The Good Friday sermon under review, preached by Rev Philip Burns at Bendigo Presbyterian Church, is marked by significant doctrinal strengths. It confesses the reality of sin and guilt, rejects salvation by human achievement, affirms the holiness and wrath of God, and proclaims Christ as the willing substitute who bears the punishment sinners deserve. It rightly declares that Christ is not merely a moral example, a tragic victim, or a martyr whose death should make people behave better. He is the Lamb of God who bears sin in his body upon the tree.
This essay appreciates these strengths. Other sermons in this Series have often made the cross an illustration of divine sympathy, moral inspiration, or therapeutic acceptance, yet this sermon retains truths central to the gospel. Human beings are not innocent victims. They are guilty and accountable before God. The cross calls for repentance, confession of sin, and the acknowledgment of utter dependence upon divine mercy. Christ’s death is substitutionary and judicial: the judgment sinners deserve falls upon him.
Yet the sermon’s substantial theological strengths make its central experimental weakness more important. The New Birth in Exile Series is specifically looking for evidence of the necessity of the new birth and the application of it in Easter sermons. This sermon undermines the necessity of the new birth in significant ways. It formally rejects self-righteousness, but it does not sufficiently expose self-righteousness in the hearer. It says that people cannot save themselves, but it does not adequately unfold the particular way Isaiah 53 exposes covenant people who have gone their own way; including the religious way of seeking to stand before God in a righteousness of their own.
That is not a minor refinement. It concerns the pastoral force of the text, the identity of the people who confess their sin in Isaiah 53, the nature of saving faith, and the difference between admiring the cross and abandoning every confidence except Christ.
I want to begin this essay by reaffirming strengths in the sermon that have not been found in other sermons belonging to this series to the same degree. The sermon begins with a fitting call to “survey the wondrous cross.” There is a proper place for sustained meditation upon Christ crucified. The eschatological element of the Atonement should prevent a Christian ever treating Good Friday as a bare historical anniversary or the cross as a familiar religious emblem. At Calvary, the love of God, the obedience of the Son, the evil of sin, the the vindication of the justice of God, and the salvation of his people come into their fullest redemptive-historical focus.
The sermon is especially right to speak of the burden of sin and guilt. Isaiah says, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” and later declares that “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:4, 6). The preacher rightly understands that Christ bears what sinners cannot bear. The burden removed at the cross is not merely sorrow, anxiety, or the painful consequences of life in a fallen world. It is guilt before the holy God.
The sermon also rightly connects the cross with rest of conscience. Christ’s promise, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” is not merely an invitation to emotional relief. It is the promise of rest for those who cease seeking acceptance through themselves and come to Christ. The preacher is therefore correct when he says that any attempt to appease the wrath of God through one’s “own self-righteousness apart from the cross” is folly.
Likewise, the sermon faithfully rejects the notion that Christianity is a project of human moral ascent. The gospel is not the story of people becoming acceptable to God through kindness, religious effort, or achievement. It is the good news that God has acted in Christ to rescue sinners who cannot rescue themselves. Romans 5:8 is rightly invoked: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The sermon’s treatment of Christ’s voluntary obedience is also important. The Son is not dragged unwillingly to the cross. He lays down his life. His suffering is the obedience of the incarnate Son to the will of the Father and the expression of his love for those whom he came to save. Jesus is therefore not presented as a powerless victim of political and religious hostility. The cross is not an interruption of his mission. It is the accomplishment of it.
Its strongest doctrinal section concerns Isaiah 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The preacher speaks of human inability, responsibility, and guilt. Sinners are not merely victims of their circumstances. He names human pride, callousness, bitterness, ruthlessness, and unforgiveness, and insists that the cross displays the seriousness of sin.
The sermon therefore contains the central doctrinal grammar of penal substitution missing in many sermon belonging to this Series. Christ, who knew no sin, bears the guilt and judgment due to sinners, so that they may stand before God in a righteousness not their own. This is the great exchange proclaimed in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
The problem lies not in these affirmations, but in what the sermon fails to do with them.
At approximately nine minutes, the preacher states that trying to appease God’s wrath through one’s own self-righteousness apart from the cross is foolish. A few minutes later, he says that the gospel is not a matter of becoming acceptable to God through acts of kindness, goodness, or self-effort.
Those statements are true. But they remain largely doctrinal denials rather than pastoral experiential exposure. The sermon tells the hearer that works-righteousness is wrong. It does not sufficiently expose how the religious heart actually practices it, which is Isaiah’s concern.
Self-righteousness is rarely experienced as a conscious declaration: “I will save myself by my good works.” It is ordinarily more subtle and entrenched. It is the impulse to retain some personal ground of confidence before God; the confidence that one is acceptable because one is morally decent, serious about religion, doctrinally informed, active in church, part of a Christian family, disciplined in devotion, sincere in repentance, or comparatively better than others.
Such a person may sincerely affirm that salvation is not by works. He may cherish the cross as a sacred truth, sing of grace, and profess faith in Christ. Yet in the practical reckoning of his conscience, he may still treat his own record as part of the reason he expects God to receive him. He does not rest wholly in Christ’s righteousness because he has not truly abandoned his own.
A congregation therefore needs more than the general principle that sinners cannot save themselves. Hearers must be confronted with the question: What is the grounds of your righteousness before God? Where do you look when your conscience accuses you? To what do you appeal when you imagine that God should receive you? Is it Christ alone, or Christ supplemented by your morality, your knowledge, your churchmanship, your conversion story, your ministry, your family, your suffering, your repentance, or your success in avoiding conspicuous sins?
Until such questions are asked, self-righteousness may remain entirely undisturbed beneath orthodox language.
This weakness becomes clearer when Isaiah 53 is read in its wider prophetic context. Isaiah is not speaking merely to an abstract collection of irreligious people who have no knowledge of God. He speaks within the history of God’s covenant people: a people who have received revelation, known the Lord’s acts of redemption, possessed his worship, heard his word, and borne his name.
Yet this covenant people is repeatedly exposed throughout Isaiah as blind, deaf, stubborn, idolatrous, and resistant to the God who has redeemed them. “Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see!” Isaiah declares. “Who is blind but my servant, or deaf as my messenger whom I send?” (Isa. 42:18–19). Israel is called the servant of the Lord, yet Israel has failed in the servant’s calling. It has not faithfully listened, trusted, obeyed, or borne witness to the nations.
The people’s problem is therefore deeper than isolated moral failures. They have departed from the Lord’s way. They have pursued other securities, loyalties, forms of wisdom, and paths to life. Their outward covenant privileges have not cured their inward rebellion.
This gives Isaiah 53:6 its searching force: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way.” The statement certainly reaches beyond Israel to the universal condition of fallen humanity. But the confession is voiced from within the history of the covenant people. It is the confession of people who knew the Lord’s way and nevertheless turned to their own.
The phrase “his own way” therefore does more than state that everyone is morally defective. It exposes the governing impulse of sin: the refusal of the heart to live by God’s way and the determination to pursue one’s own desires instead that the elect of God are not immured to.
That self-directed way takes openly irreligious forms in rebellion, idolatry, cruelty, pride, unbelief, and the pursuit of desire apart from God. But it may also take religious forms. The sinner may turn to his own way precisely by seeking a righteousness he can measure, manage, defend, and present before God. Religious activity then ceases to function as the fruit of grateful faith and becomes an instrument of self-justification.
The Apostle Paul identifies this covenantal tragedy when he speaks of Israel’s failure to submit to the righteousness of God: “For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness” (Rom. 10:3). Israel did not lack religious zeal. Paul explicitly says that they possessed it. Their problem was that their zeal was not according to a right knowledge of God, or of themselves. They vainly sought to establish their own righteousness rather than submitting to the righteousness only God can provide.
This sharpens the pastoral significance of Isaiah 53. The person under gospel preaching may hear descriptions of bitterness, cruelty, violence, and public corruption and readily agree that these are sins. He may confess that humanity in general has gone astray and acknowledge selfish tendencies in himself. Yet he may remain largely untouched because he assumes that his religious seriousness places him in a different category.
The sermon risks moving in this direction when it expounds Isaiah 53:6 primarily through examples of general human evil. It points to dictators and tyrants who impose their selfish will upon others and then observes that ordinary people possess the same tendencies in smaller form. That is true, but it is not the full pastoral force of Isaiah’s confession. A sermon on this text must not only say, “You are more like the tyrant than you wish to admit.” It must also say, “You are more like the self-justifying religious person than you wish to admit.” My former theology lecturer often stated that Presbyterians were prone to this sin due to the seriousness in which they hold the Scriptures.
Isaiah’s larger theology makes the contrast still sharper. Israel is repeatedly described as the Lord’s servant, yet as a servant who has failed. Against this backdrop, the Servant of Isaiah 52:13–53:12 appears as the faithful and righteous Servant.
The context of Isaiah reveals in is the the people of God who have turned, every one, to his own way. The Servant does not turn aside. He does the Father’s will. The people are guilty and cannot bear their own iniquity. The Servant bears their iniquity. The people cannot establish a righteousness sufficient to stand before God. The Servant, described as “the righteous one,” makes many to be accounted righteous because “he shall bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11).
This is why the sermon’s brief statement of “the great exchange” needed fuller and more careful development. The preacher rightly cites 2 Corinthians 5:21, though he momentarily reverses the terms when he says, “His sin, His righteousness to you, your sin transferred to him.” Christ has no sin of his own to transfer. The biblical truth is that our sin is reckoned to Christ, while his righteousness is reckoned to those who are in him by faith.
That distinction protects both the glory of Christ’s sinlessness and the freeness of justification. Christ remains the spotless, obedient, righteous Servant, yet bears the liability, condemnation, and curse due to his people. Believers, in turn, do not stand before God upon their own moral record. They are counted righteous in Christ.
Now, I admit, the sermon indeed gestures toward this truth, but it does not sufficiently use it to demolish the self-righteousness that God’s people are prone to and its own exposition should confront.
A sermon may faithfully mention substitution, as this sermon does, while leaving religious self-confidence almost intact, as this sermon also does. It may tell hearers that Jesus died for sinners while allowing them to assume that they are the kind of sinners who need only modest assistance. It may declare that salvation is not earned while never exposing the ways a churchgoing person continues to calculate acceptance with God through himself.
A hearer can admire the cross, be moved by the suffering of Jesus, intellectually affirm substitutionary atonement, and still remain fundamentally committed to his own righteousness. He may believe that Jesus makes salvation possible while quietly treating his own decency, sincerity, repentance, or religious practice as part of what makes him acceptable.
Such a person does not necessarily deny grace in words. He diminishes grace in the secret calculations of his heart.
Paul’s own testimony in Philippians 3 illustrates the necessary reversal. He counted his inherited privileges, religious achievements, and legal righteousness as loss “because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” He desired to be found in Christ, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8–9).
This does not require the despising of good works, obedience, church membership, biblical knowledge, or moral seriousness. These are good gifts and necessary fruits of grace. But they cannot become the ground upon which a sinner stands before God. When they function as a basis of acceptance, they become instruments of self-justification.
This also matters for assurance. If assurance is grounded partly in personal achievement, it will always be fragile. The conscience knows the inconsistency of devotion, the coldness of affection, the impurity of motive, the omissions of love, and the instability of repentance. A person who looks inward for sufficient righteousness will either despair because he sees his failure or become proud because he refuses to see it.
The gospel gives a different ground of assurance. Christ is the righteous Servant. He has borne iniquity, satisfied divine justice, and accomplished what his people lack. The believer is received not because he has finally become impressive, but because he is in Christ. His assurance rests upon the work of the Savior rather than upon his ability to produce a record capable of surviving the judgment of God.
The same is true of repentance. If sin is reduced to visible wrongdoing, repentance becomes regret, apology, behavioral adjustment, or resolution to improve. But if sin includes the religious insistence upon maintaining one’s own righteousness, repentance must reach deeper. It includes the renunciation of self-trust, the turning of the whole person from self-rule, self-justification, and self-salvation to God’s appointed Savior.
Saving faith is therefore very active, not passive relaxation. The sermon’s Dead Sea illustration rightly denies that sinners can save themselves by frantic effort. Yet faith is more than ceasing to struggle and allowing oneself to float. It is the Spirit-wrought receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation. It is a coming to Christ, an actual fleeing to him, and the abandonment of every other refuge.
The sermon’s bushfire illustration comes close to expressing this urgency. A family stands on ground already burned by the fire because the fire cannot consume the place where it has already passed. The preacher applies the image to the cross: only on the ground of the cross can a sinner be safe.
This is a compelling picture. But its full implication needs to be drawn out.
The self-righteous person believes himself relatively safe where he is. He has his moral ground, his religious ground, his spiritual achievements, his memories, and his comparisons with others. He does not feel the urgency of fleeing because he has persuaded himself that his own ground will hold.
Exposition of Isaiah 53 should expose that delusion. The religious sinner’s own way is not safe ground. His righteousness cannot endure divine judgment. His moral record cannot bear the weight of his guilt. His religious knowledge cannot reconcile him to God.
This is why the cross must not merely be surveyed, it must confront. We sinners must be brought to see that not only Christ bore sin, but that he bore my sin, including my religious self-righteousness (using the context of Isaiah) , which made such bearing through crucifixion necessary. We must see not only that there is refuge in Christ, but that there is no refuge in himself.
The sermon says, “When you stand on the ground of the cross, only then can you be safe.” That is right. But it needed to say with equal clarity: You are not standing on the ground of the cross merely because you approve of it, understand it, attend a church that preaches it, or regard yourself as a decent person. You stand there only when, renouncing confidence in yourself, you receive and rest upon Christ’s righteousness alone.
The sermon’s concluding appeal reveals the practical importance of the omission. After preaching Christ’s substitutionary death and the safety of those who cling to the cross, the preacher asks, “Will you be amongst the grateful ones? You can.”
The sentence is warm, and its intention is gracious. God’s redeemed people will indeed be grateful, and the preacher rightly speaks of Christ’s promise never to cast out those who come to him.
Yet this final question does not adequately arise from the sermon’s own account of Isaiah 53. The controlling question is not first whether the listener wishes to join the grateful. Such a question is inimical to Isaiah 53. It is whether he sees that he has turned to his own way and whether he will abandon every false ground of confidence for the righteousness God has provided in the Servant.
The final appeal should therefore have brought the doctrine of the sermon into direct contact with the religious conscience:
Do not bring your record to God. Do not offer him your decency, religious background, moral effort, spiritual feelings, or past decisions. Do not attempt to supplement Christ with yourself. Your iniquity must be borne by the Servant. The righteousness in which you stand must be found in him alone. Search your heart and see its wickedness. Forsake your own way. Come to Christ. Receive and rest upon him alone.
That would not be bare decisionism or manipulation through sentiment or fear. It would be the evangelical consequence of the text itself. The gospel is freely offered to all, and Christ truly receives all who come to him. But they come as sinners with no ground of confidence in themselves.
The contrast should then be made explicit. We have turned to our own way; he has done the Father’s will. We are guilty and cannot bear our own iniquity; he is righteous and bears the iniquity of his people. We are tempted to establish a righteousness of our own; the righteous Servant provides what sinners cannot supply for themselves.
Here lie both the offense and the comfort of the cross. The offense is that there is nothing in the sinner upon which he can finally rely. The comfort is that Christ is sufficient. The humiliation is that his religious record cannot justify him. The liberty is that he need not construct a righteousness of his own.
Without this application, the cross may be preached as a provision for generally sinful people while the religious sinner remains hidden behind moral and ecclesiastical respectability. With it, Isaiah 53 confronts covenant breakers whose own way has brought guilt upon them and directs them to the righteous Servant who bears that guilt.
The sermon is therefore right to say that there is no other way of salvation than Jesus Christ. But Isaiah 53 presses the question further: Will the hearer abandon his own way, including every attempt to establish himself before God, and submit to the righteousness God provides in the crucified Servant?
That is the crisis the sermon needed to create. It possessed much of the necessary doctrine. It needed to use that doctrine more searchingly: to uncover the self-righteous heart, strip away every false refuge, and direct the hearer wholly and urgently to Christ. For hell will have the world’s tyrants alongside the religious self righteous.
