Orchard Bible Church

07/02/2024

He Gave His Life a Ransom for Many (Part 1)

Mark 10:45
For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The picture of God offering Jesus as a ransom for many is one of the most powerful, illustrated truths in the Bible. So, I want us to lower our buckets down into the well twice, to drink in its rich encouragement.

Today, I want you to remember that you and I, and all humanity after Adam and Eve, were born into captivity – to sin and spiritual death. All of us.
But then one day a messenger hands us a message, a letter as it were (hold it up and open) that said (in my case) – “Dear Nate, today is an amazing day for you. You thought you were trapped here chained to the floor, with nobody rich enough, and who also cared enough, to pay your ransom price of sin and get you out of here. But someone has paid the ransom. I have received the briefcase and it’s all here. In fact, there was way too much included, so here’s a Righteousness MasterCard with an unlimited balance for you, too. Take it, you’re free to go.”

Astonished, we look around, making sure we’re the intended recipient.

“But I haven’t done anything to earn this. I can’t accept it.”

“Well,” we’re told, “this is your only chance, you either take it or leave it…but if you leave it…then you’ll be left in here…until the Day of Judgement.”

“This seems too good to be true, though. Is it a hoax? Is it a joke?”

“It does seem pretty incredible,” comes the reply. “But I checked it carefully…it’s signed in Jesus own blood. I ran the account, and it’s in your name, everything checks out. And I represent God. He never jokes about an eternal human soul.”

I was really given that wonderful message…and one day I took it and walked out of the cell of darkness and into the kingdom of light and life. And nothing and no one can ever put me back in there.

And one of those notes and MasterCards has been handed to every human being – you, too.

Many have accepted the gift. Even now in your mind you can look down at your letter and remember that day – and all the days of life you’ve enjoyed since that day you were ransomed. And you remember that it was Christ’s body broken for you and his blood given for you, that redeemed your life and set you free. That is what we are to celebrate every time we take communion at church.

On the other hand, maybe you’ve been handed your letter, but you’ve read it and put it back into its envelope and you’ve set it on a shelf in your cell. Or, it’s even possible, that as I’m sharing this truth with you today, it is the first time you have heard these things explained. I am handing you God’s letter telling you that you have been ransomed from your sin and Jesus’ blood was not only sufficient to pay for your mistakes, but a Righteousness MasterCard is yours, too. God will cover any (and there will be many) future mistakes you make.

I want you to look down at the letter and see your name written there. See your name stamped on the debit card. Then look up at the barred door of your captivity to sin and guilt that stands open. Nothing stands in your way, you can be redeemed today. Don’t put it back on the shelf.

06/06/2024

Foolishness or Wisdom & Power

1 Corinthians 1:17 – 25
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Why does Paul talk so much about foolishness and wisdom, folly vs power, over and over in these verses? What is his point and why does he feel the need for so much repetition to hammer his point home? I’d like to illustrate this.

Two women meet each other one morning as they sit down right next to each other at a scientific talk. They listen to the same lecture, which is on a new cure to a rare disease. At the end, the first woman thinks to herself, “What a boring dry speaker, I wish I had chosen the other session.” The other woman rushes forward to be the first to meet the speaker and to learn more. Both women have the same rare disease, for which a cure has just been discovered. But the difference is that the first woman doesn’t know she has it and the second woman knows she is dying and has no other cure. The first woman was unimpressed and heard nonsense. The second woman could care less about the eloquence of the speaker, she heard only POWER and WISDOM that would change her life.

The Corinthians were connoisseurs, they knew how to really appreciate and discern the best rhetoric and eloquence. They made much of the style and giftedness of the speaker, and little of the content. The content Paul preached was of Christ’s crucifixion, a method of ex*****on considered so crude it was not even mentioned in polite company. There was no way to make this content “cool”, the “wow” factor wasn’t there. It’s a gruesome, shameful, topic that shouldn’t even be brought up. It was deemed nonsense for the elevated mind to find hope, power, and God in a man killed by crucifixion.

The same has been true across the following centuries and is true today. The world today, full of very smart people, scoffs at Jesus on the cross. What they miss is that the cross isn’t meant to be cool. It is meant to be so low, so painful, so ugly that we weep in amazement at a God who would lower himself to that point, the point we deserved, to heal us.

You, along with every human alive, were born with the spiritual disease of sin and guilt and the bad news is that it is terminal. But there is news of a single cure and you and I have heard it. We sit in our chairs now at the end of the talk and the question is, do we think it’s foolishness and walk away? Or do we rush the stage to follow our savior and to be healed by the wisdom and power found at the cross?

1 Corinthians 1:17 – 25For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it...

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06/19/2023

Camp Elim in the City

Orchard Bible Church: Centennial, CO > Camp Elim in the City

05/12/2023

Camp Elim in the City!

Registration is open!!. Go to https://www.campelim.com/inthecity for more information and to register.