Welcome to this weekend's In-Touch Podcast with Tarl Stanley.

God places high value on having a relationship with us, so much so that he sacrificed his own

son to make it possible.

Today's podcast is a lesson on redemption as we learn about the encouraging message from the cross.

In return, please to Ephesians 1, let's begin reading in verse 3 and read through verse 7.

Ephesians 1, beginning in verse 3.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings and heavenly places in Christ,

according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love having predestinated us unto the adoption of children, by Jesus Christ unto himself,

according to the good pleasure of his will.

To the praise of the glory of his grace wherein he has made us accepted in the beloved.

In whom that is in Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace.

And listen to me carefully.

Until you and I understand the message of the cross, we will never understand who God is and what he's like.

Because so much of what God revealed about himself, he revealed about himself, of course through Jesus Christ, and so much of what he revealed himself through Christ becomes evident and manifest to us when we see what Jesus Christ did at Calvary.

There are two Greek words primarily in the scriptures, about 100 and sometimes in the Old Testament.

There is a word referring to redemption, but in the New Testament where I want us to primarily look at for today, there are two words.

One of those words, Lutron, is the word we come to in Matthew 20 when the Bible says that Jesus Christ gave himself his life a ransom, a Lutron for many.

The other word is the word that means to buy out of the market.

And it is the word from which we get agriculture originally and the word which meant the marketplace and it is the word which means to buy out of the marketplace.

So that redemption in the mind of those who were reading these epistles, they understood what Paul meant when he talked about Jesus Christ being a Redeemer.

Because this is the way they would operate in those days in the slave markets.

And then when the buyer purchased the slave for so much money, he gave the money and it was called redeeming the slave, that is buying that slave for himself.

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