4th February 2025

4th February 2025


Pray (ACts)


Read (Philippians 2v5-8)


Message (Scott Woodburn)


I am so thankful for the active obedience of Christ, it frees me from a life spent wondering “have I done enough?”. The truth is that even when I am at my best, I still fall far short of what God requires. Thankfully, by faith in Christ, His obedience is counted as my obedience. He has kept the law perfectly and His righteousness is credited to my account.


Nevertheless, perhaps you and I know moments of great doubt. What if God has had enough of my repeated failures? What if I have run out of chances? What if grace is conditional upon my performance? To these questions I want to answer with Christ’s passive obedience. If Jesus actively obeyed God’s law then He also passively endured all the humiliations and sufferings poured out upon Him in this life.


Paul would speak of Christ’s passive obedience in this way “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” 


In the face of death Jesus didn’t speak or shout or command the angels to destroy His enemies. Instead, He stood passively before Pilate and kept silent as many stood beneath His cross and mocked. So did Christ’s active obedience end and His passive obedience start? Not quite. Lorraine  Boettner put it this way “Throughout all of His life He was perfectly obedient to the moral law in all that He thought and said and did. And in varying degrees every moment of His life on earth involved humiliation or suffering or both.”


Christ’s passive obedience ran from the womb to the tomb. The author of all creation willingly lowered Himself to our level and passively endured the humiliations that met Him everyday. Do you know that Jesus was circumcised in obedience to the Law? Do you understand that Christ knew physical hunger? Do you grasp that sinful men beat and spat upon God? From his nine months in the womb to His three days in the tomb, Christ’s passive obedience shone out.


You and I deserve the wrath of God in response to our wretched sinfulness but by faith in Christ we flee the wrath to come. Why? Because Christ was the perfect sacrifice. He endured all the humiliations and sufferings of this life so that you will not perish. Jesus was sinless and yet was treated as a law breaker for our sake. It was in our place that He hung upon the cross.


We should respond to Christ’s obedience with gratitude and strive to walk rightly before Him all the days of our lives. But what about when we fail? Brothers and sisters, unprofitable servants fail every single day but our failures are met by the grace of God. Can we lose our salvation? No. Do we run out of chances? No. Will I be punished at the last day? No.


Those who have trusted in Christ are saved to the uttermost. He is the perfectly obedient profitable servant whose active and passive obedience is enough. I am so thankful for the active and passive obedience of Christ, no hope without it.
 
Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC


Q105 What do we pray for in the fifth petition? In the fifth petition, which is, And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” we pray, that God, for Christ’s sake, would freely pardon all our sins; which we are the rather encouraged to ask, because by his grace we are enabled from the heart to forgive others.
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