Matthew 16:24–28

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me (follow after me - CSB), let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake (because of me - CSB) will find it. For what will it profit (benefit - CSB) a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul (loses his life -CSB)? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul (in exchange for his life -CSB)? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay (reward- CSB) each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (ESV)

Mark 8:34–9:1

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.” (ESV)

Luke 9:23–27

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.” (ESV)

The Call, Cost & Crown of Discipleship

INTRODUCTION

Let me begin by showing you a couple pictures of the church where we have been serving in England the past 14 years….Bridgeway Church in Manchester…And these are my friends and co-elders Adam and Danny who the Lord has raised up to Lead the church as they send me back to Boise….Please do keep them all in prayer for the sake of the gospel in Manchester

If you are visiting or weren’t around last Sunday morning, the church is in a series in the Bible book of 1 Corinthians, which will be continued next week. Last week Pastor Jason very helpfully showed us that even though in our culture today we don’t typically bow down to physical status and idols, our whole life is surrounded by things that we trust in and sacrifice our time for, things like money, sports, and even our marriages that we often expect to fulfill us in the same way that the Bible tells us only God through Jesus Christ can.

THE BIG QUESTION

I’d like to play off that idea this morning and ask you a couple questions before I read the bit of the Bible that I want to look at….So, here are a couple questions for everyone, whether you are a regular member, attender or even someone just visiting church this morning:

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO BE REALLY HAPPY IN LIFE?

Instantly some things should be popping into your head. Maybe some things like a little vacation, etc.

It’s strange, because of the season we are in, in our family life, I find myself confronted with all these possibilities all at once in a way I’ve never experienced before…and for that reason I’m so grateful to look at God’s word

Or, here’s another and maybe even more stark and clarifying way to put our question to meet us this morning:

WHAT MEANS SO MUCH TO YOU THAT IT IS WORTH DYING FOR?

Some of you might think, nothing! I don’t want to die for anything! Or more likely, the list gets a little smaller, like “my wife, my kids” or “My country and freedom” - these seem to be the two that we are willing to die for….if we have to.

It’s possibly not a normal thing for us to wake up each day of our lives and think, “What am I willing to die for today?” But in reality, by pursuing whatever we believe will make us ultimately happy, we are in fact saying we will live and die for it. So, in order to help us figure out if what we SO think will make us happy is worth even being willing to die for it…let’s look at some words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16, verses 24-28.

Before we read I have to confess that I’m aware this could be quite a blunt passage and a direct introduction to choose this as my preaching passage today. But, I suppose if I am a candidate as a pastor of discipleship, then revisiting Jesus’ call to discipleship is a good place to start, even if it is a little uncomfortable….So, let’s read the words of Jesus:

Matthew 16:24-28 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (ESV)

To understand this fully, we need to see what’s happening around it in the story of Jesus’ life. A few weeks again, Pastor Trent helpfully preached from this same gospel on the prelude to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted and tested. And the focus of that test was Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. Was he really God’s special son and did he need to prove that to Satan? Of course he passed this test with flying colors without bowing to the devil’s games, and the rest of his ministry in the gospel could be described as miraculous events, profound teaching, and confrontation with religious leaders as he lived out his true identity as the true Son of God. But around him, underneath the surface there was still a continuing and growing buzz asking the question…WHO IS THIS?

In light of this, as the questions around his identity crescendo, Jesus puts his disciples on the spot and in verses 13 -17 of this same chapter 16, and asks them…

Matthew 16:13-17 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven….

Who are people saying I am….and more importantly….WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

So, our pre-question to the big question of our text today is Who is Jesus? This in and of itself is a massively important starting point.

Peter in all his typical boiling zeal bursts out that Jesus is THE CHRIST. The Christ means the anointed one chosen by God to do his will and purpose.

Peter is an expectant Jew in the first century…and the disciples understanding was common to the Jews of the day. They were expecting a Christ, or a messiah to come and relieve them of the oppression of Rome. To be a political king, physically on the throne, ruling the Jews and the world form Jerusalem. You can almost see Peter and the others caught up with joy as Jesus confirms his identity, shouting “Yes we can” or cheering while wearing their “Make Israel Great Again” hats…

This is what they wanted and this is what they expected…And that is sort of how we can be with Jesus too. I’ve noticed as we’ve transitioned back to life in the USA that people in our amazing city are much more religious than where I’ve been living. Everyone seems to have some church background or at the very least some sort of appreciation or thought about Jesus. People are praying in coffee shops, going to church, and even having identifications with churches they go to a couple times a year. BUT a lot of it really does seem to centre on what Jesus can do for us. What Jesus can do to make us great. How can Jesus add to our lives….How will He make us

enjoy our most happy life and get all the goodies we want. WE AREN’T REALLY THAT DIFFERENT FROM THE DISCIPLES ARE WE? We want Jesus enthroned so he can give us what makes us happy.

Jesus was quite blunt with them though and said it straight..that is not his mission. Look at verses 21-23.

Matthew 16:21-23 From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (ESV)

Jesus makes it clear that his mission it to suffer and die on a cruel Roman cross. That All the mistaken expectations of a King like David to be the only way God’s plan could work are wrong… He will be a suffering and dying and humiliated man in the world’s eye in order to sacrifice his life for God’s glory and the forgiveness of sins for all who believe…He is a redeemer and not a life coach or a genie by any means at all. And this is where we get to a very intrusive Jesus saying the most awkward thing as he interrupts both the disciples and our understandings of what he is about and what it means to be a follower of him.

So let's read that again:

Matthew 16:24-28 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (ESV)

WOW….Just to get this straight. Jesus just went there. He just told people who seem really sincere in wanting to follow him a very strange thing. And et me make sure we get it. Jesus just said that if you want to follow him, you need to put your head on the chopping block, strap on your electric chair right now and be ready to die… because he is worth it. That’s sort of the equivalent. You’ve got to die continually, it’s going to be a life that is lived not for you, but for him and it’s going to feel like you are dying everyday. It reminds me of something that the German revolutionary theologian Diethrich Boehoffer said:

“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”  - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

WHO IS HE SPEAKING TO

24 “Then Jesus told his disciples (and ALL)…if ANYONE”

This doesn’t seem nice. And by the way, while the text in Matthew tells us that Jesus is speaking to his disciples…to those that already follow him…The same story in Mark and Luke’s gospels say that Jesus spoke to the crowd and to everyone. So this isn’t some secret thing that you sort of try and break the news to people after they already are on the team. Jesus says to the disciples, the crowd, to ALL, to you and me today. This is my invitation, this is what it means to follow me.

I don’t know about you, but that is NOT the typical way that Jesus is presented to people. And if you are here this morning and just looking into Jesus, on one level I’m sorry, because it is very serious…on another level, aren’t you glad that Jesus doesn’t bait and switch you? Aren’t you glad that Jesus is real with us? Aren’t you glad that Jesus says that following him is going to be very very hard and dangerous….UP FRONT?! In our culture we sell each other on everything and often get disappointed later…But Jesus isn’t like that. He doesn’t move the goal posts…he has laid it all out there.

If Jesus isn’t the one chosen by God, if he is just some guy…this is very rude…I know. And if you aren’t yet a Christian, you are probably thinking, ok I respect his authenticity, but he is rude! Why would I want to follow anyone like that???

And for those of us that already are people who profess to follow Jesus, can we admit, that this kind of annoys us a little bit. Can we admit that a lot of times, we want to be free to enjoy our life instead of thinking about these seemingly morbid words about dying to follow him.

But if he is the chosen Son of God, the Christ, then he has every right to interrupt our pursuit of happiness and speak real to us. If he is really the summation of the all of God’s plans and purposes for the world, then he speaks with authority into our stories.

But there is something wonderful about the character of Jesus in this text.

While it’s blunt, Jesus actually is super gracious here….He shows us three reasons why it makes total sense to be interrupted by him and even die for him. Let’s examine the three elements in the text that Jesus says are apart of following him, and see why it actually makes sense. It’s the Call, the cost, and the crown of following Jesus:

The Call, the Cost & the Crown of following Jesus

Deny yourself instead of trying to save yourself - v.24-25

Living sacrificially instead of sacrificing your soul - v. 25-26

Playing the long game instead of instant gratification - v. 27-28

DENY YOURSELF INSTEAD OF TRYING TO SAVE YOURSELF (deny yourself - The call)

As we look at this first point, you have to remember that Jesus issues this as an invitation…No one is forcing you to consider following Him, but He is putting it out there…It’s like the famous but most likely mythical advertisement put into the newspaper by the English explorer Edward Shackleton as he looked for men for his Antarctic journey:

Whether or not this ad ever ran, we can agree, It is attractive and repelling at the same time. As it always is when a good leader calls anyone to allegiance to a mission of utmost importance.

Another quote from Bonhoeffer helps us see then when he said…” Great leaders have always demanded personal allegiance. King Arthur bound his knights to him by rigid vows. Giuseppe Garibaldi, nineteenth-century Italian patriot, offered his followers hunger, death, and Italy’s freedom. Sir Winston Churchill’s stirring speech in the House of Commons in 1940, is best remembered by the dramatic words: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

It’s these kind of men and callings that we are compelled by…we actually long for purpose like this. SO Jesus’ calling is attractive…

24 - “Deny Yourself”

But, even though we are curious and might start to consider going with Jesus, we are still more offended than anything else….There is a reason why I think this is the case.    It’s not that He’s just saying we might not be able to have all the things that we think will make us happy in life…It’s bigger than that. look in verse 24…He actually says that we are the problem. That is just downright offensive and not acceptable in an age where we are told we have to celebrate everything about ourselves, others and everyone….

HE TELLS US TO DENY OURSELVES….WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? - TO RENOUNCE JUST LIKE WE WOULD THAT PERSON WHO WE DON’T WANT RELATED TO OUR LIFE AT ALL, who has betrayed us…We won’t stand by them…and we would be saying we don’t stand by ourselves….We RENOUNCE OURSELVES…

But this is necessary, because the heart of all the things we want to make us happy is that we are the center of them all. Our sense of self I don’t believe has ever been greater than currently. our SELF is all we have! Or all we think we can have….

This is what Jesus references here. Look at verse 25…he intimates that our lives are all about saving our lives, saving our selves….And we see this as the central pursuit of life all around us… This :

LOOKING FOR A BETTER YOU

The most recent iWatch advertisment plays on this…We could be a better version of ourselves, a disciplined with time, working out, healthy version…if we just get the iWatch! And we in all sorts of ways are looking for a better or accurate version of ourselves, so we can save ourselves and keep ourselves strong in a sense of who we are…. I see at least three ways we do this:

The science of self - The new evolution of ourselves as the projection of our brain…That is our true self in a solely naturalistic view of life….We are just like our phone screens, that is all we have and our only hope for salvation will be to someday project that information into another source…something scientists are readily working on. So ironically even though the the universe is said to be the most amazing thing and what we should wonder at, we get right back to me at the centre of the story…yes the universe is amazing, but all i really have is myself and I grip it even if it is a projection that is a product of mere chemicals and chance…

The medication of self - And this is where we really are offended in our current climate. We have rightly come to understand the working of out medically of things like mental health including depression, anxiety, addictions, birth order, personality, etc. We are furious to grasp our identity thinking that in that we will find some relief from the ails of our internal beings. But if that is the case why does our over-identifying simply seem to perpetuate the feelings we have. We are depressed and we know it and expect others to treat us appropriately, but it doesn’t actually make us feel any better…

The religion of self - This one is more subtle, but I expect may hit a nerve with us here this morning. Many church people will read this passage of Jesus’ words and think…YES that is what i am doing. With my church going, bible reading, prayer times, donations to various ministries…Look here, I am denying my self. BUT the question is are we. Or are we rather building a version of ourselves that we can look to and say LOOK, I am a good moral christian person. Some of us may actually have to renounce our religious pursuit as a type of self life…

But in all these ways, and more, we try to save ourselves, to build our identity and find our happiness in ourself whatever the expression of that…whether that be purposes we define, our perceived or real issues in life, or our efforts to be a good person… The issue in this is that we have not taken the first step of the gospel seriously…We have to renounce ourselves….We can’t make ourselves happy or be worthy of knowing or following Jesus and we must admit this. It’’s self-evident or else we wouldn’t need all these external things or ways in which we try to get happy….We can’t make ourselves happy no matter how much we try and he knows it. It’s like author Robert Capon says:

“Salvation is not some happy state to which we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps after the contemplation of sufficiently good examples. It is an utterly new creation into which we are brought by our death in Jesus’ death and our resurrection in his. It comes not out of our own efforts, however well-inspired or successfully pursued, but out of the shipwreck of all human effort whatsoever… Death and resurrection are the key to the whole mystery of our redemption.” - Robert Capon

This attempt to save ourselves is the central pursuit of every single one of us on this planet at all times..And Yes I am trying to overstate this. We are trying to save our own lives….But if it were really making us happy would we have to make up purposes for our lives everyday, would we remain anxious and lonely, and would we be so worn out with all our religious efforts? Aren’t we tired of trying to save ourselves?

Jesus says we absolutely have to stop…because it won’t work and A life denying self makes more sense, because our self is the problem that makes us unhappy.

…he then tells us with crystal clear logic the first reason that supports his call in verse 25…

25 - “FOR whoever would save his life will lose it….”

The first of three “fors” or in the Greek “gar” (which means “for”) that Jesus ties together to mercifully show why we must renounce ourselves…

We need to renounce ourselves..Because we get lost in ourselves.

I had the opportunity this week to speak to a couple Boise High students about this passage. They needed a little explanation, but when they understood what Jesus was saying, one of them said it was very interesting and profound. He said it was a good message for young people because they get lost in the world today…Get lost in relationships, technology, looking for and prepping for college and life, drugs, alcohol and everything else….HOW TRUE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AN EVERYONE ELSE

But, even If perhaps we could “succeed” for the most of our life to have what we would call as a happy life and a strong sense of self purpose and identity, the reality is that we will lose it in the end….While the science of the universe is up for discovery and even for debate…what isn’t is what the book of Ecclesiastes tells poetically to young and old alike….

Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low—they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets—before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity. (ESV)

The writer says in kind of a poetic and funny way.. that we are getting old and will die. the grinders

our teeth will stop because we’ll lose them, The golden bowl (our skull) will crack and the silver chord (our spinal chord) will snap one day…and then those pursuits of self happiness will be done…they’ll be lost….its true even if we try to live in a delusion that denies it..

So Jesus is being so gracious here. He says, let’s start with the renouncement you need to make once and for all. Life isn’t about you…it never was and never will be, and if you succeeded in living your whole life somehow successfully making it about you, you’ll lose it anyway…This is futile…no matter how we try to save our lives, we will lose them.

So what should we do instead???

LIVING SACRIFICIALLY INSTEAD OF SACRIFICING YOUR SOUL (take up your cross - the cost)

Look at verse 26

“FOR what will it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul…?"

We try to save our lives and more than that we truly to gain and consume a little bit more each day…

This For is connected back to the other part of Jesus’ call to discipleship…Instead of trying to incrementally gain more and more in life….

Jesus’ answer is that we should take up our cross….

The people hearing Jesus knew the image of a man carrying around a piece of wood that he would be hung up on to cruelly die of asphyxiation. But that’s what he tells them and us to do. To take up an instrument of our own death.

Daily

And in another gospel Luke adds we need to carry this instrument of death DAILY…maybe that’s clue to help us know what to do.

In the context of Eccl. and the whole of the Bible we live our lives, we pay our bills, we eat our food and we have our families and that is entirely fine…those are good gifts of God to enjoy and that keeps this from being a strange command we can’t obey if we want to follow Jesus.

….BUT what IS important is how we do those things, why we do them and to what end we do them - that matters. Do we do it all for ourselves, or do we do it for our Creator and for others good. And every day is an opportunity to express in self sacrificial ways that we have renounced ourselves.

Because the reality is that one day, any follower of Jesus may be asked to really give their life simply because they identity not with themselves or any other self, but with Him as the centre of the universe.

Look at Pastor Andrew Brunson who just this week was released from a Turkish prison after years of confinement and mistreatment. Lies and slander and misunderstandings fueled by a culture that believes their sense of identity was at stake, led to his imprisonment…in the mode and shadow of what happened to Jesus. Now thankfully he was not killed, but he could have been and many other Christians are EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. My friend is a Turkish national church planter who tweeted praise to God that this pastor was released but asked for prayer as they dwell under the shadow of the threat that continues.

Here’s how we connect that to our lives living in Boise, Idaho….We can say we would die for Jesus one day, because we know he is the truth and maybe we would, it’s easy to say from the comfort of our homes and this nation…BUT here are some clues to whether we could bear that cross….

If you won’t miss cheering your sports team on to gather with God’s people and raise your hands or at least your voice to Jesus…then you probably wouldn’t die for him

If you won’t risk making friends with a someone who has none instead of staying with your conformable group…then you probably wouldn’t die for him.

If you wouldn’t get out of bed to serve your wife or husband or family…then you probably wouldn’t die for him.

If you wouldn’t cut back on your work hours to spend more time and money on ways to share the gospel…then you probably wouldn’t die for him.

If you wouldn’t invite the “foreigner” (whoever that is to you) to your table for a meal…then you probably wouldn’t die for him.

If you wouldn’t bring up Jesus in a conversation at the local coffee shop, bar, restaurant or in the office…then you probably wouldn’t die for him.* (Adapted from a list in a book by Steve Timmis)

I think we get the point…And the point isn’t to say go do these things to try and prove you would die for Jesus…that would just be you living for yourself again! The point is that we must be honest about our hearts and say, “Jesus these self-sacrificial, cross centered daily little things are even more than I can handle…but they are all good and they are all right…would you help me to live this way…”

We just need to agree with Jesus that, as John Henry Newman said:

“The self-denial which is pleasing to Christ consists in little things. This is plain, for opportunity for great self-denials does not come every day. Thus to take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all, it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.” John Henry Newman

If not…. we are essentially saying to Jesus something like….

“I would like to buy three dollars’ worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of Him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy three dollars’ worth worth of God, please." Jones, G. C. (1986). 1000 illustrations for preaching and teaching (p. 146). Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

And to encourage us in this Jesus in the gospel of John told us that this self-sacrifice principle that began with His death on the cross as our redemption and example mirrors the natural world and always has a result…

John 12:24-26 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. (ESV)

Jesus died and we live…we daily die and sacrifice ourselves in little acts to others in community and they live….this is God’s kingdom at work in this world…

Let me illustrate it this way….

Those of you that are grandparents know the joy of seeing the legacy of the generations that come after you…I’ve heard it’s an almost unparalleled experience to be a patriarch or matriarch this way…IN the same way every act of cross centered living for the sake of the gospel has very real effects on a harvest of spiritual children that come through the gospel yes, but through the gospel through people who make sacrifices following after Jesus to see his gospel go forward….That is a joy that satisfies…as it satisfied Jesus. His death brought many sons to glory

So, A life of sacrificial living makes sense because the world can’t fill the void that only being part of God’s purposes can.

The Lord Jesus’ sacrifice is certainly all sufficient, but he is calling us to take part, and get in the game despite the pain….even with a promise of sure reward.

PLAYING THE LONG GAME INSTEAD OF INSTANT GRATIFICATION (follow me - the crown)

A life of delayed gratification through cross bearing makes sense when you weigh and taste the glory of Jesus compared to everything else…

“FOR the Son of man is going to come in glory….”

And Now we see here the most scintillating aspect of the call to follow Jesus, to really scratch where we itch. the reward and the good life to make us as happy as we could possibly be.

From the story of the whole Bible we know something to be true…though Jesus sacrificed himself for God’s glory and for our good…His ultimate destiny is glory…

The rest of the gospel of Matthew shows that…in the immediate context after the passage we are looking at today, Jesus goes up on a hill, glows white and let’s Peter and John what he really looks like in all his luminous glory while talking to Elijah and Moses from the OT. The picture is that the Jesus who suffers and bears the cross is the same Jesus of all eternity who will again be seen as glorious. And after Matthew we have the rest of the story of the Bible all the way to revelation where Jesus is literally the light of all eternity with his glory…And that reality is one of no suffering, pain, no death, with all of God’s people together with no selfishness and only His love to share…

So Jesus says clearly….there is a cross before there could ever be a crown…BUT THERE IS A CROWN!

We SO need to hear this… because this gets to the heart of our attempts to “GAIN THE WORLD”

We live our lives looking for that instant gratification…in our youth we look towards it, try it out and try and find the experience that will best suit our souls to find happiness…and then we get to old age and have regrets that we never found it.. that we can no longer have the strength to try and attain it…And there is that middle short time from our late twenties to late thirties where possibly we think we have found the sweet spot - only to see it slip out ion our hands into time. It is futile to look for instant gratification because it is only for an instant.

Doesn’t this leave a bad taste in your mouth? Doesn’t this make you feel like there is a massive ruse going on? That’s because its not what you were made for…You were made to experience the glory of God that will only be found when Jesus comes with all his holy angels..

So imagine for minute a massive set of old time scales that weigh everything in comparison to the other side….put everything on the scales….put your family life, your career pursuits, your legacy, your church life, your pursuit of pleasure through alcohol and drugs, your romantic life, the best vacation you’ve ever had, the best day of your life, all the respect and popularity or fame you could earn…Put it all in the scale… all the accolades for being a really good Christian man or woman…All the thousands like on Instagram and facebook, even traveling the world and seeing every country and culture imaginable and tasting all their foods both savory and sweet….

NOW, that all sits on one side and on the other falls the WEIGHT of the glory of Jesus and his coming and the angels and that which is unthinkably unimaginable and pleasurable in the love, friendship, and presence of Christ with all his gifts given forever to you as his delighted children of grace….How does that feel? What kind of taste does that leave in your mouth…Hold that, savor it, that should be enough to convince us that following Jesus is worth it. At least C.S. Lewis thinks it should be…as he said

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child that wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are too easily pleased.”  - C.S. Lewis

27 - “Will repay…taste death”

Jesus makes it clear that there.

The other gospels, Mark & Luke make it clear that this is not some judgement for being bad or good people. We’ve already seen that our self is the problem. But this section is a statement of support for the reasonableness of denying yourself, taking up your cross and following Jesus. And if you get it. If you see his glory, if you see the value of his kingdom you will live for it, and not only live for it, you won’t be ashamed of it and you will speak about it….And that is the basis of his judgement…That’s why Luke says it this way:

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.” - Luke 9:26-27

The “what you’ve done” is related to what you know…or in the words of another part of the bible, what you have tasted….If you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, you cannot help but describe his savor of goodness to others…and he will reward that evidence of a genuine relationship and experience with him, given through his grace, with the crown that we so desperately chase outside of Christ, but cant attain.

But if that is not enough…At the end Jesus makes it clear that the Son of man will return and that his judgement will happen…It will in fact be a hurricane, a shipwreck, the biggest stock crash of all time - if there is no real relationship with Jesus through his sacrifice that has been expressed by sacrificially following in his example…

So you will taste the Lord, or you will taste death…and lose all that you tried to gain, hoard, grasp, taste, fill yourself with, find yourself in, etc…

The Call, the Cost & the Crown of following Jesus

Deny yourself instead of trying to save yourself - v.24-25

Our happiness is not to be found in any version of ourselves, only in Jesus and what He has done for us through his sacrifice

Living sacrificially instead of sacrificing your soul - v. 25-26

Our happiness is found in sacrificially blessing others and seeing God’s work and purpose through the gospel, following the example of Jesus

Playing the long game instead of instant gratification - v. 27-28

Our happiness is not found in the shadowlands of this world but only the reward of grace in being with Jesus in His glory forever

WOW this is real, this is stark…but we know it’s true, we know we have to say no to ourselves, and live daily a sacrificial life pointed to eternity….So how do we do that in some simple applicable ways?

APPLICATION & CLOSE

As we make application to close up our time together….Let me bring it back to the start and ask the question I often have asked my kids if they were throwing a bit of a fit because they weren’t happy and wanted to have something, do something or be something….

So...are you happy?

To Those Not Yet Believers:

First of all, if you are not a believer in Jesus, I want to apologize on behalf of the church more broadly for confusing you about what it means to follow Jesus…It is so much more than a little add on to your life…and it’s worth so much more than that.

Would you take the hints of your heart and feelings that sin is real in yourself and that you are fighting a losing battle to keep the ship afloat? Would you deny yourself and come to Jesus - though it will be hard it is where real freedom and happiness are found.

To BELIEVERS:

Deny yourself by getting in community

Small group - new one starting this week!

Membership class over the next 3 weeks….

Anything we can do to be more committed to others instead of our rugged individualism and self life….

Sacrificially live every moment making intentional choices to die to your sense of self importance

Let the Spirit lead, but some examples could be:

Not driving alone, but inviting someone to the go shopping with you

Having a meal with a “foreginer” at your house

Going to a football game but taking people you don’t know that well

Cutting back work hours to give time to your neighborhood

Working a bit extra (in a healthy way) to give to gospel ministry

 Our Last Application comes from the parallel text in Luke 9

Luke 9:26-27 "For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God" (ESV)

Speak about Jesus every possible moment because he is profoundly attractive and worthy of our praise and proclamation. This falls in line with the gospel priorities of the year

Jesus call to discipleship is a call to true happiness….When we get this we will naturally, willingly, happily say no to ourselves, die daily and proclaim his goodness with our lips..

We’ll be ultimately happy if we know Jesus, follow him, and live sacrificially for him everyday in community and in the city…instead of living for self and our own pursuits of happiness.

Let’s pray

So the Corinthians have asked Paul a seemingly simple question, "Is it okay for us to eat meat sacrificed to idols?"

The question was simple but the answer was not. Paul has said, you have freedom in Christ to eat meat, but be careful. Don't underestimate the allure of idolatry. Don't overestimate your strength. Don't get too cocky in your freedom. And in chapter 10 Paul used the nation of Israel as an example of just how powerful the enticement of idolatry can be, "Look at the nation of Israel."

He says consider Israel - They saw the works of God in delivering them out of the land of Egypt.

- They saw God blow a channel of dry land through the water.

- They saw manna materialize out of thin air.

- They saw water flush clean from the rock.

And yet, over and over and over again they got lured into worshiping idols and it destroyed them. And how did that happen? By small, seemingly insignificant migrations. A little festival here, a little dancing there, a little flirting around the edges, and it effected them. It began to mess with their core - it began to reorder their loves and pretty soon it was game over. Israel went from a nation worshipping YHWH to a nation worshiping idols. That's a massive relocation of the heart but it happened slowly - by participating in idolatry - one small incremental value shift at a time.

So Paul is warning be aware of the progression of idolatry. Don't think you are immune to it's influence. Don't think you can somehow avoid everything negative thing and just participate in the positive. Don't think that you are going to be different than the millions of Israelites that went before you. It doesn't work that way.

Paul is saying, "Be careful. If you don't think you are in danger of idolatry then you are in the most danger. If you think you're strong, well then you're probably weak."

Paul says, we ought to have this non-stop healthy fear of idolatry.

Now, I'm guessing most of us didn't wake up this morning fearing idolatry and it's for that exact reason that we need to pay close attention. If you didn't wake up conscious and aware of the danger, then you're EXACTLY who Paul is talking to. Paul says, it's super dangerous out here and you're not even aware? If you aren't aware of the danger you can't avoid it?

Now in order to understand the danger of idolatry we have to understand what idolatry is. What is an idol. What is idol worship? Even though we don't live in a culture with statues and temples and replicas, we still very much are an idolatrous nation. The forms have changed but the heart has not. What is idolatry at the root?

Idolatry is trusting in created things rather than in the creator for our hope, happiness and significance. So we might trust in our atheticism, or our appearance or our wit or humor or our intellect or our career. And it would be those things that we look to for our happiness rather than God. I will find worth in my job rather than finding worth in God. You've just made your job an idol. I will hope in a raise that is coming my way. You've just made money and idol.

Now how does this happen? Because while we may identify with the problem of idolatry from a strictly intellectual point of view this is ridiculous. Why would a person, especially a Christian, trust a created thing rather than the Creator of that thing? That seems stupid beyond words. Why would we ever kick God off the throne and say, "I'm done with you. I don't trust you anymore. I trust this thing you made more than you." That seems insane.

How Idolatry Happens

Well, here's how it happens. The foundation of idolatry is laid when we experience an unmet God-given desire.

It could be a desire for acceptance.

It could be a desire for food or sex

It could be a desire to be loved

It could be a desire to be happy

It could be a desire to be respected

It could be a desire to have purpose and meaning.

It could be a desire to have worth

Let's observe a few features of those desires:

Those are all God-given desires.

They are very powerful desires.

And here's the interesting part - none of those desires can be met in an of ourselves.

And because we cannot meet those desires in ourselves, we start looking around for something we think can satisfy those desires.

Now, thus far, everything is going PERFECTLY according to God's plan. This is exactly how God made us. He wants us to feel that void. He designed us to thirst, to hunger, to experience need in ourself that we can't fulfill. He designed us to search for sources of fulfillment outside of ourselves. That's all part of the plan. But the search is supposed to end in Jesus Christ.

Idolatry is when our search ends in something other than Jesus. Our hearts lock onto some object and we really do believe it will fulfill in some ultimate sense. And so we create this powerful idol. Now in order for this idol to be effective in your life you've got to do three things:

You have to give it power.

It is important to realize that all idols are made. We create them. When speaking about a physical idol we can picture that. Isiah 44 talks about the craftsman going out and watering a tree and then cutting it down and shaping into the shape of a man and then setting it up and then bowing down to it. And Isaiah 44 is a mockery of this whole operation.

And so we read this and think, you Barbarians. Where is your sense? How silly that he would give a block of wood that sort of power. How can he expect a block of wood to deliver him? He's putting way too much trust in a thing? Can't he see that it's a delusion? Can't he see that the power this idol possess is entirely imagined?

But that's what all idolatry is like. When you make money a god, when you make all your life about gaining money what are you doing? Your giving something that has no power incredible power over you. You take a tree, you slice it up into dollar bills and you bow down to it. And you say, save me. Deliver me.

We imagine in our minds that this thing money has this god-like power to meet our deepest needs. We create around money, this cognitive field, this emotional field and we treat it as ultimate. We imagine it having supernatural power to fulfill us. What have we done? We have fashioned an idol with our hands. We are bowing down to it. We are worshiping it.

This happens invisibly in the life of the mind. Perhaps your living in this tiny cramped rental making peanuts at your job you don't like and you see pictures on Facebook of vacations and smiles and the comparative ease of other people. And you tell yourself, with just a little more, life would be so much easier. You tell yourself a story, 'if-only' I had a little more. Guess what? You just gave that lifeless thing power to fulfill you.

If only I had more of you oh god, I would be saved. It pretty much works to take any worship song we have and instead of saying God, just put in the word Money. We'll take a verse of a song we sang this morning.

Why does that work? Because it's a worship song. Worship is not a religious concept. It's a human concept. What makes it religious is when the object of the worship shifts from something in the creation to the Creator himself.

So we said that in order for an idol to be effective in your life you've got to do three things: You have to give it power.

You give it sacrifices.

All worship structures itself in a covenant relationship. And the covenant goes like this, "If I give my time to you, if I give my emotional energy to you, if I give my mental energy to you, if I give you the first fruits of everything valuable to me, then you in return will give me that thing I need that I cannot get on my own." That's the contract we make.

Sacrifices are like votes of confidence in the worthiness of the thing you decide to worship. Let me give you an illustration. Have you ever been to an event where there are door prizes. Maybe there are 30 prizes and they give you 10 tickets. And you are supposed to wander around and look at the items and place your ticket in a jar in front of that item.

So you can't possibly win them. There isn't enough tickets to go around. But if you want something really badly, you are allowed to increase your chances by putting more than one ticket in a jar. So lets say you see this iPad. I really want one of those so you take all ten tickets and you dump it into the one jar.

Now because you've invested, because you've sacrificed your ten tickets, you are entirely disinterested in everything else, but when it comes time for that particular drawing you are locked in.

So when we say that in order for an idol to be effective in your life, you have to give it power, meaning I think this is going to make me happy. You really want it. And then you have to give it all your tickets. You give it time, money, thought, emotional energy. You start making hard decisions. Sorry family I have to work. Sorry wife, I need to take this call. Sorry church, I am busy this weekend.

Once we start invest heavily, we've really stoked the fires of that idolatry engine. We've put our eggs into that basket and now it's gonna be hard to put it out.

One of the ways you can identify idols in your life is to look into your investments. Look at the books. Look at the sacrifice log. Where are you spending money? Where are you giving your time? What are you thinking about in your free time? What do you constantly wish you were doing that you aren't doing.

Just roll down the ledgers of your life, roll down the sacrifice logs and you'll see your idols. They will reveal themselves. Why? Because all worshipers give sacrifices to their gods. Follow the money and you'll find the gods. Follow the time usage and you'll find the gods. Follow the mental and emotional energy and you'll find your gods.

Why because all worship is contractual. You give me the first fruits, I'll give you that thing you want.

So in order for an idol to be effective you have to You have to give it power, you have to sacrifice to it and you ultimately have to trust it.

Trust in it.

What this means is that you put your hope in it. I expect that some day soon this deep need of mine will be met by you oh idol. That's what we mean by hope. It's coming, just around the corner. I'm hoping for the warmth of summer.

Even more than hope, you put your faith in it. What is meant by that? Why is this an important concept? Because faith is the conviction of things hoped for the evidence of things not yet seen.

So that means that even though your god of money or power or athletic accomplishment isn't coming through for you today and even though you can't quite see how it could, you have faith in it. You trust it despite all the evidence around you.

That's why people can so doggedly pursue something that rationally could never give them what they're hoping. Why? Because they have put their faith in it. That is when idolatry has closed the eyes of the worshiper. It's not open for discussion. This person has invested too much. They can't possibly pull out now. But one day it will all come crashing down.

The Personal Test

Now here's how to tell if something has moved to this point where you given it power, where you have begun making sacrifices and where you have began to trust in it for your happiness. Here's the test: take it away! Sometimes the best way to tell an idol is operating in your life is not so much by looking at how good you feel when you get it but by how devastated you are when you don’t.

What's so interesting is the absolutely irrational response that happens when you strip people's god away. When you strip away the lowercase g God they then accuse uppercase G God. They get mad at God, “How could God do this to me?” God looks at you and says, “Why am I all the sudden in the equation? You've ignored me for decades. You’re not miserable because of me; you’re miserable because of you. You’re miserable because you have been trying to power your life on this tiny little AA battery god. You’ve built your life on serving a weak god that can’t deliver, never could deliver, I told you up front it could never deliver and you’re mad at me because I haven’t made you more successful in your delusional attempt to make a AA battery your god? I want to deliver you from from your bondage to this idol.”

The best test for idolatry is stripping it away.

The Temptation to Idolatry

So all of that was to contextualize the concept of idolatry so that when we get to verse 14 and it says flee idolatry you don't roll your eyes in irrelevancy. No, this is about as relevant as it gets. So look at 1 Corinthians 10:12.

What's that? That's a warning. Paul says, we are all prone to idolatry. Every one of us. You don't think idols can tempt you? Think again. Take heed he says. For you will all be tempted to idolatry.

No temptation has overcome you except what is common to man. Common to man, means every man experiences it. Every woman in this room experiences. All will be tempted.

Now here's what's interesting, when we hear the word temptation, we understandably hear something bad because that's what the English word implies. But the Greek word for temptation is an entirely neutral word. It doesn't have a moral connotation to it one way or another. It simply means to test.

So for example this exact same word is used in the familiar opening verses of James.

That word trials there is the same Greek word for temptation in our passage. And you can see from this usage in James it doesn't have a negative connotation at all. The root idea is testing. We test the integrity of something by putting it under stress.

In the world of concrete, in order to keep people honest, inspectors will sometimes take random concrete samples and form them up into cylinders and once those cylinders have dried, they insert them beneath these hydraulic rams. And they apply incredible amounts of pressure to see if they will crack. It's a pressure test. And it's fun to watch the videos. It's more like and explosion when they finally break.

Now here's the point. In the Greek language it would be a totally legitimate usage of the word to say that you are tempting those cylinders of concrete.

If the character of that concrete is strong it will resist the test and if the character of that concrete is weak it will crumble under the temptation. Whether it is a test or temptation depends on the character of the concrete. Does that makes sense. The test/temptation is merely the external pressure.

This helps us understand the passages in the Bible that talk about Jesus being tempted.

What's going on here? Jesus, in his humanity, is being put into a press. The hydraulic ram of a pressure situation but his character was such that it was able to resist the temptation. It couldn't crack him.

Same with passages like:

Again, the character of Jesus resisted the pressure. The testing did not reveal any flaws.

Temptation and testing are near synonyms here.

So, with that understanding in view, let's read verse 12 again listen carefully. How do you hear this verse,

What is Paul trying to tell us about our character? What that tells me is that we are weak, feeble, brittle cylinders of poorly constructed concrete. Our constitution is so poor, we are so frail it doesn't take much to crack us.

Our hearts are fickle.

We are immature.

We are prone to wander.

Our hearts are eager to chase after idols.

Our affection constantly deviate.

Throw a little wilderness our direction and we will crack into a pile of rubble. That's why Jesus instructs us to pray, "Deliver us from temptation." Don't put us to the test because we will fail. We are too poorly constructed.

Paul says, take heed. You're not very strong. We ought to know that about ourselves. For goodness sake, know yourself. Stop kidding yourself.

That's the main point Paul is trying to make. You are free in Christ, Corinthians, but know thyself. You can handle much less than you think you can. You are a poorly made cylinder of concrete. Don't think you have some superhuman ability to avoid idolatry. Let anyone who thinks he is made of 6000 psi concrete take heed lest the testing reveal the truth - the hairline cracks, the weak bonding and turn you into a pile of rubble.

Paul says, appreciate your weakness. Where you possess control, exercise it. And so let me ask you church,

What movies are you watching. You think you can handle it? Take heed, lest you fall.

What media are you consuming? What music are you listening to? What are you doing on your phone?

How much advertising do you consume?

What effect is that having on you? Be so careful.

These are culturally powerful forces. Here's another way to approach. Take some observational notes on the lifestyle of people your respect and I think you will see some common threads. Those who we would say are the very strongest act like they are tiny, frail babies. They don't put themselves in the way of temptation so how are we who are admittedly weaker than those who we respect, able to resist.

Or is it that you are deceived regarding the danger?

The Way of Escape

Now to be sure, some temptation, some testing will come your way and when it does, God is gracious and merciful to give you a way of escape.

Now this is of great encouragement to a Christian. You are not doomed to sin. Yes you are made of weak concrete but God knows that. And he's not going to put you in a situation that dooms you to a pile of rubble. That's a promise you can take to the bank.

When you become a believer, sin no longer has dominion over you, which means you don't have to sin. Romans 8 says that we are either slaves to sin or slaves to God. Prior to being a believer, sin is all you ever knew. But now as a believer, you are never in a condition where you are absolutely under the mastery of sin. It’s no longer your king. Jesus is your King. It’s there, it’s powerful, but it’s no longer your king.

It's an incredible promise. I'm never given more than I can handle. A 4th grade math teacher doesn't give her students Calculus problems on the test. She gives her students problems her students can handle. 4th graders are not as strong as Calculus students and so the test must be according to their ability.

Know that no matter how hard it feels, the test is passable. But the test is also failable.

How would you fail this particular test? By not taking the way of escape. So what's the way of escape? Well, you could throw out any number of true things here. Certainly, God's mercy in helping us to resist temptation would be Bible reading and prayer and fellowship and attending church.

But the main way of escape is what he mentions next.

If you don't run away from thing you know will hurt you, well, you can't complain when they end up hurting you. You see, that's where the battle is won. The reason this is not more obvious is because it's not clear when it will hurt you or how much exposure it will take before it effects you.

I have this ongoing fascination with the nuclear plant that melted down in Russia - Chernobal. So always watch these documentaries.

And I think it's safe to say, that if you did a dead sprint through the nuclear meltdown site of Chernobal you'd be fine. You didn't spend enough time there to be effected by the radiation. You'd probably be fine if you walked through. You'd probably be fine if you actually setup a picnic lunch there. Probably. You could potentially even be fine by spending a week there. But again, not sure on that one.

Do you see the problem? How much time is too much? It's not clear.

Let's say your idol is sports. You love your sports. And you admit the theoretical possibility that this thing could corrupt your heart. But how much? Can I never throw a football. And the tendency is rather than look at the millions of people who are in spirtual cancer wards and say, man that is dangerous, you try to find the one guy who escaped the effects and say, "I'll be like him."

That's foolishness talking. Take deep inventory of your life. What idolatry dragon is lurking beneath the water that really, only you know about. You see idolatry grows in secret. We are on red alert against sins like adultery, overt lying, cheating, etc. But those don't pop out for years.

Idolatry has to have been growing in your life for years before that stuff pops out. Idolatry can be festering it's way deep into your heart without ever expressing itself in clear, easily identifiable violations of God's law.

For example,

If money become an idols it can lead you to working too hard, it can block the development of the fruits of the Spirit in your life so you are less joyful, less patient with others, and because you love money and not people all your relationships go flat, there's no ongoing investment in them... the cancer is growing but there's nothing you can obviously point to but eventually it will lead to something. Eventually out pops the affair.

It is said of the man who falls into adultery that he didn't fall very far. In other words this was just the next logical step of making an offering to his god, the day before was step 10004 and this is step 10005

Application Time

Application time folks, how can we flee idolatry FCBC? What is this going to look like as you walk out these doors? Let me walk through a few examples here.

If you are being tempted to love money, what does fleeing from the love of money look like?

Often it's just calling it out. It's the way you talk and think about.

It can be resisting a promotion because you know that you don't need more money and all that would do is hurt your family.

It can be rebuffing anyone who treats you differently because you have money and certainly destroying any thoughts you have that you are better because of what God has given you.

It can be challenging the way money is being talked about in your home. Guys we are not going to talk about money as if it is our savior. It is not. Jesus is our savior and he gives us money as a tool to glorify him. It is his prerogative on how much he is going to give us. If he withhold money it is because he wants to test our character and if he gives us money it's because he wants to test our character. We are not going to talk about money as if it is our god that can save us.

Fleeing idolatry can take on so many forms. Here's another example.

It is common for married people to reinforce to one another and encourage one another to make regular offerings to their god. They live in codependent idolatry relationship where a single sacrifice placates two different gods.

Or the husband worships his career and the wife worships the money she gets from her husband's career. So now the long absence at home is a dual sacrifice both to the god of work and the god of money.

The husband worships sex and beauty and the wife finds her identity in her sexuality and desirability. That is a sick codependent relationship where each use one another to make offerings to their god.

Or the husband worships sports and the wife worships the idea of her kids excelling in sports.

Or the husband worships materialism and the wife worships a family image and to get that you need the smiles on the boat.

There are hundreds of combinations of this.

So fleeing idolatry might be interrupting whatever cycle you have found yourself in in your own marriage. And just a warning here, if there is a lurking see monster of idolatry, he will surface. This will cause conflict unless both see the problem.

Oh, I'm not going to take the promotion.

I don't think we can afford the vacation.

We aren't going to play sports this year.

We need to put away our phones.

We need to stop watching this media.

I think we need to be more generous.

We need to stop spending so much time on fixing up our house.

Do you see why this is so tricky? How could you say any of this is wrong? IT isn't. That's what Paul is saying. Eating meat sacrificed to idols isn't wrong. Sin isn't just doing bad things. It loving the right things in the wrong ways. Turning good things into ultimate things.

Listen church, God wants us to flee. Let's stop dabbling around in the temples of our culture. This doesn't mean to stop being part of the world. It means be honest with what is effecting you. And if something is effecting you, you need to get out of there - no one else. You need to take a serious break. Not everyone needs to eliminate this but you do.

Don't let Satan win by walking out here today and NOTHING CHANGES. Everyone else is doing this, so I should be able to as well. FLEE idolatry. Run. Admit how poorly constructed and weak you are.

Slideshow for this message is available

So we are working our way through the book of Corinthians and the church is asking a relatively simple question, "Paul, is it okay for us to eat meat sacrificed to idols?" But Paul doesn't know how to answer a question simply. He launches into this three chapter diatribe on how we ought to think.

First he says, "Yes, there is a technical answer to the question. Of course you can eat meat sacrificed to idols. There's no spiritual poisoning going on." That's like the first 3 sentences. Then he's got three chapters on the caveats and nuances.

The first caveat was this. You can eat meat sacrificed to idols, unless of course you have an awareness that you will wound the conscience of a weaker brother. In that case, love controls freedom. This was his first caveat.

Now in chapter 10 he's got a second one. He says, "Sure you are free in the technical sense of things, but I'm concerned why you would want to. I'm concerned that your not concerned."

Because ultimately God does not judge us for what we do but for what we want to do. He doesn't ultimately judge us for our actions but our loves that motivate our actions. And do you not know that the more you do something the more you love that thing?

And to illustrate this point, he tells a story. He says, "Once upon a time there was a nation who saw the works of God.

This nation's God delivered them from a terribly cruel taskmaster.

This nation's God saved them from certain death by making a water shaft through the sea.

Their God fed them food out of thin air

Their God gave them water to drink from a rock.

And what did this nation do to repay him? They court marshaled him. They threatened to murder the leader that God put in charge. They demanded that HE explain himself to THEM. Can you believe it?

And what do you think that God did? When their leader came to God and said, "These people are trying to murder me! What should we do with them?" How do you think that their God responded?

Their God said, “I’ll tell you what to do with these people, these people who are trying to murder you, these people who deserve to be abandoned in the wilderness, these people who deserve our contempt, who deserve to be disregarded entirely.

I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with them. We’re going to go meet their needs. We're going to absorb the injustice. We’re going to fulfill their desires. How does that sound?”

And we learned last week this incredible metaphor of the rock in the OT as Christ. It really was a foreshadowing of this incredible mercy of God. And God continued to be gracious to them. But what do you think they did? They brought more charges against God.

And that mercy-rejecting attitude eventually resulted in judgment. Let's look at verse 5. So after all this blessing, here's the summary:

So Israel becomes an EXAMPLE of what happens when we continue to spurn grace. That's a key word. Verse 6 says, these things took place as examples for us that we might not crave evil things. He repeats the idea again in verse 11 using the same word. "These things happened to them as an example for us." The Greek word 'example' in both cases is the word typos which in it's root sense means mold, not the stuff that grows on sandwhiches but a mold that you cast things with.

And the reason I bring it up is because the concrete image of a mold is helpful for the point Paul is trying to make. Picture making a waffle. The waffle iron is the mold. The waffle batter is the unformed substance that gets poured into the mold. In it's liquid form it impressionable - it can take an impression. There are literally an infinite number of possible shapes it could take. But when you finally decide to pour it into that iron, the forming begins. And three minutes later, it's hardened into the exact shape of the mold.

How does the mold do it's work? It puts edges and borders and limitations on the formation of where that batter is allowed to go. The batter will go left and not right. It will pool here, but not here.

That is exactly what following an example does in our life. Our souls are a little like batter. They are impressionable. They are moldable. The possible things a person could love are infinite. The possible ways a person could use their time is infinite. The possible interests they could acquire are legion. But what does an example do? By following an example, we are being pressed into the shape of something.

I am going to love this, not this. This small decision over here instead of this. And eventually what do you have? You have a copy of the original? Why? The same decisions were made. When you add up all the small decisions what do you have? You have a copy.

So pay attention to what pattern you are following. You can't say, "I hate the shape of waffles, but then pour your batter into the iron." Paul says, in the same way, you can't say, "I don't want to be like the world, but then pour your soul into the mold of the world, pattern every decision you make after the world, use your time exactly like the world uses their time. What do you have in the end? The world.

Paul says, it may seem like this is no big deal. It may seem like, "Hey what's the big deal with meat sacrificed to idols. I have freedom." And it's true, you do. And it's true, that one decision is not a big deal. Drinking one coke is no big deal. But look at the big picture of your life. What mold are you following. What decisions are trending? What's your spiritual diet.

Israel thought, what's a little friendship with idol worshiping people. But one example patterned after another after another and pretty soon they found the batter of their hearts had dried in a shape that rejected God.

Paul is saying, learn from them. Don't pattern yourself after the bad molds that Israel left behind. Don't pour your soul into the mold that made Israel who she was.

So what did Israel do that we should avoid? We learned last week that the main sin Israel committed, the main evil, was putting God to the test.in their suffering They tried to court marshal God. The brought charges against him. And the text goes on today to give three stories and three different charges that Israel brought against God. So we'll try to summarize these stories and the charge that was brought against God in those stories. These are wilderness charges. This is important for our text today because it's not just Israel - this is human. These types of charges are brought against God when people begin to suffer.

Charge of Abandonment

And here's the first charge.

Verse seven recalls the incident.

Now this is referring the golden calf incident in Exodus 32. The context here is important to recall if we are to understand this charge. Israel is parked at the foot of Mt. Sinai after roughly three months having been delivered from Egypt. And already now they have griped and complained and threatened to kill Moses at Moses a dozen times.

And so God says, "You know what, I have a plan for how to show these people that you are my messenger."

So according to this text what's the purpose of this display? The idea is to re-enforce the authority of Moses words with a visible manifestation of his presence. So Moses says, get ready. In three days God is going to appear. And they put up some fences and God descended. And on that third day, there was lighting and thunder and a super loud trumpet blast and out of the thick cloud God literally called Moses up into the mountain.

So this was the reaction. Whatever happened here, it got their attention. Wow, God is big and real and scary. I submit to God. And out of this absolutely terrifying experience, they get the ten commandments.

God says, I'm your God, you are my people to be a witness to the nations.

So that's the setup for our text. This is literally the immediate context. This is ex 19-20. Then you have a bunch of laws but the next narrative section is ex 32. So this is the immediate context.

Now given THIS, how do you get to golden calf? This sounds a million miles away. What events happened between the scary thunder and lighting, God-is-real experience and the wholesale abandonment of God and idolatrous feasting and the golden calf.

What happened in between?

Here's the answer: Nothing. You wake up the next day and all the thunder and lighting is gone and it's just normal. Your leader is gone. And you wait. And then what happens the next day? Nothing. What happened the day after that. Nothing. You wake up and again it's clear blue sky. Birds are chirping just like the previous day. Lizards are flicking their tongues just like they always do. Every day, they got more and more used to the idea that God doesn't really intervene in our affairs. That his presence didn't have any real implications on their life.

Who knows? Is Moses even alive up there? He's probably dead and we are waiting for nothing. This ideas is about as human as it gets. Fast forward 1500 years and it's still the same thing.

It's the charge of abandonment. God you left us and so now we are off to find other gods. This is what was happening to Israel. All those miracles are distant. So in one sense what happened in that dead space was nothing, but in another sense everything happened. As the abandonment is slowly believed, the allegiance shifts. God's provision and presence were distant. They began to say, "Why are we giving the best days of our lives, living in servile total allegiance to a God that might come back when we can have a god right now that will give us what we want."

This is what happens in the wilderness. God's provision is distant. This is why the wilderness tempts you. We are never tempted when we are feasting on God's provision. It's in the dead space. That vast expanse of sameness, that void of God really appearing in meaningful ways causes you to question, "Has God abandoned me?"

You look around and everyone is having fun it seems, except for you. It's the molasses creeping of doubt. And that doubt erodes away at the mind. The loyalty gets chipped away. The allegiance needle creeps a different direction.

Now the point is that it's a slow fade. Allegiances rarely change quickly.n No sailor goes to bed one evening, happy with his captain and then wakes up the next morning and decides to declare mutiny on the ship. It always happens slowly by degrees working up an attitude over weeks and months and usually through a bit of suffering. And that's exactly where Israel finds herself. Time plus suffering = test of allegiance. Israel drags God into court with a charge. You've abandoned us!

Now remember, Paul is addressing the Corinthians about this subtle danger of eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul isn't worried about the first time. He could care less about the first time. He's concerned about the 101st time. He's concerned about that slow drip effect on the heart. Be careful, he says. Be careful. It may seem like a small thing, but I'm warning you that if you don't guard your heart you are going to end up like Israel. Your going to look back someday and think, "How in the world did I get here?" Israel went from terrified of God to worshiping idols. How do you think that happened? By eating meat sacrificed to idols! One small decision at a time.

How do you go from worshiping God in church to scorning him? How do youth group kids grow up and chuck everything to do with God. By patterning themselves after the world. By first participating with the world and then laughing with the world then loving the world loves.

Have you ever had a paper airplane book? You can fold a piece a piece of paper an infinite number of ways, but if you follow the pattern and do the step by step, you'll end up with a copy. Paul says, be careful Corinthians. And he's saying to us, be careful. If your heart bends this direction, and then it bends this direction. And you keep patterning your heart after the world, then you will become just like the world.

So here's the first example. Here's the first bad mold. Don't pour your heart into this mold. Paul warns, don't be idolaters like Israel. When you are in the wilderness don't ever Accuse God of Abandonment.

Charge of Unlawful Restraint

Now the context of this is crazy interesting. This is Numbers 24. What precedes numbers 24 is the story of Balaam. Now the story of Balaam is bizarre beyond words.

The story begins with Balak who was king of Moab. He stationed in his kingly perch and he looks out at this sea of humanity coming up out of Egypt and he sees them gobbling up the land. Every natural resource is being consumed. To him, the Israelites are a plague of insects.

He's terrified at the sheer number of them; he doesn't think he can win a war so he's going to try some alternate forms of warfare - divination. So he calls on Balaam. Balaam appears to be a sort of a famous witch doctor with a reputation of being especially skilled at cursing. And so Balak sends for Balaam and says, "I'm going to pay you a kings ransom if you curse these guys." Well YHWH God actually intercepts him and apparently scares him. Through a series of visions, a miraculous confrontation with a talking donkey, Balaam is reminded, "Listen buddy, you'd better only say what I, YHWH God put in your mouth." And so Balaam agrees.

And so three times King Balak takes Balaam to a high place to try to curse the nation of Israel, but every time, instead of cursing them, Balaam blesses them.

And the narrative ends almost humorously, Numbers 24:25, Then Balaam rose and went back to his place. And Balak also went his way. So they kind of just tuck their tails and give up. But before Balaam leaves, he gave the king some advice. I can almost picture the scene. They are shaking hands parting. And I can picture Balaam saying, "Well, I told you up front I wasn't going to be able to curse them. Sorry I couldn't be more help.....I can't curse them, but I can tell you how to destroy them."

And you can picture Balak stopping, raising his eyebrow. Tell me more. And Balaam says, "Bring in the women."

Bring in the women? What's that going to do?

Here's the plan. Bring in the beautiful women. Who can resist a beautiful woman? And you know what that's going to do. It's going to test their allegiance. It's going to lower their resistance. Invite them to a feast to their gods. Nobody can resist a good cooked meal especially when served from a good looking woman. How can they possibly resist? They've been eating manna for a year!

And through this feasting we will get Israel to reject her God. And if there is one thing we know from Israel's history it's this: their God hates spiritual infidelity. If we can get this to happen, we won't have to do a thing. It won't be us who destroys them. Their own God will destroy them. That is GENIUS!

And so Balak develops this sinister plan to attack the soft underbelly and seduce the nation of Israel. We will get our most beautiful women and dress them seductively. We'll just simply invite them to a feast. It's so innocent. What's wrong with a little feast?

Now all this is going on in the background. Israel knows nothing of this. What is Israel doing. Answer: once again. Nothing. They are just sitting their in the field bored out of their mind. Their throwing rocks. Their just sick of the desert. Weeks and weeks go by and they have their routines and it probably seems so purposeless.

They are just waiting, eating manna. Waiting, eating manna. Waiting so sick of the manna.

The wilderness increases appetite doesn't it. I remember when I was in college I went backpacking for a week and I just brought rice as a backup thinking I'd live off the land. Well, turns out the land isn't very cooperative. I remember hitting McCall and going to a restaurant up there called Lardos and I ordered this burger and on the first bite, my eyes just rolled back into my head. My body just went limp; it just paralyzed me. But I know the hamberger wasn't that good. It was the wilderness experience that set me up for that.

Balak is probably laughing to himself. How sick these guys must be of their desert meals. They probably just look at the manna and want to throw up. They are eating locust sandwhiches week after week.

Who could resist? So in comes the carts of food, the smell of the local spices, the hospitality that seems so effortless and the cooked meats and they see the baskets of fruit and they hear the music, who can resist that? And everyone is all smiles. They are laughing and dancing and they seem like they don't have a care in the world. This is the life!

And you can picture an amazing evening. They've just eaten the best meal they've eaten in a year and they roll back in contentment.

And that's when the dagger sinks. They are filled with wine, they are fed and they can't believe how content they feel.

And one of the beautiful women leans over. Now wasn't that fun? Do you want to know where all that fun came from? It came from our God Baal. Now that kind of was unexpected. Baal. Mmmmmm. He's forbidden. But how can that be bad? Wow, that was fun. That's sure a lot better than the lame manna we've been eating. I like this god a lotter better than our god. And the beautiful woman leans over, so tell me about what your God gives you?

And you are tongue tied. Supposedly we are some sort of chosen people but our God is pretty stingy. If all this great food and partying and dancing is available and all we get is manna. Something's not right here. Why is holding out on us? He supposedly created the universe and everything in it. WE are supposedly his chosen people and yet this is what we get? And out comes the charge of unlawful restraint. God you aren't protecting us. You are holding us captive. We are in prison. We are being held against our will. And out comes the wilderness charge: unlawful restraint.

And now that all the walls have fallen. Now that the accusation has been cast, all the cords are cut. The women arouse them to commit sexual immorality against their God.

The plan is working. This is a pretty graphic passage. Baal Peor was a fertility goddess and so part of the worship involved cultic prostitutes. So this is full on spiritual, sexual adultery. This is as bad as it gets.

I'll just summarize the rest of the story. God says, "Destroy them." So Moses orders that the ringleaders get impaled on stakes and that checks the plague but not until 23,000 had died.

So this is wilderness charge #2 - unlawful restraint.

Wilderness experiences often feel like we are being unlawfully restrained. We feel imprisoned in this unnecessary suffering. And we leverage this charge against God, "Why am I the only one who doesn't get to have fun. Everyone else around me is having fun and you are restricting me for no good reason.

Maybe you are single in college and you see your friends free in their sexuality, going to parties, enjoying recreational marijuana, drinking, enjoying popularity and your life just seems so lame.

Everyone else is looking at pornography. I'm so sure. 99 percent of guys out there are doing it. It doesn't seem like there is any real harm. Why am I restricted?

Maybe you don't have money like others around you. Why are we restrained and restricted. Here we are trying to be faithful where God put you and everyone else seems so care-free in their situation.

This is what Israel was doing. Charging God with unlawful restraint. There's a third charge.

Charge of Neglect

Here's the third narrative.

Now he mentions two stories here that we wont go into deeply but both of these stories have to do with running out of food or getting tired of the food that God provides.

3500 years later we can laugh at the tone.

You can just picture them so sick of it. But this was no laughing matter.

Now on the surface, this seems like a pretty severe overreaction. What if the next time your kids complained about the green beans you released vipers.

I'm sure you feel like doing that sometimes but this would be a severe over-reaction. Israel is charging God with neglect. Is this so unreasonable?

Why is Israel's wilderness charge of neglect so serious?

Well, it's the attitude that is laced into this charge that's so serious. Think about a father who sees a bad attitude in his child and decides to discipline him by taking away a privilege. My child is pretty entitled right about now. She has no idea what kind of privilege she has been given. This precious little bundle of joy needs a little wilderness to reset her attitude. And so dad takes away her phone. And you can see the volcano explode. The child becomes enraged and rebels against that discipline and says, "You don't love me."

Whoa that's a serious charge. It's because I love you that I'm doing this. The father would say, I would hope that after all the things I've done for you could not possibly question that, you couldn't possible conclude that my motive was to hurt you. The last thing that's going on here is neglect and lack of love.

Now it's that concept times 10,000. It's not like Israel is without examples here of God's loving care and provision and protection. My goodness.

One time Nate and I read through the all the narrative portions of the OT. It took us a couple days, but we did it. And it was such a fun experience because you see things you don't see any other way. Normally it takes months and years to move through large sections of Scripture. And you certainly never get the from preachers. My goodness, these guys are always moving like molasses through the text. But when you step back and read the OT, one of the things you see super clearly is God's absolute patience and kindness.

Chapter after chapter, page after page, Israel finds herself, cornered, trapped, reaping the fruits of her behavior. They need liberation. They need sustinance. They need to be protected from the enemies all around them. And what does God do? He liberates. He sustains. He feeds. He protects, over and over and over again.

But you know what else you see? Every single time (without exception) they get into situation that’s really bad, what do they say? “See guys, we can’t trust this God. See I told you all along, this guys a flake. He is never around when you want him. He's always letting us down.”

When you read this compressed history, it just jumps out at you. You say “What a bunch of idiots!” It’s so obvious that you almost want to say, “This must have been made up. No group of people could be this brain-checked stupid. Why aren’t they just totally chill?” They should be just walking straight into these situations with head held high, “Okay, no water here. Well, that's no problem for our God. I literally can't wait to see how he's going to provide for us. I mean I used to doubt, but he's yet to disappoint.”

Just look at it. Every single chpter from chapter 1 to 20 is a non-stop string of miracles and provision and deliverance and salvation and relief.

But it's never faith. It's always doubt.

How could you accuse God of abandonment? How could you possibly accuse God of unlawful restraint of neglect. He's anything but that!

The Hook

Oh what fools. I'd never be like that. Don't worry Paul, the last thing I'll ever be is one of those idiot Isralites. Do you know what the Exodus writer is trying to do to you? Do you know what Paul's trying to do. He is drawing you in.

Reading the book of Exodus is a little like walking into a room, and you see a portrait on the wall. You walk over to the portrait, and you say, “That's person in the portrait is hideous!” Then you realize you’re looking at a mirror.

That’s exactly what this is.

Paul is saying, I want you to look at Israel, because in looking at Israel you are looking at yourself. Israel suffered from the same sickness you have, being human.

You are just like Israel. You are Israel. You think you are all strong until you get into the wilderness. The wilderness always tests your allegiance. The wilderness exposes what is really there. Do you think Israel would have complained about food if they had food. Of course not. When's the last time you went without food for 5 days. Just try asking your family to fast for 5 days and I guarantee you will be releasing vipers.

The problem is our attitude in suffering. The problem is what the wilderness reveals about our hearts that was always there. Think carefully about the metaphor of a wilderness situation. What happens in the wilderness? All the normal wells dry up. Those things that used to provide pleasure and happiness no longer do. They are all gone. And that's why God brings wilderness experiences. He gives you all the other wells and he wants you to enjoy them but they can't provide you ultimate fulfillment. You can't build your life on them.

And if you start building your life on them, God will graciously, mercifully dry them up so you are reminded of the foolishness of building your life upon them.

But it's risky business for God to do this because the result is not guaranteed. Some will experience the wilderness and will learn and repent and rejoice as they come back to God and drink deeply. Others will grumble and complain and become idolatrous and accuse God of not loving and not caring.

When you are facing the desert you have a choice.

You can blame. You can grumble. And as the wilderness wears tears you down you can lodge complaints against leadership. You can lodge complaints against God. You can lash out against those you see responsible for your situation. Do you really love us or care for us? We look at God with this crusty attitude. We throw out our wilderness charges. We blame God and we see it as betrayal. And we go running to some other dry cracked well and start lapping up that dirty water.

Or you can get up on a mountaintop and look around and get a birds eye view of Exodus 1-20. Look at all God has done for you. Are you kidding me? He will never leave me. He will never forsake me. Look at all the good I have! It's all from him. My health, my family, my life. We all have personal examples of Exodus 1-20 in our own lives. We all have wonderful experiences of God's reality and presence. And we think, how could I ever need more than you? How could I ever question you?

And yet just like Israel we are prone to forget. We are prone to remember only the bad things. 100 people can compliment you and only one slightly criticize and what do you remember? The criticism. We forget the good. If you've succeeded 1000 times in amazing ways but you fail one time, what do you remember? Your failure. You pray and God answers so faithfully 300 times, but you remember the one prayer he didn't answer the way you wanted.

Our spiritual memories are so poor. He provides, he protects us from foolish mistakes, he is gracious in our failure, he answers our prayers, and then he allows a little wilderness in our life to refine us, we forget it all.

You know what a healthy spiritual memory is called? It's called faith.

In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul says,

That doesn't mean we walk without evidence. Faith is built on past faithfulness. It's built on a history that God has never failed me yet and so I will continue to trust him. Faithlessness is forgetting the faithfulness of God. Here we are freaking out because of a little trial. We do not have the big bird’s-eye perspective. The big theme of our lives is that God always provides, always cares, always loves is continually good.

You have a choice when you face the desert. You can trust God or you can court marshal him. To court marshall God will always end in death. That's the lesson. Don't follow Israel's example. Learn from her mistake. Look at the faithfulness of God and learn the lesson he is trying to teach you in the wilderness.

Soft Close

We are going to close with the song give me Jesus. It's a super simple song but man it's so appropriate for what we've been talking about. When God strips you down, where are you going to turn? When God allows wilderness experiences to really frustrate you, where are you going to turn? Idols? Women? Pornography? Money? Or Jesus.

And we shouldn't rush over this. This morning we are going to have a soft close to our service which means after the closing song, the lights will stay low and the music will continue to play in the background and if you need to leave right away, no problem, but we encourage you to come forward and pray up here with the prayer team.

Maybe you can turn to a neighbor or friend next to you and pray. Maybe you just need some time for personal reflection. No need to rush. Look at your life? What pattern are you following? And what does that say about what you love?

I used to teach Bible to 9th and 11th and 12th graders at a Christian School. And one of the FAQ that seemed to constantly pop was some version of this question, "Is it okay for Christians to listen to secular music?"

Now how do you answer that question? If you have teenagers in the home, this is certainly a discussion you've had.

There is of course a technical answer to that question. The answer is yes, Christians are free to listen to secular music. There are no laws that say you can or cannot listen to one type of music or another. You are not sinning by listening. You are absolutely free.

But here's the question that is far more significant. Why do you want to? What desire do you have that you find being met by secular music? The sin is never in the doing; it's always in the wanting. And music is tricky because of course there is the desire for the music itself, but there are themes, there are lyrics, there are messages that can appeal to the flesh. And so any discussion of music needs to focus on the desires.

This is exactly what Paul is doing in our passage today. If you can back up in your mind to a few weeks ago, the question the Corinthians have been asking is a simple one on the surface. Is it okay to eat meat sacrificed to idols? Same thing. Is it okay to listen to secular music. Same type of question. So a simple question deserves a simple answer, right? Is what I am doing right or is what I am doing wrong? Give me an assessment as to the rightness or wrongness of my DOING. And there is a technical answer: God does not prohibited eating meat sacrificed to idols. Idols can't spiritually poison meat. You are free in Christ.

But there is far more to say than just that. There are a thousand traps along the way. Paul won't answer simply. In fact, his answer to this simple question is 3 chapters long. He's going to ask the Corinthians to go deeper than what they are merely doing. He's going to ask them to start thinking about what they are desiring that then leads to the doing. The question isn't are you doing the right or wrong thing. The question is are you desiring the right or wrong thing.

That question might throw you a bit. Because we rarely think about where our desires come from.

Isn't what I desire just part of who I am?

The question can frustrate. Why do I desire what I desire? I don't know? I just do.

Why do I want one thing and someone else wants something totally different? I don't know? I just do.

If I desire something I shouldn't how can I tell myself to just stop desiring it? I can't control them.

Am I to be held responsible for these seemingly uncontrollable evil desires?

Can we really change what we desire?

Paul is going to probe in these waters and the conclusion is somewhat startling. Not only can we change our desires, but we will be held accountable for the evil desires we don't change.

The Corinthians want to ask a simple question, "Can I eat meat?" We love the simple questions, "Can I listen to secular music." But God traffics in areas much less simple.

Don't get stuck on the external action only. Paul tells them. Beware your own heart. You want to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Fine. But why? Go beyond the surface. Are you so sure that it is strictly social? Don't simplify this. It's complicated. Sure you there is a social reason. And there's a practical hunger reason. Those are the obvious reasons you point to. But don't stop there. Don't ignore the subtle undercurrents. What other reason may exist?

Is your reputation as a strange Christian slightly improved because of this?

Is there a nerve of the flesh that gets scratched? Your innocent participation in meat sacrificed to idols may enflame evil desires.

Paul warns that ultimately God judges our desires, not our actions. Our evil desires will witness against us. And to illustrate this, he's going to turn to the history of Israel.

Paul begins by explaining why he's telling about Israel's history. He's making them aware. He says, I'm fearful you will be unaware, so let me make sure you know something important.

And then he starts to list. And what's the common denominator in this list? This list is trying to make us aware of the spiritually privileged position of Israel.

They were all under the cloud? Meaning what? They saw the glory of God manifest in a physical cloud. They literally saw with their eyes supernatural glory.

They all passed through the sea. Israel witnessed the greatest miracle ever recorded in the Bible. Miracles just don't get grander than that. And all 2 million of them witnessed it.

They all ate the manna and watched water come out of the rock.

Now what's the point of this list. Why is Paul leading with this? Well, he's about to issue a stern warning. When you give a warning to someone who doesn't feel they need it, they instinctively try to find reasons why the warning your giving does not apply to them. You might tell your kids, "Hey, see this guy right here. I knew him in high school and he got involved with drugs and now look at his life. Don't get involved with drugs." And that warning might feel ludicrous. And they say, "Dad, I would never do that. I'm nothing like that guy."

And at that point what does dad do? He points out the similarities. Son, don't be unaware, this guy grew up in a Christian home. He went to church and sat under great teaching his whole life. He went to Christian school. He drank water from the same spiritual drink you do.

This is what Paul is doing here. Corinthians, don't think you are somehow above Israel, that you are immune to the sin of Israel. There are more similarities to Israel than there are differences. They have rich spiritual blessings just like you. You think you are special because you have Christ. So did they. Look at the end of verse 4.

So even with all that spiritual blessing, they were overthrown in the wilderness. They were able to harden themselves against it all and with most of them, God was not pleased.

Now of course this is the overstatement of the century. You have two million men, women and children leave Israel? How many made it into the promise land? Two. Yes, I suppose that is accurate. With most of them God was not pleased.

Now there's a point. There's a reason this story is preserved for us.

Can I eat meat sacrificed to idols? Absolutely. You a free, as long as you don't desire evil like Israel did.

So what evil did they desire? What evil desire did they embrace? What evil desire did they coddle in their heart that ultimately undid them such that they fell in the wilderness, a judged nation?

The Rock as Christ

This text really opened up to me when I started thinking about what Paul means when he identifies the rock they drank from as Christ. This particular reference has always puzzled me. Because when you read it, it is so unexpected and it seems so strange. It's positioned as the capstone of his argument. Israel was so privileged.

they went through the cloud

they went through the sea

they ate manna

AND THEN CAN YOU BELIEVE IT

"They drank from the rock which is Christ."

Why does he throw that in there with hardly an ounce of explanation? How is this the capstone argument? Why is this particular episode chosen as the capstone evidence of the grace and mercy of God?

Well it's actually genius. And to get at that genius we need to turn to that passage. So open to Exodus 17. Now the historical context of chapter 17 is very important.

Israel has just experienced as series of pretty incredible miracles.

Chapters 1-13 is the narrative of the 10 plagues of Egypt

Then they Crossing of the Red Sea

Bitter water made sweet at Marah

They experience the manna from heaven!

And now they are on the move again. It's hard to really get firm time markers here but all these events happened in the order of days and weeks. So Israel is getting regularly accustomed to seeing God provide for them. They have seen dozens of history altering miracles in a very compressed period of time.

And so with that backdrop we look at 17:1

It says here in verse 2 that the Israelites quarreled with Moses. If you watch the story in Exodus, you'll see a progression. They start out murmuring which in Hebrew is an automotopia. Just like in English, when the word itself is pronounced it sounds like murmering. So they start out with a light murmer under their breath. It's a signal that things better start changing. There's discontent in the ranks. But a murmer is self-contained. It's a complaint that you say to yourself and it's just barely vocalized.

Then it progresses from murmuring to grumbing. So now it's not just an undercurrent; people are talking to one another. People are openly complaining one to another and trying to see if they can find agreement. They are grumbling trying to find sympathizers. I'm not the only one who thinks this, right. Miserly loves company. Can you believe this Moses guy? Can you believe he led us out here in the wilderness with no water? What is he even thinking?

The Court Marshall

But now here in chapter 17 it's more. It's a quarrel. They are dug in and ready to fight. But the word means even more than that. The Hebrew word used here has a legal sense. It's the word used for a covenant lawsuit. It's almost better translated sue. It has the idea of lodging a complaint or making a charge with associated evidence.

Do you remember when David cuts of the corner of Saul's robe? He's defending his innocence and he's lodging a complaint against Saul. He says, may God be the judge and plead my cause.

That word plead is the same word quarrel in Exodus 17. Do you see the way the word is being used. It's a legal matter. There's evidence and David wants God to use that evidence and fight on his behalf against Saul. That's the idea.

So when the text says, "

This was a legal charge. This is literally a court marshall.

In fact, The famous Old Testament scholar Gerhard Von Rad whose no lightweight Hebrew scholar observes that the names Massah and Meribah are derivatives of this same Hebrew word for quarreling - this place was named after a court trial that went down. It would be like naming a place RoevWade.

They are pressing charges. They felt they had evidence they were going to leverage against Moses. Moses comes to God and says, “They want to stone me.” In other words, this is a capital offense. They are rushing to a verdict.

They felt that Moses had seriously betrayed them, something akin to treason. Moses took us out here with willful intent to kill us and we have evidence to prove it.

Now this might sound ridiculous to you but it's not as ridiculous as it seems. In a culture that lived in the desert everyone knew the consequences of the desert. You were trained from the time you could walk don't you dare head out into the desert unless you have a plan for water. Here's one of the possible locations of the waters of Marah where Moses turned the water sweet with a branch.

You can tell what kind of dessert we are talking about here. If you leave this area, here's what you are greeted with.

This is a no kidding around desert. You drag two million people out here, you better have a plan. Where's the next water hole? I mean these days, we'd be accused of willful intent to kill our children if we sent them to school without a water bottle. Even an absolute amateur would not lead 2 million people into a dessert location without knowing exactly where the next water source could be found.

This was a reasonable conclusion. This guy is working for Pharaoh. He's trying to kill us under the guise of trying to help us. He's fully conned us. It's either flagrant treason or criminal stupidity but either way this guys bones will be the first to bleach in the sun.

Do you see the legal nature of this. They are lodging an official complaint. They’re suing him and they have evidence.

But Moses knows they’re not really suing him. Moses knows they’re really angry at somebody higher up, and that’s why he says, “Why do you put the Lord to the test?”

Really Moses is not on trial. God's on trial but since they can't yell at God they yell at Moses. This how all humans think. If some situation is difficult, if some person is hurtful, if some trial is thrust upon us we start looking to blame.

We’re just like they are. Things started getting difficult and they complain, “Our exodus is not going right, and we believe we know how it ought to go, and we want to be in charge.” In all reality, that’s treason.

It wasn’t Moses who was treasonous; they were being treasonous. Moses was the last person they should have blamed. How did they get into that absolutely miserable situation? How did they come to find themselves in that water-deprived state? Answer: God took them there. According to verse one they were obeying the command of the Lord.

It actually reminded me of Jesus. Trent preached last week on the temptation of Jesus and that text opens by saying Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.

It is common for God to lead us into situations that feel like the wilderness. We don't like it.We hate wilderness experiences. So we argue, "We don't like the way this whole wilderness wandering it going." We were expecting the promise land a little sooner. We think to ourselves, This is insane. “By now I really would have thought I'd be married, or have a better marriage or made a little more money or advanced a little further in my career. There's an awful lot of subtle suing of God going on?

It’s subtle because most of us intellectually know how silly it is to get into the car of our lives and to kick God out of the driver’s seat saying, “Get out of here! Give me the wheel. You’re making a mess of everything. You’re going to wreck the car. Get in the backseat.”

Wait a minute. This is the Lord of the cosmos who stretches out the earth as a canopy. “To whom will you compare me?” he says.

But we are looking for someone to blame. We are looking for someone to kick out.

Again, what are they doing. They are trying to blame someone. When a tragedy hits, everyone looks for a finger point. I guarantee you if another plane flies into a tower in NY someone will be blamed.

Whose in charge of security around here? Who let the terrorist on the plane? And they track it down and they find an 22 year old girl.

She says, "Don't blame me." Blame the pilot. He told me to.

The pilot says, don't blame me, blame the FAA and the

FAA says, don't blame me, blame the secret service and the

secret service says don't blame me, blames the president.

But eventually people stand back and say, "You know the real problem here is God himself. If God cared, he wouldn't allow this kind of evil and injustice. If God cared, we wouldn't be suffering like this. What a joke."

The upward blaming travels all the way to God himself. We've gotten to the supreme court. We've come to the supreme cause. It's time to court marshall God.

So whose on trial here, really? God is on trial. God we are dragging you into court and we are putting you in the prisoners dock. "We don't trust you any more. Our suffering demands an explanation."

The wilderness was supposed to be a place of testing for the nation of Israel. Ex 15:25 says that he tested them at the waters of Marah. In Exodus 16:4 a chapter later God tested them when he sent manna from heaven seeing if he would follow his instructions.

But Israel is trying to turn the tables. Israel is testing God.

So this is the ultimate setup for a trial. You have the plaintiff - Israel is bringing their complaint. You have the defendant - Moses. Justice is being demanded. Here's where the text goes supernova. So unexpected what happens here.

Now, you know how this text ends, but disabuse yourself of it. Just take the setup we've walked through.

Israel is like a walking sharpie just leaving behind them a non-stop trail of complaint and grumbling. Every where they go, is the stain of complaint.

they complain when Moses tries to free them and Pharaoh gets upset - but then God redeems

they complain when Moses leads them out of Israel and the are trapped next to the Red Sea - but God graciously, miraculously, rescues.

they complain when they are led into the dessert and the waters are bitter - but God rescues and they throw a branch in the water and the water is sweetened.

they complain when they run out of food - but God provides manna.

Israel suffered from spiritual amnesia. They forgot the provision, the protection, and the presence of God. Psalm 95 remembers this:

They have had evidence after evidence after overwhelming evidence that God will care and provide for them. Given their sassy attitude, given their entitlement, given their insolent attitude of thinking they are in the position to judge God, when I hear God say, Okay Moses, bring out the rod and elders, I'm thinking it's time for a smack down. Everyone duck. It's time for judgment. Right?

What does that rod represent? Moses was given the staff at the burning bush which was to be the sign of the presence of God. The rod is the symbol of authority. It's the symbol of judgment. This was the rod that Moses used to strike Egypt in judgment. A king is always pictured with his rod. Somebody is going to get it. It's a symbol of execution.

He takes the elders, and the elders are representative heads for the nation. But they don't just represent, they decide. The elders passed judgment on disputed matters. You only get the elders together when they’re going to make some kind of decision. The elders represent the people.

So it’s very clear that God is saying in response to these very, very, very serious charges, “There’s going to be a trial,” but whose trial is it?

Somebody here surely deserves a trial but who? This will blow your mind.

Whose on trial? Here’s the incredible answer: It's astonishing and so unexpected. Verse 6 says, “I will stand there before you there on the rock at Horeb.”

The rock of Horeb was the place where God had first appeared to Moses in the burning bush and God chose this place to appear to them again. But notice something very carefully here. And the grammatical construction here is crystal. It's not that the nation of Israel is going to stand before God. The construction is that God will stand before them. The hebrew is לִפְנֵי, which is a super common word which literally translates as "before the face." To stand before someone means that you are coming before a superior. One Hebrew scholar I read in studying for this says that the word usually means, almost always means, a servant standing before his master waiting either for a command or a sentence of judgment.

It's a super common word. And it's really helpful that it's common because we have lots and lots of usages to compare against. Here's the kicker. In the hundreds of uses NEVER in the entire Bible, never do we have God standing before men. Always, it's men standing before God. That is always the case EXCEPT here.

This is absolutely astonishing and unprecedented that God would say, “I will go and stand before you.”

In other words, God is on trial. The picture is this. In every courtroom there is a dock where the prisoner or the defendant sits. And the passage is setup such that God is in that place.

God says even though this is the most unjust thing in the world, even though you are the criminal, “I will stand in the dock.” What have I done? I have delivered you. I have spared you. I have given you life. I have ransomed you and protected you. I have fed. I have given you water to drink. When have I failed you? You should be the one in the dock.

It's the most insane thing in the world, but I will stand in the dock. God stands before Moses in the midst of that rock and what does he say to Moses? “Raise the rod and strike the rock,” the rock of God.

Can you imagine the blaspheme of man hitting God? Think of all the presidents we have in Scripture of man interacting with God. Isaiah gets a wiff of God's presence and falls on his face an the angels are screaming out holy, holy, holy.

Nobody could possibly raise a rod against YHWH, the embodiment of glory itself? How are you going to land that blow? Paul hundreds of years laster in 1 Corinthians 10 identifies the rock as Christ being struck by the rod of judgment.

Do you see the powerful imagery here? Can you imagine the amazement of Moses when God says, “Hit the rock?” You’re not supposed to touch something God is on. Do you remember what happened if people or even animals touched Mount Sinai when God was on Mount Sinai? Do you remember what the penalty was? Death. Here is God saying, “I will stand there and I want you to bring down the rod.” So up goes the rod of God, the rod of his judicial wrath, and down it comes onto the rock of God.

What did God do? He provided. He nourished. He cared. He protected. He loved. And you want me to raise my rod and hit him?

What does this all mean? Paul tells us that the “The rock was Christ.”

We should be on trial. Israel should have been put on trial. But in Exodus 17 God put himself on trial instead. Why? In order to teach them the way of salvation, he submitted himself to judgment—not their judgment, but his own! The rod of judgment stricks and out flows water, life. It was through the blow of judgment that life sprang forth.

We should be guilty of cosmic treason, but God stands in the dock. If we are to be spared for putting God in the dock, he has to stand in the dock himself and take the blow we deserved. And he does it.

Alright so now we know what Paul meant when he said the Rock was Christ.

The Evil Desire

Now let's answer the question we started with. We aren't in Exodus 17. We are in 1 Corinthians 10. So Paul is recounting Israel's unbelievable privilege and he culminates this by saying,

Is it okay to eat meat? Paul says, Yes as long as you don't desire evil like Israel. What's the evil?

Let's pull it all together. Look at the spiritually privileged position of Israel. They saw God in the cloud, they were led by God through the water, they drank from the rock. And the climax of the passage is, even when Israel deserved extreme judgment, God spared them by taking that judgment in himself. The Rock was Christ.

And what did Israel do? Next week we will see the continuation. They complained. They continue to put God on trial. They ordered another court marshal against God.

What evil did they desire? In their suffering they desired to put God to the test. Is God who he says he is? Let me stand in that seat of judgment and I will tell you if he is worthy of following or not.

C.S. Lewis wrote and article entitled, God in the Dock

Here's the fundamental evil: we believe we have the right to ask the question. We stay on the bench; God stays in the dock until he justifies himself to us. On the surface, it seems so innocent. What's wrong with a simple question?

But it's evil to the core. Think about what Trent preached last week. Was this not Satan’s EXACT strategy when he tempted Jesus? Exact. He was putting Jesus in the dock. He was trying to get Jesus to prove himself.

He took Jesus out to the wilderness, just like God did with Israel and said, if you are God prove it.

He took him to the highest point of the temple he said, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. If you are God, prove it.

Satan was putting Jesus in the dock. He was trying to get him to prove that he really was the Son of God.

But Jesus refused to submit to Satan's test, not because he couldn’t pass, but because the trial itself was wrong.

So what does Jesus say? “It is also written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’ ” (v. 7; cf. Deut. 6:16).

That's the evil desire. It is not our place to bring God to trial. We can't court marshal God. The real question is not “What do we think about him?” but “What does he think about us?” It is not a matter of us reaching a verdict about him, but of him declaring his verdict on us.

If you want to drink from the Rock of Christ, you have to get the order right. You have to put the right person in the dock. Even the pagans understood.

God is your Judge.

You deserve the blow.

When you finally see that and stop making excuses,

Stop thinking God owes you something because you have to suffer.

Stop making yourself the judge,

Stop putting yourself in the center and inflating your own importance.

And instead stand before Jesus Christ, the judge and say, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to the cross I cling,” you can start to drink. Not before.

We are scared to allow Christ to take the seat because of what we fear. That he will rightfully condemn us. But this is not the character of God. He takes the blow and out comes the water - the life. But you have to drink from that rock. How do you drink from the Rock?

Of course nothing actually happened that day. It was all symbolic. But one day God did take the rod right in the heart. That sword thrust into Jesus' side and out flowed blood and water. Blood symbolizing death, water symbolizing life. Because of that, Jesus Christ says in John 7, “Anyone who comes to me will never thirst again. In fact, out of him will flow streams of water from his insides.”

We never test God. We allow God to test us. Lewis was right. People often claim the right to reach their own verdict about God. They demand some answers before they will even think about becoming Christians. Some of the questions are legitimate, such as “If God is good, then why does he allow evil?” or “If God is love, then why did he come up with such a narrow way of salvation?”

It is not wrong to ask, but our motivation for asking makes all the difference. Are we asking from a genuine desire to know God, or are we raising objections that are really based on a refusal to submit to him because you like calling the shots? God loves to answer the questions of an honest seeker, but for those who expect God to meet their demands, his ways will forever remain a mystery.

Let's be so careful of this attitude in our suffering. Don't belittle their suffering. It's not pretend. It's real and significant. It's crushing. There have been many, many, many times in which we have cried out, like Job in his agony, in which we have accused God of things. We have said, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

But if God is willing to take the blow for us, can you not trust him and see that he loves and cares for you. This is your greatest evidence that he will never leave you or forsake you or allow you to endure anything that you cannot bear. How can you question a God that would do that for you?

Will you not trust him?

Slideshow for this message is available

Good morning church! Today we are taking a break from our series in 1 Corinthians. I am going to be preaching this morning from the Gospel of Matthew, please turn there with me.

While you are turning to the Gospel of Matthew, I wanted to briefly explain my rationale for preaching this text:

There are several reasons for this sermon:

We are coming to a point in 1 Corinthians where Paul begins to warn the Church at Corinth about the temptation to become like the wilderness generation: the generation who died as they were overcome by various kinds of sin and were not allowed to enter the Promised Land (Exodus-Numbers).

“Nevertheless,” Paul says, “with most of them (the Exodus generation) God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did…” (1 Cor. 10:5-6).

Later Paul continues, “Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:12-13).

While Paul warns the Corinthians about this temptation by the example of failed Israel, we wanted to look in depth at temptation as it is successfully dealt with by Jesus Christ, who is not only our example, but also our high priest.

Jesus undergoes temptation for us

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness have within them the seed of every other kind of temptation that exists for humankind. Furthermore, all of these temptations have one common theme woven throughout: they are threats to the fatherhood of God.

Apologetic Sidebar: Someone might immediately object to this text by saying, “Jesus was God. So, he couldn’t possibly have fallen to temptation. He had no possibility of sinning. Therefore, he can’t possibly understand the severity of the temptation that I undergo on a daily basis.”

C.S. Lewis answers this question very well in Mere Christianity (124-125):

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

So, the idea that Jesus wasn’t really tempted because he is God is false. It fails to understand the reality of Jesus as the God-man. It fails to understand that Jesus, as God the Son, was incarnated in flesh and he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. If he gave in, we would still be in our sins, with no forgiveness available to us. Jesus’ temptations far exceeded the strength of our own, and for this reason, he understands ours as well.

Main Question/Tension:

The question and tension that is raised by this passage is, what is the purpose of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness? By implication, what is the purpose of the temptation that we also experience? How can we summarize what we are being pulled into? What is attempting to overtake us? What is it that is feeling the weight or pressure of this testing?

To answer this question, we need to look at two contextual clues:

The Purpose of Israel’s Temptation:

“2 And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. 3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Exodus 8:2-3).

The wilderness is for:

Learning humility before God (v. 2)

Revelation of the heart’s contents (v. 2)

Demonstration of fidelity to God’s commands (v. 2)

God shows us in the wilderness that:

Human beings live by faith, not only by bread (v. 3)

God always keeps his word, what comes out of God’s mouth produces life (v. 3)

The Context of Jesus’ Temptation:

“And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, [and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17).

This is the claim that is primarily tested by Satan in the wilderness: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

This is also the claim that is primarily tested in all of our lives when we undergo temptation toward sin.

Therefore, the target of all temptation in our lives is this: Do we trust that God is our Father and that he is well pleased with us? The target is the strength of that relationship. Do we trust that “We are all as fully loved as Jesus is loved?” (Packer, Knowing God, 196).

Why? Why would Satan target this? Why does he care so much about this claim?

I. Packer, in his book, Knowing God argues that being adopted into God’s family, being God’s son or daughter, is a greater privilege even that having your sins forgiven.

He says, “To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is [even] greater” (188)

In fact, he says, “Father is the Christian name for God” (182).

Satan attacks this claim, that God is our Father because connected to this claim is our very life. God the Father, as a good father, provides our daily bread, protects us from true danger, and guarantees an inheritance in his kingdom for us. So, if Satan can attack that primary claim, that God is our Father, he can destroy your security in the family of God.

If you are a Christian, you know that this claim is always under pressure. If you are not a Christian, this is the one privilege that Satan will attempt to keep you from. He will do everything in his power to make you believe that God the Father cannot be trusted. Jesus shows us that he can be.

Apologetic Sidebar: We need to say at the outset as well that our fathers, whether good or bad to us, are barriers to our understanding of God as Father. If you have been wounded by your earthly father, we need to learn who God is by contrast of character. If we have been blessed, loved, and upheld by our fathers, we must allow them to point us beyond themselves to our true Father.

Exegetical Introduction

Historical Context: In the Old Testament world, Fatherhood meant three things for a son:

Provision: getting his physical, material needs met.

Protection: meeting his need for safety and security.

Inheritance: the promise of an enduring future, lineage.

Every good father seeks to meet these three needs for his son or daughter. And Satan subtly tailors each of his temptations to address each level. At each level, Jesus faithfully resists, showing that God can be trusted as Father.

Outline:

So, how does Jesus do this? I am going to argue the following in this sermon:

Jesus triumphs over temptation for us by feasting on God’s provision, focusing on God’s protection, and glorifying God alone (FFG).

 

Main Point:

Jesus triumphs over temptation for us by feasting on God’s provision, focusing on God’s protection, and glorifying God alone (FFG).

Prayer:

Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning feeling the pressure and weight of our sin. We feel the pressure of our circumstances, the weight of our burdens, the fatigue of our responsibilities. Every day we are pulled down by the evil in the world, and the evil in ourselves. So, we pray that you would empower us to be led by the Spirit in the same way that Jesus was. We pray that as we are pulled down by the world, the flesh, and the devil, Holy Spirit would you pull us up to recognize all the benefits that we have in Christ! Show us today our union with Christ. Show us how Jesus has overcome our enemy, the flesh, and the world through his finished work. Show us again how you see us, as sons and daughters dearly loved by an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect Father. We long for you Lord! In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.

Scripture Reading

Let’s watch Jesus resist temptation by reading Matthew 4:1-11

Jesus Triumphs over temptation to eat by Feasting on God’s Provision

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry”(Matthew 4:1-2).

Now, don’t mistake what Jesus is doing here by putting ourselves in Jesus’ shoes. Jesus is not dragging his feet behind the leadership of the Holy Spirit into the wilderness. Jesus is not wandering around after making a few wrong turns, lost in the wilderness.

This word “led” in this context describes the entrance into the command of the military leadership of the Holy Spirit. Remember, Jesus is both the better Moses in this scenario, and he will show himself to be the better Joshua, his namesake. Jesus is preparing for victory over the enemies of mankind and he starts by going to the heart of enemy territory, the wilderness: Satan’s homecourt.

Notice as well the purpose statement: “to be tempted by the devil.” Jesus is led by the Spirit for the purpose being tested by the devil. Why? Well, because in overcoming the temptations, Jesus will also overcome the Tempter himself. From the Father’s perspective, the claim “this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” is being inoculated to all potential viruses so that even Jesus’ death on the cross will not be pursued for any other reason but the “joy set before him” (Heb. 12:2). Jesus is overturning the kingdom of this world by overthrowing the “god” of this world on his home turf.

Notice the purposeful diminishment of Jesus’ personal strength: “And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry” (Matt. 4:2). Again, this is not accidental! Jesus is undergoing rigorous spiritual preparation for the purpose of overcoming temptation. After 40 days and 40 nights, Satan finally comes out to play.

“And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 4:3).

Notice that Satan immediately begins to test the claim that the Father established in the previous chapter, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Satan says, “If it is true that God loves you, and if it is true that he is pleased with you, demand the rights of your sonship and do a miracle!”

Watch the subtle craftiness of Satan here: the action that he is telling Jesus to do is not a sin. But, Satan is not merely asking Jesus to do something, he is commanding him to command the stones to turn to bread. He’s doing what only a Father should do: demanding allegiance to his word. Do you see how subtle this is! There is nothing inherently wrong with eating. There is nothing inherently wrong with performing a miracle. But, there is something inherently wrong with obeying Satan’s word. (Remember Genesis 3: nothing wrong with eating, just eating that food that God said not to!)

Do notice how Jesus enters the same kind of temptation that we experience? “If God is really your Father, if he is really pleased with you, get what you want! If God were really your Father, you’d have that career that you’ve always wanted. If you’ve really been adopted, you wouldn’t feel so terrible about yourself all the time. If God were really pleased with you, you’d be able to do more miracles, love your family more, etc.”

Satan is always testing this claim in our lives, and he is simultaneously commanding us to take him on as father rather than God. He wants our allegiance, and he is willing to give us what we want to get that allegiance! So, we must watch carefully how Jesus responds here. The hook is hidden within the bait of Satan’s command, and Jesus exposes the hook:

 But he[Jesus] answered, “It is written,

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,

but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Jesus unveils the hook in the following three ways:

“It is written,” the claim “This is my beloved Son,” is defensible by the revealed word of God in the Old Testament. “The Scriptures have authority to command my allegiance, not you Satan.”

“Man shall not live by bread alone…” Notice the nuance here! Jesus is not saying, “Man shall not live by bread at all” or “ever,” but “by bread ”

Life and death, sonship or abandonment does not ultimately come down to the question of bread, but another kind of provision.

“But by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Michael Ward, in his book, Word of Life argues that “To say of God that he spoke, and to say of God that he did something, is often one and the same thing.”

The Father accomplishes his will by speaking. He commands reality itself.

Jesus is saying here that God has arranged the world so that a person does not live or go on living by consuming food alone, but by eating, consuming, breathing in what comes out of God’s mouth.”

 

Apologetic Sidebar: Christianity is the only religion that is utterly balanced when it comes to the body and the soul. For example, look at Elijah. After God provides him with food for his journey it says “…he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:8). The Bible is not against food, but against relying on food alone.

 

Let’s look briefly at a few applications of Jesus’ response to Satan.

Application: Notice the immense intimacy in this Father-Son relationship! I don’t let anyone breathe my breath, but someone who often breathes it is my son, whom I love, with whom I am well pleased! Why? Because I bring him near to me. I hold him. I am affectionate toward him.

Be familiar with what comes out of God’s mouth so that you can discern when another voice is speaking. Jesus can smell bad breath.

Rely on it for life. You are not too busy to read God’s word, but it may be that your mouth is full with other food. God will wait for you to empty your mouth so that he can fill it with the right things. What are those things that crowd your life? What would happen if they weren’t there?

Recognize God’s love for you: He wants to breathe life into you by his word.

Live by Words, not images: Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he traces the transition in our culture from being word-centered, to image-centered. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are all evidence of an image-centered culture. As a church, we must be the last place where words are valued as how God, who is Spirit has communicated himself. Even as we engage our culture, we must not lose our love for words. God has seen it fit to communicate what is most real about the world we live in and about himself through words, not images.

Eating at Satan’s table: consider the ways that you might be eating at Satan’s table, consuming the content driven by the hungers that he is commanding you to satisfy.

Reconsider the seriousness of the pre-meal prayer: Eating shapes our loving, and we will love whatever satisfies our desires. Direct yourself to God so that your highest satisfaction doesn’t become the gift of food itself.

 

Jesus confronts our modern assumption and Satan’s temptation: that a person can be reduced simply to material and is, therefore, made up solely of material and is, therefore, sustained by the consumption of material, in this case food. We do not obey our hungers. We obey God.

This leads us to our second point: If God is totally confident and satisfied in God’s provision, even without bread, will Jesus be satisfied with God’s protection without a demonstration of it. (Notice how Jesus is living by faith here!)

Jesus Triumphs over temptation to test God by Focusing on God’s Protection

Let’s read again Matthew 4:5-6,

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,

lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

In the previous section, Satan puts out bait but he hides the hook, which is a cunning trickery. In this section, he does what Thomas Brooks, a 17th century Puritan Pastor calls, “painting sin with virtues colors” (Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, 4). Satan takes God’s word and twists it in order to make sin look like virtue, something with which God will be pleased. Let’s look at this temptation closely:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him…(v. 5)

If Jesus will not obey Satan by satisfying his human desire for bread, maybe Jesus will obey Satan by satisfying his human desire for praise. The miracle of turning the stones to bread would have been private. This miracle of protection would have been public, hundreds of feet above the valley below, the pinnacle of the temple would have attracted the attention of Israel’s populated, holy city.

Notice again, Satan’s subtly! He knows the power of a change in scenery. He knows what the temple represents. Satan’s home court is the wilderness, the secret, isolated lands of self-gratification, but his home away from home is wherever false religion flourishes. Satan has no problem going right to the top of the temple: God’s dwelling place with man.

“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,

lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

“Okay,” Satan says, “We’ll play your game. We’ll go to the Scriptures. If you are going to reenact the Scriptures, fine. Show me how safe Israel really is from death. If you live by his word, put yourself in a position of danger so that we can know for sure that this is true.”

Jesus, again, shows that Satan is commanding him to do something contrary to Scripture, even though Satan appears to be commanding on the authority of the Scriptures. Notice how he quotes from Psalm 91, but he leaves out some very important words!

Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place—

the Most High, who is my refuge—

10 no evil shall be allowed to befall you,

no plague come near your tent.

11 For he will command his angels concerning you

    to guard you in all your ways.

12 On their hands they will bear you up,

lest you strike your foot against a stone.

13 You will tread on the lion and the adder;

the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.

Notice the importance of the prior verses! “Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place…” (v. 9), and the verse right in the middle of the verses that Satan quotes “…to guard you in all your ways.” The logic here is that “in all of your ways, you have made the Lord your dwelling place.” If we do this, we can expect that the Lord will guard us. If “in all our ways we acknowledge him, he will make our paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6). But, we should not expect that God will guard us in any and all situations, especially if they are situations in which we are explicitly going outside of God’s commands (i.e. obeying another master).

Jesus sees what Satan is misquoting, and he responds with,

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matt. 4:7)

Again, Jesus remembers the history of his people. While in the wilderness, the people quarreled with Moses because they ran out of water. The people quarrel with Moses and test the Lord in this particular way: “They tested the Lord by saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’”

“Show us, Moses, that God will provide for us. We know he just brought us out from the most powerful nation in the world by ten plagues, through the Red Sea by miraculously dividing it, and provided manna for us to eat. But we’re thirsty now Moses, Is the Lord among us or not?”

This seems like an honest question, “Is the Lord among us or not?” But when you put the question in the context of the story, it’s obvious that the Lord was among them! They simply failed to believe he was among them. In other words, they wanted water, not God. God has made a mistake for letting them go without water, and he must prove that he is among them now. He must prove that he is for them, with them, to guard them in all their ways.

Satan says, “Show the world that God is for you! Jump!” But, Jesus’ trust in God’s protection and remains unwavering, though it went untested, undemonstrated, seemingly unverified. Jesus trusted God’s revealed word, and he would not stand above God by forcing his hand.

Application:

Forcing God’s Hand: We often use our holiness as an apologetic for our voice with God. Since I am doing these righteous acts, shouldn’t God demonstrate his love for me by giving me what I want in return! Doesn’t Scripture say, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). We take that to mean, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will be obligated to give you the desires of your heart before you began delighting in him.”

This text confronts testing God by forcing his hand of protection.

We remember the great statement of Mufasa: “Being brave doesn’t mean we go looking for trouble.”

I can think of no greater application than trying to find God’s “will for your life.”

Many of us are left in a perilous spiritual quandary when we think that God is not being clear in directing our paths regarding, career, family, or future.

So, we can look for signs of God’s presence in other ways than his revealed word: peace, weather, audible voices.

I’m not saying that God won’t use weather to direct your path (i.e. He shipwrecked Paul on the way to Rome), but he won’t use weather to demonstrate, verify or guarantee his direction for you.

We should not expect God to protect us from things that he has not promised to protect us from.

Again, Jesus extinguishes the flaming darts of Satan’s temptation with the revealed word of God in the Old Testament. The claim “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” has already been publicly verified by his baptism and the descending of the Holy Spirit like a dove. Jesus would not test God by asking for an additional, public, self-glorifying miracle by which that claim could be verified. Jesus trusted his Father’s protection and resisted.

If Jesus had the spiritual strength to resist the temptation for bread, and he had the fortitude to not make a show of God’s protection, surely he would not deny himself the pleasure of a kingdom.

Jesus Triumphs over temptation to worship other god by Glorifying God alone

Let’s look together at the third temptation of Jesus:  

 

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’[a]”

11 Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

Again, we must remember that Jesus is being “..led by the Spirit to be tempted by the Devil.” Notice how while Jesus is being tempted, Satan is revealing himself to his enemy. By becoming weak and hungry, Jesus exposes one of Satan’s greatest weapons against humanity: food. Satan takes Jesus to the temple, in this he exposes another great weapon in his arsenal: safety and public praise. Finally, Satan takes Jesus to one of his(Satan’s) most beloved places: the high mountain where all of the kingdoms are laid before him. Here, he exposes his last and greatest weapon: power and glory.

Jesus is, as he commands us to be, “…shrewd as a serpent,” though he is not a serpent himself. Jesus is showing himself to be the conquering King, one stage at a time.

Notice in this temptation the Devil does not start where he normally starts, “If you are the Son of God…” Rather, he assumes that he is, and he begins to treat Jesus as the King. He raises him up on the mountain so that he can survey the grandeur, the glory of all the worlds kingdoms in a moment and he says, “All this I will give you…” What is the price for all these kingdoms? Worship. This is what the Devil longs for. At the heart of his desire is worship. Do you see this? Satan is exposing himself. He’s exposing what he wants. Jesus is crushing the Serpent under his feet. He is being de-fanged. What does the Devil want more than anything? Sons who will worship him for his stolen power, stolen glory, and stolen his kingdoms. Ultimately, in the Devil’s economy, breaking the first commandment is the way to glory, power, and kingdoms.

While the Devil changes his tactics, exposing himself, Jesus finishes him off by sticking to his.

10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’[a]”

For the first time in this text, Jesus addresses his enemy by his proper name: Satan, the accuser. Prior to this he is the “Devil,” or the “Tempter,” Jesus now shows that he is Satan. He has been utterly exposed. In the Ancient Jewish world, to know the name of a demon was to have power over it. Jesus now commands that power.  Rather than accepting Satan’s offer of all the world’s kingdoms of the world for the token of worship, Jesus for the first time, commands Satan. Notice that this is a military victory. Jesus wins.

Jesus will not command by stolen power. He will not offer stolen praise. He will not govern a stolen Kingdom. Jesus will not worship or serve a person who is unworthy of his worship or unworthy of his praise and in doing this, Jesus shows himself to be worthy of our worship and worthy of our praise.

Conclusion

I want to close by reminding us that Jesus does all this for us. The enemy will come to us with the same kinds of temptation: to be defined by our appetites for bodily satisfaction, to distrust our assurance and safety as children of God, and to worship the Devil by governing stolen kingdoms.

Jesus’ military victories, won by the power of the Spirit, are all done in weakness and dependence and faith. In the temptation for bread, He trusts that God will provide. In the temptation at the temple, He trusts in God’s ultimate protection. In the temptation before all the kingdoms, he trusts that he will have his true Father’s inheritance.

Let us enter into that same relationship that Jesus had with his Father. Let us trust in our situations that God will provide what we need, he will protect us as we abide in him, and he will give us the keys to his kingdom as co-heirs with Christ. We know all this because God has done this for us in Christ.

 

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, we stand in awe of what you have done for us in Christ. I pray that as we go about our weeks, and we are pulled by our sin, the world, and the devil away from you that you would help us to cling to your word. Help us oh Lord to see that our need for you is greater than food. Help us to see that you are a refuge and comfort that goes beyond demonstrated protection. Help us to pursue your kingdom and not our own. Help us to be led by the power of the Spirit to overcome as we humbly submit our difficulties to you. In Jesus Christ’s name we pray, amen.

 

References/Works Cited

In this sermon, I borrow ideas extensively from Russell Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and Triumph of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011).

Well last week we talked about removing obstacles to the gospel. We talked about the fact that the gospel is good news but not everyone knows that it is good news. And there are obstacles to people even discovering that it's good news. There are many who have Bibles on their shelves and don't even realize that the answer to their deepest problems in life is written down in a book that they've owned for decades and never read.

And even though the answer is so close, there are some pretty significant obstacles to them ever reading it and taking it seriously. It takes a lot of WORK to remove those obstacles. To remove obstacles takes WORK.

And Paul wasn't afraid of work. Paul was in the business of removing gospel obstacles, no matter how hard, no matter how much sacrifice was needed. He wanted to remove any unnecessary, alienating influences that would make the gospel inaccessible. Let's remove cultural barriers, linguistic barriers, geographic barriers.

Paul's reasoning was this. Listen, the gospel is hard enough. There's no way we can smooth away the resistance so people can have a one-click amazon shopping experience?

The gospel has sharp edges that cannot be removed. It's power is in its sharpness.

It tells us that we are sinners deserving of the wrath of God. That doesn't sit well with pretty much anyone and you can't remove that.

The gospel tells us that our loves are disordered, corrupted and misplaced.

The gospel tells us we are proud and self-absorbed. You don't see that on amazon's homepage.

We can't remove the obstacle of the gospel itself, we can't remove the gospel's offense. Jesus himself says that the gospel will be a stumbling block.

But we can remove any obstacle that prevents people from understanding what the gospel even is, what Jesus is even offering, why it's even called good news in the first place. We can remove the obstacle to the obstacle.

The problem is, to do that, is really hard work. It's not easy. It's not a minor thing to remove these obstacles. The obstacles are there for very good reasons.

That being fully acknowledged: difficult and impossible are very different things. Impossible things aren't worth attempting. Difficult things may be.

There are a few things, that require major effort but are still worth doing. The effort is in proportion to how worthy the object. Paul says, removing gospel obstacles is one of those worthy, hard things.

Remember from last week, Paul says my object is to win people for Christ. I'll go to great lengths to remove gospel obstacles. To the Jew I become as a Jew to what? To win the Jews! To the weak, I become as the weak. Why? To win the weak. I have become all things to all men that by all means I might win some. This takes purpose. This takes strategy. This takes work. It takes effort.

Now he gives us a metaphor that describes the kind of effort he's willing to invest to WIN people for Jesus Christ.

What's the point of this sports metaphor? To illustrate the kind of effort he's willing to exert to win people for Christ. As an aside, I think from a teaching standpoint this is masterful. He is writing to the Corinthians and even in using this imagery he's literally modeling for them. To the Corinthian he is becoming like a Corinthian to win Corinthians. He's starting with where they are at. The Corinthians loved sports so he uses this sports imagery to make his point.

There are some biblical pictures that are lost in the cultural translation but not this one! Americans and Corinthians love their sports. Corinth was a hub for sports. Athletes throughout Greece would converge on the Isthmian Games every two years during the spring. These games were in honor of the Greek god Poseidon, the “earthshaking god of the sea”. The most prominent building at Isthmia was a temple dedicated to Poseidon. There was also a stadium, theater and hippodrome used for the athletic competitions.

A small structure called the Palaimon was situated near the Poseidon temple. Within this structure, the athlete took an oath to abide by the rules of the Games. If they broke the oath, they were disqualified from the Games.

The athletes would compete in footraces, wrestling, boxing, throwing the discus and javelin, the long jump, chariot racing. They even had poetry reading and singing. You did not know singing was considered an athletic event, did you?. According to several inscriptions that are contemporary to Paul, women competed in these games as well. The inscriptions mention women winning the 200-meter dash as well as the war-chariot races.

And to be clear, only one person won the prize. Unlike the modern Olympic Games where gold, silver and bronze medals are awarded to the first three places respectively, in the ancient games, only the winner received the crown. There was no second place award – winning was everything!

So this was a language the Corinthians understood and loved. So Paul leverages it. Paul says, in the same way that an athlete wakes up early, eats a strict diet, exercises extreme discipline and 100 percent all-out effort to obtain a prize, I want to do the same thing as it relates to the gospel.

Paul says, think about how much effort we are willing to expend to obtain a "perishable wreath."

The epitaph of a boxer named Agathos Daimon (that name means good demon), from Alexandria (Gerand-Jean 1964: 185-187) found on a funerary monument at Olympia in Greece said:

What is Paul saying? He is saying, look at these guys. They are willing to give it all. They are willing to put it all on the line. This guy right here clear up to death for what? For a crown made of pine needles and celery. He's willing to punish and crush his body and suppress his physical appetites and exercise extreme self-discipline and undergo excruciating physical pain for what? For a crown of leaves.

"I want to win people for Jesus Christ." Can't we amp up the exercise just a bit? Can we give a little more sacrificially? Live a little more radically?

What is the Place of Effort?

Now I want to address a question here that I think will be very clarifying, at least it was for me. There are some here who may bristle a bit when we talk about expending effort for the sake of the gospel.

I like the sovereignty of God. Isn't God ultimately in charge of salvation? No matter how much effort we expend, God is still going to be the one that ultimately does his work of regeneration in that person's soul.

Are we somehow able to drum up results by increasing our effort?

Isn't our effort supposed to motivated by the Spirit?

What are we trying to do, manufacture gospel results by trying harder?

We know there is an error somewhere over there.

And yet of course Paul is pro-effort. Paul is pro-discipline. We have the ditch of legalism and self-effort and pharisaical religion over here and we have the ditch of sloppy lazy, apathy over here. So what does gospel-effort look like?

Advice vs News

Let's figure this out. It's important. Now my goal, which may be a little ambitious, is to put that question to bed once and for all.What's the difference between fleshly effort and gospel effort. You can't distinguish it from the surface because it looks identical. You have to dive underneath.

Now here's the best example I know of how to illustrate this distinction. And it's not my illustration. I think Martin Loyd Jones came up with this.

The difference between fleshly effort and gospel effort is the same difference between advice and news? Let's break that down.

What is advice.

Advice is counsel about decisions that are yet future. Advice intends to direct that future decision making power you possess. So for example,

You should go to school and get a degree.

You should clean your house more frequently.

You should go out to eat less often.

You should apologize.

Those are all pieces of advice. These are all suggestions to your will, a proposition about the way your future ought to look. It hasn't happened yet and you hold in your hands, decision making power that will alter your destiny depending on how you apply that advice.

Now compare that to news.

News is a declaration about something that has already happened outside of you, very much apart from your will. You can't do anything about it. It's already happened and all that's left to do is respond to it.

Here's an example of news:

Your son just fell of his bike.

Your granddaughter just had her first baby.

You won a million dollars.

Your lawn has grown four inches.

This is news.

These are declarative statements of fact about something that happened. It doesn't matter what you think or wish. It has already happened. This is news. The only thing you can do with news is respond to it. It's past tense. Events have transpired totally apart from your will.

So let's put advice and news together in a single analogy. Imagine a general and he goes into a battle against an invading army. If the general defeats the invading army, he sends back to the capitol city messengers. Messengers are news bearers. It's fun to be this guy. You aren't telling the inhabitants of the city to do anything. You are telling them something that has happened. And of course they respond. They put together a celebration, they dance and sing, and generally conduct their life in the reality of the freedom that has been won for them.

But if the general doesn't win? What does he do? The king sends back military advisors. Archers here, we are going to battering rams here, we need to divert their water source. And the advice if heeded will determine the future standing of the city. The general says, here's our best strategy but you are going to have to fight for your life. Your future is dependent on your effort.

News tells you what has been accomplished.

Advice tells you how to accomplish.

Every other religion counsels you on how you are to please God. Every other religion sends military advisors. Every other religion says you are going to have to fight for you life. Every other religion says, "If you have any hope of entering into heaven you are going to have to WORK your tail off."

Here are the rites of passages,

here are the liturgies,

here is what has not happened, but needs to happen, if you have any hope of entering heaven this is what you have to do.

Fight for your life.

Work for your life.

Christianity is the opposite. Christianity says, here is what has been done for you and there is nothing you can do about it. Here is what has happened in history totally apart from your will. We send messengers, not military advisors. We declare what has been accomplished. We declare that the enemy has been defeated. By the way, you know that the Greek word for messenger and the Greek word for angels is exactly the same? Why? Because this is what angels do. Angels were created to send messages about what has already been done. Angels aren't advisors. They just speak true things about what God has accomplished that have dramatic impact on our lives.

Our job is to respond to the message. This is so incredibly important to understand. This is by the way, why Christianity has always centered around preaching. Preaching is not some smart guy giving you advice. Christianity doesn't have gurus. Nor is preaching tell you what you need to do. Preaching is primarily declaring what has been done. We are telling about a historical reality that was accomplished in history.

Just because it's completed doesn't mean there's nothing to do about. Both get an enormous response. In either case there are all kinds of things to do, but it's motivated from totally different wells. One is motivated from fear and the other from joy.

When you hear the gospel good news bearer and he tells you the news that your salvation has been accomplished for you, what do you want to do? You want to go to church and sing songs to God, to read your Bible and you want pray and you want to obey everything Jesus told you!

If on the other hand you listen to the military advisors and they say, you are going to have to live a really really good life if you want to get to heaven, what are you going to want to do? You are going to make sure you don't miss a Sunday and sing all the songs they tell you to sing, you're going to pray, read your Bible, obey the ten commandments.

Looks the same for two radically different reasons.

Effort

Now, let's get back to where we started and tie it all together. Paul has said, "I exert incredible effort in trying to win people for Jesus Christ." To the Jew I became like a Jew. To the weak, I became weak. I have become all things to all men that by all means I might save some. I'm willing to struggle, strain, exercise incredible self-discipline, employ all my will-power, forgo comfort, I'll do whatever is necessary to win some. And we can hear the objection? Paul, are we trying to manufacture gospel results by trying harder? Is this just another one of the deadly, lifeless forms of fleshly, self-effort?

Paul says, no, no, no. Gospel effort is the effort of telling people that the struggle is over. Gospel effort is the effort of working to tell people they no longer have to work. It's the same effort that a news reporter exerts. A news reporter, if he does his job well, does nothing but just proclaim and tell you as accurately as possible a piece of news that actually happened and has tremendous import into your life. That's it. The war is over. That will change your week. He does nothing more than that. His job is to be transparent so people totally miss him and see nothing but the story itself and revel in the implications of that story.

We can overthink what we are trying to do in evangelism. Evangelism is no more complex than this: we are messengers (literally angels) who simply declare about a historical event that objectively changed the world.

But they got to hear it!

Paul says in Romans 10

People cannot be effected by historical events until they know they have happened. We've all heard stories of battles that continue raging after peace treaties have been signed because the soldiers never heard the news.

We talk about the phrase ignorance is bliss which means the greatest tragedy in the world might have happened. You might have just lost all your money in a stock market crash. But you are totally happy until that piece of news reaches your ears. And the second that news hits your ears it destroys you.

News has to be heard in order to transform. The power is in the news not the person delivering the news, but the guy who delivered the news still may have to exert tons of effort to tell you that powerful, life-giving news.

Consider the well-known account of Philippides running 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver the news that the Persians had been defeated. This is the most ancient account of that.

That's a good picture of the kind of ultimate effort that a newbearer might exert. He gave it all to deliver the news, but still his effort was nothing. The power was not in the messenger. The power was in the message - the news.

So gospel effort saves nobody. But it is also true that without gospel effort nobody gets saved. Because gospel effort carries the news which is the power of salvation unto all who believe that news.

All our effort is effort to declare life-transforming news. That's it. We aren't fighting for our life. We don't work to liberate ourselves or others. We work to proclaim an event that has already liberated us. We work to declare. That is gospel effort at the highest level.

So what characterizes gospel effort. Three ideas from the text.

Paul says if you want to be a good herald you have to be self-controlled. Because declaring is not easy. Being a good herald takes work. Paul says anything hard requires self-control and this is not exception.

Athletes competing for a crown have to do this. Why? Because they want the crown!

They might want to eat, but they want the crown more so they choose to only eat certain things.

They might want to sleep but they want the crown more so they have to get up to exercise.

They might want to stay out late but they want the crown more, so they choose instead to get to bed early.

Every single thing in their life is under control so they get the prize. For the athlete, he's fighting for his life. If he doesn't win, he's nobody. He's like the boxer, either I die or I get the crown.

For the messenger, he's under control as well but for an entirely different reason. What's he doing? He's fighting so you can hear the news. He's running, runnning, running waking up early, skipping lunch, being very disciplined so you can hear news that frees you from the need to fight for your life.

What you need to see fundamentally is that discipline is derived from love. In the athletes case, it's the desire for athletic glory and excellence. That's the love.

And it's fundamental. It’s not the conclusion of some strain of logic. He loves glory and being controlled by that love, he is then self-disciplined.

It becomes for the athlete a passion of the heart. All these other passions are under control because there is one passion that controls. It's like one ring that rules them all. One love that masters and orders all the rest. Because you want the prize, all the other things are under control.

Saint Augustine, said sin is nothing more than disordered love. Sin is getting the order of your loves mixed up. It's appropriate to love your work. But if you love your work first and then your relationships second then you are bound to feel the consequences of that. It's right to love ice cream. But if you love ice cream more than health then your going to pay the consequences. You’re going against the fabric of the cosmos.

So what is the one love? The Ismithian games athlete was fighting for a crown. That was his one love.

Paul was fighting for a crown too. He was fighting for an "imperishible crown."

Clearly this motivated Paul. Paul wasn't a boxer but he was a prize fighter. He was after something. But he wasn't after it the same way that a prize fighter goes after his prize. Here's what I mean. 2 Timothy was one of the last books Paul wrote. When he wrote this book, he was in the fourth quarter. He was on the back stretch. He was looking forward. And you can see his neck veins bulging as he strains toward the finish line.

So what is the crown? What is this thing that Paul loved so much, this thing that ordered his other loves such that he could discipline himself?

It's important to understand this. The crown represents something. If you were to ask the athlete, why are you so intent on winning a crown of celery leaves. That's stupid. He'll say, "You idioit, it's not about the celery leaves. It's about the glory, the fame, the renown. That's what I'm after.

And similar to Paul. He's not after gold or jewels in a crown. What does the crown of righteousness represent? I think the key to understanding what this crown is is to concentrate on that last part of the phrase, "but also to all who have loved his appearing..."

At first glimpse, it appears that Paul's performance earns him the crown. You could almost read it this way:

Because I have fought the good fight,

Because I have finished the race,

Because I have kept the faith

Therefore, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness. And that is the very natural way we read this text. That's how a prize fighter thinks. I work, I earn. But that is not what the text actually says. It fact, it very explicitly doesn't say that. There is a very strong word Paul could have used if he wanted to say THEREFORE. In fact, there are a couple of options. But he didn't choose any of those words. It's very carefully worded.

Look at verse 8. It's not "because I fought", therefore "I receive." Paul makes a statement. "I have fought", henceforth. That word in the Greek is an interesting word.

It means from now going forward. It's not disconnected from the previous events but it's not trying to explain cause either. Those things were necessary prerequisites but they were not causes. "I have fought the good fight and now going forward there is a crown of righteousness awarded to me."

Here's another example. You might say, "I have grown to be 35. Henceforth, I am now president." Being 35 was not the cause of you being president, but you had to age a certain amount in order for you to become president.

Or maybe better, "A climbed the podium. Henceforth, I received my metal." It wasn't the climbing of the podium that earned you the medal, but in order for the medal to be awarded, you have to climb the podium.

Paul was not running in order to EARN a crown. He was running because a crown had already been EARNED for him and he was so excited to receive that crown. And it was the running that was necessary to get the crown that already been earned.

And the culmination of all that, the last thing that has to take place is for Christ to actually return. So of course, he loved the idea of Christ coming.

Listen, obviously this is not works righteousness. If you have to earn a crown, who is going to love the righteous judges appearing? There is only one person who will love this. It's the guy who knows he has earned first place. It's the guy who is perfect and knows the crown is due him. Nobody else will love the coming of the righteous judge. Not even Paul. We know that from a 100 things he says. You'll be terrified of the judge coming.

No, Paul's ultimate love was Jesus Christ himself. He couldn't wait to see Jesus. And all of Paul's running and striving was to help others see him! To be a messenger of the news that the crown of righteousness had been earned. The crown for Paul was Jesus.

Whenever you see something of incredible beauty, you want other people to see it and share in its blessings, don’t you? When you watch an amazingly beautiful movie (These are scarce to be sure), don’t you grab your friend and say, "Wow, you have to see this movie." Why? Because you want the other person to revel in it. The most pleasing thing in the world would be to hear your friend say, "Wow, that was amazing!" Being the one to introduce a person to greatness is one of the most pleasing things. We love to see our friends joy almost as much as our own.

Paul says, “When I see what Jesus did for me, how he ran his own race and he took the crown of thorns that I might have the crown of life... when I realize he loves us like that, that’s beautiful! That captures my imagination. That captures my heart. I want to share that with you!”

This was the prize for Paul!

You might think Paul is boasting in his effort. Look at me. Look at how hard I run. Look at how disciplined I am. Paul, aren't you being a bit proud here. You're harshing on the Corninthians for their pride, but that sounds a bit prideful to me.

But that's not it at all There is some language in here that certainly doesn not come from the heart of pride. In fact, it might be a little disconcerting and perhaps a bit confusing. Paul says in verse 24

What does he mean by being disqualified? Remember we said that one of the things the athletes did was take an oath. You had to take an oath that you would play by the rules of the game. And if you broke the rules you would be disqualified.

The rules say in the running race you have to stay between the lines. If your foot even slightly touches the line, you are out. You are disqualified. You broke the rules.

Now think about this. The entire message is that the you don't have to earn your righteousness. Your righteousness has already been earned. So how could you loose your already earned righteousness?

Well you couldn't. But one thing you could do is reject it. It's not possible to loose your salvation. But it possible to reject a salvation that is ready to be given to you. You see, the most common problem, the largest obstacle to the obstacle is to convince people that they are in need of a Savior.

No I can run my own race, thank you. I don't need another man's crown. But you see, we do need another man's crown. We need the crown that Jesus wore, that crown of thorns. And we need the metals that he bore, the nails through his wrists.

What ultimately disqualifies you? All who run their own race are disqualified. Certainly none will win. And all who try will break the rules along the way.

Paul's primary act of discipline all through his life was to remind himself of his need. To remind himself of what had been done on his behalf so he didn't have to. And that discipline placed him on his knees to receive a righteousness that was not his own.

And that creates in a heart an incredible longing for the coming of Jesus, does it not?

So Paul's running, fighting, straining, disciplining does not EARN him the crown, but it is the EVIDENCE that he has received the crown. It is the evidence that he understands how amazing that good news really is.

Today is communion Sunday and I want to take a few minutes to just humble ourself in confession and discipline ourself to remind ourself of our need.

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