It is a pleasure to be together again, to listen to Gods voice together. God’s voice will always be a direction of orientation and it’s above any other voice, and it’s just not direction or orientation, its encouragement, strength, because God is everything in life. His word is eternal, His word is perfect. This is why this time would be enjoyed; we are together in the presence of God. And some days ago I was reflecting upon something I want to share with you and it is really practical…sometimes in our lives when we get used to something, that something becomes common. It even became monotonous because when we get used to it, it can also produce a routine for us. So what I have I see it every day and I am already used to seeing it and having it. And to understand this a little bit deeper, what I am trying to say is…I am going to give you an example…I am going to make up a story and we are going to use two women for the story…one of them name is Beatriz and the other one is Lucia, and they are friends. Beatriz told Lucia that she needs clothes and that she specifically needs a top, because she got clothes but she doesn’t have a blue top in this case to match with the rest of her clothes and they go to stores, different businesses and they can’t find this top but one day they find it. She realizes this is the one that she likes, she takes it in her hands, she touches the cloth, is a good quality, she knows is going to fit her well and actually is a good brand and is priced well, it’s on sale. So happily Beatriz found this top and she buys it, this blue top. Once she has it, she goes home and she says Lucia I found the top, this top that I wanted so badly to find. “Oh congratulations” Lucia says, well see you Saturday. I am going to put it on and you’ll see it. Imagine that Saturday morning of Beatriz takes care of that top, it can’t have any defects, any stains, it needs to be well ironed because she is wearing for the first time. When she sees Lucia, imagine Lucia says “wow this top, it’s so beautiful, that blue color, it’s great” you know how it feels when you are trying a piece of clothing once people say something and then Beatriz and Lucia hope to find other friends that day and when they find those friends the same thing happens, same thing that happened between Beatriz and Lucia, that blue top was the comment of all of their friends. But then the days went by, there is a second time when Beatriz wears this blue top and someone says “oh that top looks good on you” “it’s very nice” “nice blue top” but then there is a third and a fourth and a fifth time that she puts it on and then this blue top becomes something common. Beatriz got used to this blue top and she barely even values it anymore and actually Lucia asked her about this blue top and she says “oh you know what? It’s in the closet, somewhere, it’s been there so long, you know I wear it on Saturdays when I go shopping or go to the supermarket.” What happened between the day that she tried it on for the first time when it wasn’t common, when it was something beautiful and everybody was saying things about it and it wasn’t a common thing for her? What happened between that time and the present time when that top was just a common thing she got used to it and it’s a routine thing? Well what happened is that because she got used to this blue top, that blue top lost its value.

What am I trying to say with this? And we are going to go to the spiritual side of this whole thing. What happens in me? What happens in you when we say or hear words like: God, Christ, Jesus, Lord, salvation, faith, believe, repentance, gospel, good news, eternal life? Of course, in this time, this mental image is bringing you words and you are saying: ok, this is practically the doctrine of salvation or the doctrine of faith or believing in the gospel, and we might even say, wow, this is extraordinary, the gospel such power, the day when I surrendered to Christ, the gospel has great power, Paul would say, that the gospel is power of God for salvation for anybody who believes…
Yes, I have so many years of being a Christian.
But we know what salvation is, what eternal life is, who God is, who Jesus Christ is, we know about the gospel…but we know it. So much time has passed from the moment when those words were a living for us, that now they become concepts for us. And what God marked very strongly for me and and I want to leave this feeling for you in Christ, so that from today on we may start to live a Christian life that flourishes and what the Lord marked for me is that the time has come to cancel the routine, to say no to monotony, to renew everything that we are and we have in Christ Jesus, to not allowed that everything that was one day something that burned in our hearts today be simply a moment. And I want to transmit this because I think is important that the times we are living, the times of so much confusion, where people can listen from us and seeing from us that we are transmitting Christ with love, with power, and passion. Why? Because if we continue in this routine and getting used to things, and this routine makes us loose the love, the passion for God, and the work of Christ becomes an intellectual concept for us, were yeah is true and we value it but they don’t have the same effect in each of our lives.

This is why I want to share with you a verse that is very important in the Word of God, it says:

“For he made him who knew not sin to be sin for us;
that we might become righteousness of God in him.”
2nd. Corinthians 5:21

Lets look a little bit into the past, if we can penetrate to eternity, there in the eternal sense is defined the plan of redemption for humanity before the earth was created.
This means that the plan of salvation from the moment before the earth was established, it was already planned, was already prepared, and then the time came were heavens were moved and the entire heavens was moved so that the son of God could come to this earth. God himself made man in Jesus to make hope the work of our salvation.
Imagine now, the heavens invading the earth with the person of the Son of God, the perfect one, the holy one, the righteous one, to bring into fruition the work of redemption and salvation for the entire human race.

Now, when we think about this and we know that this is so, starts to be in our hearts our recognition that is different, because we start to find the importance to the work of Christ that we should never loose. I will just speak about this verse that I just mentioned, through phrases, I am going to go by phrases and we are going to analyze that.

The first phrase says: “him who knew not sin…

The Redeemer, the Savior, had no relationship with the sin. It’s obvious that He had and needed to always have a superior power to sin, because sin could not defeat him, so Jesus did not know sin. So He had no experience of ever sinning, this is why the Word says, to him who knew not sin. There was no stain, there was no sin in his person, because if there were, then the sacrifice on the cross would have been invalidated and the devil would have taken advantage of that opportunity to know that he could run away from the defeat that awaited him when the Son of God would die on that cross. Him who knew not sin.

And the second phrase is, God, made him be sin for us…

What a tremendous phrase, what tremendous content, Him who knew not sin, who had no experience of having sinned even though he was tempted and everything but he did not have sinned, this one, was made sin by God for us…so God treated Jesus like sin itself; it doesn’t say that Jesus became a sinner, I reaffirm this because he never sinned, instead he carried on him the sin that was not his. This is why is very graphic when the prophet Isaiah says:

“All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Isaiah 53:6

This verse is notable, it starts by saying, all of us…every one of us, the entire human race, we have gone astray like a sheep goes astray. Why does the sheep go astray? Because it does not have a sense of direction, it leaves and it doesn’t know how to come back to the same place.

We had done the same thing in relation to God. We had gone astray, we were disoriented, we took our own path, and that was the path of independence. That was the path of individualism; this was the path of saying to God: I know where I am going, even though we didn’t know. This is why rebellion comes, this is why apathy against God, this is why indifference, the heartens of hearts, so Isaiah is very graphic, that one, that Jesus, was made to carry the load of our going astray of our independence, of our indifference, of everything that we never wouldn’t be able to carry ourselves, so all of that was carry over Christ.

He experienced the shame, the humiliation and the pain of sin, this is why God left him at the moment of the cross, because God could not see that sin; that damning, that condemnation that was over us was not loaded on Him and the entire human race could take this redemption from Jesus Christ.

God made Jesus a collective representative for the entire humanity, Jesus was the representative of all humanity in relation to carrying sin, but He never sinned. What can we say to this? This is an admirable work, this is an action of love and surrendered that we could have never thought of; that we can’t even measure.

So here the concept of substitution comes in.
What is to substitute? It’s to place one thing or person in the place of another.
Give you an example so we understand: one day God says to Abraham: you have to give your son Isaac, Isaac is about to be sacrificed, and in one moment Abraham lifts up the knife to sliced his son and an angel from the Lord comes and says: Abraham don’t kill him, because I have seen that you are fearful of God because you did not refuse to give me your only son. Immediately when Abraham, the father lowers the knife, he looks to one of his sides and he sees a beast tie to a bush and that was the substitution. He took this animal and he sacrificed it in place of Isaac and that is substitution.

Now we were supposed to pay for that sin, we were supposes to pay for the faults and from everything that meant to be far from God, but God said: none of you would sacrifice themselves, because your sacrifice would be insufficient, the only who can pay that is a lamb without a stain, without contamination and who never have relationship with sin, and that’s my Son, and he died in substitution and in your place.
Beloved, He was the perfect Lamb, so today we need to come back to our past, not to remember the old sin but instead to make active again this Christ who loved us, this work on the cross that is powerful so that we could rise up and recover that communion with God. And this ends with the apostle Paul writing in this verse, and after saying, He who knew not sin, and God made him to be sin for us…now he says, that we might become the righteous of God in him.

So, Jesus took everything that was ours, the sin, to give us what we don’t have, this was the justice of God. And the result is that now God sees us righteous and holy. This is such a supernatural work, its incomprehensible, and only through the work of the Holy Spirit can we reach the point of having this as treasure. Why? because God through Christ sees us as righteous. God treated Jesus like a sinner to treat us as righteous; his life without sin was accredited on our behalf.

So definitely, this righteousness within us is Christ, and that’s in 1st. Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 30:

"Christ has been made wisdom and righteousness from God…

God makes us righteous, he makes us righteous, he does justice for us in Christ Jesus, when God sees us as righteous is when he sees Jesus Christ in us, it’s not because of us, it’s because of Him.

After analyzing all of this, we can reflect on different things, what else could we ask of God? What else is there that God has not already done to complete the plan of salvation? We can’t ask for anything.
This is why Paul in a note that is admirable and exclamation of jubilee in the Second Letter to Corinthians, he says: we have this treasure in jars of clay…
What is he saying? Well, in this 4th chapter of 2nd. Corinthians, the context is talking about the gospel, talking about the power of the gospel, and when he speaks about this, even though he summarizes by saying that, the gospel is Christ. And beloved, that’s the way it is, if I could paraphrase what Paul was saying based on what I just said, itd be to say, we have this treasure, Christ, within us, within these bodies that are so fragile and so weak.
And what do we find out? Paul never got used to it, he never fell under the routine, he never said oh I already know this. Paul had a spiritual engine; he was fed by the spirit in a way that his spiritual living allowed him to always have the work of the cross active in him that is why he transmitted it with such emphasis and power.

This is why I now understand when the apostle Paul when writing to the Philippians, he says: make sure you watch over your salvation with fear.

And the first thing that we think about is, but wait a second, does this mean I have to guard my salvation because I might lose it? No not at all. Paul is never expressing that we have to occupy ourselves of the salvation because we may lose it, what he is saying is you and I have received a treasure in the shape of salvation and that treasure is Christ, that treasure needs to be made to grow, we have to multiply it and because this salvation that we have is whole, because it takes up the spirit, soul,  and body, when we make it grow, when we make it develop that salvation that we received from Christ, Christ is the one that starts to grow within each and every one of us, because he starts to develop; and then when we speak Christ is the one that is being manifested.

This is why Paul says: watch it, guard it; what it means is dedicate yourselves to working on the salvation, because you have a treasure, and that treasure is invaluable, incalculable.

This is why, almost to finish this important thing I wanted to share with you, and before reading one more passage from the bible to finish, I want to ask you that once we finish this meeting make small groups to pray to the Lord in thankfulness and recognition of the work of Christ on the cross of Calvary. Let’s take the determination not to getting used to the Christian life, let’s remember the love that is renew, that first love today.  If that wiliness is there, the Holy Spirit does the work in us and after that time of prayer, I think it would be important to have as a congregation a time of praise and worship to the Lord, where when we say Jesus is the center, I love him with all my heart, I gave him my life and He is exclusive in my life and there is nobody else like Him, this that we are singing would be a reality, this would be a reality and it will be something active and current, because when we speak it transmit the gospel because we have the mission and vision to do so, this love for Christ, this passion, this grace from God that is rich, and it will melt the cold heart people and we would find out that the power of salvation is there, that Christ continues to save, that the gospel is power from God for everyone who believes.  

And I want to read to finish, beloved, something beautiful that is in Revelation, Chapter 7, verses 9 through 12, and it says:

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying: “Amen! Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!”