As we continue our series “The Wonder of the Cross,” today’s focus is “Power in the Blood.”  God’s word makes it clear that no forgiveness of sin is possible without the shedding of blood.  In every era God’s people have been saved and forgiven through the shedding of blood---first through the blood of animals in Old Testament times, and then through the precious blood of Jesus.  As we approach Easter, the day Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, we must remember that without Good Friday, there would have been no Easter, without the shedding of Jesus’ innocent blood on the cross of Calvary, our lives would be forfeit for eternity.  This morning we’re going to listen to a dramatic reading titled “The Passover Lamb,” which offers us a perspective on the shedding of blood for salvation from both the Old and New Testaments.  The reading alternates between the “Passover,” the event in Jewish history, when God called His people to place the blood of lambs on their door posts, to save them from the angel of death, which He sent as the final plague on the land of Egypt when that nation would not let His people go; and the death of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who shed His blood to redeem the world…..

[Dramatic Reading:  “The Passover Lamb”]

     In our day, some get a little squeamish at the sight or even the mention of blood, but in the history of God’s people blood has been central, because God established that only through the shedding of blood could sin be forgiven.  Many of the old hymns referred to the power of the blood of Jesus.  In fact, one hymn was titled, “Power in the Blood.”  The chorus proclaimed, “There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the Lamb.”  Those words ring true when we examine God’s word.  In fact, more than thirty references to the blood of Jesus or the Blood of Christ are found in the New Testament .  This morning we’re going to turn to one of those Scriptures, and see firsthand how vital the blood of Jesus is to us.  (Please, stand with me as we read from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossian Christians, the first chapter, beginning in verse 18….)

¹⁸Christ is the head of the church, which is his body. He is the first of all who will rise from the dead, so he is first in everything. ¹⁹For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, ²⁰and by him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross. ²¹This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, ²²yet now he has brought you back as his friends. He has done this through his death on the cross in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. ²³But you must continue to believe this truth and stand in it firmly. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News. The Good News has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed by God to proclaim it.  Colossians 1:18-23 NLT  Let’s pray….Amen.  (Please, be seated.)

     Colossians 1:18 contains more than a record of the importance of Jesus shedding His blood on our behalf on the cross.  It starts with an acknowledgement that defines our faith as Christians.  That acknowledgement is this:  JESUS IS GOD!  The belief that Jesus is God defines us among all the religions of the world, because most of the world’s religions define God as a rather nebulous being, while Christianity proclaims that God became flesh and lived among us.  Paul put it this way:  ¹⁸Christ is the head of the church, which is his body. He is the first of all who will rise from the dead, so he is first in every-thing. ¹⁹For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ.  Colossians 1:18-19 NLT For God in all His fullness was pleased to live in Christ.  I don’t pretend to understand exactly HOW Jesus can be both fully God and fully man.  The HOW of that reality has been debated since Jesus walked the earth, but believing THAT Jesus is fully God and fully man defines us.  Jesus was not just a great man.  Jesus was not just “a god,” as some cults based on Christian teaching suggest.  Jesus IS God.  He existed before anything else existed.  As Paul explains in Philippians 2, even though Jesus was equal with God, He didn’t consider equality with God as something to fight over.  Instead, He emptied Himself, and became one of us.  As a human being, Jesus continued to display the characteristics of God as He lived without sin.  Jesus performed incredible miracles and taught with an authority no human being ever possessed.  In fact, many years ago, I heard a preacher said that here in America we have done the impossible. We have taken the teaching of Jesus, which in His day people would walk miles and skip lunch to hear, and made it into something that people would walk miles and skip lunch to avoid.  Jesus is God.  That reality makes all the difference.  As I said last Sunday, Jesus was not just a martyr---martyrs are people who die for a cause, which Jesus certainly did, but martyrs stay dead and Jesus didn’t!  The way we live our lives must be defined by the reality that Jesus is God. If He’s God, then He’s Lord of our lives, and that means He’s watching and listening and calling us to lives of obedience in the power of His Spirit.  We start with that truth, with that reality as we consider the power of Jesus blood.

     So what precisely is the power of the blood of Jesus?  The power is the power of reconciliation.  The Apostle Paul tells us that GOD RECONCILES EVERYTHING TO HIMSELF BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS! Remember how he put it?  ²⁰and by him [that is by Jesus], God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of his blood on the cross.  Colossians 1:20 NLT What does it mean to be reconciled?  The dictionary defines reconcile as “To re-establish friendship between.”  That’s a great definition.  Our friendship with God was broken by sin.  It started with Adam and Eve and has continued with every person who has ever lived right up to our day.  That friendship with God is everything, because apart from being friends of God, we will be separated from Him not only in this life, but forever!  In order for reconciliation to take place, God must forgive us.  Remember this:  in any friendship when one offends another, only the one offended can restore the relationship.  Have you ever offended a friend?  (Unless you don’t have any friends, I know you have!) As human beings we are prone to hurt the ones we love.  Often, we believe that once we have offended a friend that we must be the ones to bring about reconciliation.  The reality is we can’t do that.  Sure, we can buy flowers, or say we’re sorry and ask forgiveness.  We can even beg the other person to be friends again, but when we break the friendship, our friend has to forgive us in order for the friendship to be restored, in order for us to reconciled.  A lot of time and energy is wasted in friendships, by people who think they can bring reconciliation when they have broken the friendship.  Offended friends also waste a lot of time by thinking that the offending friend must “pay” for what they did.  The reality is the offending friend can’t pay to reconcile the relationship, all the friend can do is put himself or herself at the mercy of the friend who was hurt. 

     In human friendships forgiveness is essential, because we all fail one another at times.  When it comes to our friendship with God forgiveness is all the more essential, because God never sins.  God never breaks relationship with His people.  God is always the one who is offended, is always the one who is let down; is always the one who has to forgiven.  What we must do in any friendship in order for reconciliation to take place is demonstrate that we recognize our fault, our sin, our being the one who has broken the relationship, and a desire to see it restored.  In biblical terms this is called repentance.  Repentance is turning around, or turning away from the sinful attitude or action that broke the relationship and back to the one who was offended.  After that, we must throw ourselves on the mercy of our friend.  When that friend is God, we find that one additional component exists in order to reconciliation to take place.  In the letter to the Hebrews we find that the shedding of blood is that additional absolutely, essential component.  We find these words in Hebrews, chapter 9:

      ²²In fact, we can say that according to the law of Moses, nearly everything was purified by sprinkling with blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.            Hebrews 9:22 NLT  When Jesus died on the cross, shedding His innocent blood, He opened the door to reconciliation for us all.  His shed blood is effective to cleanse us from sin, to give us a whole new life!  That reconciliation is for everything according to Colossians 1:20.  What an amazing reality.  All of us—all of humanity—stands condemned because of sin.  Every person’s friendship with God is broken, so Jesus—the only person whose friendship with God was never broken—died on the cross and poured out His blood to forgive our sins and to reconcile us to Himself—to restore our friendship with Him.

The Apostle Paul pointed out a reality that makes this incredible reality, all the more incredible:  GOD RECONCILES YOU TO HIMSELF BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS!  Paul’s first statement included everyone who had ever lived, was living or would live.  God reconciled EVERYTHING to Himself by means of the blood of Jesus shed on the cross.  But even with that amazing reality, some people have said, “Not me.”  Jesus death on the cross didn’t reconcile me.  What I’ve done is too, bad.  What I’ve done is unforgivable.” Over the years, I’ve had folks come to me and say, “Chris, I know that God is supposed to forgive everyone, but I know He can’t forgive me.”  After telling us that God reconciled EVERYTHING to Himself, Paul went on to write:  ²¹This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, ²²yet now he has brought you back as his friends. He has done this through his death on the cross in his own human body. As a result, he has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.  Colossians 1:21-22 NLT Paul made it personal.  Jesus’ blood didn’t just reconcile everything in general.  Jesus’ blood didn’t just restore God’s friendship with the whole world.  Jesus’ blood restored your friendship with God and mine.  Amen?  (Amen.)  Friends, we must realize that Jesus died for us, for our sins.  You and I were once enemies of God.  We may not think so.  We may say that we grew up in the church and that we’ve always been Christians.  No one who has ever lived has ALWAYS been a Christian.  We start out separated from God.  Many of us have known the blessing of being brought up in godly homes, where Jesus was honored and served.  But even in such homes, each individual in the family must receive the forgiveness and reconciliation of Jesus personally, in order for friendship with God to be restored.  Know this—no matter how bad your life may have been to this point.  No matter what you may have done, and how many people you may have hurt, Jesus died on the cross and shed His blood so you may have reconciliation.

 One of the sad realities of life is that hurting people hurt people.  Those whose friendships with God are broken, often have broken friendships all along life’s journey.  That doesn’t matter to God.  What matters is whether you and I have turned from that hurting others life and turned to Him for reconciliation.  When folks claim the forgiveness of God through the blood of Jesus, that amazing power in the blood of Jesus remakes us, restores us, renews us and reconciles us with God---but, and this is important to hear—it doesn’t mean that all of our human relationships will be remade, restored, renewed and reconciled.  Sometimes we have hurt others so much that they are unable to forgive us. Sometimes the ones who have been hurt live under the false assumption that we who have hurt them need to restore the friendship—which we can’t do, so the friendship remains broken.  Sometimes those who have been hurt, just aren’t willing to trust that our repentance is real, so they won’t risk reconciliation.  What all that means is God will ALWAYS reconcile us to Himself through the blood of Jesus, and that blood has amazing power to transform us.  Those around us then have a choice:  do I believe that my friend (or former friend) has changed or not?  As the Apostle Paul reminded the Roman Christians, “Insofar as it lies with you live at peace with all people.” 

The Apostle Paul was never satisfied with passing along the truth of God’s reconciliation through Jesus.  He always called people to action as a result of it.  The action in today’s Scripture is this:  TO EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF THE BLOOD IN OUR LIVES WE MUST BELIEVE AND STAND FIRM!  This is the “punch line” of Paul’s message:  ²³But you must continue to believe this truth and stand in it firmly. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News. The Good News has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed by God to proclaim it.            Colossians 7:28 NLT  All too often, we hear the Good News of God’s reconciliation through Jesus, and we see it as a sort of “get out of jail free card.”  You know what I mean.  We claim the truth, and expect that when we get in trouble we’ll just call on the truth.  We don’t make the effort to live out the reality.  The blood of Jesus DOES wipe away our sin.  The blood of Jesus DOES reconcile everything to God, and it DOES reconcile you and me to God.  But that reality was never intended to be just information, just a doctrine of the church.  The blood of Jesus has power to transform our lives.  As we go out into a hurting world, people are going to hurt us.  That’s a fact.  Our friends will hurt us. Our relatives will hurt us.  Our classmates at school and our co-workers at work will hurt us.  Strangers will hurt us.  Some of those hurts will come in the form of verbal abuse.  Some will come in physical attack.  Whatever happens, the blood of Jesus will give us the power to forgive—IF we are living in that power, if we are living in the reconciliation that God offers us through Jesus’ blood.  Every, single time that someone hurts me, the natural, human response is to hurt that person back.  Our culture teaches us, “Don’t get mad, get _________.” If we want to reverse that response, we must rely on the power of the blood of Jesus.  It takes far greater strength to forgive than to get even.  It takes far greater strength to remain calm that to erupt like a volcano.  It takes far greater strength to live at peace with others, than to start a battle everywhere we go. 

People think Christianity is weak.  People think that Christianity has no power to make a difference in life.  Why is it that Islam is growing in America, while Christianity is not?  At least one reason is this:  Islam calls people—particularly men--to discipline, to restraint, to victory in the moral and spiritual realms of life.  So does Jesus, but the church hasn’t been living that.  Every poll out there shows that there is no discernible difference in the lives of Christians in America and those who say they are not Christians.  We must call on the blood of Jesus to cleanse us from sin AND to reconcile us to God and others.  We must show the power in the blood to others, so they will recognize that God is powerful not only to save—for eternity, but to transform us here and now.  The world needs Jesus.  The world needs the wonder-working power of His blood.  We have the opportunity to model that and to offer that to others this week.  Please stand with me right now, and as we close our time together, let’s pray and ask God to work that power in our lives, to use each of us today and throughout this week, as living examples of the power of the blood of Jesus! Let’s pray……Amen.