It's safe to say that one of the first parts of making ALL THINGS NEW is simply asking God and those who He has placed as authorities in your life where to start or how it works. So in this lesson I aimed to answer one part of those questions, starting with a game.
While talking with one of our leaders and trying to figure out a game with an adequate message, we developed Musical Chairs with a "Twistery" (mystery+twist=twistery, cheesy... we know).
This version of the classic game has a hidden catch to convey penal substitution. If the game goes as usual, then all the students lose, but if at any time one student offers their seat to another student and takes the penalty (being out) for them, the game is over and EVERYONE wins.
..but more on that later.
What do you think enables us to change? Don't just skip ahead and read the answer. Take a few minutes and really think about this. What is it that enables us to become that new creation?
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He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them. So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:15-21 NLT)
Let me ask you that again. What enables us to change?
The answer is one thing and one thing alone. The answer is the CROSS.
Now take some time and think about what happened on the cross. What is the first thing you think of when I ask you, "What happened on the cross?"
To help you understand I'll refer back to the game of Musical Chairs. As the students who came walked around a circle of chairs, the music played and they waited for it to stop so they could frantically pounce after the chairs in attempt to avoid the penalty of being separated from the group. What they didn't know at the time was that the object of the game wasn't to be the last one standing and there was no way to earn victory by fighting against the other students. The only way that everyone eventually won was when a student figured out that they had to make the sacrifice for the good of the entire class. That one student took the punishment for someone who could not find their place. That one student left their seat and instead accepted a loss. That one student became the outcast, even though they had not made an error. That one student helped me create the perfect analogy for what Christ did for us on the cross. JESUS took the place of ALL of us who had no chance to overcome death on our own. JESUS left HIS SEAT at the right hand of God and traded it for earthly pain and suffering. JESUS paid our debt and was outcasted even though He had done NO WRONG. His death was a substitute for our punishment. He took the death that WE deserved. And just as the one student's sacrifice covered the entire group and allowed EVERYONE to win, Christ's sacrifice allows everyone on this earth an opportunity to win the race and live eternally with Christ in heaven.
Now even though Christ's death paid our penalty, His LIFE and PERFECTION is what saves us, but we'll touch on that in a minute.
Another hard-hitting question that a lot of teens (and honestly, adults) ask is, "Is God sending his son to a torturous death by the hands of men really a story of LOVE?"
I figured, rather than allowing you to be caught off guard with this question from kids at school or people you work with, I have to equip you to answer it by asking you, myself.
Is this a story of LOVE? Take another few minutes and try to answer that for yourself. Think about how you would answer that friend or co-worker who asked you that question...
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This is MY answer -- the BIBLE's answer. God is love, but He is also justice. He is all knowing and we as humans cannot dare to deny that only He could judge the true penalty for the consequence of sin. Whether we LIKE it or not, that consequence is death. But His mercy towards us, who had betrayed Him and His laws, shows us that this IS a story of love!
But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. And since we have been made right in God’s sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God’s condemnation. For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. (Romans 5:8-10 NLT)
we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son.
Like I said above, it was His perfection in life that saves us; the fact that he was a spotless man without sin or blemish to his record. The only sacrifice that God ever deemed worthy under the Old Covenant was the sacrifice of an animal without spot or blemish. And we already covered in a previous post that the cross entered us into a New Blood Covenant with God.
So the next step in this process is to find out what WE have to do to make this change happen. What covenant terms do WE have to uphold?
More on that next week...
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