the world. And it's that gospel that for our 40 plus year history has been at the center of everything that we've done.
I'm so grateful for our founder CJ Mahaney, who helped us keep the gospel at the center of all we do in our preaching, in applying the preaching to our lives, and the way we just orient our entire life. We want to orient it around the gospel of Jesus Christ. He's done a great job, continues to do a great job in building his church, of just reminding us, as he said, keeping the main thing the main thing. And it is really captured in one of our shared values that we have as a family of churches, the second one that's listed: gospel centered doctrine and preaching, which says, we believe that the gospel, the good news of God's saving activity in Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of his redemptive acts, the center of the Bible's story and the essential message for our faith, life and witness.
We as a family of churches are committed to preaching the gospel, singing the gospel, praying the gospel, and building our churches upon the gospel. Our ultimate hope in all that we do is not in our plans and labors, but the perfect life and substitutionary death, victorious resurrection, and glorious ascension of Jesus Christ that captures it so well. We are reminded this week of what Jesus has done on our behalf and why we even exist. And because we exist, it is that gospel that we're to proclaim and declare to many; where we were once like people who didn't know Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
Benjamin Kreps:
Yes, it is always a good reminder. We know this, we can answer the question on the test, but to be aware that we are not merely a club for like-minded people with similar interests. We are in our local churches, small expressions of the global reality of Jesus purchasing for himself, people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. And we celebrate that in a distinct way during Holy Week. The reality is during Holy Week, typically most pastors are very busy. We're getting ready for preparing for Good Friday service, preparing for Easter. I know at Living Hope we, like a lot of other churches, are doing baptisms. We've got six baptisms on the docket and there's a lot of preparation, a lot of work to be done, but you wanted to help us as well, not just pastors, anyone checking out the podcast, but I think for pastors this could be very helpful to give us some fuel for our personal worship and celebration of Holy Week in the form of some quotes from a recently published book from R.C. Sproul and how we miss R.C. Sproul, who now is with his savior and enjoying his reward. But you wanted to share some quotes from a recently published book of material from Sproul.
Mark Prater:
Yeah, the book is entitled Holy Week, the Week That Changed the World. It's a book that Ligonier recently published, and obviously it's a collection of his older teachings and writings assembled into the Holy Week format. And so he talks about Monday, Thursday and Good Friday and obviously Resurrection Sunday. And I wanted to read a section from Good Friday that focuses on the death of Christ. And as I read this, it's a couple of things; we do miss R.C., he's just very unique, who died as you mentioned a few years ago. So we do miss him, but also may these truths I'm about to read may not be familiar to any of us, and they may not not be familiar to your church and to our family of churches. So just a couple of quotes I want to read from R.C.
Here's the first one: As the scriptures tell us, it pleased the Lord to bruise him, Isaiah 53, verse 10, not because the father took some kind of fiendish delight in suffering, in afflicting his son, but because the father delighted in the value of what was taking place. On one hand, the perfect justice of God was being upheld because sin received punishment. On the other hand, the most marvelous and glorious expression of grace in the history of the world was put on display. The one who paid the penalty for sin, paid it not for himself, but for us. Justice and grace married in an extraordinary ceremony that took place at Golgatha.
And he goes on to just unpack that a little bit more specifically by, a little bit later in this chapter, focusing on propitiation and imputation, theological terms that are rich in meaning. And this is what he writes: Propitiation refers to what Christ did to satisfy the demands of God's justice and holiness. It represents the vertical dimension of the atonement. The work of propitiation is that ministry by which Jesus satisfied the justice of God. When Jesus cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was bearing the curse of God for our sin. An amazing truth, but it's not just propitiation. Not only did he bear the judgment that we deserve, there's imputation. And R.C. writes this: at the heart of the gospel is the good news that the righteousness that we need, the only righteousness that avails for us, the only righteousness that will ever justify us is the righteousness of Christ. The only way that we can have the righteousness of Christ is by it being imputed to us. That's the glory of the grace of God, that not only are our sins imputed to Jesus on the cross, but his righteousness is imputed to us.
Well-written, rich theological truths, well-written and very clear, and I wanted to share them because I don't want them to become familiar to me, and I don't want them to become familiar to our pastors and to the members of our churches and to our family of churches throughout the world. May those truths continue to deepen our affections for Jesus and may they fuel our desire to advance the gospel. And so this week as we reflect, may we treasure Jesus more, may we love him more, and may we be more committed to reaching out and inviting people to Good Friday services, to Resurrection Sunday services, to share the gospel with them. And may the Lord Jesus Christ reach more and more people with this good news that we know and that we love.
Benjamin Kreps:
Yes, amen. Wonderful quotes and wonderful encouragement, Mark, for each one of us. We got good news to share. We got some great news that we get to share. And I just spent just recently in the past couple of weeks interacting with someone that we did church discipline with back a few years ago, very serious sin involved who has repented and is actually moving toward membership in a Sovereign Grace church, and wrote a letter to our church explaining his repentance and return to Christ, and then spent time with a friend just the other day who I knew previously before his conversion and then recently converted. And just being able to share with him this discernible gentleness and joy that exuded from him. And again, just being reminded in the first place, of course, we should never get over the reality that God has saved us.
I mean, we are aware that we are the worst sinners we know. And so for him to intervene by his grace and bring us to life in Christ through the proclamation of the Gospels, endless source of wonder, and then to be surrounded by other trophies of God's grace and living illustrations of God's saving power, man, let's share that good news and what an opportunity we have to do that this upcoming Easter Sunday, especially as preachers, every preacher who gets to stand in that pulpit in herald forth the good of the gospel, man, so much to look forward to during this Holy Week.
So thank you for your encouragement, Mark. Thank you to everyone checking out the podcast. Happy Easter. This is our happy Easter and happy Holy Week to all of you, and we'll see you here next week. Lord willing. Bye for now. Thank you for watching.
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