The Cross - Victory in Christ

Tim Tebow spoke to a group of young people in Nashville a year ago about living a victorious life. He talked about victory in Christ in particular.
Tebow told the audience that he had narrowed down his college choices to Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida before he made his final decision to be a Florida Gator.
He said he visited Knoxville and at the time Phil Fulmer was the head coach at Tennessee. Fulmer brought him in his big office and on the desk was a huge red phone.
Tebow wondered what is that phone for? He asked Fulmer and Fulmer explained to him that they had a direct line to Heaven at Tennessee. They could call any time for 1000 dollars per minute long distance charge.
Tebow was impressed, being a Christian – he thought well they take their faith serious at Tennessee.
The next week he want to Alabama and at the time Mike Shula was the head football coach.
Shula took him in his office and sure enough there was a big red phone. Shula went on to explain to Tebow that at Alabama they had a direct line to Heaven and it cost 1000 dollars per minute in charges to call but it was there whenever Tebow needed.
At last Tebow went to Florida to meet with then Coach Urban Meyer. Meyer invited Tebow into his office and Tebow found that Meyer also had the red phone on his desk.
Tebow cut off Meyer before he could explain and he told Coach Meyer, I know that that is for.
Meyer said, really – what is it for? Tebow said it is a direct line to Heaven that costs 1000 dollars per minute.
Meyer said you are right about one point there Timmy.
He said Yes it is a direct line to Heaven but you see here in Gainesville the call is free because it is a local call.
Now I am not a Florida fan but I love Tim Tebow and I just had to share that story.
But when I think of Tebow I think of a winner.
I think of Victory.
Today I am going to talk about a different type of victory – Last week I started a series of sermons on the Cross of Christ.
Last week we talked about How Jesus freely took our place – He was our substitute. He loved us so much he took our punishment for sin.
This week we are going to talk about the cross as Victory.
What do you think of when the word "victory" is mentioned?
What ideas come into your mind?
Do you think of military victories like V-E day or V-J day?
During a war in Europe in the 1860's each regiment of an army returning to one major city was stopped at the city gate.
They were each asked by what right they desired to enter the city.
Each regiment would sing and tell of the victories they had won. They would then enter the gate and march through the streets, saluting their leader.
Is this the sort of thing that comes to your mind when victory is mentioned? Maybe you think of sports rather than military victory.
One famous television commercial refers to "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." Maybe you think of the Super Bowl or the World Series.
As a Christian a very different sort of victory ought to also come to your mind.
It is a victory that has been won for you by someone else.
It is a victory you are unable to win for yourself. Only by sharing in the victory of Jesus Christ can you attain this victory.
This victory is unusual in that it was not won through military conquest or athletic skill.
Force and violence were not used to overcome an enemy or an opponent.
Instead this victory was achieved through sacrifice and the power of the resurrection.
Scripture says the Following:
"In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Rom. 8:37).
"But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 15:57).
"For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith" (1 Jn. 5:4).
This idea of Victory in Christ is largely ignored in our world today.
How, then, is the cross of Jesus a victory?
If someone were to ask us how the execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Romans in 33 AD resulted in any type of victory what would you say?
I) VICTORY OVER SIN
First of all – The Cross represents Victory over Sin
The Biblical view of man is that we are in bondage to sin.
Jesus said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin" (Jn. 8:34).
While modern man proclaims his freedom very loudly, he is usually enslaved to his own passions and lusts.
He is like a beautiful eagle a preacher noticed one time while visiting in Switzerland.
This magnificent bird that could look so majestic floating on air currents in the wild instead was bound with a twenty foot long chain.
Man is the same way- we were created to be great, God created us in His image
Likewise man is in bondage to sin.
Once in Iowa a stranger called late at night at the local jail.
He was a member of a local theatrical company who was locked in handcuffs and wanted help in getting them off.
They had performed a local magic show and what was all fun and games was no longer fun.
They keys were broken off in the lock of the handcuffs and they were almost in full panic mode.
Sin is like that. We can play around with sin, flirt with temptation, and believe we will not get hurt.
We can think that sin is just a passing fancy and then one day we when we get older we will get serious about our faith.
What we then find out is that sin enslaves us, locks us up.
Then, when we are ready to quit, we find that we are addicted, entrapped, enslaved, and in bondage.
The Bible teaches that all mankind is enslaved to sin. Freedom from bondage to sin does not come merely through more information.
Education alone is not the answer. If that is all that we needed, then God could write us a letter from heaven and tell us how to be free of sin.
The problem is rarely that we do not know enough, but that we seem unable to do and perform what we know is right.
We need victory over the power of sin in our lives.
Freedom from sin and its power comes by yielding ourselves to Christ:
"Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness" (Rom. 6:16).
The victory over sin has been won for us by Christ
Some early church writers compared this to the struggle between David and Goliath.
It was David who won the victory that day, but the Israelites participated in and benefitted from his victory. It is the same with Christ and the Christian.
Christ won the victory over sin but now we benefit because of that victory.
II) VICTORY FROM THE LAW
In Christ we have the end of the old system of law as introduced by Moses for the Jews:
"Having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross" (Col. 2:14)
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13).
"For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Gal. 5:1).
Salvation does not rest on self-effort.
If it did, it would be impossible for us to be saved. When we are confronted by law, it merely condemns rather than saves.
Many times law and regulations make us worse.
Think about it this way, when you tell a kid not to do something many times it entices them to try it all the more.
We are rebellious in nature many times and laws and regulations do nothing but make people worse.
Since all sin and fall short of God's law, it is a sentence of death rather than life.
Only by a system of grace such as Christ instituted through his death on the cross can one be saved.
We accept salvation through faith rather than vainly attempting to earn it by our worthless human works.
WE don’t obey Christ as a Christian because we HAVE to – We do it because we WANT to. We want to please our Lord.
We want to live by God’s family values – we are so thankful for salvation that now we are alive to good works because Christ has set us free from sin.
We are now truly able to be human.
III) VICTORY OVER DEATH
As sinful human beings we are also in bondage to death.
Although death is such a universal reality of life which cannot be avoided, we still fear it to a certain degree.
Most people cope fairly well with death, including non-Christians.
There are people dying all the time in our culture who have no relationship with God, and there is no apparent overt fear of death.
We have built in mechanisms designed to help us cope with and handle death.
Some think we are a Christian nation and that as moral citizens we are surely within the grace of God.
Even in our culture, though, I have had funeral directors tell me that those who have no religious roots are those who do not cope with death as well.
In mission work one finds a very different story, though.
In some cultures there is a terrible fear of death.
One missionary had a Muslim woman come to discuss death with him.
Her daughter had been converted to Christianity and had also died recently.
The mother wanted to inquire what they had done to her to make her die that way.
The missionary said they had done nothing to her. "What do you mean?", he asked. "She died smiling. Our people do not die that way," was her answer.
Christians may not welcome death as a friend due to earthly commitments, but the pagan fear of death should be gone, since Christ came to
"deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb. 2:15).
In one village there was a custom of ringing the church bells once for each year of age of a person who had died.
One man said he used to listen carefully to that ringing and count the number of years.
If it was seventy, eighty, or ninety he would breathe a sigh of relief.
He reasoned that he would probably live many more years until he reached such an age.
If the number was lower, a chilling fear would run up and down his spine when the ringing would suddenly stop.
This continued for a long time until he came to realize that in Christ, he had eternal life. He was given victory over the fear of death through Jesus.
Paul explains that in Christ we are also given a victory over death itself:
"Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 15:54-57).
The real fear of death is that we will die lost in sin and suffer eternal torment in hell. Through Christ the sting of death, sin, is removed by cleansing in the blood of Jesus Christ.
IV) VICTORY OVER THE DEVIL AND EVIL
When the time for his death was drawing near,
Jesus declared, "Now is the judgement of this world, now shall the ruler of this world, be cast out...He said this to show by what death he was to die" (Jn. 12:31, 33).
Jesus saw his death on the cross as a victory over Satan and the kingdom of evil.
The writer to the Hebrews agrees: "He himself likewise partook of the same nature [flesh and blood], that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil" (Heb. 2:14).
The so-called ransom theory of the atonement really stressed this victory over Satan during the first millenium of the church's existence.
People really believed in a personal devil back then.
They had an awareness of the reality of evil more so than the contemporary, secular American.
People today joke about Satan and picture him as wearing a red suit and having a pitchfork in hand, but we do not take him too seriously.
He makes a good character for a movie from time to time, but we rarely think of him.
In the first century, though, people believed that Satan had gained power, a kingdom in this world. He is called the
"ruler of this world" (Jn. 12:31; 16:11)
and "the prince of the power of the air" (Eph. 2:2).
Anyone not following Christ was said to be following Satan. In the early centuries, though, it was stressed that the dominion the devil had over man was wrong.
He had no right to man. He was a robber, a thief, and a usurper.
When the devil incited men to put Jesus on trial and finally crucify him, many Christians believed this was the greatest irony of all.
In the devil's seeming victory he met defeat.
The resurrection turned the cross into a gigantic trap which caught the devil and saved mankind. Some of the descriptions of this were quite crude.
The humanity of Jesus veiled his deity, so that he was like bait on a fishhook which caught Satan.
Another described the cross as a mousetrap baited with the blood of Jesus. Granted these analogies are somewhat grotesque to us, but there is an element of truth in them.
In the cross of Jesus the devil was defeated and judged.
"He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him [or it]" (Col. 2:15).
Possibly this is the explanation of that difficult passage in Revelation 20.
There we are told, "He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years" (Rev. 20:2).
Maybe Jesus' atonement is the binding of Satan. The preaching of the gospel, the good news of the cross of Jesus Christ, is a binding power against Satan wherever it is proclaimed.
In Jesus' death on Calvary we have victory over sin, over death, over the devil, and from the law.
This is a great message of hope for all mankind. In Christ a once-for-all and a once-for-all time victory has been won. God is not the victim of circumstances beyond his control. History is not subject to Satan or chance. Rather history exhibits the careful plan and foreknowledge of God. We can shout, "If God be for us, who can be against us."
Application:
So what do we do:
1) We as Christians Go and tell the Story of Salvation- We cry out the victory Cry – we let people know the good news.
The story has often been told of the little church in Germany sited near train tracks that carried Jews to their death.
"Each Sunday Morning," the German man telling the story said, "we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks.
We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!"
"Week after week the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us."
We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices.
If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.
Years have passed, and no one talks about it much any more; but I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. I can still hear them crying out for help.
God forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians, yet did nothing to intervene."
Now when we hear this story we are horrified that these German Christians did nothing to stop the trains. We know that if they tried they would have died for it.
Now consider this – we live in a free country – we can proclaim the Gospel to whoever we want. There are people literally in the bondage of sin.
Much like these people going to the concentration camps – we have people all around us dead in sin and we do nothing.
I think this is far more serious in that we are talking about people’s eternal destiny.
We must tell people about the victory of the Cross of Jesus Christ.
A preacher tells of visiting 2 churches back to back, and it was a great lesson in opposites. He said that 1 church was dying, the other was growing and thriving.
The first had a big sign out front that said, “All welcome…come on in.”
And it was dying. The other was thriving, but it’s sign wasn’t on the outside, but just inside the door…you could only see it from the inside as you made your way out…
“you are now entering the mission field”.
That sign was saying, “go out and bring them in from the fields of sin!” Just as Jesus said, “go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.”
Nowhere does the Bible command sinners to come to church!
We must go and tell others about Jesus and the Victory that the Cross has one them.
2) We may have people right here that have not claimed the victory.
You need to take hold of the promises that Jesus has given us through His work on the cross.
During the Spanish-American War, Clara Barton was overseeing the work of the Red Cross in Cuba.
One day Colonel Theodore Roosevelt came to her, wanted to buy food for his sick and wounded Rough Riders.
But she refused to sell him any. Roosevelt was perplexed. His men needed the help and he was prepared to pay out of his own funds.
When he asked someone why he could not buy the supplies, he was told, "Colonel, just ask for it!" A smile broke over Roosevelt's face. Now he understood--the provisions were not for sale. All he had to do was simply ask and they would be given freely.
I know that there may be someone here today that has tried to do it themselves. You may be trying to figure out this life all on your own and you are getting nowhere.
Here is the message of Christ – He has done it for you. He has won the victory on the cross.
You have nothing to fear- you have everything to gain by just accepting His free gift of salvation.
All you answers are given in Jesus just don’t be stubborn and submit your will to Jesus – take the promise and victory of the cross and make it your gift today the gift of God’s grace that He wants to give you.