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