TWELVE ORDINARY MEN – Part 3 of 4

Christ’s choice of the apostles testifies to the fact that God can use the unworthy and the unqualified. He can use nobodies. They turned the world upside down, these twelve (Acts 17:6).  It was not because they had extraordinary talents, unusual intellectual abilities, powerful political influence, or some special social status. They turned the world upside down because God worked in them to do it.

God chooses the humble, the lowly, the meek, and the weak so that there’s never any question about the source of power when their lives change the world. It’s not the person; it’s the truth of God and the power of God in the person. (We preachers need to remind ourselves of this. It’s not our cleverness or our personality. The power is in the Word -- the truth that we preach -- not in us.) And apart from one Person -- one extraordinary human being who was God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ -- the history of God’s work on earth is the story of His using the unworthy and molding them for His use the same careful way a potter fashions clay. The Twelve were no exception to that…

Let’s not, however, underestimate the importance of their office. Upon their selection, the twelve apostles in effect became the true spiritual leaders of Israel… The apostles became the preachers of the new covenant. They were the ones to whom the Christian gospel was first entrusted… They became the foundation stones of the church, with Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). Those truths are heightened, not diminished, by the fact that these men were so ordinary. 

-- Excerpts from “Twelve Ordinary Men: How the Master Shaped His Disciples for Greatness and What He Wants to Do with You” by John MacArthur

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NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD OF JESUS

"This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of His blood -- to be received by faith.” (Romans 3:22-25a)

The gospel of grace is underwritten by the most precious commodity in the universe -- the blood of Jesus.

Some have lost sight of an important truth, possibly the most important truth, which is this: no blood means no salvation. And no redemption, no forgiveness, no sanctification, and no future.

Without the blood, the gospel is no gospel and the cross is nothing more than two beams of wood. As the song-writer Robert Lowry wrote, our cleansing, our wholeness, our pardon, our hope, our peace, our righteousness, our overcoming, are all based on “nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

On the night before He died, Jesus said: “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you.” (Luke 22:20) 

-- Paul Ellis 

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FREEDOM IN CHRIST

We can serve God out of a cringing feeling of failure to measure up, or we can serve Him out of gratitude for the work of grace He has fully brought into our life. Grace is by far a superior motivation to guilt. God doesn’t want us running holes in our shoes on some guilt trip. He doesn’t want us living life by some Levitical checklist of rules and regulations. He wants us to be free -- not just from sin, but from the chafing collar constraint that the Law clamped around our necks.

God wants us to be free, He wants us to live free, as Hebrews 10:15-18 indicates: “The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First He says: ‘This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put My laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.’  Then He adds: ‘Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.’ And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.”

Having the Law in our hearts as opposed to an external standard of stone is the primary difference between the New Covenant and the Old (Jeremiah 31:31-33). The power of God’s Spirit residing within us is sufficient for us to live fully, to live fruitfully, and to live freely, unfettered from the shackles of sin and from slavery to legalism…

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free, therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”  (Galatians 5:1) 

-- Charles R. Swindoll in “The Preeminent Person of Christ: A Study of Hebrews” 

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A NEW COVENANT

“Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah -- not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”  (Jeremiah 31:31-34 NKJV)

“Then Jesus took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’”  (Matthew 26:27-28 NKJV)

The Hebrew religion was an unfinished religion.  That is one of the best proofs of its divine inspiration.  The prophets had the forward look [and] great things were yet to come.  As one of the most daring expressed it, the old and hallowed covenant, made by God at the Exodus, would be superseded by a new and higher relation; God would write His law into the hearts of the people; the old drill in outward statutes would disappear, for all… would know God by an inward experience of forgiveness and love.  

-- Walter Rauschenbusch in “The Social Principles of Jesus” [1916]

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