Affirmation 3: Crisis
Life is filled with crises. As humans, we try to help one another, as we should, to survive each crisis, become stronger as a result, and move on with life. We talk about perseverance and resilience as crowning human achievements, and we celebrate each other’s victories. Rightly so. That said, most people, in the West anyway, give no thought at all to the greatest crisis anyone will face. It is a metaphysical crisis and an existential one. It is spiritual, and it is real! It is the crisis each human being will have when they come face to face with God. Very few are preparing for that moment.
The Rule of Faith is the set of established beliefs that clarifies what it means to be in Christ. This third affirmation builds on the first two: getting under God’s authority and understanding who we are as humans, created by God, and who Christ is in his own humanity, having taken on flesh for our sake. And that brings us to the third affirmation: crisis. We cannot stay as we are and yet hope to have an eternal relationship with God, becoming what he always intended we should be. The crisis is ours, yet Christ makes it his, substituting his perfect, sinless life in place of ours so that we might be with God.
There are some incredible and beautiful truths that we will hear in God’s Word this Sunday as we consider our own sin, Jesus’ atonement for us, the great cost paid, and come to realize this is the one and only way. This is the hinge point in The Rule of Faith. I’m looking forward to working through a pile of Scriptures with you as we look at this together on Sunday.
Series: The Rule of Faith: Being human in God’s World
Todd Dugard
Message: Affirmation 3: Crisis
Harvest Bible Chapel
Text: Various Scriptures
May 11, 2025
While others are congratulating themselves, I have to sit humbly at the foot of the cross and marvel that I’m saved at all.
Charles Spurgeon
Romans 5:6
If I live by the rule of faith, I see the crisis I’m in and my desperate need of
Christ…
…Confessing my sin (Romans 3:10-12; 10:9-10)
[Jesus] isn’t scandalized by others’ moral behaviour. Ever. He knows how we are. He knows how the human heart works.
Brant Hansen, Unoffendable
Jeremiah 17:9
…Looking to Jesus as my substitute (Isaiah 53:4-6; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13)
All people are in need of a substitute since all are guilty of sinning against the holy God. All sin deserves punishment because all sin is personal rebellion against God himself.
Thomas Schreiner
He became what we are that we might become what he is.
Athanasius
The atonement is the work Christ did in his life and death to earn our salvation.
Wayne Grudem
…Grasping the cost to save me (Romans 3:23-25a; Hebrews 2:17; 1 John 2:2; 4:10)
Habakkuk 1:13a
The atonement is often summarized with the phrase ‘sufficient for all and efficient for some,’ meaning that it was limited in its efficacy to a certain group of people but was sufficient to cover the sins of the whole world.
R. C. Sproul, Everyone’s a Theologian
Propitiation means averting the wrath of God by the offering of a gift.
Ligon Duncan
…Knowing it is the one and only way (Hebrews 10:4, 10, 12)
RESOURCES
Crisis
Saved From What? – R.C. Sproul
https://a.co/d/dyh8qGF
The Secular Creed – Rebecca McLaughlin
https://a.co/d/4XAg964
Deeper – Dane Ortlund
https://a.co/d/5e37IVB
Humanity (May 4):
Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t – Gavin Ortlund
https://a.co/d/ig5YrLq
The Christian View of Man – J. Gresham Machen
https://a.co/d/3eH7o6q
Authority (April 27):
Sola Scriptura – The Protestant Position on the Bible
https://store.ligonier.org/sola-scriptura-the-protestant-position-on-the-bible-paperback
Taking God At His Word: Why the Bible Is Knowable, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You and Me – Kevin DeYoung
https://a.co/d/dq6nAlJ
