That means that all that God has done is ineffective, because they haven't applied it to their life, and so God has done many things for us, but if we don't know what He's done, and then apply it, it's in the application that change takes place. And if you don't know how to apply the blood to your life, and where to apply it; the blood of Jesus is to be applied to at least three areas of our life to bring a change, and Jesus shed His blood in a whole number of different ways, to deal with every possible condition of humanity. So He didn't just shed His blood and that's it. There's quite a lot more to it. As we'll see it's very, very foundational. So what I want to do get this started, I want to just start off really, right now before we even talk about the blood and why we need the blood, we need to look at what it is, that is the problem, because if you don't know what problem you're trying to fix, then you won't embrace the solution.
So we say Jesus is the saviour - in fact the name Jesus means saviour - but why do you need to be saved? And do you really need to be saved? And why is it people go out on the streets and speak to people, why are they so passionate to do that? What is there about it, because if you listen to a lot of people, you get the impression that almost like somehow it's all going to work out alright for everyone, no matter what. Actually nothing could be further from the truth, and I want to lay out some foundations.
The first one I want to talk about is, God has established consequences for sin. God has established consequences for the sin. Now I want you to listen to this part very carefully, because I want to show that there are two major things that God has established. The first one we're going to see is that He's established certain consequences. The thing about consequence - we'll see in a moment - you can absolutely do nothing about them. That's not the bit you get involved in. That's what you experience as a result of making decisions, so if we see for example in John 1, we find in the first three verses it tells us that everything that was made, or everything we can see, that was made was made by Him. As believers we would understand creation has been made by Him. I'm going to keep appealing to things you know, to get you to look a little above it to things you're not so sure of.
So if I designed something, I'm a manufacturer and I designed something, I decide how it will work, because I'm the designer. Steve Jobs designed an iPad. He's the one who knows how the iPad works, and it can't do anything more than he put into it. He designed it - so you can either use it for what it was intended, or if you don't know what it's intended for, you'll end up abusing it and smashing it or destroying it, because you just didn't know what to do with it. It's designed with certain things built into it. In other words the person who designed it makes the rules about how it's to be used, and makes the rules about how it works, and what will make it work well, and how you get the best out of it. You don't get a say in that. You just either buy in or don't buy in. Getting the idea? So it's quite foundational this.
So we need to see that God created the physical world. He set in place physical laws. Now scientists have got no idea why the laws are there, they just know there are laws, and by observation they can work out the laws; for example there's the law of gravity. Now no one knows what really creates the law of gravity. They don't understand fully what is the cause of it. They don't even understand fully the forces behind it. It's just a law of gravity which they can describe, and that we can work with.
Now you can say I don't believe in the law of gravity. It doesn't really matter whether you believe in it or not, it's still in place, it's still there. It's what holds you to the earth. It's what makes planes crash if they run out of power. There's a law of gravity, and whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, it's still there and it operates, holds our solar system in place. So God has set the law in there, and He's set many physical laws in place; for example He's set in the law of sowing and reaping, so we know and we depend on it in this area - we sow products and we expect to reap, we sow vegetables, we expect to reap. We sow, we expect to reap - so we actually run our life without even thinking, but there are laws that are in place. Okay, we've got one.