Two Journeys

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. The main subject of the sermon is how love manifests itself as not being envious, boastful, or proud.

So I'd like to ask that you turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13. So we continue to make our way through this incredible chapter, the love chapter. Now, the ancient Israelites, as they encountered the living God at Mount Sinai, he descended in fire on that mountain. And he spoke to them out of the cloud, and as he did, they saw no form of any kind, and they were forbidden to make any artistic representation of God of anything they saw in the heavens above or in the Earth beneath, or the waters below. They were forbidden to make any artistic representations; instead, God through the Holy Spirit gave the Israelites words, descriptions, character traits of Almighty God. For example, Moses, when he went up on that same mountain, heard the Lord speak his name, the Lord the Lord, and then gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love. These are virtues, these are character traits or attributes of God, and the Bible is filled with these descriptions, we have these God is statements. For example, God is Spirit, meaning you can't make any physical representation of him. No artistic rendition of God can be made. God is light, and in him there's no darkness at all. And then beautifully, God is love. These are the descriptions we have.

Well, similarly in the New Testament, when the Word became flesh, became an actual human being, Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary, had an actual physical body, but we have no physical descriptions of Jesus, we don't know what his cheek bones look like, we don't know the color of his hair, how long it was, we don't know what his eyes look like, the shape of his nose, none of those things matter, we have no portrait of Jesus physically given to us in the New Testament, instead, similarly to Almighty God, we have words that are given that describe who Jesus is, and I believe 1 Corinthians 13 is a portrait of Jesus, the perfect man of love: the perfect man of love.

Now, some preachers, I've listened to a lot of sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, trying to understand how best to preach this incredible chapter. And one preacher I heard said, “We ought to insert our own name in these descriptions,” so this is what it would sound for me, and I can't do it very long because it becomes difficult such as: Andy is patient, Andy is kind, Andy does not envy, I'm gonna stop right there. Because it's not true, I wish it were. I wish that this would perfectly describe me, and I think you can do the same thing, you can insert, not my name, but your name in there and put your own name, and then you can see how convicting this chapter can be. But Jesus Christ lived out this perfect love every day of his life. Jesus was the perfect fulfillment of the Law of God, the two great commandments, vertically to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, horizontally to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus is the only man that has ever fulfilled both of these perfectly. Now we, in our minds should go ahead to the cross, that's where we get the perfect picture of Jesus, the man of love. He loved his Father perfectly by going to the cross. He said in John 14:31, “The world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what the Father has commanded me to do.” In other words, going to the cross, Jesus' death on the cross under the wrath of God was a perfect display, vertically, of his love for God.

It was also a perfect display of his love horizontally for others. As it says in 1 John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” But Christ's perfect love for other people was put on display before he ever went to the cross, every single day of his life, so therefore, we can look at these words as a beautiful portrait of Jesus. We can say Jesus was patient. Jesus was kind, Jesus did not envy, Jesus did not boast, Jesus was not arrogant. Jesus was not rude. Jesus was not self-seeking, Jesus was not easily angered, etcetera, this is a perfect portrait of Jesus Christ.

Now, in our salvation, in our sanctification, once we have been justified, once our sins have been forgiven through faith in Christ, we begin that internal journey of sanctification, of growth in godliness, of growth in Christ-likeness. And so the indwelling Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit enters us at conversion, he begins to form the portrait of Jesus in our souls, not a physical likeness, we don't physically look like Jesus, we don't know what he looked like. But every day, the Holy Spirit transforms us more and more by the ministry of the Word to make us like Christ. And so it says in Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” So that's the work of the Holy Spirit in us in sanctification, that we would be conformed to Christ, the Holy Spirit within us, the indwelling Spirit inside a Christian's heart is a skilled artist, and he takes the same paint brush and paint of the Word, of words, and works them in our souls, he paints Christ in our souls, we become gloriously conformed to Christ, and that means we will become perfectly loving.

Now, this is an incredible work on the part of the Holy Spirit, this is an incredible work, because, look who he has to work with. John the Baptist called his generation, the people that came to listen to him, especially his enemies, a brood of vipers. The Apostle Paul picks up this image in Romans 3, talking about the natural human being apart from regeneration, is like a brood of vipers. He says, “Their throats are open graves, their tongues practice deceit, the poison of vipers is on their lips, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.” That's who we were apart from the transforming work of the gospel, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, a brood of vipers. So picture a whole kind of nest of wriggling, writhing poisonous snakes, they're hissing and snapping at each other with bared fangs, or maybe you could picture a bunch of junkyard dogs snarling, barking, circling each other, ready to go for the throat, that's what we are naturally, apart from the grace of the gospel.

This is the raw material that the sovereign artist, the Spirit of God has to transform and some day he's gonna take this pen of junkyard, rabid dogs and make us in heaven, a colony, more than that, a city, a nation, a world of perfectly conformed to Christ, people, redeemed, perfectly loving, and that's something we can look forward to. Now, 1 Corinthians 13 really is law, it is the law of God, and we need to understand that. That's why when we read it, we have this initial sting, this initial conviction comes on us. The law of God is perfectly summed up in love. Romans 13:10 says, “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” Now, the law is relentless. The law cannot justify us, the law cannot forgive us for the times we violate it; however, justification is a gift of God to all who believe in Jesus. Jesus' perfect obedience of the law is ascribed to us; it's imputed to us as a gift, so that, by faith, we are seen by God to be as obedient to the law as Christ was. We are seen to be as loving to each other as Jesus was to those around him.

Now, once we have been justified through faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit then brings us back to the law of love and says, “Now, obey this. Obey this.” And so, yes, it's relentless, but at the same time, it's powerfully transforming as we look at the law, we don't have to prove ourselves, we could never do that, but we know now based on this law of love how we are to live, and as we gaze into 1 Corinthians 13, it's really gazing not only at a portrait of Jesus, what we should be, but we're also looking as in a mirror at what we are, and both of those things happen. I wanna grab an image from one of my favorite Michael Card songs, Michael Card's a Christian artist, and he wrote a song called, “When a Window is a Mirror” and so I want you to picture this image, I'm gonna expand it a little bit. Imagine that you love to hike, and you pick out a mountain in the Rockies and you go on a vacation out there and you rent a cabin with a fantastic view of the mountain that you're intending to hike, and you wake up just before dawn and you look through the window at the mountain, you can see a beautiful view of it, right up to the summit, maybe you can even see the path you're gonna travel, the course you're gonna take, the path, the trail you're gonna hike, but as you're looking in the low light of the early, early morning, you can also see a reflection of your own face, so you can see your face and you can see through the window, the distance you have yet to travel as well, and that's what happens with this mirror that is also a window. We can see where we're going, we can also see who we are.

Now, this idea of the law as a mirror comes from James, we just finished going through the whole Book of James, and you remember James 1:22-25, James says, “Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and then goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he'll be blessed in what he does.”

And so we look into the law of love here in 1 Corinthians 13. We gaze into this, and then James calls it, the perfect law that gives freedom, we are set free from some invisible chains that have held us back from being truly free, truly loving, and so we're about to embark in 1 Corinthians 13 on a series of negatives, 1 Corinthians 13 gets very negative. Those are the chains, the invisible chains that hold us back from really loving one another. There are eight negatives in all, one after the other, we're gonna look at three of them this morning. But look at verses 4-6, “Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil.” Do you see that? Eight straight negatives. Why, all these negatives? Well, I believe you could picture the first man, Adam, before he fell into sin as a pure human being, ready to love God with all of his heart, ready to love others as himself, ready to love creation, not idolize it or make an idol of it, but see God's glory in it. He was ready, this effusive, beautiful spring of love, ready to flow, but sin made that reservoir of love blocked up, you could think of sin as blockages would be one image, or you could also see sin as pollutants that pollute the spring and make it poisonous, and so it is with our hearts, we are filled with blockages, envy, which we are about to talk about is a blockage, it keeps love from flowing, flowing out, or it's a pollutant, it's a toxin, and we are full of envy, we are also full of boasting, we are defiled to the core by pride, we are consistently rude, we are habitually and fanatically selfish. We flame into anger at the drop of a hat, we keep careful and meticulous record of wrongs other people do to us, and we secretly delight in evil. That's who we are apart from Christ, and that’s someone who we still can be from time to time, even as Christians. Now, when we're redeemed, the heart of stone is removed and the heart of flesh is put in by the sovereign working of the Spirit. We are given a new nature. “If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation, the old is gone, behold, everything has become new,” 2 Corinthians 5:17. Now with this new nature, this mind of Christ, that we have in us, we are able to love as Christ did, but we still have vigorous traces of toxins, of poisons flowing through our spiritual bloodstreams or in the spiritual organs within us, there are blockages keeping them from functioning normally, and the first we're gonna look at to seek to remove is this issue of envy. Love does not envy. 

Now, Jonathan Edwards in his treatise on this, Charity And Its Fruits, defined envy this way, “Envy may be defined as a spirit of dissatisfaction with and opposition to the prosperity and happiness of others as compared to our own,” a spirit of dissatisfaction with and opposition to the prosperity, or I would say the blessedness, that we see in others as we compare it to our own. So the envious person sees the happiness of another person, his success, his possessions, his honors and achievements, his spouse, his car, his house, and he's displeased that that other person has those good things, it makes him actually angry to see those good things in the possession of another. The spirit of envy is especially aggravated then when the person compares those items with his own, he compares his office with that of a co-worker, he compares his car with that of a neighbor, he compares his house with that of his neighbor's house or a vacation home that he doesn't own and his heart is embittered by those blessings that have been given to that other person. This envy is actually exceedingly common, it is much more common than we think it is. Ecclesiastes 4:4, the preacher says, “I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man's envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after wind.” Now, that's an overstatement, but it is a strong tendency in the natural world that achievement and labor is driven by envy. Now, in the '50s, it was called, “keeping up with the Joneses” during that suburban kind of pattern of life. People would see the Joneses got a new car. We need to get a new car. Etcetera. It's just based on envy.

Now, there are a lot of very tragic examples of envy in the Bible. Go back to the very, very beginning of the history of sin. After the fall into sin, Cain killed his brother Abel out of envy. Because God spoke well of Abel's offerings, but he did not speak well of Cain's, and out of envy, he murdered his brother. Joseph's brothers were envious of him because of the favor that Jacob, their father had given to him over against all of them, they were envious of his coat of many colors and his apparent status as the heir, and so they wanted... Some of them wanted to kill him; they threw him into a pit and eventually sold him as a slave into Egypt, all out of envy. Or think about in the story of Esther, we've got this evil man, Haman, who is lavished with all kinds of honors and privileges and money and power and all that. But he said, he actually said to his friends, “None of it brings me any satisfaction at all because of Mordecai the Jew,” because he will not rise in fear before me, etcetera, he's envious of Mordecai's servile submission to his power and he can't enjoy any of his blessings because of that. The greatest envy that has ever been, most significant envy ever was of Jesus' Jewish enemies to Jesus, they were envious of him. They were envious of his miraculous powers, they were envious of the crowd's accolades when they said, “Hosanna!” and, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” and they were honoring and showering blessings on him. As a matter of fact, Pontius Pilate, it says in Matthew 27:18 said, “he knew that it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him,” he saw right through- this man had done nothing wrong, he only did good to other people, but the Jewish enemies were envious of him.

So what is so evil about envy? Well, it's a greedy, grasping- it just seems demonic, selfish spirit, it's at the root of envy, it's so wicked, it corrupts the heart, the whole heart with bitterness; it always competes and drives us to achieve. We're unable to love others and be happy about their successes, it is as we've seen the root of some of the most hideous and evil actions there have ever been in history, it has murder, actually, and thievery as its ultimate goal, not only does it rob the envious of happiness in the good news of others, it robs them of happiness in their own blessings, their own blessings seem so inadequate. They’re essentially thankless people. We become bitterly discontent about our salary, about our car, our home, our family, our clothes, and yet all of these are good gifts from God that we didn't deserve, but instead of being thankful, envy pollutes that stream that should be flowing up to God in thankfulness and out to others in blessing, envy pollutes all of that. Instead of being peacefully content and thankful to God, we grumble against God for blessing the other person.

Now, the opposite of envy really is love. But we're gonna define it specifically in this regard: it is delight, actual delight, heart delight in another person's blessedness from God. We actually take delight that the other person is blessed. We realize as James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” And we see the hand and purpose of God in giving that specific blessing to that specific person. And we delight in it, because we delight in God. And everything God does is right. It enables us to celebrate the goodness of God in someone else's life really as though it were happening to us. Now, I'm not gonna go into any great details about this. Probably out of pride, I don't know. But when I was a teenager and on, you know, toward the end of my teenage years, I was ugly competitive in sports. Some of you guys who love sports, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I was like John McEnroe in the tennis court. I remember just hitting a tennis ball over the fence into the woods when I was playing it with a friend of mine. I had this rage inside me. This competitiveness. And it went out to any time I would compete on the court; I had this ugly rage inside me before I was converted. Once I was converted, the Lord began to show me how evil that was, how wrong that anger was, and that envy of others. And I began to enjoy sports just on their own, and I'll never forget, there's this one time, it just shines in my memory, it was at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, we were involved in a church plant and some friends of mine, some brothers, we used to get together regularly to play basketball. And we were playing basketball together, and I looked around at the faces and the people, the brothers that were there and I realized two of them were about to go overseas as career missionaries and we were not likely ever to play together again, we'd played together many times. And there just came a sweet happiness in that one occasion that we had, one last time to play together. And every basket that was made, I felt like it was a celebration of God's goodness. It didn't matter that it was the guy I was guarding that made the basket. I would try to guard as best as I could, but I was happy that they made it, and then happy about my own baskets. My heart expanded out to include all of those people because I saw that basketball wasn't important. What mattered was our friendship in that one time. That one last time we had together. And that was God having transformed my heart from bitter envy and jealousy and rage to an actual celebration of the good thing that person just did or that... All of it is a display of God's goodness to us all. God wanted to scatter his athletic gifts to other people and not consolidate them all in me. And that was an expansive love. That's the essence of love. You look at another person and you say in your heart, or even verbally, you say, “I find delight in that blessedness you have from God. I'm glad you have it. Truly glad.” That's what love is. Now, this extends out to evangelism. We want to give blessedness to other people. And we are willing as evangelists and as missionaries to put up with a lot of difficulty, even a lot of abuse and a lot of pain, so that we may have personally, the delight of seeing that person cross over from death to life. And then in our mind, go ahead to the delight we'll have for all eternity in fellowship with that person. That's that horizontal expansion out to love. That's the essence of it.

How does the Holy Spirit work love, this aspect of love in us? Well, it enables us, as I've said, to see the sovereignty of God in every blessing, to understand every good thing comes from God. We don't deserve any of them. To see how Christ lived that way. How he delighted in what God had done in other people's lives. He… God causes us to be content in the good gifts that we have, the overwhelming gift of salvation through Christ, but also all the lesser gifts, realize, and we don't deserve any of them. They're contrary to what we deserve. And he causes our hearts to expand to include our neighbors, to truly yearn for what's best in them, positively, but then turn around to see how ugly envy really is, and to hate it. To love righteousness and hate wickedness, that's salvation. He causes us to examine our hearts to see if there's any bitterness of envy, any root of bitterness within us, and that we would take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. Perhaps it's a childless couple that has to learn by grace to delight in other people's good news when they find out that they're expecting. Perhaps it's a single Christian who yearns some day to be married and has to learn by grace to celebrate another person's engagement or wedding. And even be involved in it. Be a groomsman or a bridesmaid in that wedding, and really genuinely celebrate. Perhaps it's a pastor like myself, really delighting in someone else's success, evangelistically or the size, or the prosperity or the health of their church. And not compare it with my own, but really delight in what God's doing through other people. Perhaps it's a set of parents whose teen is a chronic under-achiever and that individual struggles, but then some other parents have this really achievement-oriented, excellent, intelligent, skillful child that's going off to an incredibly prestigious school and be able to celebrate someone else's blessedness and skills and gifts and not be jealous. So examine yourself. Examine your heart to see if there's any bitterness, to see if there's any envy or jealousy in you. And realize it's part of your birthright as a Christian, to be conformed to Christ in this area and have the darkness of envy driven out by the light of God's love. When you get to heaven... I can't say this enough, you are going to so delight in other people's rewards as though they were your own. We're part of one body, and when one part of that body is honored, the whole body shares in that honor. And we are going to delight in other people's honor and glory as though it were our own.

Now, the next negative, I'm gonna combine them: Love does not boast, love is not proud. I wanna put those two together. This boastfulness that Paul mentions here really is a parallel evil to envy. Whereas envy is angry and jealous over a blessing given to another person, boastfulness is pride over blessings given to us and not to other people. That's the specific aspect, “I have it; you don't.” Ironically, a boastful person is trying to stimulate envy in other people. He would delight in other people being envious of him. It's an evil thing. It makes us feel superior to others. It's interesting the Greek word here is related to a windbag. Imagine a big bloated balloon of hot air. It kind of reminds me of the earlier statement, “knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.” So you become this big hot windbag of self-praise and self-worship. That's what boasting is. It forgets again, that all honors, privileges, skills, talents, abilities, positions, all of that comes from God, and is given... All of those things are given to be an outflow of blessedness to other people. Remember 1 Corinthians 4:7, it says, “For who makes you different from anyone else? And what do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, then why do you boast as though you did not?” That's a perfect verse for killing boasting. The root evil of this boasting is pride as pride really is the root of every kind of evil. Pride was at the root of Satan's fall originally. Pride was the doorway by which evil entered the universe through Satan's fall. God created all creatures at varying levels of ability and scope and power and stations. And that began with the angels. He created different angels with different levels of power and different levels of glory. It seems, based on Isaiah 14, Satan thought so much of his own power and his own ability that he thought, “Not, only am I superior to all the other angels, I think I can topple God from his throne.” So with the five “I wills” he says, “I will ascend, I will make myself like the most high.” Ezekiel 28 gives an opposite kind... Or another angle... Not opposite, but another angle of the pride where it had to do with beauty. He was infused with a superlative beauty, a radiant beauty, maybe greater than any other angel or archangel. And he became enamored with his own beauty, fell in love with his own beauty, and decided to topple God. He decided to worship himself and become his own God. This is pride.

Now, humanity through Eve's temptation, and then Adam, we sinned in Adam. We in pride joined Satan's rebellion. We sought to make much of ourselves, really to worship ourselves, to become like God knowing good from evil. Envy springs from that pride, and so does boasting. It makes... Envy makes us hate blessings given to others. Arrogant boasting is clearly rooted in pride. It makes us worship ourselves and despise others. Think about Nebuchadnezzar walking on the palace of his roof there in Babylon in Daniel Chapter 4. And he's walking there and he's so filled with pride and says, “Is this not the great Babylon I have built as a display of my own power and glory and for the...” Or whatever. I mean, all of this boastfulness coming, filling his heart. And while he's speaking, an angel of the Lord struck him down and turned his mind into the mind of an animal.

Now, our daily boasting is a little less grandiose than Nebuchadnezzar's on the palace of his roof in Babylon, but it's similar. Someone tells a story, and as you're listening to that story, you can't wait to tell your own. You've got the trump card. You think that's something, wait till you hear my story. And we play that trump card. And it happens every time. We're listening and we can't wait to tell our story and trump the other person's story. We use our words to elevate ourselves and lower others. And we tell stories in which we are the hero and others are the villains. If we do some act of service we wanna be noticed and praised. Noticed and praised. Noticed and thanked. It's so selfish. And we talk about it, we find ways within the Christian community to talk about the things we've done, so that people notice the things we've done, so that they will praise us and thank us. And that's... It's ugly and we don't wanna admit it, but that's actually what's going on. And we talk a lot about our virtues and we hide our vices. And again, we've forgotten that every single blessing we have, not only does it come from God, and not only is it contrary to what we deserve, it was given to us horizontally to flow out toward others, and bless them.

Salvation is the only answer to this problem. Unaided, the human heart cannot cure its own pride. If we did cure aspects of our pride, we will become proud about that. There's no way out for us. We need a savior. And Jesus Christ, the salvation that has come through Christ comes in and at the core it's meant to humble us. I mean to our core, he means to humble us. He wants to work in such a way that when we get to heaven, we will not boast in ourselves. We will not boast. As it says in 1 Corinthians 1:29, “so that no one may boast before him.” And then two verses later, “rather, as it is written, let him who boast, boast in the Lord.” Boasting in the Lord is called worship. We're gonna get up to heaven and we will be so free of self-worship and so filled with worship to God. In order to love then, we need to be humbled. We need to be genuinely humbled. 1 Corinthians 13 is about horizontal love. We need to be humbled toward each other so we can love them. And salvation is that work of humbling.

Truly humbled people know how lowly we are before God. We are doubly lowly. We are first lowly because we are creatures and God is the Creator. And there's an infinite gap between all creatures and God the Creator. The holy angels in heaven know this. It's why the seraphim cover their faces, though they've never sinned. They understand the infinite gap, the holiness of God. He is infinitely above all archangels and holy angels though they've never done anything wrong. A beautiful verse for this... I didn't even know this verse was in there teaching this, but you ought to look it up. Psalm 113:5-6, listen to what it says about almighty God, “Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high [listen to this], who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?” He has to lower himself to look at the highest archangel. That's the infinite gap there is between God and all creatures. So the holy angels are humbled in heaven, but we are even more humbled as creatures for we were created from the dust of the earth. We were created from the... We are lower. We are created from the dust of the earth. Isaiah 40:15 uses that, it says, “Surely the nations are a drop from the bucket,” listen to this; they're regarded as what? “Dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were [what?] fine dust.” We're dust, and we're created from the dust of the earth.

But not only so as... Not only is this so, we're doubly humbled because we have sinned. We have violated God's holy laws. We have rebelled against the most high God. We have joined Satan in rebellion against this Holy God, so we are humbled as creatures and we're doubly humbled as sinners. And every aspect of our salvation is meant to humble us so that we see things rightly. It's not a false picture; it's actually a true picture of ourselves, we are humbled by every step. We are humbled by eternal election and predestination. It's humbling. Before we were born or had done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose and election might stand, not by works, but by God, the one who calls. That's humbling. We didn't do anything, we're chosen just because God chose us. And then we're humbled in justification by faith alone. We're humbled in needing a savior to save us. We're humbled by the fact that long before we were born, he completely worked redemption. We're humbled by the fact that the redemption involved his intense suffering under the wrath of God. And when you look at the crucifixion, we realize, we as sinners deserved that before God. That's humbling. And we're humbled by the imputation of his righteousness. His perfect righteousness is given to us wholesale as a gift, because we... Our righteousness is like filthy rags. That's humbling. There's enough humbling at the cross to last all eternity.

Justification is humbling. But so also is sanctification. Do you feel it brothers and sisters? Are you not humbled by 1 Corinthians 13? You look at it and it says... And you say, “Boy, I would love to be that person. Just the ones we're looking at today. I would love to never envy or boast or be prideful again the rest of my life. What kind of man, what kind of woman would I be?” But it's humbling. Every single day, we make holy resolutions and don't keep them. We fall into habitual sin patterns and the Holy Spirit restores us, forgives us when we confess our sins. And we make more resolutions. We keep some of them, but others, we don't keep. The very thing that we hate, we do. The thing we wanna do, we do not do. We do make some progress, the thing that we love, we do. The thing we hate, we don't do. And we make progress, but it is a long journey of humbling. Do you feel it? I feel it.

And then glorification, that's humbling too. You'll be perfected in humility at glorification. Because in an instant God will do, in your life, what you tried your whole lifetime to do in partnership with the Holy Spirit, and you could never perfectly achieve. He will in an instant conform your soul, and you will be instantly perfectly righteous. And then when the resurrection happens, He'll instantly raise your body from the dead and make it like His glorious resurrection body in an instant, effortless. And then when you see God in all his glory, and you'll realize you're a creature and a redeemed sinner, you will be humbled.

Well, the more that we can be humble now the better. I spent many hours as I was working on this sermon thinking about one thing. I don't think it's my goal to confuse you in sermons, but sometimes that happens. “Thanks, pastor, I never realized what a hard verse that was, but now you've shown me how difficult it is to understand that verse.” So here's the thing, how does humbling before God produce love for other people? It's actually not intuitively obvious. The demons know that God's superior and they hate it. They seethe with rage over it. Jesus' enemies knew that he was superior, and they seethed with rage against him. The damned in hell know that God is infinitely above them and more powerful than them and they seethe with hatred. It's not intrinsically obvious that a vision of the greatness of God makes us loving. But what happens is, at redemption, the Holy Spirit transforms our heart so that we don't just see the infinite greatness of God, but we are actually attracted to him in all of his character, in his virtues, in his love. We are drawn toward him. We love him. And as we are drawn toward him, we start to swim in the sea of what he is. God is light, and in him there's no darkness at all. We want to be pure from sin. He draws us in to the fact that he is love. God is love straight through, and we delight in it. We see the beauty of it, and we yearn for it. So that humbling brings us into an ocean of love, and we are healed of these blockages, we're healed of envy. Envy becomes gone because of our humility. We're brought into this ocean of God and we see his wise, infinitely above us purposes. And who are we to question how much he gives to this person, how much he gives to that... Etcetera. Whatever God does is right. We see his greatness and we see his love, and we then are conformed to that and celebrate it.

And so this humbling draws us into an ocean of love that then flows out toward others. Boasting is gone. We realize if God has opened his hand and given you a gift... First of all, it's just 'cause he loves you and wants you to enjoy that good thing. So enjoy it. But he also wants you to bless others with it, not to be boastful toward it. Certainly not to create envy in another person, but rather that you would be a blessing to them as God has been a blessing to you. And again, when we get to heaven, this is gonna be perfectly consummated. We are gonna be so humble in heaven, we're gonna be liberated from this narrow, bitter, inward self-worship. You're gonna be set free from you. And I'm gonna be set free from me. And we're gonna just soar, enjoy. Delighting in the infinite greatness of God. Heaven is going to consist in a constant direct view of the glory of God. The entire universe will be illuminated in the glory of God, and of Christ. The new Jerusalem won't need the light of the sun or the moon, or the light of the lamp, but it's gonna shine with the glory of God. And all creatures in the heavenly world will be perfectly glorious, and we will see their glory. And we ourselves will be glorious. But unlike Satan, we won't be taken in with our own beauty. We won't be enamored with it. Nor will we try to worship other angels or other glorious beings. We will see other beings more glorious than us and we'll delight in their glory and celebrate it, because God worked it in them. And we will be set free. And other people who have more glory than us, we'll delight in that. And the people who have less glory than us, we will not be arrogant or boast over them. We will see all these things in light of God's wisdom and God's purpose. That's where we're heading. 

So applications. 1 Corinthians 13 is meant to be a mirror for you into your own circumstances. Look at yourself now. Do you love? Are you characterized by envy? Are you characterized by boasting? Do you see temporal blessings properly? Do you see them in another person's life properly? Do you see the temporal blessings in your own life properly? Are you characterized by envy toward another person's blessings? Are you characterized by arrogant boasting and pride toward your own blessings? Let me just start with your own salvation. Are you a Christian? Have you come to genuine faith in Christ?

You've probably heard the gospel many, many times. You've heard it again today, that God sent His son. He became incarnate by the Virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life. Worked a perfect righteousness that he wants to give you as a gift, because your righteousness is like filthy rags. And he died on the cross for your rebellions, which are more than the hairs of your head. Have you humbled yourself and come in faith to Christ, trusting in him for the full forgiveness of your sins? That's what you must do in order to begin a journey of truly loving others like God has loved you. Come to faith in Christ. Don't wait. You've heard this before. There's nothing new here for you. But maybe out of pride, you're holding back. Let today be for you the day of salvation.

Now, if you've been a Christian for many years, you know there's still so much work to do. Go over your heart. Go over your life. Go over your circumstances. Ask if you have any envy in your heart. Anything inside you that curdles your delight in your own blessings, because you're jealous of what somebody else has. Ask the Lord to drive that darkness out of your heart. Repent from that. Repent from that envy and ask him to work genuine love in your heart. Conversely, concerning pride, ask the Lord to give you a vision of the infinite greatness and the holiness of God, and the beauty of his love. God is love, it's not just God is loving, God is love. He's the source of all love. Draw close to him in humility, and allow his love to saturate your life and your being. Close with me if you would in prayer.

Father, we thank you for this incredible chapter. We thank you for how detailed it is, how powerful it is. We thank you for the way that it exposes us, but it needs to. We're under the scalpel of a skillful surgeon. The word of God is living and active like a sharp double-edged really... Scalpel; cutting out the tumor of envy and boasting and pride. Please do that work in us. Thank you for the gospel. I pray that any that began this live stream unconverted would not be unconverted now, but that they would trust in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and the transformation of their hearts. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:4. The main subject of the sermon is what it means for love to be long-suffering and kind.

So I would like to ask that you turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13. Andy already read the text for us and we're gonna continue our journey through this incredible chapter we've already seen. As Paul says at the end of Chapter 12, introducing chapter 13, that love is the most excellent way, love really is the summation of everything that God wants to do in the soul of a Christian, and heart of a Christian, it's the most excellent virtue. We've also seen last week that even the most excellent gifts and abilities and ministries are worthless if they're not done in love, and Paul uses the most extreme language, the tongue of men and of angels, of having the gift of prophecy and fathoming all mysteries and being able to have all knowledge, but having not love, or somebody who gives of himself even to the point of being burned or gives everything he owns to the poor, if it's not done in love, it's worthless, it's nothing, and so we saw that last week.

Now, these strong assertions were necessary, because the Corinthian church for all of their giftedness, for all of their ability, it seems were not a very loving people. They were prideful, and they were bickering and faction-ridden and even some were taking others to court. But honestly, the real issue here as we come to 1 Corinthians 13 is not the ancient Corinthian church. Those people all died a little less than two millennia ago, and that local church long, long ago, the lamp stand was removed from that church, and so that the local church ended. What we have instead are the timeless words that the Holy Spirit moved the apostle Paul to write that stand over every generation of Christians, has stood over 20 centuries of Christians to teach us what love is. So the real issue is not what were the Corinthians like, but what are we like? And frankly, for each of us individually, as we come to it, it's what am I like? What am I like? That's the point of all the sermons that I plan to preach and that I'm going to preach today in 1 Corinthians 13.

And for you as those that are listening, the point will not be how good is the sermon, or how excellent are my illustrations or how tight is my logic or my eloquence or my delivery, how excellent is all of that, or how clear or any of that. None of that is the issue, the real issue is, what is the Holy Spirit saying to me personally? About my own heart and my own life? What is going on in my life? What is going on in my heart? The Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write these words so that we could look into the perfect mirror of this chapter and learn what love really is. So honestly, the kind of love described in this chapter is really supernatural, it's beyond anything that we can do consistently day after day, minute after minute, now I wanna say there's nothing particularly miraculous about any detail of it, it's not like Paul is saying, love is patient, love walks on water, love flies like a peregrine falcon, love cooks dinner for its family every night, a mixture of common place things and then supernatural things we could never do. It's not like that at all.

Actually, every bit of this chapter is both natural and supernatural. It is natural in that we can do any of it some time, we can do it in short stretches, but we can't seem to carry it off day after day, minute after minute for the whole of our lives, and the reason for that is we've learned in Romans 7 is indwelling sin, sin living in me. As Paul talks about, the very thing that I hate, I do, but the thing I want to do, I do not do. And if that doesn't perfectly describe the problem that thoughtful Christian readers have as they read 1 Corinthians 13, I don't know what else does. We've got this problem of indwelling sin that makes us radically unloving people, so our only hope is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, and the fruit of the Spirit is love, and all of these virtues flow from that.

Now, as I mentioned last week, I'm not feeling any compulsion to hurry through this chapter, you may say, Pastor, you're not even doing a full verse today, just “love is patient, love is kind.” We're not even getting through verse four, but I don't want to hurry because of the power of this chapter. And as I said last week, I'm gonna be leaning on Jonathan Edwards' excellent work on the 16 lectures he did on 1 Corinthians 13, which is grouped together in a book called Charity and Its Fruits and it's public domain. I commend it to you. And I'm leaning on him this morning as I look at the first two aspects, love is patient, love is kind.

Now, as I was driving in this morning, I was just thinking about this chapter, and thinking about love is patient, love is kind, and it occurred to me, I've been wrestling with 1 Corinthians 13 now for weeks, and it's been very difficult actually for me. It’s been somewhat painful, but there's also a certain delight, and I wanna commend that, and I'm gonna keep talking about this over the next number of weeks, because I think the Holy Spirit has given me a key to understanding what's going on with 1 Corinthians 13. And that is this dual phrase of “painful delight”, painful delight. It is painful. As I read, love is patient, love is kind to see how impatient and unkind I really am day after day, that's been painful, it is painful, but then the delight is threefold. First of all, that there is evidence through the Holy Spirit that I'm alive in Christ because it does bring me pain to not be loving, and I actually do see some evidence of supernatural love being worked in me by the Holy Spirit, so that's the first level of delight. 

The second level of delight is hope for the rest of my life. I believe that as I apply the lessons from 1 Corinthians 13, week after week, I will become a more loving person. It will improve my marriage, my parenting, my pastoring, everything in my life, so I have great hope that the rest of my life can be much more richly colored by love, and in this particular case, I can become a much more patient and a much kinder person as I study this through the power of the Holy Spirit. And then finally, ultimately, eternal hope, the delight of knowing that some day I will be perfected in love, I will be in Heaven perfectly loving now, I won't need long-suffering in heaven, I won't need patience in heaven. But I will be perfectly kind in heaven and all of the other positive attributes will be at work in my life, and so that's what I wanna commend to you. As we begin this journey, I'll mention this again, God willing, in future weeks. This painful delight.

So let's look this morning at these two aspects, love is patient, and then love is kind... Now, the word patient, the Greek word behind the word patient is well translated long-suffering, makrothumia, it means to suffer a long time. Long-suffering, now, we don't use the word long-suffering much, and so we generally just go with love is patient, but what it means is to patiently endure injuries of every kind. Alistair Begg put it this way, “Love has a long fuse.” A long fuse... not a short fuse, it takes a long time for a patient person, a loving person to blow up, to blow his stack. It specifically has to do with patience with other people, and even more specifically, patience with other sinful people. We won't need to be patient in heaven. No one will task our patience in heaven, not at all, but here on earth, we need it because people are sinful in our lives. Chrysostom said about this text and about the patience, a man who has been wronged and easily has it in his power to avenge himself and refuses to do it, so that's his take on long-suffering. Ultimately, of course, Jesus Christ is the best picture of this. As it says in 1 Peter 2:23, “When they hurled their insults at Him, He did not retaliate. When He suffered, He made no threats.” And so that's Jesus' level of patience. We'll talk more about this as well.

Now, Edwards in his lecture on this section of 1 Corinthians 13, talks about the various injuries that commonly happen to people in this world, and that's why we will need long-suffering, the myriad ways that we injure one another. That we hurt one another. My purpose here is not to give you an extensive catalog of all of those ways, but to give you or remind you of the flavor of what our life is like in this world. So for example, there are injuries in business dealings and financial dealings, injuries connected with money and business. People in this world are constantly defrauding one another in so many ways, people withhold payment when they should give it, or they renege on contractual agreements, or they do shoddy workmanship on a job. Money, we're told in the New Testament is a root of all kinds of evil, and it is a great mark of Christian maturity, of our sanctification, it's put on display when we care more about horizontally about other people's souls than about our money. But this idea of love is long-suffering can happen in reference to money and business, or injuries in reputation, this has to do with the damage we do to each other's reputation, people slander each other, people tear each other down with their words. They do character assassination. They spread gossip and poisonous innuendo. A lot of this happens these days on social media, such a venting place for people to do this kind of character assassination and pour poison into the souls of others concerning individuals. 

Then there are injuries to our bodies, physical injuries. It can happen ever since Cain killed his brother Abel. Jesus linked anger to murder, and so frequently an angry heart can lead to attacks, physical attacks that can happen. Attacks on your possessions, attacks on your body, even to the point of serious injury or even death. Or it could be injuries from authority figures, people have positions of power, in our lives or in society. It could be elected officials, government officials, could be police, those with that kind of authority, could be a boss, it could be a coach, it could be a teacher, professor, somebody with authority, and they have the ability to make your life miserable. They can lord it over you, they can abuse you physically or verbally, materially. Some governments enact laws against our Christian brothers and sisters that make it impossible for them to gather, to meet together without fear. They arrest pastors and drag them off, physical assaults from authority figures.

Then there are injuries that happen with neighbors, perhaps they like to play loud music or shoot firearms at odd hours. Our neighbors in Japan, I remember, had a habit of burning their garbage at a certain time every day, and the wind always seemed to blow toward us, and so it was interesting, it's just a unique smell, burning garbage, and then our clothes would smell like it, etcetera. Or perhaps in your neighborhood, it's a crotchety old man who yells, “Get off my lawn!” at your kids. I've actually felt that myself, I remember years ago, some of our neighbors took a diagonal journey across the street to go fishing in the lake, and I felt that welling up inside. It’s like, “Do you really wanna be the get-off-my-lawn neighbor? But that's the kind of thing that can happen in neighborhoods,. Maybe your neighbor has a dog that barks all night. We used to live near what I called the “metronome dog” that used to bark like.…well, I won't imitate it, but a very rhythmic barking that was annoying. Or maybe you live in an apartment complex and people cook with certain ingredients that make the entire building smell like that ingredient for the rest of the day.

Most especially we look at injuries from family members. We are in such close quarters with each other, and especially with this sheltering at home, we can be in each other's grill, in each other's space. And there are things that can happen, husband to wife, wife to husband, parent to child, child to parent, brothers, sisters, siblings, and we can annoy each other and irritate each other, and there can be injuries, we use that word, but just things that are annoying or bothersome, etcetera. And then move it out to extended family, aunts and uncles, cousins, things happen, and we have this historical memory of when this happened or that happened, and there can be injuries. 

So all of these are things that happen in life. And they require Christians to be long-suffering. They set you up in a situation where you need to bear patiently that issue, what does it mean then to be long-suffering? Well, it means to bear the injury meekly and humbly, and to not seek retaliation at all, to not seek revenge, there are so many things that we can do to get revenge, there's so many movies and books and different things out in popular culture, they're basically based on revenge, it's a very common plot development where at the beginning of the movie, some villain does something villainous, and at that point, it's almost like in the movie, all bets are off, that person is fair game for revenge, and it's just a whole story of revenge.

There are so many of these, there are vigilante stories where somebody will take justice, the matters of justice right into their own hands and they become the investigator, the jury, judge and executioner in that, and we actually can even celebrate it because of the evil done by the villain in the story, but to be long-suffering means to forgo any of that. To forgo any revenge or retaliation, to choose not to slander your neighbor back, get them back to subtly attack their character or use innuendo, to not get back at the coworker who backstabbed you and kept you from getting the promotion, to not get back at them, to be long-suffering means to forgo the right to treat your neighbor as they've treated you, or to repay a family member for the way that they've treated you, even if it's a small offense. They were irritable and rude with you, and therefore you're gonna be irritable and rude with them. That’s not long-suffering. Sometimes we can be passive aggressive and exact payback in that respect, so basically to not harbor in any respect, any spirit, bitter spirit of retaliation or revenge, not only do you not enact revenge in real life, you don't even fantasize about it. 

In your mind and heart, you don't cherish any thoughts or use any creativity or thinking about ways you could get your revenge, you drop the matter entirely, you forgive as the Lord has forgiven you, you treat the person as if the injury had never occurred, and you maintain a loving spirit toward that person. This is the fundamental aspect of love, you desire horizontally, that person's blessedness still, despite what's happened, actually, perhaps even more because of what's happened, you really yearn for them to know the forgiveness that only God can give and you really would love to spend eternity with that person in heaven, you have that eternal perspective. You don't lose the quietness and the tranquility of your own heart before God, their injury toward you hasn't done anything toward, vertically toward your being spirit-filled with God, and then also horizontally as well, and so you actually have a supernatural attitude, like Paul said earlier in the lawsuits passage, “So why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated than go to court?” So that's what long suffering looks like.

This is why it's called long-suffering, 'cause we bear the injury over a long time. We bear it, we carry that injury for a long time, I don't even need to remember and keep a record of wrongs we will get to that later, but the point is that we are willing to bear this and put up with it, not even just a small injury sometime, but sometimes even a very great one, one that's changed your whole life to be willing to bear that wrong for a long time. This takes supernatural endurance. So many situations in my pastoral ministry have come up where this has been what the circumstances call for. It might be an unregenerate spouse, and the regenerate, the Christian spouse, has to bear for a long time and pray for a long time, and love and cherish for a long time and put up with a lot of things. Or you could think about Christian parents of a wayward son or daughter that's living maybe an alternate lifestyle, and every occasion, every holiday, they bring their sin and all of its effects into the family and bring so much distress, and there's just so much that you have to be long-suffering for.

So how does our Christianity, how does the gospel set us up for being long-suffering? I think we should look vertically at the first great commandment, love for God, and then horizontally at the second great commandment, love for our neighbor, and the way that Jonathan Edwards sets it up. He says, We are equipped through our Christian faith to fulfill the law and to love God and that love for God enables us to be long-suffering, and then our love for horizontally for our neighbor enables us to be long-suffering, first love for God and for Christ enables us to be long-suffering because we want to imitate God, if we love him we wanna be like him. Fundamentally, as he said, “Be holy because I am holy”, you could just take that out and say, Be long-suffering, because I am long-suffering, we see the virtue of it, we see the beauty of it, that God actually is incredibly long- suffering. Think about when he made the promise to Abraham of the promised land, and he made the prophecy about what would happen, how the Jews would be in Egypt, and he said in the fourth generation turned out to be almost half a millennia later, your descendants will come back here, under Joshua, because the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. For 500 years, God was long-suffering toward the wickedness of the Canaanites and all of their evil religion and their immorality. He bore it for 500 years. Or think about God's patience with the Jewish nation. We see all the catalog of idolatries and all their sins and in the ways they violated the Mosaic Law, and how even in the New Testament, when Christ came, most of them didn't believe. And how it says, powerfully in Romans 10:21, concerning Israel, God says, “All day long, I've held out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.” That story is one of God's incredible long-suffering toward Israel, and we wanna imitate that, we wanna be like God. 

Secondly, our love for God gives us gratitude to God and that gratitude for the way he's patient with us, he's been long-suffering with us, and the more you realize that the more you say, "How can I not be long-suffering toward others?" Has God not put up with much from you? Be honest. As you look in the Word that your conscience speaks, when you look back at your own life, even up to this very day, has God not been patient with you? Is He not patient every day? We have been stubborn, we have defied Him, we have resisted him, we have disobeyed him, we have sinned in many areas, but we've sinned in some areas again and again through habitual sin, and God has been so patient. And so just out of gratitude to God, we want to be long-suffering toward one another. Love for God also makes us extremely humble. It humbles us to know the grace of God, and it severs the tap root of that wicked pride that says, I don't deserve the injury you're giving me, I don't deserve to be treated like that.

 But then when you realize the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and we're supposed to play the role of that tax collector, that stood off at a distance and beat his breast and would not even look up to Heaven, but said, "Be merciful to me, oh God, a sinner." And Jesus said that man went home justified. Not the other one. We realize how could we be prideful toward God or toward any other person. And so it enables us to be long-suffering because it severs the tap root of that pride that says, "I don't deserve to be treated like you're treating me." Also, it gives us wisdom, we are able to see, love for God enables to see God's hand in the bad treatment we're getting. God actually wants us to go through some of that bad treatment, those afflictions, those persecutions, those oppositions, to help us grow in our sanctification. We're supposed to consider it pure joy whenever we face trials of many kinds. The Apostle Paul never forgot who he was before his conversion, he never forgot that he was the chief of sinners, that he didn't deserve to be called an apostle because he persecuted the church of God, he never forgot that. 

But he also realized that God was using these light and momentary afflictions to further the Gospel and to prepare him for glory that doesn't even, isn't worth comparing with the afflictions we go through, so we are able to see God's wisdom in bringing these injuries to us, we need them. And then finally, love for God gives us a perspective of where we're heading. We are going to heaven. We're gonna spend eternity in the new heaven, new earth, we're gonna spend eternity in the new Jerusalem. We are going to swim in an ocean of happiness. What is the injury you're going through compared to that? Is it not a particle, a dust on the scales of eternity? Doesn't our love for God give us an eternal perspective, enabling us to soar above the clouds of the injury, whatever it is, no matter how severe, to soar above it and see eternity and see beyond it? I love what it says in Hebrews 13:6, “So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?’” So honestly, what can another human being do to you in reference to your eternal reward and your eternal inheritance in heaven? Nothing, there's nothing they can do. And so it just gives us that vertical love for God, enables us to be long-suffering. 

Also our horizontal love for our neighbor enables us to be long-suffering, too. We are able to see our neighbor in light of eternity, and if we are genuinely loving toward that neighbor, whether a Christian or non-Christian, just another human being, we genuinely want their blessedness, we genuinely want them to be eternally blessed, we would love to spend eternity with that person in Heaven. I remember I was witnessing on an airplane with a guy, I never met him before. And it says in 2 Corinthians, "As though God Himself were making His appeal through us, we implore you, be reconciled to God." And so I was sharing the gospel, actually got to the point of, to some degree, begging him to come to Christ, we had an hour-long conversation, and my heart was filled with one desire. I had one desire, and that is, I wanted to spend eternity with this total stranger in Heaven. Now that had to be the work of the Holy Spirit in my heart. I didn't know this guy at all.

And it wasn't weird. The guy said, "Why do you care so much?" I said, "Well, honestly, I'd like to spend eternity with you in heaven. We’re gonna land in about half an hour, probably I'll never see you again, but that's the truth." And so I think what happens is the Holy Spirit expands us horizontally to include other human beings created in the image of God and makes us want to see them blessed both in time and in eternity. 

That's what love does. Think about what Stephen did when they were stoning him to death, and he said, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin, do not hold this sin against them." Just like Jesus, when he said, he said, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." And so as Jesus's heart expanded out, it included the thief on the cross and won him over, so that the thief said, "Remember me when you come in your kingdom." "Today, you'll be with me in paradise." So also Stephen's heart moved out and he couldn't know it, but his life, his arguments from scripture and his demeanor and his prayer, I believe were instrumental in winning Saul of Tarsus to faith in Christ. 

And so it just goes out horizontally. Lord, don't hold this sin against them. Oh God, would you forgive them? God would you love them? So Christian, long-suffering is the mark of a great work of grace in the human soul toward neighbor. It is the consummation of the second great commandment, to be able to turn the other cheek, humbly, to be able to accept wrongs, to be willing to be persecuted. Even some of our brothers and sisters, even savagely persecuted. We think about in East Africa, where roving bands of fanatical Muslims have hunted down our Christian brothers and sisters and killed them with machetes, etcetera, It’s remarkable how much grace and love has been shown through those Christians to win some of those Muslims to faith in Christ. This goes on all over the world, but then think of the rewards that you have. If you're able to love your persecutor, you're able to bless those who bless you. And Jesus said, "If you only love those who love you, what reward will you get? But if you're able to love your persecuting enemy, great is your reward in heaven." Jesus said in Matthew 5, so let me just stop at this issue of long-suffering and just apply it immediately, what you need to do as you listen to this is evaluate your own heart and life. Are you long-suffering? Are you patient when wronged or do you tend to have a short fuse, and you tend to fly off the handle? And I think all of us I know will come up short of where we'd like to be. Some of us come up very short, you know that this is a big problem in your life, you fly off the handle regularly, you have a very short fuse, this is a part of your.…but just ask God to show you the dimensions of this sin of being so radically impatient when wronged and ask Him to work this in you by His grace, we can take these words and bring them up to God in prayer and see Him work in us. 

So the second part is kind. Love is patient, love is kind. What does it mean to be kind? So I think long-suffering, the way I look at it is in a sports or way like football, where long-suffering is playing defense. And then being kind or kindness is putting points on the board. It's offense, so we're gonna play defense when wronged, when attacked, and then we're gonna move out in kindness and goodness and love. The word is linked to goodness, to freely doing good for other people. It may have to do with goodness done to the bodies of other people, kindness may be shown physically to alleviate pain and suffering or to bless physically in some way, or it may have to do spiritually. It may have to do with evangelism. Sharing the gospel is an act of kindness. Giving a word of biblical encouragement is an act of kindness. So it's moving out doing good works to bless other people, that's what kindness really is. 

Think about the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Good Samaritan, where this man is beaten up on the road to Jericho and the priest and Levite just ignore him and walk by, but the Good Samaritan goes over and shows him kindness. He cares for his wounds, he picks him up, he carries him on his donkey to a hotel or an inn where the innkeeper can care for him, he pays for it, and whatever is needed, he does just as Jesus said to the sheep and not to the goats. “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you came and visited me, I was in prison, you looked after me.” All of these are acts of kindness, and it's done from a demeanor of delight, of gentle delight, when you think of kindness, you think of a demeanor as well as the action, it's not just what is done, but how it's done, and it's done... I think I picture gentleness, tenderness and a certain measure of delight. God loves a cheerful giver, not somebody who gives reluctantly or under compulsion, person's happy to do this good deed for you, that's with kindness. You get a sense that the other person is enjoying doing this for you, they really delight in doing this for you, there's a certain level of that. 

Now, biblically there are so many examples of this. My mind goes to Joseph. After Jacob died, and Joseph's brothers had done him so wrong, some of them wanted to kill him. Threw him in a pit. Sold him as a slave. It was about as bad as it can get. But by this point, Joseph had developed a supernatural perspective on what God was doing in all of this. Now, after Jacob died, his brothers were terrified of his Egyptian power base, of the incredible power that Joseph had, he could have killed them. And they knew it. And so in Genesis 50:18-21, it says, "His brothers came and threw themselves down before Him, ‘We are your slaves,’ they said. But Joseph said to them, ‘Don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.’” Or, intended for good, “‘to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.’l Now, here's the key, listen to this. "So then, don't be afraid, I will provide for you and for your children. And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.” That right there is why I'm sharing this text. He had the supernatural perspective of what God was doing to get just so beyond what his brothers had done to him. So he was patient, long-suffering, but then he went out in kindness. And first and foremost, he not only did not retaliate, he physically cared for them. He blessed them, set them up at houses, made sure they had enough to eat all that, but it wasn't just that, it was how he did it, he reassured them and spoke kindly to them, he actually had a heart, a genuine heart of affection for them. It's incredible. So you could just take that and say, "Oh God, make me that kind of a person.” 

Or again, take the story of Boaz in the way that he treated Ruth. Remember Ruth was a Moabitess, she was a widow, and she came back with her mother-in-law to Israel, foreign land for her, and she goes out to glean, that's what poor people did, if they wanted some food. They'd go out into the fields and get some extra grain that was laying around in the ground. She could have gone anywhere, but she ends up at Boaz's field, and this is what happened. Second chapter, Ruth 2:8-13 says, "So Boaz said to Ruth, 'My daughter, listen to me, don't go and glean in another field and don't go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls. I've told the men not to touch you, and whenever you're thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled'." Wow. “At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground, She exclaimed, ‘Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you even notice me, a foreigner?’” 

Now here comes the kindness. Boaz replied, "I have been told all about what you've done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with the people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge." So not only does he provide for her, makes sure she has enough to eat, and at the end of this encounter, he gives her a bunch of grain to take back to her mother-in-law, he lavishes goodness on her. But it's how he does it, it's that he elevates her, speaks respectfully to her, find something he can encourage in her. She's blown away. And then she says in verse 13, "May I continue to find favor in your eyes, my lord. You have given me comfort and have spoken kindly to your servant, though I do not have the standing of one of your servant girls." So as you read that, doesn't that stimulate in you the desire to be that kind of a person, not just to be certain the person's cared for, but that you elevate them, you encourage them, you speak words of honor to them and treat them with that gentleness and that kindness?

Jesus did this every day. Think of what it was like to be a broken-hearted or disease-ridden or suffering sinner around Jesus, never was there one who is gentler and kinder and more tender-hearted to broken-hearted sinners. So many stories in Jesus's life. How did he treat the sinner, the woman who was washing Jesus's feet with her tears and drying them with her hair? At one point he just shuts out the Pharisee host that he's eating dinner, he shuts everyone out, focuses on her. And says, "Take heart, daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace." He just focused on her and gives her love and tenderness, forgiveness. 

Or think about the widow at Nain in Luke chapter 7, is coming out and grieving bitterly. She’s a widow and she's burying that day her only son, and Jesus goes right to her. And looks at her and says, "Don't cry." That just moves me, is the first thing is toward the grieving woman and says, "Don't cry," and then He raises this son from the bier, from the dead. So there's this tenderness, this sweetness, this kindness that you see. Mothers show it all the time to their children, you think about a little five-year-old, he skins his knee, what he wants is mommy, he goes running and she's gonna pick him up and she's gonna cuddle him and she's gonna stroke his hair off his forehead and kiss away his tears, and she's going to bind the wound on the knee, and it's just that's what... You just know that kind of mothering is the essential word is kindness, she's showing kindness. There's so many examples of this in life.

I think I thought about this and when I went and researched it. I said, "Yeah, that's amazing." Tim Tebow, the quarterback and now baseball player, has just developed ministries of kindness that you should research, it's remarkable. I had heard this story about how he took a special needs young woman, a teenage young woman out to a prom, got a limo, dressed up in a tux, did this a number of years ago, and now it's developed into a whole ministry that he and his wife do. And it's called The Night to Shine, they do for special needs kids and set them up, making them feel precious, making them feel special. Well, it's just one small part of the kind of kindness that Tim Tebow has been doing in the name of Christ for years. When he was the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, and he led them to their first playoff victory. And this is in 2012, in seven years. Every game when he was starting quarterback for the Broncos, he chose someone that was going through a trial, suffering. It could be a teenage boy or girl, could be an older man, whatever brought them to the Broncos game and just showed them the day of their life. And in the hour that followed that incredible victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, when the world was going crazy over Tim Tebow, and there were 9,000 tweets per second for that hour, he was spending that hour with….Bailey Knaub was her name, a young girl, teenage girl who had been through 73 surgeries, and he was just totally focused on her after the game, for the hour after the game. "Did you get enough to eat? Did you have a great time?" "Yes, sir." Incredible. And so it wasn't just what he did, it’s how he did it. 

I picture the “not just what you do, but how you do it” from a scene in the movie, Ben-Hur, the old Ben-Hur movie with Charlton Heston. And Charlton Heston is condemned to the galley, to become a galley slave, and then condemned really to die as a galley slave. Then he's marched by foot across the desert to the port city, and they're not.…he's dying, probably literally dying of thirst, and he collapses to the ground. They're at a well, and all of the prisoners are being given water by the soldiers, and they’re throwing gorges with water at him and they're just trying to get drops of water, but the guard is singling Charlton Heston and saying, "No water for him." Jesus in the story, before he had begun his public ministry, comes over and Heston's on the ground. He picks up his head, he takes the water and washes his face with it tenderly, and then lifts his head, pours the water into his mouth. It isn't just giving the water, the Roman soldiers were doing that, but they're throwing it at him. Jesus did it with these tender hands of love and literally saved his life in the story, he later comes around and comes to faith in Christ. So this is the act of kindness. It's not just what you do, but it's how you do it. 

Now, how does our Christianity enable us to be kind? Well, first of all, we see the kindness of God to us. As Titus says, "When the kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of good deeds we have done, but because of his washing of rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit, the kindness of God in saving us." And then he puts the spirit of kindness, the Holy Spirit, who's depicted as a dove coming down from heaven, he puts the spirit of kindness in us so that we do good works, we yearn to do good works in such a way that it will bless other people. So again, this is a matter for looking in the mirror of God's Word and asking your conscience, “Am I a kind person? Would the people around me say that I'm characterized by good deeds, a river of good deeds done with a gentleness and under light?”

That's what kindness is. Is that happening in my life? And again, it's gonna be that “painful delight,” we're gonna see the pain of how unkind we frequently are, but hopefully we're also gonna see evidence that God has worked some kindness in us, but we want more, and so we have hope. We look ahead for the rest of our lives and say, I could be an incredibly kind person the rest of my life in the spirit of this text. And not only that, when I get to heaven, I'm gonna be perfected. In the spirit of kindness, I will spend eternity in perfect love in heaven. So I want to give you a sense of the pain of the conviction. I want you to see the ways that you've been unkind. I wanna see it in my life, so that we can hate that sin and move away from it, and then in hope say yes, but I know that I'm alive, 'cause I feel the pain. I know I'm alive because there's evidence of fruit too, but boy, I want more, I wanna put the sin to death, the unkindness to death, and now I wanna start living more and more as I've never done before. Living for the glory of God and goodness in other people's lives. 

Now, if you having clicked in here today are not a Christian, I'm so glad that you have come to this livestream, and what I want you to do is I want you to feel the attraction of the kindness of Jesus, our Savior, the kindness of God. Let me read this text again. This is Titus 3:3-6, "At one time we were….we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures, we lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God, our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy, He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit whom He poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ, our Savior." I'm pleading with you like I did to that guy on the plane, come to Christ, swim in the ocean of His kindness. Understand how long-suffering he's been to you and just swim in the grace and the mercy. Jesus died on the cross for all of our sins of un-lovingness. He died on the cross for that 'cause we were foolish and deceived and hating one another, but Jesus took all of that on Himself and died, and on the third day, God raised Him to life, and He gives us the spirit of a new resurrected life by which we can be long-suffering, patient with each other, and by which we can show kindness to one another. Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank You for the Word of God. I thank You for the pain, and I thank You for the delight. And God, I pray that You would continue to work both of these aspects in us. Show us our sinfulness, show us our impatience. The fact that we're not very long-suffering, we don't put up with much, show us our unkindness and then turn it all around. Lord, make us incredibly patient with other sinners as You've been patient toward us, and then Lord open up the fountain of our hearts that we would just have a river of good deeds of kindness shown to the people in our lives. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:1-3. The main subject of the sermon is how love is of greater value than even the greatest spiritual gifts.

I'd like to ask that you turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13, and we're gonna begin this next phase of our walk through this incredible book, 1 Corinthians. As we get to this chapter, I would say, perhaps one of the most famous chapters in all the Bible, I have the privilege again and again of officiating weddings, and I would say probably two-thirds of the weddings I've officiated, this has been one of the scriptures that people have chosen to read. And it's right to do that. So we can celebrate Christian love at a Christian wedding, a Christian marriage. And yet, these words a long time ago ceased to be sweet wedding poetry for me, there is a toughness to 1 Corinthians 13. 

Once you start meditating on this definition, this comprehensive definition of what love is and what love isn't, how it affects us, and what will happen if we don't have it, it is a very strong chapter. To some degree, you feel.…you know that expression, like we're being put through the wringer. I think about that. I think over a century ago, my grandmother used one of those old-style washing machines. You can picture a big kind of tub with sudsy water and you're taking the dirty garment and putting it in there, and you're racking it and rubbing it on this rack and pulling it up and it's dripping and you're rubbing it some more and then you put it through the wringer as it squeegees out all of this dirty water and you look at it and it needs to be washed again. And so it is, I feel like, we go carefully step by step through 1 Corinthians 13, we feel like we're being put through the wringer, and I think we need to have not too light a view or too heavy a view of this chapter.

And so week after week, I'm going to wanna go both sides, I want this chapter to have its way with us, I want it to work us over, I'm going to make an argument in the weeks that we have to study this chapter that this is a pure distillation of the Law of God horizontally, one to another, the second great commandment. And as law, it's gonna work us over, it's not here to tell us how wonderful we are and how incredible we are and how good at loving, it's to show us our faults and our flaws and our deficiencies. So we can't have too light a view of it as a kind of fluffy wedding poetry, but we can't be crushed by it either. It ends up.…1 Corinthians 13 ends up in heaven. It ends up with heavenly love, and we someday, brothers and sisters, through the ministry of the gospel and through the transformation of glorification, we are going to be perfected in love, so we don't wanna be crushed by it either, we wanna have a serious walk through this chapter and find ways that we need to grow and develop in love, but we also need to be filled with hope, and so to that end, let's look at the heaviness of this chapter and let's try to understand.

And as I look at it, I feel like this chapter is designed to put sin to death in our lives, that we would mortify loveless-ness in our lives, it's designed to kill us, that it may give us life. Jesus said that the Christian life really is a life of learning how to die. He said in Luke 9:23, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” So there is a daily dying to self, and this chapter which defines perfect horizontal love toward other people, it commands me to die to myself constantly. I've said many times before that we sinners from birth, from infancy, have a fanatical commitment to self. Recently, my daughter, Jenny and her husband Steven, gave birth to our first grandchild, Sola. Sola Grace, named after “by grace alone”, what a wonderful name. And she's a sweet baby, she's….she seems relatively easy to care for and has a sweet disposition, but she is, like all babies, fanatically committed to self, and her mom and dad know this, that very much she is going to get her own way or want her own way and demand it. And it's gonna get more and more. 

So it is with all children, we have been that way from infancy. Now, 1 Corinthians 13 is a powerful remedy to that relentless bent of the flesh toward selfishness, toward feeding of the self, if you look at the 15 statements that Paul makes about what love is and what love isn't, you realize the flesh is opposed to all of them, the flesh is impatient, the flesh is unkind and jealous, the flesh is boastful and arrogant and rude, the flesh most definitely seeks its own pleasure relentlessly, the flesh is easily provoked, the flesh definitely keeps a record of wrongs done to it. The flesh does not delight in the truth, but rejoices in evil, the flesh bears nothing, it believes the worst about other people, it has no hope in the relationship and gives up on other people quickly. That's what the flesh does. 

Every single one of the 15 assertions that Paul makes about love calls us to a kind of death, to spiritual warfare, that we would put the flesh to death. Now, the good news of the gospel, as I've said, is that God knows that we can never produce or manufacture this kind of supernatural love on our own, our salvation is a work of grace from the beginning to the end. It is the very thing, the cross and the empty tomb of Jesus Christ are brought into the world and into our lives to produce that we would become supernaturally loving people. This is the work the Spirit wants to do in us. So for a number of weeks, we are going to be walking through this chapter. We're gonna slow down. We're not gonna hurry through it. I already have written, I think, four more sermons on this, and I'm not even beyond verse seven, I think, or six, something like that, so we're gonna take our time and we're gonna let the Holy Spirit do its work on us in reference to love. Now, other than the Holy Spirit, and our dear friend, the Apostle Paul, one of my guides through these sermons will be Jonathan Edwards, a great Puritan, New England Puritan pastor from the 18th century who preached.…now get this, 16 sermons through these 13 verses in the year 1738. The revival at Northampton, Mass. had already happened a few years before that, the first Great Awakening was still a few years off, and so in between, he preached this series of sermons to exhort the church to a life of daily love with one another, and it's a marvelous work, a detailed work. I'm not gonna preach, I don't think, 16 sermons in 13 verses, but I'm gonna lean heavily. These sermons were gathered in a volume called “Charity and Its Fruits”, and I would commend it to you. You can read it online, it's public domain, and I'll be leaning on his insights again and again.

Now, I wanna begin by saying that love is the supreme goal of our salvation, this is what our salvation is meant to do to make us love. Edwards put it this way, all the virtues that are saving and that distinguishes true Christians from others are summed up in Christian love. He also says, notice what excellent things are being mentioned as worthless without love, the most excellent things that have ever belonged to natural man, the most excellent privileges and the most excellent performances are nothing without love. So things such as speaking in tongues, prophesying fathoming the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, possessing all true knowledge, laying down one's life as a martyr, giving everything that one possesses to the poor and needy, these are some of the greatest privileges. And some of the greatest performances there could ever be on earth, and Paul says all of them are worthless without love, if even these most excellent things, privileges and performances are worthless without love, then love must truly be the sum and substance of our Christian religion. And I think it is. Now, I think if we look at the two great commandments that Jesus gave, he was asked, What are the greatest commandments of the law, or which is the greatest commandment in the law? Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it, Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” So therefore, love really is the sum of what God is working in us by His grace. Paul makes a similar assertion in Romans 13:8-10, “He who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law. The commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not covet, and whatever other commandments there may be are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” So everything that Christian salvation works in the soul is ultimately summed up in this one word, love, now love vertically for God above all else, that we would love God more than any creature. Above all things that we would love God with all of our heart, soul and mind. But 1 Corinthians 13 is not primarily or first and foremost about vertical love, love for God, it is definitely about horizontal love that we should have for one another. Now, what do we mean by love? We use this word all the time, don't we? It's remarkable how the same four-letter word, the same English word for love is used for such a wide range of experiences. 

Like, I love my wife, I love our dog, I love my new suit, I love going to the beach, I love seafood. I love college football, I love chocolate chip ice cream. I love Jesus Christ. Now if any of you know me, you know that that list does not entirely refer to me, but we use those expressions for everyday life experience. The same word, really, I love chocolate chip ice cream and I love Jesus Christ who died for me. We use the same word.

Now, the Greeks had different words for love, for example, sexual love, eros. Family affection or natural affection like a parent would have a mother would have for her infant, storgē. Brotherly affection that we would have for friends, philía, and then a morally pure self-denying love, agápe, which is the focus here. Sometimes those words are used interchangeably in various verses, but those are different aspects of love, but we in English, we just have this one word, love. Now, Jonathan Edwards defined love in this way, that by which.…love is that by which something is dear or precious to another, that by which something is dear or precious. But he goes into much greater detail in another great work he wrote, which is Treatise on Religious Affections and in Treatise on Religious Affections, he said that the human heart has a twin ability, a capacity first to understand something in terms of its nature and its behaviors, etcetera. That's more of a scientific knowledge and evaluation of something. And then secondly, to be attracted to or repulsed from that thing, to a greater or less degree. So attraction would be that by which we use the word like, or liking or love, and then repulsion by which we use the word disliking even to hatred. And in my own heart, I've had a sense of a number line of affections with zero being perfect indifference and then the positive being liking on into loving, and then the negative being disliking on into hating.

We do this all the time, and so therefore, I tend to think of it as the heart's capacity to be attracted like a magnet, or conversely to be repulsed, but we're talking about positively love, that our heart is attracted, that by which something or someone is dear to us or we're drawn to it. Now, when applied to human beings as in this chapter, it has to do with a heart disposition. Affections toward other people. Now, what you love and what you hate ultimately define you as a person.

In Hebrews 1:9, it speaks of the Father's love for the Son and why he loves him and esteems him so highly. In Hebrews 1:9, it says, “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.” That's the Father's commendation of the Son. Dear son, my son, whom I love. It's because you love righteousness and hate wickedness, that you're the greatest of all human beings, it defines you as a person, what you love and what you hate. Now, let's take this chapter 1 Corinthians 13 and set it in context.

We are walking through 1 Corinthians, been doing that for a long time now, took a break, but now we've come back to it, and we're in the middle of a section in which Paul is writing to this sadly very, very talented gifted church, but dysfunctional in so many ways, he's writing them. 1 Corinthians 12:1 about spiritual gifts. Special abilities that God gives through the Holy Spirit to build up the body. Special abilities. Like speaking in tongues, prophecy, giving administration, special abilities. So we've got three chapters on this, 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14, Now the Corinthians were fractious and divided and prideful and arrogant, and some of them are very boastful about their spiritual gifts, they thought very highly of themselves, they really effectively could say to others, I don't need you, like my gifts are so great, I don't have any need for you. And others were kind of buying into that and feeling very crushed by the whole thing and were saying, You don't need me, and so Paul gives this beautiful image in 1 Corinthians 12 of the body with many members, and the members are all working together. 1 Corinthians 12:12, “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.”

And so he is working on this arrogant attitude or this crushed attitude that you would not think either too highly or too lowly of your gifts. As he gets to 1 Corinthians 13, he's looking at the heart attitude you have toward your brothers and sisters, toward other people, while you use your gift, this is vital that they would use their gifts in love for one another, so he introduces this love chapter at the end of chapter 12:31 with these wonderful words, I will now show you the most excellent way. So this is the most excellent way that you should use your gifts, and that is love.

Now, he begins with the gift of tongues. Tongues without love, he says, is empty noise. Look at verse 1, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I'm only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol.” So I think the Corinthians, those that had the gift of tongues were very proud of that gift, it was a supernatural gift, it elevated them like in their pagan days, the frenzy in the Oracle of Delphi and all that to be touched by the divine of the supernatural and be able to speak in tongues, it elevated, they were very arrogant, very proud of their gifts, so Paul shows them how vital love is compared to the gift of tongues, and he uses extreme language really in all three of these verses, if I take the gift and push it to its extreme. 

And I don't have love. It's really worthless ultimately. So he uses the word if. If, if, if, if, if… Kind of like this, even though I were to have the gift of tongues up to the nth degree, the tongues of men and of angels, even if I had the most excellent speaking gift ever. So he zeros in on the tongue of men and of angels, whatever that could be, what are the tongues of angels? Just we could imagine eloquence, the ability to just move people with our language and to be able to speak languages immediately and with a flourish. Just a gift of communication, preachers in particular, I think are known and celebrated often for their eloquence. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople lived from 347 to 407. His name literally means “golden mouth”, wouldn't you love to be called the golden mouth? Like you can just speak and people melt, just amazing. Or John Bunyan, who is a tinker, that is a repairer of pots and pans and sharpener of knives, very much a blue collar guy, not educated. But he had an amazing gift of language, he was an incredible preacher, and we see his gift of language, of course, in Pilgrims Progress, but he was an amazing preacher, and John Owen the great Puritan theologian loved to go hear him preach. 

Well, John Owen was an aristocrat, very well known, and a friend of the king, and the king said to him, “Why do you go hear that tinker prattle?” He was very disdainful of Bunyan, 'cause he's a low class lower class person, and Owen said, “May it please Your Majesty, if I could possess that tinker’s ability to move men by words, I would surrender immediately all of my learning.” Just his ability to move people by eloquence. George Whitfield, perhaps one of the most eloquent, passionate preachers of the Gospel in church history, had an amazing gift of eloquence, so much so that an actor named Garak said these words... Heard him preach and said he could move... Whitfield could move men to tears by simply pronouncing the word Mesopotamia. 

It's like, wow, I mean to have the ability to melt people by saying Mesopotamia. Charles Spurgeon was known as the Prince of Preachers, probably one of the most eloquent speakers of the English language ever. He went up without any notes at all, and just all you have to do is read a Spurgeon sermon and say, how could this level of eloquence flow through anyone's mind? But he said this about eloquence, “Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost.” What we want is to win souls, they're not won by flowery speeches. So eloquence, the tongues of men and of angels, highly esteemed among human beings. But Spurgeon's right, souls are not saved by eloquence, they're saved by the spirit of God, mediated through people who really care about other people, who deeply love other people who are shattered by the spiritual lostness and the condition of other people.

Robert Murray-M'Cheyne was one such man. He ministered in the first half of the 19th century. He moved thousands in Scotland to faith in Christ and died young, very young, but it was not his eloquence that saved souls. I read an account once of a young pastor that went to the site where M'Cheyne had ministered years and years later, and he didn't see the spiritual power in his own ministry and wanted to connect with whatever it was that was happening in M'Cheyne's ministry. And there was an old man there who actually had heard M'Cheyne preach, and he was the caretaker at M'Cheyne's church, and this young pastor went and he said, “Tell me what is the secret of the amazing influence of Robert Murray M'Cheyne.” And the old man took the young pastor inside the church into M'Cheyne's study, he said, “Sit down here at the desk, now put your elbows left and right here, prop your face up on it and weep, weep, weep for the people you're about to talk to. Weep for those who will hear you. Weep for their souls, then get up and preach.” So as I look at that and it's like my heart has to be knit together with the work that God is doing through the words, it's not enough to have the tongues of men and of angels, if there's no heart of love for other people, tongues without love is worthless.

Paul said, "I would be a tinkling brass or a clanging gong if I had no love." So you can picture that. I've been near Buddhist temples, I was near one in Kathmandu, Nepal, and there's all these little tinkling things like wind chimes everywhere. You can picture that and same thing in Shinto shrines in Japan, there's these gongs and it's nothing, it's meaningless, just empty noise, maybe for in our culture, you know these little wind-up monkeys that have those little cymbals going…[vocalization] Like that. 

So that you could picture, it's just what truth, what power is coming from that? None. It's just empty noise. Tongues that do not flow from love are worthless. So imagine then, let's make it very practical, someone getting up in front of the Corinthian congregation filled with pride, filled with self-focus, filled with self-love, speaking in tongues better than anyone ever has before, he has no love for the congregation at all, the only thing he wants from the congregation is praise and commendation back for himself, completely selfish. Paul's saying, "That whole display is worthless, worthless." It's a wind chime at the time, it achieves nothing of eternal significance. Then he goes from tongues to prophecy and knowledge. Prophecy and knowledge without love are nothing.

Look at verse 2, "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing." And Paul will argue in the next chapter that prophecy is the greatest, the most impactful of all spiritual gifts. Prophecy is the ability to speak the word of God directly by revelation from God through the prophet to the people, so that the prophet can say, "Thus says the Lord” and out comes the Word of God. Though the Corinthians greatly esteemed tongues, Paul will want them, he'll argue in chapter 14, that they should yearn even more and esteem even more of the gift of prophecy because of the impact it has on people's hearts. 1 Corinthians 14:24-25, it says, "If an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all, and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare so he will fall down and worship God exclaiming, "God is really among you."

That's the impact of prophecy used by the power of the Holy Spirit, but what Paul is saying here in chapter 13 is, "The prophet who has no love is nothing." Now, certainly a genuine prophecy from God, the words can have impact even if the prophet himself is a worthless man, and we know this. For example, Balaam, Balaam spoke true prophecies about Jesus centuries out. "I see him but not near. A star will arise in Jacob." The words were true, but Balaam was worthless, he was a worthless man. Though he spoke true prophecies, he led Israel into sin with Moabite women and was slaughtered as a result, he ends up a quintessential example of a false teacher and false prophet in 2 Peter 2.

So he can speak true words, but himself, he is worthless. Or again, think of Caiaphas, the high priest, who was Jesus's bitter-sworn enemy. But amazingly, John says that he opened up his wicked mouth and spoke a true prophecy about Jesus saying it would be better for one man to die and the nation not perish. And then John interpreted the prophecy. By this, he was speaking of Jesus's death not only for the Jewish nation, but also for the scattered children of God to bring them together and make them one. But Caiaphas himself was a wicked person and it gained him nothing. So it is with a prophet who has no love, he is nothing.

Paul takes this gift even up to the extreme, not only if a prophet speaks God's words, but even if he can probe the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, he can fathom all mysteries, he can plumb the depths of the infinite mysteries. Another word, mystery, in The New Testament has to do with something secretly determined in the heart and mind of God as part of redemptive history before the foundation of the world, but then revealed in time. That's how the word mystery is used in the New Testament. And so along comes this prophet who can fathom it right away, he understands exactly what God's doing in all of these New Testament mysteries, and not only that, but he possesses all knowledge, all doctrinal knowledge, he speaks of an individual with the greatest prophetic gift, with a theological perceptivity to be able to probe the deepest mysteries of the Christian religion, and there's no question that stumps him.

Anything you could ask him about Christian doctrine, he can answer. Much like Solomon on issues of wisdom, when the Queen of Sheba came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom. First Kings 10:3, it said, "Solomon answered all her questions, nothing was too hard for the king to explain to her." Now, such a giftedness would be mind-boggling to have an individual, this level of prophetic gift, you'd think a person like this would be extremely valuable, worthy of tremendous reward in Heaven. But Paul says, "Even such an extraordinary person, if he has not love, he is nothing."

Now, we want to be a church that knows doctrine, we want to be a church that knows the deepest mysteries of the faith, we want to be able to have accurate knowledge, but Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8, "Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies” or builds up. We want knowledge, it's true, we wanna learn as much of the Bible doctrine as we possibly can have, it's not a good thing to be doctrinally ignorant. The church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. We want to know the truth, but truth without love is nothing. And then Paul goes beyond that to the gift of faith. Faith without love is nothing. Look at verse 2, "If I have a faith that can move mountains but have not love, I am nothing." This is the gift of faith now, the gift of faith is something beyond justifying faith, all Christians have faith, but some have the gift of faith, and that's the ability to perceive the hidden things that God is doing, and then even to be instrumental in moving the mighty arm of God to do those things that he's going to do, especially by prayer.

So the gift of faith exerts itself through prayer. By faith, we're not making God do something contrary to his will. But Jesus said in Matthew 17:20, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there and it will move.’ Nothing will be impossible for you." So like Elijah, who we just studied in James 5, was a man of faith in prayer, and God laid it on his heart, the corruption of the Jewish nation, and he laid it on his heart to pray that there would be no rain and fulfillment of the curses of Moses, and there was no rain, and he linked the the going of the rain and the coming back of the rain to a man, a man of faith, a man of prayer. And so we saw this in James 5:17-18. “Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again, he prayed, and the heavens gave rain and the earth produces crops."

So this is great. It's a great gift. The gift of faith. So a man or a woman with a faith that can move mountains would be amazing, an extraordinary gift, an incredible blessing we would think to the church, a mover and a shaker in our time, somebody that actually is almost shaping history right before our eyes, by his or her amazing prayers. I think about John Knox, the great Scottish rWeformer in the 16th century, he was a fiery man, but also a man of strong faith, and who pled in prayer, saying, "Give me Scotland or I'll die." He's gonna passion. He wanted to win his countrymen fellow Scots to a genuine faith in the reformed gospel, in the true gospel, away from medieval Catholicism and its wrong understandings of the gospel. He wanted to win individuals. He was a man of prayer, fiery preacher and fiery man of prayer, but Mary, his lifelong enemy was Mary Queen of Scots, and she said, "I fear John Knox's prayers more than all the assembled armies of Europe." So talk about a man of great faith in prayer, but Paul says, "Even such a man or a woman of faith exerted in this kind of prayer is nothing if not moved by love."

And now we get to verse 3, which I consider one of the toughest verses in the entire Bible, it's really quite remarkable. Talk about being put through the wringer. Look at it. Sacrificial, self-sacrificial generosity, even to the nth degree, even to the farthest degree is... Without love is nothing. Verse 3, "If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love I gain nothing."

This is probably the most extraordinary statement of all that we're gonna study this morning, the gift of giving, pushed to the absolute extreme, here is an individual who actually does what Jesus urged or commanded the rich young ruler to do, sell all you possess and give to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven, then come follow me. He wouldn't do it. But this individual, in Paul's statement, verse 3, does do it, he gives everything he possesses to the poor. More than that, that's not enough, he lays down his life as a martyr, and not just any martyr, but one who dies an agonizing death in the flames, to be burned at the stake. It's a horrible death. The level of giving here in this verse is almost incalculable, it's almost inconceivable, it's almost immeasurable.

Everything this man has on earth, he gives away, but if he has not love while he's doing it, he actually gains nothing. Now that may be taken one of two ways. The Kingdom of Heaven is not advanced at all by such a gift, that he gains nothing for Christ, or that he himself on judgment day in terms of rewards will gain nothing, and I think it's more likely the second, that he himself will get nothing for it. Like Jesus says in Matthew 6, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you have received your reward in full. You get nothing on Judgment Day." Do you not feel the way to this? Very few of us would ever get to this level of self-sacrifice and self-denial and love, but if you don't have love while you're doing it, then you gain nothing.

So this past week when we're doing... Talking about the doctrine of rewards, I added this as a key plank in understanding what God rewards, you have to have a loving demeanor in your heart, a love in your heart while you do what you do, or you gain nothing. Now, it's very important for us to understand, therefore, love is defined both as an action and an attitude, both sides are important, not the one without the other, not the other without the one. The Bible makes it very plain that a loving feeling that never results in any actions is worthless, too. First John 3:16-18 says, "This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth."

Well, that's true as well. So love that does not sacrifice and produce actual works, actual money given, if that's the need, actual service, works of service is worthless. Faith without deeds is dead. We understand that. Love inevitably produces actions and love actually the greatness of love can be measured in the level of sacrifice, the more of a self-denying sacrifice it is, the greater love it is. Jesus said that in John 15:13, "Greater love has no one than this that he lay down his life for his friends." So true love always results in sacrificial actions, that is true, but 1 Corinthians 13 gives the other side of the equation, there has to be a demeanor, an attitude, a heart of love behind the action, or it's worthless.

There's a heart aspect, an affection, a horizontal delight in the other person. Think about the 2 Corinthians 9, the Macedonians, who gave money to the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. You remember that? And Paul talks about their attitude. Second Corinthians 9:7, "Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion. Because God loves a cheerful giver." So there it is, there's a heart of affection, a heart of delight in the giving, the Macedonians begged for the opportunity to give, they yearned to be able to give because their hearts were knit together with their brothers and sisters among the Jews in Judea, in Jerusalem.

So therefore, it is possible to give even a ton and do it without love, to do it in an unloving manner. There could be a guilt manipulation side to it, kind of like this, "I hope you realize what this has cost me, you do know. This was a big deal for me." That kind of thing. So there's that manipulation that, "Do you understand what the cost was to me?" Proverbs 23:6-8 talks about such a person. Gives us some advice. It says Proverbs 23:6-8, "Do not eat the food of a stingy man, do not crave his delicacies, for he's the kind of man who's always thinking about the cost. ‘Eat and drink,’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you, you will vomit up the little that you have eaten, and you will have wasted your compliments." 

So this is fundamental to love, the person giving has to expand his own heart to take in the person and delight in their blessedness through the giving. That's what Paul means by love. Jonathan Edwards said this, "In some sense, the most benevolent, generous person in the world seeks his own happiness in doing good to others, because he places his happiness in their good. His mind is so enlarged as to take them as it were into himself, thus when they are happy, he feels it, he partakes with them, he's happy in their happiness." This is so far from being inconsistent with the free-ness of love, that on the contrary, free benevolence and kindness consist in it. This is what love actually is, your heart expands to someone's suffering or somebody going through something, and you want to take them in and make them blessed, make them happy.

Now, I believe a lot of Christian teaching that I've heard in my life is against this. I've heard again and again, love is an action. It's an action. It's not a feeling. Love is not a feeling. Christian love is not a feeling, it's an action. You've heard that, and I know it's leaning so heavily on 1 John 3 that I just read, but what I'm saying is, no, that's not true. Christian love is an action and a feeling, it's a feeling or a sense in the heart that leads to action, and without the one, it's worthless. That's the very point that Paul's making here in verse 3. John Piper makes much of this in his book, Knowing God, in his chapter on love, I know some of you have read it, and you remember that phrase, "dutiful roses".…remember that? Where the husband says to his wife, "So I want you to know, I get nothing out of this. We're told that this is Christian love, is what we call disinterested benevolence. I get nothing out of it. I just want you to realize I get nothing out of this. I've read on the calendar that today is our anniversary, and in our culture there is the giving of roses on anniversary, so I am hereby giving you 12 roses in fulfillment of the rules of our culture. I want you to know I feel nothing, no personal delight out of this given. Here you are. Happy anniversary." I mean, who wants roses like that? 

Honey, if you don't enjoy giving them, then don't give them, you need to expand your heart and say, "I'm happy because you're happy, and the roses are a means to that end." So 1 Corinthians 13 implies our hearts must be engaged, they need to be delighted. Like Jesus died on the cross for the joy that was set before him, 'cause he wanted to expand his heart and include wretched, miserable sinners like you and me. And so there was a joy even in the sorrow of giving up his body on the cross. That's what love is." So as we look at this, we think, "How could this even happen? How could love to this nth degree be done without... Or how could gifts to this nth degree be done without love? How could someone speak in the tongues of men and of angels without love?"

Well, there's no horizontal expansion, it doesn't take his brothers and sisters in and say, "I want you to be blessed by this." How does someone have the gift of prophecy and an ability to fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and have not loved? Well, it's all about him, it's all about his exquisite knowledge, his heart is enlarged or expanded to take in others and say, "I want you to be blessed by the truths of God's word." How does someone give all they possess to the poor and surrender his body to the flames, but have not loved? His heart's not expanded to include them in the sacrifice. That's what it is. Fundamentally then, love is a heart disposition, an attraction in the heart toward another human being or a group of human beings, so that our blessedness is included in their blessedness. We want them to be blessed, and so we give. And it's described in the words that will follow, we'll study, God willing, over the next few weeks. “Love is patient, love is kind, it doesn't envy, it doesn't boast, it's not easily angered. It's not proud, it's not rude, it's not self-seeking, it keeps no record of wrongs.” These things we're gonna walk through. If that's who you are, while you do your spiritual gift ministry, then you will be blessed.

So applications. First and foremost, I'm very aware that God in his kind Providence brings all different kinds of people to this live stream to hear this, and I wanna speak first and foremost to you who are not yet a Christian. If I could just say before anything else can happen, before you can genuinely love, you need to be loved by God through Jesus Christ. We love because He first loved us. And so, God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And so I plead with you, repent of your sins, repent of all of your loveless-ness, all sin is loveless-ness. Repent of the ways you've been selfish, and the way that you've fed your flesh, and the way you've not loved others, all of these things are sins more than we could count. David said, "My sins are more numerous than the hairs of my head." All of them are atoned for in an ocean of God's grace and love through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection from the dead. So repent of your sins, trust in Christ, and then see what God will do. He will take out your heart of stone and he'll give you a heart of love, and out of that heart of love, you will be able, finally, to love others as the Lord has loved you.

Now, if you are a Christian, I just wanna say let 1 Corinthians 13, first and foremost, be hard on you, let it work you over, let it put you through the wringer, let it show you the ways that you have not been loving, let it show you the loveless-ness in your life. And then let it move you to prayer. Say, "Lord, as I see this pattern of loveless-ness in me, as I see this happening, would you please transform me? Would you please work in me a genuine heart of love for others? A genuine heart of love for my wife, for my husband, for my kids, a genuine heart of love for my brothers or my sisters, a genuine heart of love for other church members? Work this in me." Go through each element of 1 Corinthians 13 and pray it back to God. And then finally, be hopeful, like I said, I don't want to be crushing you, but I don't want to be too light on you either, so that did not crush you. I want you to know if you're a genuine Christian, if you're born again, someday, these words will be perfectly fulfilled in you. Heaven is a world of love, and you will spend all eternity loving your brothers and sisters perfectly as the Lord Jesus has loved you. Close with me in prayer. 

Father, thank you for the time that we've had to study your wonderful word. I'm delighted in it, even though it's hard. First Corinthians 13:3, one of the hardest verses I've ever meditated on, but Lord, I want to have that level of self-denying sacrifice in my life, I want to have that kind of love in my life, and I want my brothers and sisters who are hearing me, to be willing to deny ourselves and to give as much of ourselves and our money as we can, but to do it with a heart of love in the pattern of Jesus Christ. Father, I thank you for this time. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 12:14-26. The main subject of the sermon is how God wisely arranges members in Christ's body, the Church.

Well, as Ron said, we are returning now to 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, so if you have a copy of the Bible, wherever you are, open to it there. And it's exciting. What a study it's been for us. It's been about, I guess, four months since we were last in this marvelous book, and so much has happened in that time. We went through the Christmas and New Year seasons and had some messages connected with that. And then we began our split services, as a result of our building renovation through More Than a Building, and so, half of us were here in Fellowship Hall where I am now, and half of us upstairs in the upper room. And over the next 12 weeks, as Ron mentioned, we had a marvelous time walking through the Book of James. However, six weeks ago, as you all know, we suspended our live services, our morning assembly, because of COVID-19, and we've been in that mode as many churches have been across the country, and I began live streaming sermons. Hard to believe this is my sixth live stream sermon. And we finished up the book of James and then had a time in Acts 17, Paul preaching in Athens, talking about evangelism and our responsibility to share the gospel.

And then last week, we looked at John 20 and the marvelous testimony of Thomas, so frequently called Doubting Thomas, as he looked at the resurrected Christ and said, "My Lord and my God." And Christians around the world celebrated the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we can do that every day. We should do it, and we do it again this week, but that was a special Sunday last week. Now, we turn back again to 1 Corinthians 12, and we're right in the middle of Chapter 12, and we are studying Paul's teaching on spiritual gifts. His treatment of this important topic goes for three chapters, 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14, all of them are nestled in that rather thorough treatment of the issue of spiritual gifts. And this morning we're going to look at the verse that you just heard Ron read for us, verses 14-26, on God's wisdom in arranging the Body of Christ.

Now, the human body is a masterpiece of God's creative power and of God's wisdom. It's one of the greatest marvels that God has made. I think it is the greatest marvel of God's creative power in the physical realm, in the physical universe. The human body is so amazing that the psalmist David said to God, addressing God directly in Psalm 139:13-14, he said, "For you created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well." So the body is made up of a diverse number of systems or parts, depends on how you look at it. And those are made up of a staggering number of diverse cells. Now, each of the body's systems, for example, the skeletal system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the respiratory system, digestive system, muscular system and others, each one of those systems has a unique role to play in the survival and the activity of the body in the world.

Now no one, I found out, really knows how many cells there are in the human body, but estimates put it as high as 10 to the 14th, that's one with 14 zeros after it. It's hard to even comprehend how big that number is. In the human brain alone we're told that there are as many neural interconnections as there are leaves in the Amazonian Rain Forest. That's in a single human brain, it's incredible. Now, unlike single-celled creatures like the paramecium, for example, the human body displays functional diversity with systems that are interdependent on each other. The cells in the respiratory system, for example, are dependent on the cells in the digestive system and the circulatory system to get them the nutrients they need to stay alive. So the marvels of the human body are on display whenever we see how people act or move in this world so skillfully. A number of years ago, Dr. Paul Brand wrote a book, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made." I commend it to you. Great study on the diversity of the systems in the body and the analogy with the body of Christ. 

And he was talking in that book about a concert pianist named Arthur Rubinstein, and he went to watch him play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". And this is what Dr. Brand wrote, "A piano performance is a ballet of fingers, a glorious flourish of ligaments and joints, tendons, nerves, muscles. I must sit near the stage to watch their minute movements. From my own careful calculations, I know that some of the movements required, such as the powerful arpeggios in Moonlight's third movement, are simply too fast for the body to accomplish consciously. Nerve impulses do not travel with enough speed for the brain to sort out that the third finger has just lifted in time, in order for the fourth finger to strike the next key. I marvel, too, at the slow lilting passages. A good pianist controls his or her fingers independently, so that when striking a two-handed chord of eight notes, each of the fingers exerts slightly different pressure for emphasis, with the melody note ringing the loudest. The effects of just a few grams, more or less, of pressure in a crucial pianissimo passage is so minuscule, only a sophisticated scientific laboratory could measure it. But actually, the human ear contains just such a laboratory and musicians like Rubinstein gain acclaim because discriminating listeners can savor the subtle nuances of control." 

That's a great quote, isn't it? And we see the marvels of the human body whenever we see someone exquisitely skilled at something. Take the staggering balance and coordination of gymnast Simone Biles, who is the most decorated gymnast in American history. When she does a back flip on the balance beam, and I come close to freaking out when I watch that, four inches wide, and she gets everything lined up and then does a back flip, but her brain is taking in constant information, spatial information, rotational information, balance information. There are 200 different categories of nerve cells that have been trained through really thousands of repetitions that enable her to stick that landing so perfectly.

Now, the human body that we're studying today, as an analogy, it's just one of several beautiful analogies of the body of Christ, of the Church. Others for example, are a temple rising in which God dwells by his Spirit. A bride, the Bride of Christ. A family, we are family with brothers and sisters. A nation, there are just different images. But the body analogy that's used here also in Romans 12, stresses unity and diversity. Unity and diversity. And that is the focus of this sermon. God's wisdom in arranging the parts of the body just as He wants them to be. So let's zero in now and look at the unity and the diversity of the body of Christ. There is one body, not many, and every born-again person, every person who hears the Gospel of Jesus Christ and trusts in Christ, believes it with repentance and faith becomes born again and instantly, a member of the body of Christ.

Look down at verse 12-13, at 1 Corinthians 12, it says the body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they all form one body. One body. So it is with Christ. Verse 13, "For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." Isn't that beautiful? What a beautiful picture of the unity of the Body of Christ. So Paul stresses this oneness, this unity here, and he does it throughout the chapter. Look at verse 20, "As it is, there are many parts but one body." And again, verse 27, "Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you a part or a member of it." So big picture, God is not doing many different works in the world, He's doing one grand, glorious, unified work. The unification of all believers, genuine believers in Christ, into one body worldwide.

And he does this remarkably, through the power of the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit. And Jesus spoke of this in John 10:16, the good shepherd passage, he says there shall be one flock and one shepherd worldwide. And so, He has to go out and gather people that are not of this group, the Jews, so that there'll be one flock, one shepherd. And then later in John 11:51-52, it says that Jesus died for the scattered children of God to bring them together and make them one. Isn't that beautiful? What a great image. Jesus dying on the cross to make all people one through faith in Christ. So given that we're coming from amazingly diverse backgrounds, this unity is even more vital for us to comprehend. As Paul wrote in Colossians 3:11, "Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, Barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all." So there's this one body. 

Now, this unity is mysteriously patterned after the Trinity. We Christians believe in one God who has eternally existed in three persons. Father, Son and Spirit, in perfect unity. Frankly, the unity of the Trinity is the mystery of it. We could imagine easily three gods, but one God and three persons, it boggles the mind. It's hard for us to understand. Just accept it by faith. But Jesus praying for the Church, praying for believers, patterns the unity of the Church after the Trinity. John 17:11, He says, "Holy Father, protect them, so that they may be one as we are one." And then later in that same prayer, John 17:22-23, Jesus said, "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one. I in them, and you in me, may they be brought to complete or perfect unity, to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." All right, so that happens instantly, a conversion, we are made one, and then as we progressively grow in unity with each other, the world observes and sees that marvelous unity, and that's powerful for the Gospel, that's His prayer there.

So, that's the unity. We have a present functional diversity in spiritual gifts. Paul is here in this chapter talking about spiritual gifts. Look back at verse 1. He says there in verse 1, "Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant." So we're coming back after four months to the topic of spiritual gifts. What are they? Good definition would be, spiritual gifts are special abilities given by the Holy Spirit, really by the triune God to each individual member of the body of Christ, unique to each one, a gift package, enabling each one to do ministries for the purpose of the final perfection of the body of Christ. Or put it simple, special abilities given for ministry. Each one of us has a spiritual gift package. Now, it's quite marvelous how unique those are. The Holy Spirit, when He converts someone, steps into a person's unique personality and history, transforms it, 'cause they were lost, now they're found, they were dead, now they're alive.

But He, in a marvelous way, uses the uniqueness of that person, as unique as our fingerprints, in combination with His own activity to make a unique spiritual gift package. It's not just one gift, but an array of abilities that comes together in a unique way in your life. I don't know that much at all about perfume. It's just dangerous, a dangerous illustration here. But they say that the perfume comes in a woman's... Mingles with her special body chemistry to give a unique aroma. All right, so I'll get corrected later by some sisters in Christ that tell me how that works. But I get that picture of the Holy Spirit coming and mingling with our unique personalities. So you look at Saul of Tarsus. He had a very clear personality and God transformed him at the core, but he had the same kind of driving, intense personality, only now for the building of the Body of Christ, so, it's marvelous. Now, he's already taught about spiritual gifts, various types of gifts and how they're given by the Trinity, as I said. Look back at verses 4-6, "There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all people."

So there's the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, working together. So the analogy of the human body is a powerful one. Unity in one body, but diversity in function. So we have different roles to play in the final perfection of the body of Christ, of the Church. Now, the purpose of spiritual gifts then is the maturity, the final perfection of the body of Christ. We get this more from Ephesians 4:13, where Paul there also talking about spiritual gifts, says, "Until we all reach unity in the faith, and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." So maturity, really perfection, is complete conformity to Christ, that's final salvation for everybody. So the spiritual gifts are given to bring every elect person, chosen before the foundation of the world, to final perfection in Christ. That's what the gifts are for. Isn't that marvelous? Isn't that weighty? And we have a role to play.

Now, the Corinthians were a significantly messed up church. I wouldn't say the most messed up church I've ever heard of, but heading in that direction. There was so much chaos in the Corinthian worship, and we're gonna find more about that in chapter 14. I think their pagan background led to this kind of chaotic worship life, but inside also there were pride problems. They had a lot of pride, and Paul has to address them again and again with their pride. And as we zero in on this morning's topic, it seems the more noteworthy gifted people were boasting about their gifts over the less notable gifted people. And this created a rift within the Body of Christ, kind of the spiritual gift haves versus the spiritual gift have-nots, so there's that kind of a rift. And Paul wants them to understand how much they really need each other. So he has to work both sides of the equation here in the passage we're looking at today. He has to address both of those, those who thought too lowly of their spiritual gifts and were therefore probably not using them enough or at all, versus those who thought too highly of their spiritual gift ministries, and were denigrating others, and they were being arrogant and boastful, and so, making God to some degree their enemy, 'cause God opposes the proud.

And so, its feelings or a sense that you have of your spiritual gifts, feelings of worthlessness on the one hand, versus feelings of self-sufficiency on the other. Feelings of worthlessness says effectively, "You don't need me. You don't need me." Conversely, feelings of self-sufficiency is, "I don't need you." Both sides of those he's addressing in this text. So let's go with those that were feeling too lowly about their gifts. Look at verse 15-19. "If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has arranged the parts of the body, every one of them, just as He wanted them to be." That's a key verse in the whole sermon, that's a key verse.

Verse 19, "If they were all one part, where would the body be?" So fundamentally, the ultimate focus here should be on God, God's goodness, God's wisdom, His kindness. God didn't mess up in what He made you to be. God is wise. So we have to think rightly about our gifts. You have to think rightly about yourself. As Paul says in Romans 12:3, "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought." So we'll come back to that verse later, but you need to think about yourself properly, how you consider. And really, ultimately, I think, it has to do with a holy contentment in your gift package and in the ministries that come, that you are delighted in it and then energetic with it. So if you see yourself too highly or too lowly, you will not function properly with your spiritual gift package.

Now, in these verses, I said, Paul's addressing the lowly, those that feel that they do not belong to the body. Those who think, "You don't need me," as who's addressing, "because I don't have one of those gifts, my gifts aren't important. I really have no contribution to make." So the attitude that you have toward your spiritual gift is vital. So just because the foot is not a hand, that doesn't mean it's not part of the body. Perhaps the foot is jealous of the hand, and why not? I mean, think about the foot, it's covered every day in our culture with socks and shoes. And it gets dusty as we go out and walk down the road, and it gets smelly. I won't say any more, but you know what I'm talking about. And it's just not as elegant and beautiful as the hand. The hand is visible, it's elegant, it's skillful. It has these dexterous minute movements. By the hands, a sculptor like Michelangelo can turn a block of marble into something living. You can see the tendons and the veins in the arm of the... He's just got these skillful fingers. We already talked about the skill of a pianist being able to play "Moonlight Sonata", the ability to play.

I doubt that any foot could attain that level of dexterity and play "Moonlight Sonata". Although there's probably somebody in the world that could at least try it. By the skills, the fingers of a surgeon, a skillful surgeon... We have number of skillful surgeons in our church that do amazingly dexterous skillful things with their fingers. By comparison to all that, what can the foot contribute? Well, we know very well how dependent we are on our feet. By our feet, we take our stand, we stand up, we face each other. By our feet, we make progress. By our feet, we walk. And so though the feet aren't as elegant and beautiful and graceful as the hand, they are indispensable to the body, they're necessary to the body, in its healthy function.

So if your spiritual gift is more obscure, speaking more directly, if your spiritual gift is more obscure and behind the scenes, you need to think of yourself as every bit as vital to the healthy functioning of the Church as those that are more out front, those that are more visible. So also he moves to the issue of the ear and the eye. Imagine the ear being jealous of the eye, and why not? I can see why. The eyes, the eyes are sparkling and beautiful and radiant with light, and they're entrusted with an incredibly important job to do. We know that we get more than 83% of our knowledge about the surrounding world through eyesight.

Whereas only 11% comes through hearing. The eyes are beautiful, they sparkle. You got different colors, blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. You think about a young couple getting to know each other, and it's very important for the man to know the color of his lady's eyes, not the shape of her ear. "How would you describe my ears?" That kind of thing. I guess that comes later in the relationship. But the eyes are so beautiful. Actually the ear, honestly, rather ugly. It's got a twisted curly kind of shape with this ear lobe hanging down. And I know numbers of people, women will decorate them with sparkling jewels and do the best they can for the ear, but it's still an ear. It doesn't even compare with an eye. 

But Paul says to the ear, "You are absolutely an important part of the body." The sense of hearing is entrusted to the strange-looking ear, and Paul gives us a rather grotesque image in verse 17. Look at it. He says, "If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?" How gross would that be? Think about it. A bunch of big eyeballs rolling around. That's so strange. It's a weird image, but He puts that in our minds. It's unable to hear, unable to walk. It's just an eyeball. So the sense of hearing is vital to a full and rich healthy life. Think about the delights of music. Think about the hearing by a mother of her child for the first time saying, "I love you, Mommy," just what that means for the mother to hear those sounds. Best of all, best of all is the hearing of the gospel. The hearing of the gospel.

The International Mission Board has different affinity groups. They've organized themselves worldwide into different affinity groups, which are roughly ethnic and geographic. So there's a European Affinity, a Sub-Saharan African affinity, etcetera. But there is one entire affinity group in the International Mission Board dedicated to a human capacity: hearing. Hearing. And I remember hearing the affinity group leader talking about why this is and how right it was to have an affinity group worldwide, for the entire world, for the hearing-impaired or for the deaf. And he said that in every culture, the deaf basically have the same problems and address the same issues in life, whatever culture they're in.

Can you imagine being deaf from birth and not being able to speak the language, etcetera, and so you're in your own island of soundlessness. And so they have to be addressed a certain way. And fundamentally, God has, in a marvelous way, arranged the ear to be able to hear. Yet, yet, lest the ear get a big head. Is that even an expression? But lest the ear get too arrogant? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? So God has arranged the nose now with the function of smell, even though scientists tell us that we only get 3.5% of the information about the shining world through our smell, through the sense of smell. But is not aroma a big part of the pleasure of eating? I mean, just think about it. When the smells waft from the kitchen, before the big meal, before Thanksgiving or a big...

"Smells so good," and it even... It's right there when you're lifting the food to your mouth, and the aroma comes up off the fork, and it's just part of the pleasure of eating. And think about the delights of this time of year when it comes to smell. The aromas of spring. Think what it smells like with a spring shower on a freshly mown field, what that smells like. Just so you can picture that in your mind. Or some of these fragrant flowering trees or wild flowers, different flowers like the magnolia or the lilac, and the world is just full of that sweet smell. 

Now all of the body's diverse capabilities combined to make a full healthy human experience in this world. That's Paul's point. No, they are not all equal in their impact on our lives. I would say, and researchers have shown one of the greatest fears human beings have is of losing their eyesight. It's one of the top five fears people have, is that they would become blind. And so we understand that eyesight has a greater impact on the way we live our lives than anything else. We get that, but we must see God's wisdom, God's wisdom in arranging the whole body, God's wisdom. It says, in fact, God has arranged the parts of the body, every one of them, just as He wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? We need to just stop and celebrate the wisdom, the goodness of God in all of this.

That's fundamentally the issue, about you thinking properly about your spiritual gift, that you would not question the goodness of God or the wisdom of God or the power of God, when it comes to how He has arranged you as a part of the body. So let me just stop right here in the middle of the sermon and just give some practical applications. Let me speak to you as a member of this church, of First Baptist Church, and let me just address, I don't know each of your situations, but perhaps you have not up to this point invested yourself much in any kind of ministry at all. Maybe you feel exactly like what we're addressing here, that your gifts are not worth discussing, they're really of no great value. 

This is exactly the situation Paul is addressing. You are not, you say, an upfront person. You don't have speaking skills maybe. You don't have amazing talents that cause people to talk about you for days afterward. Paul says God has still gifted you and He's arranged you and positioned you just as He wants you to be, you're still part of the body. And for the body, this local church, to be fully functional and be able to do the mission that God's given us to do in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. We're given a specific mission. He set before us open doors. We will not fully walk through those open doors, if every member does not use their gifts to do ministry. And so delight in the wisdom of God and how He's made you, discover what your gifts are, develop them and deploy them. I'm gonna say this again at the end of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop in the middle. Just find a ministry and do it based on your spiritual gifts. 

Now, let's address the other side of the equation, and that is the prideful ones. Don't think too highly of your gifts, either. Look at verses 20-22, "As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don't need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable..." That's powerful. So now I'm gonna bring in that verse that I alluded to briefly, but now talk a little bit more, Romans 12:3. Paul says, "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you." 

He's talking there directly about spiritual gifts. So Paul is attacking pride because pride is so offensive to God. In this case, the upfront people with the gifts of prophecy maybe, or the gifts of tongues, the gifts of teaching, are maybe even openly saying, or at least carrying themselves, as they're saying to the rest of the body, "I don't need you, I don't need you." So in this case, he has the eye speaking to the hand and the head speaking to the feet, saying that, "I don't need you." How foolish is that? The issue here is the beautiful interdependence of the body of Christ. And Paul says effectively, "Appearances can be deceiving. The parts of the body that seem to be weaker actually prove to be indispensable." Now, that word indispensable, translated indispensable, is it's urgent, it's necessary that those parts of the body are of vital necessity, he's arguing for. 

So here, I've gotta think about, what can you not live without? These would be the vital organs. So the heart, the intestines, the kidneys, all of those internal organs. I can just tell you as a squeamish individual, they are absolutely nothing to look at. I marvel at surgeons being able to look directly at it and not faint, so I'm grateful for that, but there's nothing to look at. You don't wanna see these indispensable parts of the body. They need to be covered with muscles and ribs and skin. But without them, we die. Without them, we die. So just because you're not an upfront, visible, presentable member, what Paul's saying is, "The church can't function without you." Every single member of the church is vital to the full fruitfulness, the healthy behavior and function of the body in its ministry.

Now, he goes from that to verses 22-25, to talk about the honor, the honor given to every member of the body. Look at those verses, "On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other." So he’s addressing now this issue of honor, and it's very, very important. There was a higher community honor given to certain members rather than to others.

Now, honor is a precious thing. I think it's actually a lower form of worship. We give worship to God, but we do give honor horizontally to others and there're verses that say that we should. It's appropriate to give honor, words of praise, words of affirmation. So the community trappings of the highest honor are the best seats at the banquet, the words spoken, lavish words of praise, everyone's speaking of these honored people and esteeming them highly, while others are never mentioned at all. So we're dealing with this issue of honor. Now, remember at the beginning of this book, 1 Corinthians, the problem of factions and divisions in the body, remember how one of you says, "I follow Paul," another, "I follow Apollos", another, "I follow Cephas," etcetera. And remember the answer that Paul gives by asking the question, "Is Christ divided?" He's arguing even there for a unity of the Body and not a elevation of superstars up to this high level where they end up becoming faction leaders, though those individuals didn't wanna be faction leaders, but that's how they were esteemed and honored. The unity of the Body of Christ should put an end to this kind of disproportional honor-giving.

Now this continues, I must say, to be a temptation to this present day. The cult of personality can surround some super-gifted church leaders. I remember going to a conference in Chicago and I saw friends of mine and they didn't desire this, they didn't seek it, but there were huge pictures from the chest up of these guys all dressed in black, stretchy t-shirts, which I found really interesting. And they were hanging from this major venue. I'm like, "Hmm, larger than life." But I knew those individuals when they weren't superstars, and again, they don't seek that kind of thing, but there is this tendency to this cult of personality, and it's just not helpful. Years and centuries ago, John Calvin, who was acclaimed across Europe as one of the great leaders and wrote letters to kings and his books were just game-changing books for people, etcetera. As he neared the end of his life, he gave specific orders about his burial that he should be buried at night in an unmarked tomb, and so he was. And the reason for that is he did not want his grave to be a shrine where pilgrims would go from around the nation, around the continent to go and inappropriately honor him. He had a sense of his own lowliness and humility. 

So Paul speaks then of the unpresentable parts of the body being treated with special modesty. Perhaps, I think, he's referring to clothing here by which we cover our nakedness. I think that would make sense in this context. Adam and Eve were naked with no shame before the fall. But then as soon as they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were opened, they realized they're naked and they hurried for clothing. And God upheld that and supported it by the end of that chapter, killing an animal, first animal sacrifice, and covering them literally with animal skins. And from that time on, it's been necessary post-fall for us to cover the parts of our body that are unpresentable.

Now, many cultures do not follow this kind of thing, pagan culture, spirituous cultures wear perhaps even no clothing at all, but we understand the need for this post-fall. And so in our culture, we need to be sure that the parts of the body that men and women have always covered for modesty sake, continue to be covered. And that's really important in our day and age. I just see a movement, especially with young women's clothing, towards uncovering more and more parts of the body that should be covered with special modesty. So I think that this is not the main point of the text, but just the idea of dressing with modesty so as not to cause brothers in Christ or other people to stumble into sin. But that's a side point. What he's saying is that there are certain parts of the body that need to be covered and they need to be treated with special modesty, but then there are other parts of the body that need no such treatment.

So in any case, the analogy is that every single member of the body, no matter how it gets treated in this world, is precious and valuable and honored in its own way. Now, I want you to go ahead with me in your minds, and we're gonna do this, God willing, at the end of 1 Corinthians 13... I can't wait for those studies if the Lord wills and we get a chance to do it. To understand when we get to Heaven, how we are going to truly honor each other, not worship each other, but we are going to with free hearts, open hearts, we are going to honor some of the most obscure servants that we didn't even know about in this world. Jesus said, "If you wanna be great, you need to be a servant. If you wanna be first, you need to be everybody's slave."

So some of the lowest people that were not thought of at all in this life, nobody even knew what they did, will be greatly elevated and greatly honored in Heaven. As God said, "Have you considered my servant Job?" He's going to say, "Have you considered my servant so and so? You may not have known her, or you may not have known him, but let me tell you how they served." And we are not gonna be in any way jealous of that. We are going to celebrate that, we're gonna delight in that. I can't wait, and I'm gonna say more about that in a minute, but that's the honor we should be seeking, heavenly honor ultimately for God to say on judgment day and for all eternity and beyond, "Well done, my good and faithful servant. You've been faithful with very little. I will now entrust you with much. Enter into the joy of your Master."

Now, that's what we should be living for, that God would be pleased with us and share that joy for all eternity through our rewards. So Paul then wants everyone in the body of Christ to show honor to each other and concern for each other, and not let pride or shame divide the body of Christ. Verse 24-25, "God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts elected, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other." So here we see the unity of the body, in both suffering and honor. So there's tremendous union. Verse 26 again, "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it." This is definitely true of the physical body. Imagine if you had a bleeding ulcer, intense pain. The other systems of your body, the other parts of your body will be mobilized to get that ailing part healed.

Your eyes will be going online to find the best specialist. Your ears will be hearing the receptionist there as you talk to her and set up an appointment. And then your feet will walk into the hospital or wherever you go to get that part of the body addressed and healed. Now, we saw this at the beginning of the history of the Church, in Acts 4:34-35, it said, "There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time, those who own lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sale and put it at the Apostles feet and was distributed to anyone as he had need." So they didn't consider that their own possessions were their own, but they shared the things that they had, so that if one part suffered, every part would suffer with it. 

Whereas Paul said in Romans 12:15, "Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn." And when we get to Heaven, as I've said, we are going to honor others perfectly. In Heaven, I really believe this, not all will be equally honored, and not honored equally. Some will have sacrificed and served and suffered more than others, and they will be honored more. And so I will perfectly delight, when I get to Heaven, in the appropriately higher honors given to the martyrs who died, whose blood spread the gospel more vigorously than ever happened in my life. I'm going to honor Polycarp and Perpetua and Felicitas and other Roman martyrs or the martyrs that died in the Communist reign or in Muslim countries, or you think about those that laid down their lives for missions like Jim Elliot and Borden of Yale.

We are going to celebrate those with a perfectly free open honor in Heaven. We'll feel no jealousy whatsoever. I'll feel no jealousy at what I perceive to be definitely the higher honor of Nancy Judson, who gave her life for missions in Burma and suffered greatly in ways that are hard to even imagine. We're gonna thrill with delight at Lottie Moon's sufferings for the gospel or Hudson Taylor's, both of them suffering for China and for the spread of the gospel there. Jonathan Edwards and his marvelous work, "Heaven is a World of Love". We're gonna be leaning heavily on Edwards as we get to 1 Corinthians 13, God willing, next week. What a journey that's gonna be. 

But Edwards finishes 17 sermons on 1 Corinthians 13. And don't worry, I'm not gonna do 17 sermons, but many. But he ends with "Heaven is a World of Love", and he says this, "In Heaven, not the least remainder of any principle of envy shall exist to be exercised toward angels or toward other people who are superior than us in glory, nor shall there be anything like contempt or slighting of those who are inferiors. On the contrary, all the members of that heavenly society rejoice in each other's happiness, for love will be perfected in them all." Isn't that something to look forward to? And the more we can honor each other, try to find more obscure servants, things they're doing behind the scenes and just give honor to them, how encouraging that would be.

So let me finish now with some applications. The central application here, I must say, is to come to faith in Christ, if you're not a Christian. We are just so encouraged, we have reports of people watching these live streams who were not yet born again. Welcome, dear friend. And I wanna say to you, the marvels of the wisdom of God focus ultimately on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, how God, the loving heavenly Father, the Law-giver, the Judge who gave perfect moral laws by which we are to live our lives. But all of us have violated them, all of us have broken God's holy laws. And we stand condemned by his law. God, instead of sending us righteously, sending us to hell, sent His only begotten Son who lived a sinless life perfectly under the law of God, and then received the condemnation the law says we all deserve by His substitutionary death on the cross. 

And God, as we celebrated last week, and we actually celebrate every day, raised him from the dead and ascended him to Heaven, and he sits at the right hand of God, and from that place, some day he's gonna come to judge the living and the dead. Before Judgment Day comes, he is given this time of the Gospel. This is the message you're hearing right now, that if you repent of your sins and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of your sins, you'll receive full forgiveness of sins, you'll be born again, you'll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and you'll be engrafted or made a part immediately of the body of Christ, and then you can begin using your spiritual gifts. 

Now, if you are a Christian, this whole section, as I said, is on spiritual gifts. We're continuing to learn more about that. So I'm gonna go back to those Ds. All right, first of all, discover your gift package. Is it a pattern of quiet service in life? Maybe that's what God has you doing. Is it a gift of hospitality? Is it a gift of financial giving? Is it mercy ministry to the poor and needy? Is it the teaching of children? Some people are remarkably gifted in family ministry and teaching children. Is it on the other end, care for the elderly, are you remarkably gifted at ministering to older people? Is it leadership or administration? Is it the ability to solve complex problems of finances so that large ministries like our church or mission agencies can flourish well financially? 

Maybe it's encouragement, just simply finding the ways God is at work in other people's lives and the way he's using them, and then just speaking words that say, "You know, when you do that, just so blesses me." That's the gift of encouragement. Look, whatever your gift is, discover it and delight in it, be content with it. Don't question the wisdom of God, but rejoice in God's wisdom and delight in your gift and develop it by using it. So it's a combination develop, deploy, develop, deploy. You're gonna deploy your gift and develop. And it works by, the more you do it, the better you get at it. So just do that. Think properly of yourself when you do it. Don't think too lowly of yourself saying, "They don't need me." And don't think too highly of yourself saying, "I don't need them." But be humble, be energetic and store up treasure in Heaven. When we get to Heaven, we are going to honor the servants of Christ for everything they did. Nothing is gonna be forgotten. As Jesus said, "If you give even a cup of cold water, you will never lose your reward."

 Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for the time we've had in your Word. How beautiful is your Word. How marvelous, how wise, how timeless. Twenty centuries of Christians have been reading these words and growing by them and learning them and putting them into practice. So help us to do the same for your glory and for the health of our church, and for the spread of the Gospel here in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. In Jesus's Name. Amen.

Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on John 20:19-31. The main subject of the sermon is how Jesus is recognized as God by His disciples.

What a joy it is to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we're going to zero in this morning on John Chapter 20 and Thomas' confession,” My Lord and my God!” What an incredible confession that is. And my mind this morning goes back to 25 years ago when I was a missionary with my wife, my children. We were in Japan and we had the privilege of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus at a sunrise service on a mountain in Japan. And I think about that they call themselves the Land of the Rising Sun. And it's where every day begins, worldwide really in terms of a massive population center. And yet, for all of that, for the over 125 to 150 million Japanese, less than 2% evangelical. And so it's such a joy and a privilege to assemble together there in Tokushima and be able to worship with Christian brothers and sisters there. And my mind's eye goes to that around the world, indeed, every year, I think about that and how the Gospel has made its rounds from Jerusalem through Judea, Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, there are brothers and sisters. And I, we, never can see them, but we imagine them in our minds eye we see the fellowship that we have. And we look ahead to our heavenly fellowship as well when we will be assembled with a multitude greater than anyone can count, from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

But as I think about that mountain top experience that I had, we really come this morning, in John Chapter 20 to the pinnacle, the summit, the mountain top of the indeed, the purpose of Scripture. And that is the confession that Thomas makes,” My Lord and My God!” Perhaps you have been to some incredible mountain tops and seen scenic vistas. Maybe you've been able to travel out west and seen the great Rocky Mountains, or the Grand Tetons. And how beautiful they are and you can picture in your mind's eye what you saw from that elevation. Or maybe you were able to travel to Europe and see the Alps and be able to see the snowcapped peaks, the Matterhorn maybe or some of the other alps that there are. Or maybe you've seen other incredible mountains or maybe you've gone to the western part of our state, the Blue Ridge Parkway and you've seen Mount Mitchell, the 66-hundred-foot elevation. There's a platform there that you can go to and maybe you're not a mountain climber, but you're able to drive with your car up the winding mountain road there and then walk up a poured concrete ramp and up the stairs. You don't have to work hard for it, but when you get up there, maybe it's fall time, the foliage, and you look around and see, north, south, east and west, a scenic vista.

And so it is, I think when we come to John chapter 20, the pinnacle of all of what scripture is seeking to do. The work that scripture is seeking to work in us as we read its words. And through the powerful ministry of the Holy Spirit they become not just black marks on a white page, but they become the Living Word of God. And they move us from darkness to light. They move us from death to life. They move us to salvation through faith in Christ, to be able to say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God,” looking at Jesus Christ. This is the purpose of Scripture as 2 Timothy 3:15 says, that the scripture is given to make us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And even John as he wrote his gospel so many centuries ago, and got to the end of this very chapter, John 20 just heard it read a moment ago, “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

My purpose this morning is to preach so clearly and so powerfully the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, from the grave, so that you, even by live stream, even by looking at scripture that you have opened perhaps on your lap or before you, that you may have faith in Christ and having believed may have life in his name. That is my purpose. Now all over the world Christians are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Now this year, 2020, our circumstances are extraordinary. Perhaps in some ways in my entire life, never been more bizarre. Usually, I would say all over the world, people are gathering to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead but because of this corona virus pandemic it seemed best to church leaders around the world, to refrain from gathering and to government leaders, to have a shelter in place and wisely following that. And so, pastors, church leaders worship leaders around the world are resorting to this medium, this live streaming.

No matter, God will we trust very soon put this particular plague behind us. And God willing, if the Lord wills, we will live and if the Lord wills, we will return to our ordinary life. In the meantime, by the ministry of the Word and by the activity of the sovereign Spirit of God, we can celebrate, joyfully celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 

We're gonna focus this morning on this individual known perhaps a little unfairly as Doubting Thomas. This is someone who church history has told us, did incredible work, even to the ends of the earth, even to India planting churches and did amazing things. But at this particular time before this appearance, he had serious doubts. Now, there's all kinds of doubting that people do. Even sometimes I've been well aware even people very close to me, not my immediate family, but people that I've known that have had scientific doubts, materialistic atheistic doubts. There are those kinds of doubts. There are doubts that just come from ignorance. People don't know the facts of the Gospel. But then there's Thomas, and I think he represents a certain kind of doubting that very religious people can do, and even Jesus' own disciples were doing. You think about where it says in the Gospel of Luke that they even seeing the resurrected Jesus, the evidence of their eyes right in front of them, it says in Luke 24, they could not believe, for joy. What an incredible statement that is for joy that it was actually joy that was blocking them. It's almost like it's just too good to be true, that Christ could be risen. And I think that's where Thomas was.

He was crushed by the crucifixion of Jesus. He was crushed by it. His hopes were crushed. He was devastated. You remember the two disciples on the road to Emmaus were that way. They were downcast they were depressed. And isn’t it remarkable that in some ways, the very worst day in human history and the very best day of human history, separated by three days, but it was a crushing experience for Thomas, and I don't know where he was that first day when Jesus came to give evidence of his resurrection, but he wasn't with them. They had to go find him maybe. He was off by himself. He had withdrawn. He had pulled back and he was discouraged. He was doubting. And we don't really know why, but if you look at verse 24 and 25, it says, "Now Thomas (called [twin or] Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord!’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.’” And so, he represents that kind of doubting in which he wants to believe, but he's got to be convinced by the evidence. This is no small thing, really, because by this time the other apostles of course, Judas, Iscariot had committed suicide, but there were 10 other apostles had testified that they had seen the Lord. They were telling him,” We have seen the Lord. We've seen the evidence of our own eyes.” You've got the women that have been at the empty tomb. Peter and John have been at the empty tomb. They're all telling him about this, but even more significantly than this were Jesus' own words that Thomas had heard with his own ears, in the years preceding the crucifixion.

For example, Caesarea Philippi, after Simon Peter's confession, there on the mountain, “You are the Christ, the Son of God”, and Jesus, it says, “From that time on began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priest and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” So, it wasn't just one time, “From that time on.” You get another account in the very next chapter, of the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew 17, again. But even more significantly than that the Lord would say, are the Old Testament prophecies, the Scriptures that clearly predicted the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, that his hands and his feet would be pierced, Psalm 22, that he would die as the Lamb of God, as the sheep, the substitutionary atonement for the sins of the world. These things were clearly predicted in the Old Testament prophecies. That's why he rebuked the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:25-27, he said, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

So, Thomas should not have doubted the resurrection. He should not have doubted. He was worthy of a rebuke. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus rebuked them, "How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe what God has spoken through the prophets.” But this is even more significant for Thomas was not just anybody. Thomas had been selected, had been picked by the Lord after a night of prayer to be one of the apostles, to be with the Lord and to be eyewitnesses of his majesty, and to spread the Gospel from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth. He had a whole life of preaching as an apostle of Jesus Christ ahead of him, but he would be completely disqualified from that ministry, because central to it was that he had to be a witness of the resurrection. He had to believe in the resurrection, be a witness to it. And so this is a very significant moment, his doubt.

And so, we see beautifully, Jesus stooping to his weakness, stooping to his weakness. He miraculously appears to Thomas and to the rest as he did the previous week, there in the upper room, in Jerusalem. Though, the doors were locked, it says, for fear of the Jews. And so, a week previous to that, the disciples had been a trembling mass of terror and fear. Their hopes have been dashed because they had a certain vision of the Christ, of the Messiah, that he would be a political, royal, military figure, that he would topple Roman power even to the ends of the earth. And Jesus by his mighty miracle seemed to be unconquerable, unbeatable. And so, they were expecting a certain kind of kingdom to come and their hopes, had been dashed. Now they were afraid, just all of Jesus' right-hand man, his henchmen would be rounded up, as normally happened and so they were there with the doors locked, for fear of the Jews. And Jesus came right through those locked doors that previous week, came right through in some mysterious way and we should not wonder about this because Jesus came right through the walls of the tomb as well. The stone had been removed not to let Jesus out but to let them the eyewitnesses in and then effectively through them the whole world in. Jesus was already out.

And so Jesus went right through the walls though the doors were locked and he presented himself to them and he gave them strong evidence of his triumph over death. Now, a week later, he does it again. Look at verse 26,” Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’” And then he goes right over to Thomas to heal him of his unbelief. And in verse 27, he goes to Thomas, he said, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Now Jesus had every right to rebuke doubting Thomas, but instead he is gentle with him, he stoops to his weakness. Remember that beautiful description of Jesus from Isaiah the prophet, “The bruised reed he will not break, and the smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” That might be you, dear friend, today. That might be you, your faith flickering. You might be struggling, your hope wavering. I don't know what kind of trials you're going through. I don't know what kinds of experiences but Jesus stoops to our weakness and he doesn't break the trembling bruise reed. He doesn't snuff out that flickering flame of our faith. He stoops to our weakness.

I love what Charles Spurgeon said about this sweet demeanor of Jesus toward Doubting Thomas. Spurgeon said this, "Our Lord here shows that he has a condescending care for those who lag behind. Thomas is a week behind everybody else, yet his Lord has not lost patience, but waits to be gracious. The other ten apostles have all seen the Lord and been well assured of his resurrection for the last seven days; but that is no reason why the late-comer should be left out in the cold. Our Lord does not leave the rear rank to perish… The walls of Zion enclose babes as well as veterans; the ark of our salvation preserves mice as well as [bulls] bullocks; our Solomon speaks of the [weak] hyssop [growing out of] on the wall as well as the [mighty] cedar in Lebanon; and the glory of the Lord may be seen in the preservation of the glowworm’s lamp as truly as in the sustenance of the furnace of the sun.” That's a powerful way of saying how the Lord stoops to our weakness, he finds us where we're at. And he will not have any of his sheep whom he knows by name waiver and be lost through unbelief.

And notice also he knows exactly what Thomas has said. The Lord hears everything we say all the time. He knows what the test is. He heard what Thomas said, “unless I put my finger in the nail marks and my hand in the side, I will not believe.” So, he goes over and uses his exact words. It is essential therefore for Thomas as an apostle and as a preacher of the resurrection to be a literal eyewitness to that resurrection. Jesus will not do this same thing for anyone alive today. Thomas had a unique role in redemptive history, as did all the apostles. And so Jesus goes to him to re-establish him in that role as an apostle. He had to see the resurrected Christ with his own eyes, and he had to touch him perhaps with his own hands if he wanted to, as 1 John 1 said, that which we have seen with our eyes, what our hands have touched, this, we proclaim. This physical experience then would be the basis of the gospel for generations to come and Thomas as one of the 12 apostles had a unique role in redemptive history.

And it is at this moment that Thomas makes his eternal confession, the mountain top of human experience in the world, the purpose of all Scripture. Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!” There's no higher profession that anyone can make concerning Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was praised with much lower praise during his life. Often, he was called a prophet. Even the two disciples on the road to Emmaus called him a prophet. He was a prophet, mighty in word and deed. And so Jesus was indeed a prophet, but so much more than a prophet. Even Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi, that I mentioned a moment ago, Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Which He is. But Thomas's words are simpler and more direct than that. This is the first time that Jesus of Nazareth, the little baby born to the virgin Mary and laid in the manger in Bethlehem, this human being is confessed as Almighty God so clearly and so directly. “My Lord and my God!” The essence of this confession is the deity of Christ and the Lordship of Christ. This is the central truth of our Christian faith. The ancient creed, the Nicene Creed, puts it like this that Jesus is the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father through whom all things were made, the deity of Christ. 

Now, we should not imagine at this key moment redemptive history, a week after the resurrection with one of the 12 apostles, being established in his faith, that Thomas was breaking the third of the 10 Commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. As though Thomas was somehow saying, "Good God!” Or “Oh my Lord!” Or something like that. Sometimes we're not careful with the word “God” or “Lord”. That is not at all what's happening here. Thomas was a very pious Jewish man, and the Jews at that time had an extreme reverence for the name of Almighty God. They would not pronounce the four letters that we bring over as Yahweh or Jehovah. They would just say Adonai. They would just simply say, Lord. They were very reverential perhaps even a little superstitious about the name of God. Furthermore, the text says that Thomas said this to Jesus, “My Lord and My God!” He said it to Jesus directly. And so this is the first and the clearest testimony directly to the deity of Christ in the Bible, and dear friend, this is the testimony you must make if you are to be saved from your sins.

If you yourself are to be raised to newness of life spiritually, and you yourself are to be raised eternally, made like Christ, like Christ you will rise, as Jesus said, "Because I live, you also live,” that you can receive the blessings and the benefits of salvation, you must make the same confession to Jesus, “My Lord, and My God!” Notice also that Jesus accepts this worship from Thomas. It's one thing for some individuals to say to another person, “My Lord and My God,” actually it happens from time to time in Scripture. The Apostle John, even the same one who wrote this Gospel, when he was being given the visions of the book of Revelation, by an angel, at one point, he falls down to worship the angel in his weakness. The angel is so glorious and he's so weak and overwhelmed, and the angel stops him as he should. Revelation 22:9, "Do not do it!” he said. “I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!"

Or again in Acts 12, on the other side of the ledger, we have evil King Herod who's dressed in these radiant robes and he's speaking to a sycophantic group of people who want something from him. And when he gets done with his public address, they cry out, “This is the voice of a god and not of a man.” Herod accepted that, and because he accepted that, “This is the voice of a God and not of a man”, he was immediately struck down by an angel of the Lord and was eaten by worms and died. Because of a sin of omission, because he didn't reject or refuse that worship. Or again two chapters later, in Acts 14 in Lystra, the apostles Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're sharing the gospel, spreading the gospel, and doing miracles and at that point the people, the pagans of Lystra, brought sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas saying, "The gods have come down to us in human form.” And they stopped them immediately from that blasphemy. “We're only men. Human like you. Worship God! God has sent us to turn you away from this kind of foolishness.”

But Jesus accepted Thomas' worship as God. He accepted it as right and proper, and then expands it to the ends of the earth into the ends of time. He effectively here, invites the whole world to make Thomas' same confession. Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Believed what? That Jesus is Lord and God. That's what he means. Those who have not seen and yet have believed. My deepest desire is that every person hearing this today may be able to make this same confession by faith. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. So, the question comes to you this morning. On what basis could I make such an extreme confession? On what basis could I confess that Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure, who lived 2,000 years ago, actually is Lord and God. What evidence support this confession? Well, the whole chapter John 20 gives us evidence and we would do well to walk through it carefully, but we don't have the time.

Let me just read it and see the kind of evidence that John 20 gives us of the resurrection. Everything comes down to the resurrection. If Christ died and rose again in fulfillment of the scripture. And in fulfillment of his own predictions then everything he said is true, and that includes his own deity, his role as son of God, his role as savior of the world. All of these things are validated by the resurrection. On what basis then do we believe the resurrection? Look at John 20:1-8, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So, she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!’ So, Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed.” 

Well, there you have all the physical evidence that you would ever need for a resurrection given the context, given all of the predictions that Jesus had made, given all of the prophecies and now the stone has been removed, it's separated, just lifted up entirely removed. The body is not there but the grave clothes are there. The Greek implies that they're wholly undisturbed in their original position. Keep in mind they're wrapped up with sticky resonance substances, so it would very difficult to unwrap him, and certainly for them, perhaps to have even the outline of his body, but his body be not on there, and then the head cloth folded up. It does not speak of his enemies defiling or desecrating the tomb. They actually had posted a guard to prevent the disciples from lying and saying that he had risen from the dead. They wouldn't have done that. Jesus' own disciples would not have done that, and if they were gonna remove the body, they would've taken the grave clothes as well. So, the physical evidence is all there. The only answer for this physical evidence must be the resurrection given the context. And John, when he saw the physical evidence, he believed.

Now we the succeeding generations living two millennia later, we have no such access to the physical evidence. No, it's true, you can buy a plane ticket. You can go to Jerusalem. And I think there at least two competitors for Jesus' empty tomb. And you might buy a ticket. You might go in a bus to that part of Jerusalem, and you could see the Church of The Holy Sepulchre which has been there since I think the fourth century, the Roman Catholic version, and then there's the Protestant version the Garden Tomb discovered in 1867. You can go there. I'm certain, both of them are empty. But as you as you look in there you must have reasonable doubt, saying, I don't know. I mean, it's been a long time. Jerusalem has been fought over through the Crusades and all kinds of things. I have no idea what these locations are, and faith doesn't come from that. We have no access to the physical evidence. 

Next, beyond the physical evidence though, is the personal evidence. The fact that Jesus personally appeared to eyewitnesses who testified to their own deaths. And many of them died as martyrs that Christ had risen, and they'd seen him with their own eyes. And all told the first day there were five appearances that we can count across the gospels of Jesus' physical appearance as a resurrected savior to eyewitnesses. Starting with Mary Magdalen. Again, she's not believing in a resurrection. She's saying, "They have taken the Lord away and I don't know where they have put him!" And so, she's looking in and she's weeping and there are two angels there in the account and she's wanting to go get him and put him back in the tomb of all things. Mary had such a sweet love, but her faith was weak at that particular moment, and her thinking process was weak, and they said the angel said,” Woman why are you weeping?" And again, the same thing. “They've taken the Lord away. I don't know where they put him." And then Jesus himself, the resurrected Lord appears to her, but she doesn't know it's him. 

And he says the same thing the angels did, "Woman, why are you weeping?" And she, again, makes this offer to go get him and bring him back. And all that happens at that moment is so powerful is Jesus just says her name, Mary, and the Aramaic would be Miriam. I love where it says in John 10, my sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life. I call them by name, and they follow me. And so, it was when he said her name, she knew immediately who it was. And I think there's also a direct revelation of the resurrected Christ to his followers through the power of the Holy Spirit. Now, we know it's Christ and she turns around. And she said, “Rabboni,” which in Aramaic means teacher, A rabbi. And she, I think grabs hold of him as though I'm never gonna let you leave again. I let you go once, and you were crucified. I'm never letting you go again. So, she's holding on and Jesus said, “Do not hold on me, for I have not yet risen to my the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them that I am going to go see them, my brothers, my Lord and my God. And he says go ‘I'm returning to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.’” And Mary Magdalen went and gave that testimony. “I have seen the Lord.”

Well, that's in John's Gospel right in the same account. But in Matthew's Gospel the other women are there, and Jesus appears to them. We have two disciples on the road to Emmaus which I've mentioned. Then it seems in first Corinthians 15, a specific appearance to Peter, I think before the upper room. So, after Peter saw the physical evidence, he didn't believe he went away wondering it says in Luke’s Gospel. But I think before the upper room that night Jesus appeared directly to Peter and what an incredible encounter that must have been. Peter had denied him three times and how restorative and how beautiful and how filled with love and we know that he restored him even more deeply and completely in John 21. But then you have the 10 apostles in the upper room. Look at verses 19-23. “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you!’ As the Father has sent me, [even so] I am sending you.’ And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.’”

So, he has this encounter, this personal encounter, with eyewitnesses and he's sending them out, we’ll talk more about that in a moment, and now a week later to them again and to Thomas directly. Now these personal appearances form the strongest basis of personal testimony of the witness of the early church to the bodily resurrection from the dead. Their five senses were engaged. They could touch him, all of them could, not just Thomas, but they could touch him. He said, “Touch me, and see. A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” He was able to eat broil fish in their presence. All of this personal encounter gives is strong evidence as the basis of our faith that Jesus is Lord and God. But even that we will not be able to do. We cannot touch him and see that the spirit does not have flesh and bones that you see I have. We won't get to watch Jesus eat anything in our presence. In the end for us here in the 21st century for everyone who's alive today, it is on the basis of Scripture alone that we will make Thomas' confession,” My Lord and My God!” This is the role of the Bible. This is why John calls Jesus the Word. There is such a strong connection between Jesus and the Bible and all of us who are alive today who can make Thomas' confession, “My Lord and My God,” we do so on the basis of Scriptures testimony to Jesus. It's even right in the text.

Look again at verse 8-9. “Finally the other disciple, [the one that Jesus loved, that's John] who had reached the tomb first also went inside. He saw and believed.” So, it's on the basis of the physical evidence of his eyes, just like Thomas, “Unless I see it, I won't believe.” John was in the same category. Look at verse 9, by way of concession. “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” Well, so it is for the rest of the world. From that point on, from the time that Jesus ascended up to Heaven and that first generation died off, and then history unfolded, from that point on, this blessing, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed, it will be on the basis of Scripture, and that's sufficient. Jesus on the road to Emmaus was with the two disciples and he began as already commented on, from Moses and all the other prophets and the wisdom literature all that was said in the scriptures concerning himself, that he must die, that he must be raised, that the gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth. And they said later after Jesus went away from them, they said, “Were not our hearts burning within us when he opened the Scriptures to us.”

And so, the power of the Scripture to make our hearts burn with faith in Jesus. The Scripture is sufficient. And John's own evidence. Look again at verse 30-31, “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John's logic is the Scripture is given as an instrumentality of your faith. As you read it, it is so that you may believe. That's why the Scripture has given to us. We have no possibility of seeing the physical evidence. We have no possibility of a personal encounter like Thomas had. And yet for us who live so many centuries later, we who have read the Scriptures, and we who have believed the accounts in the Scriptures we're able to say with Peter, in 1 Peter 1, “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” We are justified, that is forgiven of all of our sins, by simple faith in Jesus based on the Scripture. We are forgiven, we are made right with God, when we hear and believe Scripture’s testimony. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And so we believe in things that are not seen on the testimony of Scripture. 

But if I can say this with all reverence the Scripture itself is not enough. We need more, we need more than the written Word. Because if it were not for the activity and ministry of the Holy Spirit of God I personally would not be standing before you now as a pastor and a believer. I would still be an unbeliever. I would still be in the darkness of sin and rebellion. If the third person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit of God had not pressed Scripture into my heart and made me believe it, had not transformed me and taken out the heart of stone and given me a heart of flesh, I would still be an unbeliever. And so, the Spirit must move and so look at verse 22, “[Then] he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit's work is every bit as essential to our salvation as the work of the Son on the cross, and at the empty tomb. 'Cause honestly, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not good news for you, if in the end you don't believe in Jesus. All it does is prove his mighty power, and the power at that point would be against you. The coming king will come in judgment with fire to judge the living and the dead. And he will judge us for our sins, and if he is not our advocate, if he is not our savior, he will be our judge and our condemner. And he will send us eternally to Hell. And I would be, I was on that road. I was on that road. And by the Spirit of God, I was lifted from darkness to light, from death to life, by the power of the Scripture’s testimony. So that combination of the written Word of God, and the Spirit’s evidence is powerful.

This is what Jesus meant when he said to Nicodemus, "You must be born again. You cannot see the Kingdom of God unless you are born again, unless you are born from above, unless you're born by the Spirit.” And so I just need to ask you as you're watching this live stream. Are you born again? Have you trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Do you have a new nature, is your heart rejoicing within you that Christ is risen, or not? And if at the beginning of this live stream you were on the outside looking in, and maybe been invited by a friend to watch us, I'm so glad you're here today. I plead with you. Trust in Christ. Flee to Christ while there's still time. Let Christ be for you a sweet, a risen savior.

Now the blessedness of making this confession; I can't speak too highly of this. Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” What is this blessedness? Well, I've already mentioned it just a moment ago. The forgiveness of sins. Look at verse 23. “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” How wonderful will it be to stand in the presence of God on judgment day fully forgiven, forgiven of all of our sins, to be welcomed into Heaven, despite the fact that, as David said, my sins are more numerous than the hairs on my head, but to be fully forgiven. 

Not only that but peace with God. Look at verse 19-21, it says “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again, Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you!’” Then a week later, verse 26, the “…disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’” This is not an accident. Three times in a short space in the account, we have, “Peace be with you!” “Peace be with you!” “Peace be with you!” The repetition is so strong. At one point, we and our sins were aliens, enemies fighting against God. But through the death of Jesus as he shows them his hands and his side, through the crucifixion of Jesus, he has won for all who believe in him, peace with God. That is a status of peace. God is not at war with us. And we no longer at war with him. We are at one with him. He's in a reconciled relationship with us and also peacefulness that comes from that. That comes and goes, but we could have far more peacefulness, a feeling in peace, than we do. 

The disciples were terrified of death. In that upper room they must have felt incredible feelings of peacefulness. But whether they felt them or not. God was at peace with them, and they were justified in a peace with God. Well, what else? Life in his name as he says at the end of this chapter. Blessed are those who have not seen it, and yet believe. What do we get? We get life. We get eternal life. That's a quality of life now which the whole gospel of John seeks to explain. Born again, born by the spirit, it starts there then there's a well of water springing up to eternal life, in John chapter 4 from which we can drink any time that we want. Jesus is the bread of heaven, the bread of life, that came down, we can feed on him any time we want. Jesus is the light of the world. We no longer walk in darkness. What we have now, the light of life, our eyes are open, like the man born blind, and we can see things clearly. Jesus is our Good Shepherd; he lays down his life for us. He protects us, leads us, feeds us. We find pasture, we come in and go out before him and enjoy life. As Jesus said, "I came that [you] they may have life and have it abundantly.” And then ultimately, Jesus said in John 11, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. And if you believe that then you will be raised in glory in the future, you don't need to fear death, not from a virus, not from an accident, not from a heart attack. You don't need to fear death from anything because you know that when you die you will live eternally in the presence of God, and that's when things really get exciting. The eternal life is confirmed, finally in heaven where we’re in resurrection bodies. We're shining like the sun. We're in a place where there's no more death, mourning, crying, or pain. We're there in the New Heaven and the New Earth and the New Jerusalem and it's just glowing with the glory of God and we're going to experience that forever. When Jesus said, "Blessed are those who have not seen and he yet have believed,” that and vastly much more is yours through faith in Christ.

So, if you can make Thomas' confession to look at all of the world of blessing, and if I can just speak to you, dear Christian friend, those blessings are far greater than anything we can lose through sheltering at home or through anything and even greater than losing a loved one in the Lord. All of the earthly things, the things that we enjoy on earth are as nothing compared to the blessing that we are going to experience in Heaven. As the Apostle Paul said, our afflictions are light and momentary and not even worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. We need to meditate on that more than we do.

Well, this also gives us a work to do. Moving out with the Gospel from Jerusalem through Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth with this message of new life in Christ. Look at verse 20:21-23. “Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, [even so] I am sending you.’ And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.’” This is the work of the Great Commission. All four of the Gospels have a different version of the Great Commission. Right before Jesus ascended to Heaven, he sent them out from Jerusalem through Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes in you, and we get to take this message, dear Christian brother and sister, we get to take this message to those who are without hope and without God in the world. We're able to speak to them of the forgiveness of sins. We're able to speak to them that death has been destroyed and defeated by the resurrection of Christ. We're commanded by Christ here, as the Father has sent me, now, I'm sending you. Our task is to be as faithful through the Holy Spirit to our commission as Jesus was faithful to the commission he received from Almighty God. 

And we get to share the gospel and if anyone hears through our testimony of Christ crucified for sin, raised to life forever, and they hear and they say, "I want that. What do I have to do?" Just call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved, and if we're there as witnesses and that happens, we get to look them in the eye and say, “Based on your confession, based on the promises of God, I can tell you, your sins are forgiven.” However, many of the people we share with that hear a message just like this one and they reject it, they shrug, they walk away, or they get hostile. And we have the opposite responsibility to say your sins are not forgiven based on what you've done with the Gospel. You are still walking under the wrath of God as John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him.” And so, for all those that are outside of faith in Christ, God's wrath remains. The only way to flee it is through faith in Christ.

Alright, so what applications can we take from this with incredible study that we have. First of all, just rejoice, celebrate the joy of the resurrection. When you think about for joy they could not believe, just turn that around. It's not a matter of, it's too good to be true, it's too good not to be true. That's how good God is. God has so many good things to give us, and let's just celebrate. Let's be filled with radiant hope, even in the midst of this. You know, our Christian hope shines the brightest when earthly circumstances are darkest, so let's celebrate. And for all of you who are watching, find salvation through faith in Christ. Covi gives us some opportunities to speak the Word of life in the face of death. We know people are dying and the numbers are going up in our own country and we're able to look at that and say, “You know, through faith in Christ we don't need to fear death anymore.” Death has been defeated and we're able to take that message, but not only able, we're responsible. We're responsible for the people that God brings into our lives. So, let's be faithful witnesses with this gospel. Long after this thing, as we trust is over, long after that, we are going to be able to harken back to these days. So, you'll remember those days. How could I forget. Did you fear death? Were you afraid of your future? Or maybe you didn't fear death, but you feared what would happen to your lifestyle as different things were no longer able to be in supermarkets, different things? What did you think? Where it's just an open door to talk about eternal things. Let's be faithful to do that.

Jesus said, “My food… is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” Let's be as faithful to our commission as Christ was to his. This morning as I was eating breakfast, and I texted with my son who's up in Boston, and I was just thinking about about Thomas, and something hit me in a new way. You know how Jesus said, proving the resurrection, that he is the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, he is not the God of the dead but the living. Abraham is up in Heaven now having fellowship with God. Isaac is up in Heaven. So is Thomas. And you know what I picture Thomas doing? On his face, before the glorified Christ, who's reigning on a glorious throne, saying the same confession, “My Lord and my God”, and he's gonna spend eternity, Thomas is, looking, and he doesn't need faith anymore, he's seeing him face-to-face, forever, and he's learning the greatness, the infinite majesty of Christ, for all the eternity. I'm looking forward to joining him. Let's close in prayer.

Father, we thank you for what we've been able to study this morning. We thank you for the resurrection victory. I thank you, O Lord, that you have sustained my faith in the resurrection of Christ for more than 25 years. For 25 years ago as we were, my wife and I and kids in Japan, Lord, I believed in the resurrection that day and I still believe, and I know that it's only by your sustaining grace. Thank you for the ministry of the Word that sustains the faith of your sheep through all trials and thank you, that it also gives us the opportunity to speak the Words of life to those who need so desperately to hear it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on Acts 17:15-34. The main subject of the sermon is how Paul shares the Gospel of the resurrected Christ with pagans who reject the true God.

Well, as Chase said, I'd like to ask that you turn in your Bibles to Acts 17. We're gonna be walking through this incredible text and it brings to mind a very special memory. Back in June of 2007 I was ministering to some international mission board missionaries in Greece and I was with my daughter, Jenny, and we had the opportunity to visit Athens, and I'll never get walking up the winding road to the Acropolis of the ancient high place of the city of Athens with thousands of tourists who are going up, and as we were making our way up, I noticed a small rocky outcropping off to the side. And I was looking for it, but I was amazed at how small it was and unimpressive compared to the Acropolis. It was Mars Hill, the Areopagus, the very place where Paul was when he preached the message that we're about to study. And so Jenny and I turned off and we looked and we actually went up the stairs went on the top of this rocky knob off to the side and I was amazed how the very tiptops of the rocks up there had been polished smooth by the feet of people over 2000 years that had gone to stand where Paul was and preached. But other than that, it was very unimpressive and the Acropolis hundreds of feet above that, just soared above it. And as we came down the stairs, there was a plaque and in the Greek language there was the entire text that you just heard Chase read for us a moment ago, the text of Paul's great message to the Athenians, to the philosophers at Mars Hill. But sadly, off to the side, there was some graffiti done by some irreverent people, and far below us was the bustling city, the modern city of Athens. And it occurred to me how ignorant people are of the central message that Paul gives in verse 31.

This is what it says, "For [God] he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He is given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." And as we stood and looked at those words written there in the Greek language, I was mindful of how ignorant people are of this coming Judgment Day. It occurred to me how urgent is our mission in this world. We are called on to bring the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a bustling modern world that can barely notice the beauty of creation around us and can barely think of the brevity of life and people that are not aware of the coming Judgment Day, and it’s our task as Christians to take that clear message of hope in the face of death, that we're going to celebrate with Christians around the world a week from today, Resurrection Sunday, that we have to be ready, we have to get our hearts ready to be servants of the Gospel to the people who live here in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area.

Back in the beginning of February, a number of us committed ourselves to extraordinary prayer for the spreading of the Gospel, and this was going to be the final week of that time as culminating in Easter. And then we're gonna move into a time of training for evangelism. In the meantime, those prayer meetings, many of them in the pattern that they were in had been suspended because of the shelter at home order has come in because of COVID-19. And as we stand and look at the effects of the greatest pandemic that this country has ever seen, we realize more than ever for how acute is the need for the Gospel. The time is powerfully here upon us to share the Gospel with neighbors and co-workers and unsaved family and everyone that we know, and we trust that God in his kindness and his goodness will soon remove this scourge from us. But as he does, we are aware, we are mindful of the fact that people will be thinking about death, that they'll be thinking about the brevity of life, and they're going to be eager and ready to hear the Gospel.

And this morning we're going to get to walk through one of the greatest examples of, I would call it pre-evangelism, that you could ever have. We're gonna talk about how it's pre-evangelism and how they cut them off before he got to the opportunity to preach clearly the message of repentance through faith in Christ although he does mention the basic facts, but we're gonna see how Paul speaks to these philosophers, these brilliant men at Mars Hill in a timeless witness to a pagan city. Now, the backdrop of this, we're in the book of Acts just for this one Sunday, and Acts is part of a two-volume set written by the doctor Luke, as far as we can tell, the only Gentile writer of scripture in the New Testament, and the first volume, the Gospel of Luke unfolds very clearly the person and work of Jesus Christ. And it begins with the extraordinary message of the angel Gabriel to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Luke 1, it says Gabriel said to her, "You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David."

And so there, we have the mystery of the Incarnation, how he is fully God the Son of the Most High, and fully man, he is the descendant of David to sit on David's throne. Then the Gospel of Luke unfolds in 24 chapters, the mighty words and the mighty deeds of this Godman, Jesus Christ, how there's clear evidence in his teachings and in his miracles, and in his sinless life of the deity of Christ. But there's also clear evidence of his humanity in his bloody death on the cross. Everything culminated in his sacrificial death, he died in the place of sinners like you and me. He was nailed to the cross and he died. But God raised him from the dead on the third day, and in Luke 24, he gives clear evidence of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we will celebrate with Christians around the world next week, but we Christians celebrate it every single day.

And then Luke 24:39, Jesus said to the disciples gathered there in the upper room, "Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." Then over a period of 40 days, he got them ready to share the gospel, to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. And at the beginning of the book of Acts, we have the promise of the outpoured Holy Spirit as the sufficient power for the mission to the ends of the earth. Jesus said in Acts 1:8, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." And then, in verse 9, it says, “After he said this he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight." So these were Jesus' final words to the Church, his final marching orders to the Church, the great commission to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. And in Acts chapter 2, we see the out-poured Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The Church was assembled in the upper room. They were praying and the Holy Spirit came with the sound of a rushing wind with tongues of fire, and they poured out from that upper room and they began to change the world.

Peter and the other apostles preached the powerful message of Christ crucified and resurrected. And that day, 3000 people believed and were baptized and added to the Church. And so, the gospel unfolds, it spreads throughout Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and in the course of time, God raised up a special instrument, Saul of Tarsus, who we know is the Apostle Paul, to take the gospel to the gentile world. Now, Saul of Tarsus was a man uniquely prepared for this mission to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was really a triangulation of three great world cultures. He was the quintessential Jewish man. He was saturated in the traditions of the elders as a Jewish man, sat at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, was trained in the traditions of Judaism. So he was a quintessential Jewish man. He was also steeped in Greek culture for he was born and raised in Tarsus, which was a very Hellenized city, a Greek saturated city. Alexander the Great had swept through Turkey, that's where Tarsus is, and down through Palestine and to Egypt and even as far as India with his Macedonian army spreading Greek culture everywhere, and Tarsus was part of that. And so Paul studied Greek philosophers, he even quotes some Greek poets in this message. So he was steeped in Greek culture. And thirdly, amazingly, he was a Roman citizen. His father, it seems, was a Roman citizen and conveyed upon Paul at birth the exalted status of a Roman citizen. Well Paul himself, however, was not initially in any way a follower of Jesus Christ. He was converted by the sovereign power of God through the Holy Spirit on the road to Damascus and the story is told three different times in the Book of Acts. That's how important it was, repetition. 

Paul was actually the henchman of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, religious council, who hated Christ, who had already decided that any Jewish person who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, would be thrown out of the Synagogue. Paul was hardily on board with opposing the Christians and so he began to destroy the Church going from house to house, dragged off men and women and threw them in prison, and he had received letters from the Jewish Council to go to Damascus and arrest any there that he found who are followers of “the way” of Christianity. And the story is told in Acts 9 of his great conversion, "As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied. ‘Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’"

Well, that's an amazing story. You know what it says to me as a Christian, as an evangelist, as a lover of missions, is that God can convert anyone at any time by his sovereign power through the Gospel. And so, if you are hearing this today, if you've tuned into this live stream, I want you to hear this. God has the power through faith in Christ to forgive your sins, that you might have eternal life, that you might live forever. Paul himself said, effectively, "If God can save me, he can save anyone anytime." That he is an example of God's unlimited patience and his sovereign grace. Well, by the time we get to Acts 17, Paul was on his second missionary journey among the Gentiles. He's already gone on his first missionary journey with Barnabas, he went throughout to Cyprus, and then up through Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, Paul's home region, and planted churches everywhere he went. He was incredibly fruitful. Now on his second missionary journey, he has crossed over into Greece. He's gone west toward Europe, and he's already with Silas beginning to plant churches. He's been in Philippi and Thessalonica, and Berea. But now as he comes to Athens, he is alone. He's persecuted everywhere he goes. He was hammered by the opposition to the gospel. The Jew first then the Gentile would oppose him. He was beaten in Philippi. His enemy started a riot in Thessalonica. Paul had to escape in the night. And by the time he gets to Athens, probably one of the lowest points of his ministry emotionally, he's alone in this great city and he's waiting for his friends to join him.

Now, we come to the city of Athens, this city, brilliant city but dark in paganism. It was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, magnificent buildings, architecture that stands even to this present day. I mentioned how Jenny and I; we went up to see the Acropolis after seeing Mars Hill, and the Acropolis soars above the city of Athens far above. It's got three temples including the Parthenon. It was built incredibly around the year 447 B.C. and it's still standing, almost 25 centuries later. The Greek philosophers, mathematicians and scientists' knowledge of geometry and materials and architecture was staggering, still is. Athens itself was a center of human knowledge, of science and philosophy, boasting some of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Democritus and many others, either lived in Athens or came to Athens to ply their trade as philosophers. So we see in the city a reflection of both human potentiality, but also human corruption. Potentiality, as God said, concerning the Tower of Babel, "If as one people speaking one language, they've begun to make this incredible tower, then nothing they propose to do will be restrained from them." And so, humans have amazing abilities created in the image of God, brilliance, and science, and technology. But there's also a corruption in our hearts in that we are essentially idolaters. We worship and serve the created thing rather than the creator.

In verse 16 of our text, "The city was full of idols." And Paul would later write in Romans 1, "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles." One ancient writer said, it’s easier to find a god than a man in Athens. And so, therefore, the city was overwhelmed with gods and goddesses, or at least shrines to them and idols. And because of that, Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:20, it was filled with demons because “the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons...” And Paul said, "I do not want you to be participants with demons." So it was a demonic city, dark, with idolatry. And we see, therefore, Paul's reaction to this. Alone in this great city, he looked around to see what was there and, instead of being impressed with their technology and their architecture, he was overwhelmed with sorrow and deeply distressed at their idolatry. Look at verse 16. “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” The Greek word implies, a high level of emotional anguish. He walked around looking at their objects of worship and he was torn up inside over it.

I heard a story of the great missionary, Henry Martin, to India in the early 18th century. And he heard a story at that time. A Muslim prince was killing many Christians. And a Muslim man told Henry Martin of a dream that he had, in which Jesus, whom Muslims exalted as a prophet in their religion but lower than Muhammad, came down from the highest heaven to take hold of the hem of Muhammad's garment, and plead with him that he would intercede with this Muslim prince to get him to stop killing Christians. When Henry Martin heard this, he wept and was torn up inside at the dishonor to Jesus, of an image of Jesus kneeling before Muhammad and holding onto the hem of his robe. This tore him up inside. And when his Muslim friend asked him, "Why does this tear you up inside?" he said, "If someone plucked out your eyes, would you have to answer why you felt pain?" And so, Paul felt that way, I believe, as he looked around and saw God dishonored by idolatry, God's glory and honor taken away from him by this idolatry. Do you have, dear Christian friend who lives in the triangle region, Raleigh-Durham Chapel Hill, do you have that kind of reaction to the modern day idolatry that we see around us? Do we grieve over the lost-ness of our neighbors and co-workers, even many of them, brilliant philosophers and scientists and technicians of their own, but having empty hearts and souls just like Paul saw in his day? Do we see the spiritual darkness behind the brilliance of non-Christians around us?

And Paul's response to that darkness was to preach the Gospel with reasoned arguments, both in the synagogue and in the marketplace. Look at verse 17. "So [because of that idolatry] he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there." So Paul always went to the Jew first, to the synagogue first, and his procedure was on Sabbath days to open up the Old Testament prophecies and reason with them from the Old Testament scriptures, proving that Jesus was the Messiah, by those prophecies. But then, he would go out in the marketplace every day. The marketplace was as pagan as it got, a noisy din of meat vendors, and merchants, and political figures, and individuals that were preaching their own philosophies, their own political agendas, you could imagine like a carnival barker saying, "Step right this way." It was a noisy din of paganism. And Paul dove right into that marketplace, and he began to talk to whomever, it literally says, he chanced to meet. Now, we know there's no luck, no chance. Paul was sovereignly led by the Spirit to talk to Greeks there in Athens and share the gospel. And notice his zeal, he did it daily in the marketplace. But as time went on, he began to get into some discussions with some philosophers in the marketplace, and it says a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers listened to him and they invited him to Mars Hill, to the Areopagus to debate with them. 

Now, the Epicureans believed that the goal of human life is personal happiness, resulting from an absence of physical pain and an absence of mental disturbance. They also amazingly believed in atomistic materialism and in a naturalistic account of evolution from the formation of the world to the emergence of complex human societies. Does all of that sound familiar? We deal with a lot of that right here in the triangle. Epicurus believed he could disprove the possibility of the soul's survival after death, and therefore effectively disproving Judgment Day, there is no Judgment Day, the elimination of the fear of judgment day, then set people free to follow whatever pleasures of the flesh and of the mind that they desired. Those were the Epicureans. Now, the stoics were a little bit different, they were one of the newer philosophical movements there in Athens and they believe that emotions like fear, envy, or even impassioned sexual attractions or attachments, passionate love of anything in this world, was really a sign of weakness and it rose from false judgments. And the true sage, the true philosopher, would be able to set himself free from these deep desires, he would not undergo strong passions. The sage would be utterly immune to misfortune and that virtue is sufficient for all happiness. We get our image of somebody with stoic calm, in all circumstance, just not moved by much. Those were the Stoics.

Well, they used to debate each other all the time but along comes Paul. Now, it says of the Athenians that they did nothing but talk about and listen to the latest ideas. So they were just debating each other all the time. I don't know if you are aware of some of these chess experts and hustlers in Central Park in New York, who would sit around there with a board ready to play you. And they would wipe the board with you. They're expert chess players, and they're fast talkers, and they could take your money 'cause they wanted to bet that you could beat them, etcetera. I picture these philosophers the same way, they're ready to debate Paul and wipe the floor with him philosophically. They have a lot of disdain toward Paul.

Think about this statement, the arrogance in it. "What is this babbler trying to say?" The word babbler in the Greek is “seed picker”. And so it's very disparaging of him as a philosopher, like an intellectual vagabond, a philosophical hobo who goes from place to place with a tattered bag of ideas, and picks up a little of this, and a little of that, and adds to his collection of philosophy and ideas without any filter or organizing theme. And yet, as they listen to Paul, they're intrigued. Now, Paul does clearly preach the Gospel to them 'cause he's talking to them about Jesus and the resurrection, but we don't have that account in Acts 17. And so they invite him to Mars Hill and give him time to speak. Now, given that our own culture is becoming more and more scientific, philosophical and pagan, in love with science and technology, and more and more hostile to Christianity, it is beneficial for us to sit at the master's feet and learn from him how to preach.

Now, as I said, Paul doesn't actually preach the Gospel, he does what I call, pre-evangelism. He begins to set everything up but I think they cut him off. You can imagine a radio talk show host that's got his finger on the button, and at a certain point they push the button and shut him down. But yet he does so much of the laying of the groundwork and we need to listen to him. So he begins with this issue of, to an unknown God, an altar he saw to an unknown God. Look at verses 22 and 23, "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."

Paul was a fascinating speaker. I think one of the basic lessons of evangelism is, be interesting. Dig into their worldview. Try to listen to them and ask questions. Find out where they're coming from. And he does that. But notice also, be urgent. Paul goes immediately to the matter at hand. He doesn't waste any time at all. He goes right to the issue of religion. And he talks about this altar of an unknown or to an unknown God, and how tragic and pathetic is that in all of their polytheism they have hundreds, even thousands of gods and goddesses, of shrines, and temples and monuments, they never feel comfortable. It's never enough. They're afraid they might have missed someone in the pantheon of all the gods and goddesses, so they just wanna cover their bases. And so someone made an altar, maybe off to the side in an obscure place, to an unknown God. And Paul seizes on this as a beachhead, like D-Day, Normandy, to try to get a toehold into the discussion, this issue of, to an unknown God. And Paul's mission here is very, very plain, "What you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you." It's not enough for us to be kind to our unsaved neighbors, and to be nice to people at work and to be kind and nice people, we have to proclaim the Gospel, we have to speak the words of the Gospel, and Paul gives us clear example. 

Now, look where he begins, he begins with God the Creator, verse 24 and 25, "The God who made the world and everything in it is Lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all [people] men life and breath and everything else." So Paul begins with this clear assertion that God made the world and everything in it. Now, I wanna talk about just an approach that we should take. Some call it apologetics but they're just some basic questions that everyone has to face in life. Like the question of origins or the question of existence, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Materialistic atheism makes a God of the creation of atoms and matter itself. And that philosophy was there back then, as well. Now, atheistic, materialistic evolution cannot answer the ultimate questions of life, like the questions of origin, cannot answer it. 

I have been studying evolution for a long time. I had the privilege to go to MIT. I love science. I love theology more. I don't see any disunity between genuine good science and good theology, but evolution, friends, is just bad science as well as bad theology. Why is it bad science? Well, there are three questions in particular, the atheistic, materialistic evolution can never answer. First, the origin of life. Where did the first living cell come from? How do you go from a bunch of non-living amino acids or proteins or whatever to the first living cell with a cell wall, and all of that? It's impossible. There's no explanation for it. Secondly, why doesn't the fossil record show a continuous development of species? The fossil record is against evolution. Darwin knew that. He was hoping for thousands of missing links, not just one. And thirdly, what about exquisitely complex organs or capabilities? Like the eye or the wing of a bird. Imagine that that took thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years to evolve. What good would 60% of that evolution be if you still can't fly or can't see?

These three questions, I've never gotten a good answer to. I was talking to a guy who was writing a book on evolution on the plane. And all it did is get him angry. I didn't wanna make him angry. I just wanted some answers and I wanted to point to a creator who actually makes all things.

So evolution cannot answer the questions of origin. Neither can it answer the question of purpose. If everything evolved from non-personal matter, what is the purpose of life? We are purposeful beings, we need to know, "Why am I here? Why am I alive?" Evolution cannot answer the morality question. “Why is there right from wrong, good from evil?” Those kinds of things. We have a strong sense of morality in our hearts. But evolution doesn't give us a sense of that. And it can't answer the destination question. “Where are we heading with all this?” These questions, the questions of origin, the question of purpose, the question of morality, the question of destination, of where we're heading, the scripture gives us answers to all of these and it begins with God the Creator as Genesis 1:1 said, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and Paul preaches it clearly here, “The God who made the world and everything in it...” The God who made the world. Now, I will say this, it's only by faith that anyone will ever accept this truth: God made the world. The author of Hebrews tells us, it is by faith that we realize that the visible world was made by an invisible God. But because God is the creator of all things, God is the ruler of all things. 

Look at verse 24, "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth..." He is the sovereign king. He is Almighty God. He rules the universe. Because he made everything, he has the right to make laws and rules by which everything is to be governed. He rules over it and he has made laws by which we human beings are to behave toward him vertically and toward each other horizontally. For example, most famously, The Ten Commandments. God said, I am the Lord, your God, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make any idols or worship any idols. You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Do all your work in six days and rest on the seventh for God made heaven and earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Honor your father and mother. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor and you shall not covet. That means deeply desire anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Jesus came along later and summed up all of the laws of God, not just The Ten Commandments, but all of those vertically and horizontally in two great commandments. The first and greatest commandment is this, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind. And the second commandment is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But here's the thing, dear friends, these laws have come down from Almighty God, they are the basis of human morality. But all of us have violated them. All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us need a savior. And that's exactly why God sent his son. Because we were rebels. We were violently opposed to the rule of God. We were fighting against him. And therefore salvation is yielding clearly to the yoke of God's kingly rule in the kingdom of heaven. As it says in Mark 1:15, Jesus began preaching, he said, “The time has come… The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe [the gospel] the good news!"

In other words, "Stop your rebelling against my commands, and submit to my kingly rule, and I will forgive a grand and eternal glorious day of amnesty. I will forgive all of your sins, past, present, and future, by simple faith in Jesus." Oh, dear friend, do you know that that's happened to you? Do you know that your sins are forgiven through faith in Christ? All of us are rebels against that rule of Almighty God. Well, and Paul was there to preach that good news. Then he addresses the folly of idolatry. Look at verses 24 and 25, "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and he does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else." And then a few verses later, verse 29 and 30, he says, "Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone -- an image made by man's design and skill. In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” 

Well, Paul zeroes in on this issue of, to an unknown God, and he shows how foolish is this idolatry, and they do not realize how offended God is by their idolatry. How at the core of God's being, he hates his glory being denigrated by idolatry. And look at the specifics of what Paul says. God does not dwell in temples built by men. Solomon, when he built the temple that God commissioned him to build and God wanted it built in Jerusalem. When he got done, he realized the truth. He said, "The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple that I have built!" So God doesn't dwell in temples built by men and he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything. That's so important for us to realize. God has never needed anything at all, and he never will need anything. God is a perfectly full being. He is overflowing with fullness. He doesn't have any needs. He didn't have any needs before he created the heavens and the earth. And he doesn't have any needs now. He actually gives to all people life and breath and everything else. 

And so, if I can say this to you, dear Christian friend, as we desire to be evangelists and we desire to serve God with our spiritual gifts, we need to realize and be humbled by the fact, God doesn't need you at all. He doesn't need me. He doesn't need any of us. He doesn't need us to serve him. We actually need him to serve us. We need him through Jesus to wash us of sin and to die on the cross in our place and to lift us up. We need him to serve us, and if we're humbled that way, then we can serve him and he will accept our service, but he doesn't need us. And anything we would ever give to God is his already. Furthermore, Paul says, God is not made by man's technology. God is not designed by man's skill out of gold, or silver or anything else. Actually, man is made by God's skill. Isn't it beautiful how King David said in Psalm 1:39, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Isn't that a beautiful image? God knitting us together. Stitch upon stitch in our mother's wombs. We are specially created by the powerful hand of God. So we don't make God. God made us.

And not only that, God is the creator, the sustainer and ruler of all human societies in human history. From one man, he made every nation of man that they should inhabit the whole earth. So God gives to all people life, and breath, and everything else and he made the entire human race out of one man, Adam. And there goes or should go all racism. We are all from one man. We are all descended from Adam. And not only that, God is the sustainer of every human being, every moment. Look at verse 28, “’For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” The basic message here is our continued existence depends at every moment on God. How important is that for us to realize during these times of COVID-19, to realize that in God we live, and move and have our being. 

God is a sovereign ruler of every human being. Look at verse 26, "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live." Now, that's staggering. That's absolutely staggering. God created the whole human race from Adam, and then he orchestrated through his sovereign will and providential control where every sub-group of people would live, where some would inhabit some valley surrounded by some mountains. Others would be in some desert areas, or some tundra and God apportioned to each one their boundaries. What that means, the great empires like of Alexander the Great, the scope of his empire, or the Roman Empire, how far it would go and how long it would last.

Right now I'm listening to a biography of Genghis Khan. And though he did not acknowledge the true God, God gave to him the largest contiguous empire in history. Almost a quarter of the habitable land on earth, belonged at one point to the Mongols. And God determined how long the Mongols would rule and the extent of their rule. We could think even about the North American context, and how God decided how long the Apache or the Navajo would rule, and the extent of their domains before Europeans came and displaced them as they had displaced others before them. All of this is not some swirling mosaic mess but God is sovereignly orchestrating all of this. And why is that? Because God is seeking people to worship him. He wants people to follow him and love him.

Look what it says in verse 26 and 27, “he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that [people] men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” I want you to see in Paul's message, it's so incredible, both the transcendence of God, the infinite majesty of a transcendent God, but also the immanence of God, how close he is to each one of us. Do you realize how important those two ideas are for this present time in this pandemic? We need to realize, God sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and this virus does not threaten his purposes at all. God can actually even use sorrow, and disease and even death to accomplish his purposes of life as we see ultimately in the cross. 

So God is transcendent and majestic and unshaken by any human event. But he's also imminent. In him, we live, and move and have our being, he is not far from each one of us. And so God does all of this sovereign orchestration of history, so that sinners like you and me can just reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. And then in verse 30, Paul says that God” … commands all people everywhere to repent.” He talks about their idolatry, a great offense to him. Our sins are a stench in God's nostrils. God has a violent angry reaction against all human sin. And he is calling now, all sinners to repent. Look at Verse 30, “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” The idolatry of these pagans is not okay. It's not an alternate path to God. It's not, it's offensive to him. All of our sins, our lusts, our materialistic idolatries, all of these things are offensive to him. And that's exactly why God sent his son, the only begotten Son of God, Jesus, to live a sinless life, to die an atoning death for sinners like you and me, and to be raised from the dead, showing a hope of eternal life because God is commanding sinners like you and me to repent.

Friends, if you're an evangelist, I want you to have just some iron in your backbone on this verse. God is commanding the people you're talking to, to repent. Sometimes we're so afraid, we wilt in the face of public opinion. Do not wilt. We are ambassadors from the kingdom of heaven. We've got a message from the king of amnesty, the king who is coming, who's coming with terrifying power, who's coming to judge the living and the dead is giving now, through his advanced team, his ambassadors, an opportunity for sinners like you and me to repent. And he commands us, all people everywhere to repent. So in the midst of the Gospel is a command from Almighty God, from the king, “Repent and believe the Gospel because Judgment Day is coming.” Look at verse 31, “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.”

All of the human philosophies made way for human pleasures and human beings to live how they want. And we live in that era, too. People think it's going to be fine. They can live, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow, we die, but the Bible says, Judgment Day is coming. And Christian friends, we need to tell our non-Christian friends the truth. Judgment Day is coming. He has set a day. Now, no one knows when that day is. We don't know. But it's coming and he's going to judge all people. We're gonna have to give an account on the Day of Judgment for every careless word we have spoken. And Christ's resurrection proves his role as the judge of all humanity. Look at verse 31, “He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” So Jesus is the judge of every human being that's ever lived, past, present, future, all human beings will stand before his throne for judgment. As Jesus said in John 5, “The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father [who sent him].” And Paul says that God has given proof of this to all nations by raising that one man, Jesus, from the dead. And that's what we're gonna celebrate next week. We celebrate it every day but we get a special day with Christians around the world to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But here, for our purposes, it's proof that there is a judgment day coming and that Jesus will be the judge.

Now, Paul had gotten to that point and he was just about to unfold the beauties of the full Gospel and all that but they shut him down. That's why I call it beautiful pre-evangelism here, and there are various reactions. “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered.” So that's just an arrogant philosophical reaction. The Epicureans and the Stoics were not interested in the bodily resurrection of a dead person. That made no sense to them. That was foolishness to them, so they shut him down. But some of them were secretly interested, I think. Paul piqued the interest of some. And so, in verse 32 it says, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” And then, in the course of time, genuine faith by some. Look at verse 34. “A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” And so, it's incredible the fruit that comes and, first of all, how significant it is. These people have names. If they have genuine faith in Christ, they are in heaven right now awaiting the resurrection from the dead. But also, look at how small the number is. There's this vast city and this huge number of philosophers and just a few of them believe. Now, as we faithfully share the gospel here in Durham, and Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, and all of this region, we know that we're gonna meet with the same kind of mixed reactions. Some are gonna mock us. Some are gonna get angry. Some are gonna ignore us. Some are gonna be intrigued and wanna talk some more. And eventually some are going to believe.

So applications. The greatest application we can take from this is just, I wanna say to you, dear viewer, dear friend, thank you for tuning in. What about you? Are your sins forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ? Have you trusted in him? If not, I just wanna urge you, call on the name of the Lord Jesus. Do it right now. Don't wait. Don't wait. You don't know if you'll even be alive tomorrow. Call on the name of the Lord for the forgiveness of sins. Now, for you Christians, members of First Baptist Church, we are committed and should be committed as never before to take the message of life to people who need to hear it so much. If, as we trust will soon happen, this thing will ebb away like Noah's flood and it will become a very vivid memory, and there'll still be some economic repercussions, either way, we know that our neighbors, our unsaved neighbors and family, co-workers, fellow students, other people we meet here in this region, will remember this and they'll have questions. They'll have questions about life and about death, and about judgment, and sin, and forgiveness. It is our privilege to walk in the footsteps of Paul and be able to share the Gospel with people. Let's be faithful to do it. Let's pray. We've had our prayer, our extraordinary prayer meetings kind of interrupted by this, we've been praying at home, but we're gonna renew a commitment, once this thing's over, to gather for extraordinary prayer to train ourselves on how to do evangelism and then to go out and share; workplace, neighborhood, around the church, as we meet people here in this area. Let's be faithful to be witnesses for the glory of God. Close with me in prayer. 

Father, we thank you for the beauty of the scripture. It's timeless. It's powerful. It's alive. It never changes and it gives us hope. I thank you for the mysterious message of a transcendent God who is also imminent, who's right with us. In him we live and move and have our being, and he is the judge of all the earth. Help us, oh Lord, to be humbled by his transcendence and his majesty, to put off all of our anxieties and fears at his feet because he cares for us. He's a sovereign king. But also to realize he wants us to walk with him moment by moment and to love him. Lord, I pray any that are unsaved, who have listened to this live stream, that they would repent of their sins while there's time and find forgiveness in Jesus. It's in his name we pray. Amen.

Well, this is my third opportunity to live stream with you, so grateful that you could join us today, and I'm grateful for the opportunity that I have to minister the word of God. These are certainly extraordinary times that we're living through. I've never been through anything like this in my life, I know neither have you. And we're aware through the Internet, through the news services of the untold millions that are affected by this, over half a million that have actually caught the disease, and some good number, tens of thousands have died. We're also acutely aware of the economic impact on all people but on small businesses, on hourly workers, and we're mindful of all of this and beyond this, there are just so many changes that this has brought, which have produced a lot of disappointments, things that people were intending to do, they were hoping to do, and now they can't do them, and so they are very disappointed. And there's not one of us that's not suffered to some degree, some changes and some disappointments and some setbacks because of this, but we should look beyond all of this to Almighty God who sits on a throne, he sits enthroned in the heavenly realms.

We should understand that God rules over Heaven and Earth. “That all the nations before him are like specks of dust on the scale and like drops of water from above.” God is king over all. And not only that, but he is doing a secret work in the lives of people all around the world by these changed circumstances. Things that we will not really fully understand until we get to Heaven, but God is at work around the world, he uses times of suffering, and when he chooses to, and when he moves his little finger, the flood of this virus will recede like the waters of Noah's flood and we will return to the beautiful world still under the curse of Adam. We know that death is the final enemy, and it's going to be here until the Lord returns, until the Lord comes, but we'll return God willing to normal life. But not only that, every step of the way God is going to give us everything we need for life and godliness, and he's going to do that by the ministry of the word. We're going to be fed, we're going to receive in the scripture, the food of faith, and that's what we're here for, today. This morning is no different. How wonderful has this journey been for us through the Book of James? And it's coming to an end this morning.

And isn't it incredible how perfectly God's word lines up with our circumstances again and again? Now we follow a pattern of sequential exposition here in this church and we go from passage to passage, book after book, and last week we saw how beautifully the text lined up with the suffering and the circumstances that we're going through, we're told to be patient in affliction. Patient in suffering, through James 5:7-12. We need to be patient like a farmer waiting for the autumn and spring rains. We need to be patient like the prophets who spoke the word of God to reluctant people. We need to be patient like Job, who lost everything of earthly value in this world. All his possessions, he lost his children under the secret assault of Satan, but he never lost his faith. And he said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I will see God." Now how timely is that reminder that word from the Lord. How timely was it last week? And this week we're going to be fed again with another timely word from the Book of James, the power of prayer when facing any and every circumstance that we could face in life. Things that afflict us, things that make us happy. And how prayer is the uniting theme of this text. And especially prayer in times of sickness, and we see how perfectly God's word lines up with our circumstances. 

Now, we western Christians are used to looking to technology, to science, to solve so many of our life problems. We forget about God's amazing power to heal sick people directly, especially through prayer. God heals every disease and sickness, categorically. Every disease and sickness known to man, God heals people suffering from those illnesses. And he does it daily, even hourly whether those sick people acknowledge him or not. “God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good. God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” and so, he also sends the blessings of healing on people around the world who don't even know him or acknowledge him day after day. Now, it's true. Sometimes God uses technology, uses science. He uses medical research, pharmaceutical research, amazing technologies like radiation therapies or even genetically designed therapies that didn't even exist five to 10 years ago, tailor-made for specific people that are suffering.

We here in Durham are near some of the very best research hospitals in the world, and not just a few miles from where I stand right now are some of the best pharmaceutical companies in the world. And we've heard many people praying for a cure to COVID-19, and people we know are working on that. And when God just opens up his hand, he's going to give secret insights to scientists as he's done time and time again. Again, whether those scientists acknowledge him or not. Some of those researchers are believers, brothers and sisters in Christ who do their work as an act of worship to the Lord, and God may show them insights to help them discern how to heal this. Sometimes he uses people who are not believers, who don't acknowledge him at all. I believe in Heaven God's going to get credit for all of the scientific advancements there have ever been in history. When credit was robbed from him in this world, it's going to be given to him in Heaven. So we wait on God for that. But we're also aware that God heals directly. Sometimes he uses medicine, sometimes he uses surgeries, but he's able to extend his hand and heel and He does it many times in answer to prayer. God is a healer, the Bible reveals this plainly. Exodus 15:26, "I am the Lord who heals you.” “I am the Lord who heals you." Again, Psalm 103, the first three verses says, "Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my in most being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases." And again, see the sovereignty of God in all of this. In Deuteronomy 32:39, the scripture there says, "Behold now that I myself am he. There is no God besides me. I put to death and I bring to life. I have wounded and I will heal. And no one can deliver anyone out of my hand," that's Deuteronomy 32. 

Now, some day as I said, this COVID-19 virus, like every other disease ever known to man, and every other injury ever known to man in this dying world of ours will become obsolete. Hallelujah. We are going to the New Heavens and the New Earth where it says in Revelation 21, “He will wipe every tear from our eyes, there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who is seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new.’ And then he said, write this down, for these words are trustworthy and they are true.”

So, he wanted that vision written down by the Apostle John, so that we could read it and be encouraged. And then in the next chapter of Revelation, Revelation 22:1-3, these wonderful words, amazing words, "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life as clear as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. And on each side of the river, stood the Tree of Life bearing 12 crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him, and they will see his face." That's our future. Every disease and sickness, obsolete by the Tree of Life. But we're not there yet. We know we're not there yet. We're a week closer. Praise God, every week brings us closer to that wonderful vision, but now is a time of suffering, it's a time of sorrow and in some rare cases related to this disease, it is a time of death, and God is calling on us to pray to him as never before. This affliction is an opportunity to unleash the power of God through prayer for healing. And no text in the Bible is better for this purpose than James 5:13-20.

Now, many of us definitely myself included, feel how weak we are in prayer. I don't consider this a great strength in my life, I often feel defective in prayer, I feel powerless. And often we feel guilty about our prayer lives that we do not pray as we should. Now, we've read so many great quotes from church history of the men and women of God who have been men and women of prayer, and then they have given encouragement to their brothers and sisters about prayer. I was reading this week Charles Spurgeon, and he had a lot to say about prayer. Spurgeon said this, "To pray is to enter the treasure house of God and to gather riches out of an inexhaustible storehouse." What an incredible image that is. Like we're going into Ali Baba's cave, but it's not like the door is going to close, we have to say, “Open sesame.” We're going to go in and just get all the riches of God's grace and His power and His goodness. Again, Spurgeon said, "The ship of prayer may sail through all temptations, doubts and fears straight up to the throne of God." What a great image that is. But on the other hand, Spurgeon warned, neglected prayer is the birthplace of all evil. Can I just urge you, friends, Christian brothers and sisters, do not neglect prayer during this time. Do not let sin drive out prayer. John Bunyan said, "Prayer drives out sin or sin drives out prayer," and so, don't let that happen to you. Don't be prayerless. 

Alright, well, we read those great quotes, but then we look at our own prayer lives, and we see the weakness of our prayer lives, and we know that we need help. God has sent the Holy Spirit as the primary instructor in prayer. Charles Spurgeon, again, said this, "Prayer is an art which only the Spirit of God can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer." Well, that's a great quote from Charles Spurgeon isn't it? But isn't it better to hear the Holy Spirit himself through the Apostle Paul talk to us about this. Listen, Romans 8:26, it says, “in the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We don't know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” So the primary way that the Spirit helps us in our weaknesses is by instructing us through the scripture on prayer and James 5 is a wonderful place to start.

Pray At All Times for Every Reason

So, let's begin by just following the order of the text, and ask when we should pray and then closely related to that, we're going to ask who should pray. Let's begin with, when we should pray. Verse 13, look at verse 13, it says, "Is anyone among you suffering? You should pray." So we should pray when we're suffering. What about when we're happy? Verse 13, “Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.” So that may not refer to prayer, but you can imagine singing the song up to God out of thankfulness. When we are sick, verse 14-15, “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise him up”. And then when we have sinned, we should pray. Again, verse 15, “If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other, so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” So honestly, there is no circumstance in our lives when we should not pray. As the scripture says, pray without ceasing. Or even better, Ephesians 6:18 has a marvelous detailed unfolding of this. It says, “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests with this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.” Comprehensive prayer life. Alright, that's when we should pray, always. 

Individual Christians: Pray for Yourselves

Who should pray? Let's circle back and look at that. Well, let's start with individual Christians. Individual Christians should pray for themselves, you dear Christian should pray for yourself. When you're in trouble. “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray.” James talking about trouble uses a general word for suffering or affliction of any type. Whenever you're suffering, whenever you're in trouble, you should pray. Suffering often pulls individuals away from God. It can make us wrongly distrust God. We may question him, wonder what he's doing, wonder who he is. I remember reading the story of the great missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson, and at the lowest part, I would say of his entire life, he lost his wife Nancy, he lost their little baby as well, nothing good really had happened in his ministry, and he went out into the jungle nearby where he lived and he dug a hole there, like a grave and sat staring into it for hours. And he said with despair, "I came to bring life and have brought nothing but death." And then he said this, “God is to me the great unknown. I believe in him, but I can't find him." That's what can happen in suffering. It can feel like, God, who are you? Where are you? Job, got to that point.  In Job 30:20-22, Job said, "I cry out to you O God, but you do not answer. I stand up, but you merely look at me. you turn on me ruthlessly. With the might of your hand you attack me, you snatch me up and drive me before the wind, you toss me about in the storm." Well, when we're going through afflictions, sorrows, difficulties, that's exactly the time we should draw near to God in prayer. Just take the text simply. Verse 13, “Is anyone of you suffering? Let him pray.” 

The Happy Should Pray

Secondly, individuals should pray whenever they're happy. “Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.” At our happiest times we should go back to God and we should thank him for those blessings and sing praises to him with “songs, and hymns and spiritual songs in our hearts with gratitude to God.” Earlier in James we learned, “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly light.” So, if you're happy, it's because God has done something to make you so. He's given you some blessing, go back and sing a song of praise to him. So prayer should be the life breath of our individual daily walk with Christ. Jesus in John 15, gave that beautiful analogy, "I am the vine and you are the branches.” We need to abide in him. Remain in Him. And He makes it very plain that happens by the ministry of the Word combined with prayer. He said, "If you remain in me and my words remain in you, then ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you. This is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples." So we should pray continually, individually in our walk with Christ, as an expression of our walk with Christ. But we also can see a corporate life of prayer here as well. We are blessed to be in a healthy local church. One of the greatest blessings in my life is to ust a member of First Baptist Church, Durham. It's a great blessing, and James in this text, extends prayer out beyond the individual level to others in the Church, beginning with the elders of the church.

The Elders of the Church for the Sick and Sinning

Look at verse 14, "Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord." This is a fascinating passage. Sickness, elders, anointing with oil, and then the issue of sin. There's a lot to unravel here. The Roman Catholic church found, in this text, grounds for the seventh sacrament, which they called extreme unction done to the dying in the same way prosperity Gospel people and health and wealth people have come to this text, and found sacred anointing oils that you can... They'll give it to you if you send them a healthy donation to their TV Ministry, something like that. So you can get little bottles of oil. So it just comes from this. So there's a lot of questions that we may have as we read this. What is this talking about? Well, let's keep it simple initially, just in terms of church government polity, you can see the plural elders here in a single local church. “Is any one of you sick, you should call the elders [, plural,] of the church.” So, we believe that this is strong evidence for the plurality of elders within a local church. But why should a sick person call the elders? Well, there is a sense of spiritual leadership in elders. They should be men mighty in prayer. They should be men able to wrestle on our behalf in prayer, and to be victorious. 

And when they come it says, they should anoint the sick person with oil. What does that mean? One of two possibilities. One is that this is a spiritual, sacred or symbolic anointing, so it's completely spiritual, sacred, symbolic, and the other is, it may refer to actual medicines. The application of physical medicine. So, the first, in terms of the sacred anointing, or the spiritual anointing, we know in the Old Testament.Significant individuals in society prophets, priests and kings were anointed with oil to mark them apart. So the king would sometimes be called the Lord's anointed. And the flowing down of the oil in the head represented the ministry of the Holy Spirit in that person's life. So anointing the sick person with oil would be bringing in the ministry of the Holy Spirit symbolically, not that anything really happens through the actual physical oil, but that the Holy Spirit comes in, and ministers. But it's also possible that the anointing with oil represents the application of physical medicines. And so we Christians are not at all averse to medical procedures, surgeries, the binding up of wounds and the application of medicines. And so the oil may represent all of those things. Isaiah 1:6 says, "From the sole of your foot to the top of your head, there's no soundness only wounds and welts and open sores, not bandaged or cleansed or soothed with oil." So that that would be a therapeutic approach there. Again, Good Samaritan, Luke 10:34, "The Good Samaritan went over to the wounded man who was lying by the side of the road, bandaged his wounds and poured on oil and wine, and then he took the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn and took care of him."

Now, some commentators argue against this saying like oil is just linked to injuries not to sickness, but it could be that this is just representing all physical methods of healing which we believe in and we use, though we do not trust in them ultimately. It could be that the elders of the church might be among the wisest in the community at dealing with sickness back in Jesus' day, back in the days of the apostles. It was so often the case, this was before the Industrial Revolution before the Scientific Explosion, where we separated out and the scientific methodology was applied to medicine and you became a scientific medical specialist. And we have many of those beautifully in our church. But even back in the Puritan days and in the days of the pilgrims, the best healers in the community frequently were the pastors, they were the most educated ones. And those were things that pastors would learn is basic first aid and care. So, at any rate, these are what a sick person should do. 

Notice also that James links sickness with possible sin, possible sin. Look at verse 15 and 16, "The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." So there's a clear linking in those verses between possible sin and the sickness. So now we have to deal with the question that comes up again and again, “Is there a link between sin and disease? Sin and sickness?” This was a question that came up in Jesus's day with the man born blind, "Who sinned? This man or his parents?” Remember that question. So there's this linking. So what we have to realize is that not every sickness that happens in this world can be directly linked to individual personal sin, but some can. So James raises it up with the word, “if,” that's what the word, if, means: If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. So God sometimes actually does discipline his people, by sickness. In Hebrews 12:6 it says, "The Lord disciplines those he loves and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son." And so occasionally, that discipline may be sickness. I believe every individual Christian who gets sick should bring their sickness privately in their prayer closet to the Lord and say, "Lord, am I being disciplined for some sin?" Psalm 139, "Search me O God, and know my heart, and show me and see if there's any sin in my life." Then when the elders come, I think the elders after comforting, consoling, ministering, medicine or whatever, all of those things, and praying, at some point when it's reasonable, the elders I think, should ask gently and lovingly, "Are you aware of any sin in your life that this might be a discipline for?" Do it at a time when the person is alone, and can answer without shame or embarrassment. 

Now, this is a far cry from Job's friends who assume that Job's afflictions were because of his sins. To them it was a given; If you're sick, God is judging you for some sin. That is so far the other direction. So we cannot do that. At one point, one of Job's friends even said to the most righteous man that had ever lived, up to that point, "Is not your wickedness endless?" I mean, that's not a friend, a friend doesn't do that. But the elders, I think, can and should have this kind of ministry. So just bring that up.

Now, COVID-19, we really could say is a worldwide plague. And recently, with one of my kids, I did a study on the word “plague,” and again and again in the Bible, there's a direct link between human sinfulness and plagues that come. And so for us, we ought to see a sense of solidarity with the human race, even if we're not personally aware of any sin in our lives. We're part of a sinful human race in Adam. We should be willing to pray in light of this plague and the connection to the sins of the human race, and pray that God would use this disease COVID-19 to bring people to repentance, that they would see individual sins in their lives, and that they would repent and find faith and find forgiveness in Christ. So individuals should pray for themselves. The elders should pray for the sick, and then the church as a whole should pray for one another. 

Church Members for Each Other

James expands prayer to the whole church, again in the context of sickness and sin. He says, "Therefore, confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." So if there is any sin involved, that individual should confess his or her sins to God directly. 1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." But this passage isn't talking about that. It's talking about a horizontal confession of sins to one another. And I think sometimes we need to do that. I think in discipleship, we believe in having discipleship partners, men, with men, women with women. And you need to have people in your life that you can do this with. Confess your sins, pray for each other, hold each other accountable. And this is something that accountability partners and prayer partners do for each other. In any case, it is a powerful thing to share in each other's joys and sorrows through corporate prayer. That's a great privilege that we have. And friends if I can say now more than ever, we should be hungrily looking for ways to pray, people to intercede for, expanding ourselves out to find people to pray for. 

Pray in Righteousness

All right, how should we pray? Well the text has a lot to say about the manner by which we pray. First of all, we should pray in righteousness, in righteousness. It says in verse 16, "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." Sin blocks prayer, sin blocks prayer. Isaiah 59:1-2 says, "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear, but your iniquities have separated you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." So we need to be righteous in order for God to hear our prayers. People often ask, does God hear the prayers of unbelievers? God is under no covenant obligation to hear or answer the prayer of any unbeliever. But what we know as Christians is we all began unrighteous. 

Believe on Christ for Salvation

Romans 3 says very plainly, "There is no one righteous, not even one. There's no one who understands, no one who seeks God.” All of us began as unrighteous, and God in his mercy, sent his Son, the only truly righteous man that's ever lived. And he lived a sinless life. And he died an atoning death on the cross so that sinners like you and me can be fully forgiven of all of our sins and be seen to be righteous in the sight of God. So if you are an unbeliever, and you've come to this live stream today, I'm so delighted that you're here. This is a moment that I want you to hear and to listen to the Gospel. God is able through simple faith in Jesus Christ to make you righteous, to make you fully forgiven of all of your sins. Second Corinthians 5:21 says, "God made him, [Christ,] who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." There's a great exchange that happens at the cross: Our sins are given to Christ and he dies under the punishment and the wrath of God, his righteousness is given to us and we live shining and bright in Heaven forever by simple faith in Christ.

So justification righteousness enables God to hear our prayers, but also there's a matter of practical righteousness. Psalm 66:18 said, "If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened." So if you are violating your conscience, your prayer life will become powerless. So repent, confess your sins, turn from those things, and draw near to God in prayer. So first, how should we pray? We should pray in righteousness. Secondly, we should pray in the name of the Lord. Again, verse 14, "Is anyone of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord."

In the Name of the Lord

Now, what does it mean to pray in the name of the Lord or in Jesus' name? It's not just to say, "In Jesus' name, Amen," so that all your friends know that you're done praying. It's more than that, far more than that. Jesus' name represents his reputation, who he was as a man, how he lived. But more than that it represents his kingdom and his purposes, and his glory, and all of those things. And so to pray in Jesus' name means to pray, lined up with Jesus's purposes, lined up with Jesus' kingdom, lined up with his promises, where he's going, and for his glory. So even the prayer for the sick should be made in Jesus' name: "Lord, Jesus, if it would be for your glory and the advancement of your kingdom that this person should be raised out of this sick bed, please do it." That's what it means to pray in Jesus' name. So often our prayers are not in Jesus' name, but they're for our own selfish purposes. As James talked about earlier in James 4:3, "When you ask you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." This is the time to set all of that aside, and to pray in Jesus' name for his glory, for his kingdom. 

In Faith

Thirdly, we should pray in faith. Verse 15, "The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise them up." To pray in faith means to pray relying on Jesus the invisible. To see him who is invisible as seeing him who's invisible, it says that about Moses in Hebrews 11. It means praying, confident that there is an invisible God on an invisible throne, and we believe in his power, and his love, and his compassion, and we're praying, trusting, relying on him in faith. Now we are not thinking like the faith movement, the name it and claim it or prosperity Gospel people that say that faith can create a reality that God never intended. Not at all. I've said for years faith is the eyesight of the soul by which we receive the available light there is in the room. By faith we are lining ourselves up with God's purposes. By faith, we are trusting in him to do what is for his own glory. So that faith movement is so devastating when parents who bring their children to faith healers and then the children die, and then they're told even more they didn't have enough faith. That's not what this is teaching. We trust in God. And we believe in him, we rely on him in prayer. So we should pray in righteousness, we should pray in the name of the Lord, we should pray in faith, and we should pray in expectancy, with an expectant heart, expecting that God is going to do something. I love the King James Version translation of this James 5:16, "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Isn't that wonderful? 

Pray Expecting A Powerful Outcome

Some time ago, I was driving by a church that had a sign ministry. And I have to be honest, some of the signs that I see in sign ministry are very cheesy, but this one stuck with me, and it was powerful. And it was this, “Pray until something happens.” I was like, "That's incredible." That stuck with me. Let's keep praying, trusting that God is going to work, he's going to act. Prayer is powerful and effective. God wills to do much through prayer. When we pray, we must pray expecting that God can do anything, that God is going to use COVID-19, to work all things together for good for his purposes. For those that are called by his name. Prayer means that so many of the things that God accomplishes, he is going to do through prayer. And we need to know he, Jesus, is every bit as powerful to heal as ever he was in his physical life on Earth.

You read in Matthew 4:24, concerning Jesus, "News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon possessed, the epileptics, and the paralytics and he healed them." So various diseases, there was no sickness or disease that Jesus could not cure. In Mark 7:37 it says, "People were overwhelmed with amazement, he has done everything well, they said, he even makes the deaf hear, and the mute speak. There is no disease that Jesus cannot cure." And he's the same today as he was then, he's the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8. Notice the statement on healing here, verse 15, “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well, the Lord will raise him up.” It's kind of a concentric circle thing where the oil drops off, and you're just left with a prayer offered in faith. And then even the prayer offered in faith drops off and it's just the Lord. The Lord raises him up. In the end, it's the Lord that does it, not the oil, not even the prayer ultimately, but it is the Lord. And notice the expression "the Lord will raise him up." Doesn't that make you think about the resurrection? For me, it does. It makes me think about the ultimate resurrection. Friends resurrection day's in two weeks, but you know, you can actually celebrate it today. We can celebrate that Christ has risen. We actually do as Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ every day, and as I've already said, we are going to a world where there'll be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain, every disease will be healed.

So this sick brother or sister in bed, may actually even die from this illness. But we don't need to fear because the Lord will raise him up. The day will come when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out. Or as Jesus said in John 11:25-26, "I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die." Do you believe this? So, dear friend, I'm asking you, do you believe that Christ has risen? Do you believe that he is Lord, then God will save you if you call on the name of the Lord, in the resurrected Lord's name, he raises up sick people. Ultimately, he'll raise up all of his people to eternal life. So we must believe in the powerful effectiveness of prayer for God has worked amazing things in redemptive history by the prevailing prayers of his faithful people. 

Elijah was a Man Just Like Us

Now, he brings out one of the great examples of faith-filled prayer there is and that is Elijah. Elijah, a man of prayer. Look at verses 17-18, "Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years." Verse 18, "Again, he prayed, and the heavens gave rain and the earth Earth produced its crops." So Elijah is an example of the power of prayer. Now he begins by saying Elijah was a man just like us or of like passions. We need to be told this because Elijah was different, dear friends, in some very significant ways. Very few of you, if any of you eat locusts out in the desert and wear a leather belt around your waist with camel hair garment. John the Baptist did it because he came in the spirit of Elijah. And then Elijah at the end of his life, ascended to Heaven in a chariot of fire. He didn't even experience death like the rest of us. But James still he's saying, "Look for all of that, he was a man of like passions to us. He was just like us. He struggled physically with the same things, hunger and thirst and weariness, and even discouragement." So James's idea is, Elijah was, in one sense nothing special. And we actually can therefore imitate him in faith-filled prayer. Now Elijah's whole ministry was a display of the power of prayer, so many aspects of it. There are many things we could talk about. But James zeroes in especially on the drought.

James’ Focus on the Drought

We learned something here and this happens from time to time in the New Testament, a well known Old Testament story that there's a detail the New Testament writers tell us that's not in the Old Testament. And one of those is we are told here, Elijah prayed that it would not rain. So before he pops in, mysteriously pops into the narrative, in 1 King 17:1, we've never heard of Elijah the Tishbite, he just pops up and says, "As the Lord lives, before whom I stand, there will be neither dew nor rain, except at my word for the next several years." Then he disappears. Before that ever happened, the text says, James tells us, "Elijah prayed earnestly, fervently, that it would not rain. He prayed for the drought." 

Now, you're like, “why would he do that?” Why would anyone pray for an affliction like this? Well, it has to do with the Law of Moses, and with the blessings and curses that Moses gave to the Jewish people, the Israelite nation, before they entered the promised land. And it says very plainly in Deuteronomy 28: 23 and 24, "God said to the Jews, 'I will make the sky over your head to be bronze, and I'll make the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder. It will come down from the skies until you're destroyed." Why would God do that? As a direct punishment for idolatry, for falling into the sins of the Canaanites and all of their wickedness, for breaking the covenant. Well, Elijah looked around and said, "Lord, they're breaking the covenant, they've been doing it for for decades. God, would you please bring this discipline, bring this drought so that the people of Israel might turn away from Baal and turn back to you the true Lord." This covenant curse was meant to bring Israel back to repentance. And that's, I think, why Elijah prayed. 

Now it's interesting, when Elijah had that contest with the prophets of Baal, in 1 Kings 18, the next chapter, he says something very interesting about his prayer life. As he's praying for fire to fall down from Heaven on the sacrifice, he says this, 1 Kings 18:36 and 37, "Oh Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have," listen to this, "Done all these things at your command." That's very important. It all started with God. So when Elijah began praying that it would not rain God was ahead of that. And he gave him that prayer burden, "Pray for this Elijah." We never get ahead of God in prayer, we never think of anything first. God is always leading us. And so, "I've done all of these things at your command," and then it continues, "Answer me, oh Lord, answer me so that these people know that you, oh Lord are God, and that," listen to this, "you are turning their hearts back again." So this whole thing came from God through the prayer warrior, to the end that the people would turn back to God and follow him. At the end of the three and a half years, he again prayed for rain, we know that, he kneels down, he sees nothing and then he goes back again. His servant does and he sees nothing, and he goes back a third time. And then there's this little cloud as small as a man's fist, and the rain came. 

This is the Confidence We Have in Prayer

Now, this is the confidence that we have in prayer. It's amazing how God linked rain and dew to the word of a man. "There'll be neither dew nor rain in the land for the next several years except at my word." That sounds arrogant, doesn't it? But God gave him that power through prayer. He linked it to Elijah's prayer very much like Joshua in Joshua 10:14 when Joshua prayed that the sun would stand still in the sky, so that they could finish defeating their enemies. The day was lengthened. And Joshua 10:14 says, "There's never been a day like it before or since," listen to this, "A day when the Lord listened to a man." And so God in His wisdom includes us in what he's doing. He draws us in. And he has the idea. Elijah said, "Just let everyone know that I am your servant, I am the Lord's servant." He said that in first king 17:1, "As surely as the Lord lives before whom I stand." In other words, I didn't do this on my own. Ultimately, the man and woman of prayer has stood in the presence of God and heard what the Lord wants him or her to do in prayer. We are as Henry Blackaby said in Experiencing God, finding out where God is at work and joining Him. Better, I think even to say God reveals us to us what he's going to do. He discloses himself to us, and then we join him in it in prayer. 

So can I just apply this immediately now to COVID-19? I don't know that any man or woman of God prayed that this illness would come. I don't know that God might actually put a burden like that on someone, because God can use disease to turn people's hearts back to God. But whether anyone prayed that it would come, we can act like Elijah in the midst of this and say, "Oh Lord, use this disease, the way you used the drought back in those days to turn Israel's heart back to you. Let this COVID-19 time turn people's hearts away from materialism, away from lust and sin, away from the pleasures of the flesh, away from all of these things, and turn to God in Christ, finding forgiveness of sins and finding a new rich life in the power of the Spirit.”

Now Elijah's mission in restoring the Jews, that God was bringing all of the people back to himself through this prayer ministry and drought ministry, links up with the final two verses in the Book of James. Look at them with me, the mission of the church is to rescue the perishing. Verse 19 and 20, "My brothers if one of you should wander from the truth, and someone should bring him back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way, will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins." Now, the whole book of James has been focused on genuine faith, what does genuine saving faith look like? And the church's responsibility to be certain that people that we know are actually continuing to walk in newness of life. Our church covenant says we will watch over one another in brotherly love. So if you know that someone is wandering away from the faith, make a phone call. I know right now we do social distancing, but at some point that will end and these words will still be there. We need to go after people, we need to go visit them, show up on their doorstep. We need to pray with them. We need to talk to them, say, "You know I've not seen at church recently," or, "You used to come to home fellowship. What's going on in your life?" You know, as Jesus is the Good Shepherd, he leaves the hundred on the hills, and goes to look for the one that wandered off, so must we go after people that wander. We should make phone calls. If they're caught in a sin, we should restore them gently, Galatians 6:1 "watching ourselves." And James says if we win them over we're rescuing them from death, and covering over a multitude of sins. 

Now the death we're rescuing them from really isn't so much physical death, though it might be, because God does do that in disciplining for sin. We're talking about eternal death, the second death, Hell, and cover over a multitude of sins. That's the atoning work of Christ. And Psalm 32 says, "Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered." And so the covering up is through the blood of Christ through faith in the blood of Christ. So we should pray for each other. We should go after those that are wandering. We should rescue them and bring them back into the fold. 

All right, let's finish with some applications during this time of sheltering at home, sheltering in place, of quarantining, COVID-19 and these things, just follow the text. Just do what it says, just step by step. If you're in trouble, pray, take it to the Lord in prayer. I love that hymn. Take it to the Lord in prayer. If you're in trouble, take it to the Lord in prayer. If you have reason to be happy and thankful, and let me just stop and say, find reasons to be happy and thankful. There's so many of them. Take it to the Lord in prayer, and song. If you're sick, or someone you know or love is sick, take it to the Lord in prayer. If you need forgiveness of sins, take it to the Lord in prayer and do it within the context of the church as the text says, find ways to bless people during this crisis. Reach out as you're able, find ways to give. Andy Winn told us about the benevolence fund, give more money, pray for people, find out what needs are in the city and pray. And even once this thing is over, there's still going to be many, many ways we can minister in the aftermath. Close with me if you would in prayer. 

Father, we thank you for the beauty of your word. We thank you for the things that it teaches us and how it prepares us to live lives that are pleasing you. Thank you for this incredible 12 week journey we've had in the Book of James. Thank you for all the details and the insights. We could have preached 12 more weeks in this incredible book. Lord, help us to pray, teach us to pray, and help us to pray as we have never prayed before, with passion, spending more time in it, working on it, and developing it for your glory. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.

The Impact of the Virus

Well, if you have a copy of the Word of God, I'd like to ask that you open it to James 5, we're going to be moving through. This is the second to last sermon, God willing, in the Book of James, and we've had an incredible journey through this book. But now, we could never have foreseen, when we began this study in James, these extraordinary times, and these are certainly extraordinary times, as Andy already mentioned. People all over the world are being impacted by the coronavirus. Total number of cases, I checked yesterday afternoon, over 300,000 worldwide, almost certainly, the number's higher this morning, with over 11,000 deaths as of yesterday afternoon, maybe even more now. In the US, over 25,000 cases, I think now, with 250 deaths. And along with that, as I mentioned, there's the staggering economic effect of this virus. Not only has the stock market crashed, with a loss of somewhere between 17-20%, depending on what index you look at, as I mentioned in my prayer, small businesses are struggling. We think about coffee shops and other businesses that depend on a steady stream of customers walking in and interacting, and they've had to shut down. Think about hourly workers who are wondering how they're going to make it with their income being curtailed. And along with all of this is the change in the lifestyle that we've felt. 

Me streaming this sermon in an empty room is just one symbol of this. So also college students coming back, having their semester cut off, maybe they never even came back from their spring break. They never expected, when they went away on spring break, that it would turn out like this. Government schools closed all around us, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, closed. We think about sports leagues that have stopped, all of the sports that people just enjoy, especially around this time. March Madness, the basketball tournament, closed down. Ordinarily, people would be following their brackets now, they were never filled out. People staying home hour after hour, day after day. Supermarkets displaying weirdly empty shelves in certain categories, as people are hoarding various items, and their behavior then forces a similar pattern of behavior in those that would not ordinarily do it. All of this is clear evidence, I think, of the fragility of our lives and of our lifestyles, of the fragility of our economy, the fragility of our physical health, our earthly hopes, all of these are fragile. 

If the Lord Wills, We Will Live

Now, the last sermon that I preached live, here at First Baptist Church two weeks ago, was on the text of Scripture in James 4:13 and following, it says, "Now listen, you who say 'Today or tomorrow, we'll go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money,' while you do not know what will even happen tomorrow. What is your life? It is a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast and brag, and all such boasting is evil." What a memorable statement that is. “If the Lord wills, you will live. And if the Lord wills, you will do this, or if the Lord wills, you will do that.” All of our times and our days are in the Lord's hand. 

The Gospel For Unbelievers

Now, if you're not a Christian and you have been led, this morning, somehow, to come on this live stream service, I plead with you, right now, to realize the brevity of your life and flee to Christ while you still have time. You have an eternal soul created by Almighty God. He created all things, heaven and earth and everything in them, and as the creator, he is the king and ruler, and as the king and ruler, he makes laws by which we are to be governed. But like all of us, you have violated God's laws, and therefore are called by God a sinner, a transgressor, as all of us are. God sent His Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, into the world, born of the Virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life, He did miracles, He healed every disease and sickness that was brought before him. This COVID-19 virus would have been nothing for him. No disease was too difficult for him to heal. He did all of these healings as a sign of a coming world in which there'll be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain. But above all, Jesus came to die as a substitute for our sins, which he did on the cross, and he bled out and died, he gave up his life as a substitute. He died under the wrath of God, the death penalty we deserve for our sins, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and appointed the Church to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. This simple message, that faith in Jesus Christ is sufficient to forgive you for all of your sins, that you will be forgiven, justified of all of your sins, past, present and future, if you simply trust in Christ, and I'm pleading with you to do that now.

For all of us who are already Christians, maybe members of this church, you're coming here this morning to be fed by the Word of God, and I want to do that. I want to feed myself, and want to I feed you also by this marvelous text, and what a beautiful opportunity we have this morning to consider patience in affliction, patience in suffering. To learn to wait quietly and patiently under the Lord's mighty hand until he decides to lift us up. So we need patience for salvation, we are waiting for salvation, that's what's going on here. 

What is Patience?

Look at verse 7, "Therefore be patient brothers." What is patience? The Greek word used here, “makrothumia,” means longsuffering, the word “makro,” a long time of waiting. We're talking about the patience, the endurance of a marathon runner, not of a sprinter, the lightning-quick reflexes of a sprinter, the power of a 100-meter dash runner, not at all. We're talking about longsuffering, being a long time in the race.

Now, James discussed endurance in the Christian life earlier, but he used a different Greek word there, “hupomone.” One scholar said the difference between makrothumia, long-suffering, and hupomone, which is endurance, is longsuffering has to do with patiently enduring difficult people, and endurance has to do with patiently enduring difficult circumstances. Whether that's linguistically true or not, we know that that's all part of the patience that we have to have in the Christian life. Patience is essential to our salvation. 

The Context in James

Now, let's look at the context in James. James is writing to a people, the Jewish people, it seems, scattered throughout the world that are enduring great trials, they're going through various trials. James has just gotten done in the last text we looked at last week, speaking a fiery word of judgment to wicked oppressors who use their positions of power to oppress and dominate, and even murder people. He then turns his attention toward his brothers and sisters in Christ, verse 7, "Therefore be patient brothers until the coming of the Lord." Now, the suffering they're enduring at the hands of these rich oppressors will not go on forever, Judgment Day is coming for those rich oppressors. But this also, this message of patient endurance and suffering also fits the overall message of the book. It fits the first message that James gave in James 1:2-4. "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance, and perseverance must finish its work, so that you'll be mature and complete, not lacking anything." So that is a strong word of patience in affliction to the end, that we would be spiritually mature and complete in Christ. So James again points Christians to the need for patience in suffering, for the patient endurance that is essential to our salvation. 

Our Context: We Are a Very Impatient People

Now, that's their context, what about our context? Well, we are a very impatient people. Do you feel it? I feel it more than ever before. We are impatient, we're wanting this COVID-19 affliction to end today. That's how we are, we're very impatient. As western Christians, American Christians, we do not generally suffer the kinds of beatings and oppression and the trials that James describes even at the beginning of this chapter, in James 5. We do not face, generally, the kind of afflictions and oppression that our brothers and sisters face in certain regimes and countries, like North Korea, for example, or Iran, or China, even. In those nations, our brothers and sisters are arrested, they are detained for a long time, they're beaten, imprisoned, even tortured and killed for their Christian faith, so they would read this text very acutely and powerfully, and they're drinking in these words, needing to be sustained in their faith through fiery trials that they're enduring.

Now, we know our sufferings do not reach that level, but still, we're called on to perseverance in the Christian life, and we are a very impatient people. Our technology has, I think, tended toward that end, of making us impatient. We are used to instant solutions to life's problems. We are used to instant answers from the internet from our handheld devices or our laptops; we're used to next-day delivery from Amazon Prime; we're used to fast food, very fast; we're used to GPS systems that tell us how to get through the city from point A to point B, avoiding traffic snarls. We're used to immediate answers. 

I have found myself, even recently, getting impatient at a drive thru at a fast food place, because it wasn't fast enough. I still don't know what happened. I was there waiting, we didn't move for five minutes, five minutes, and I was wondering what was happening to my food, and I was thinking about pulling out, canceling my order. All of these weird thoughts going through my mind, and I think, “What must my brothers and sisters in Heaven be thinking about me right now, who have had to endure far worse trials than that?” I found myself getting impatient over the blue donut that circles on my laptop while I'm sitting in an air-conditioned office waiting for the program to download. So we're impatient people, and James 5:7-12 speaks a strong word to us, as do many other scriptures, of the need for patient endurance in the Christian life.

The Scope of Our Waiting

Now, what is the scope of our waiting, what are we waiting for? Well, look at verse 7 again, "Be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord." Now, we're going to talk more about this in a moment, but this is definitely speaking of the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth, ending all of human history. For 2,000 years, every generation of the Church has waited patiently for the second coming of Christ. The imminent coming of Christ. It was planned, it was prophesied, it is the next major event in redemptive history. For 2000 years, we've been hearing this word "soon." "Behold, I am coming soon." Three times in the final chapter in the Bible, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said it, "Behold, I am coming soon." For example, Revelation 22:12, he said, "Behold, I am coming soon, my reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done." So James is calling for a long-term, big picture waiting by the church, waiting for all of this to end. For those suffering daily under the oppression of rich tyrants or governmental oppressors, it's day after day suffering, out in the fields bringing a harvest and you're never going to get paid, or languishing in a cell with no end in sight. 

The Purpose of Our Waiting: Salvation

Now, we need to understand while we're doing all this waiting as a church, what are we waiting for? What's the purpose in all this? We know that God could step in at any moment and end our afflictions and end all of our grief and sorrow, he could do it. Well, the Bible makes it very clear that we're waiting for salvation, that's the reason for the delay. 2 Peter 3:15 says, "Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation." So God is being patient too, God is waiting. You need to realize that, your Heavenly Father cares about your afflictions, he is concerned about your suffering, it is hard for him to watch his people suffer. I know that's hard to believe, but it's true.

He was concerned about the Israelites in bondage in Egypt, He was concerned when David committed that sin of the sinful census, and he afflicted the Israelites with a plague for three days. He was concerned and he couldn't take it anymore, God couldn't, and finally moved to end it. 

So then, what is he waiting for? He's waiting for salvation. God has a timetable of purpose for all of history, for every day of history, and his ultimate purpose in human history is his own glory in the salvation of human beings. That's what he's doing in history. So he means, at least, the redemption of the elect, who he chose by name from before the foundation of the earth, that the elect would come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, that's what he's waiting for. 2 Peter 3:9. "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness, he is patient with us," I think that means with the elect, "not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." So history continues because there are, as yet, some elect people that God knew by name before the foundation of the world, who have not yet come to faith in Christ, they've not yet come to repentance. Not only that, though. God's patience means our own salvation, even if we have come to saving faith, we're not done being saved. Philippians 2:12-13 says that we are "to continue to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in us, to will and to act, according to his good purpose." 

Our Salvation Comes in Stages

So we know that salvation comes to us in stages, justification, sanctification, then glorification, so we're not done being saved, and we need to have these trials, as we saw, again, from James 1:4, that God's affliction of us who are already in Christ, is tending toward our own sanctification. Perseverance must finish its work, so that you'll be mature and complete, not lacking anything. Mature means sanctified, conformed to Christ, so that's what God is waiting for, and God has a timetable for everything. He knows the value of time better than we do. 2 Peter 3:8, it says, "With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day." So the two thousand years since Jesus said, "Behold, I'm coming soon," is as nothing to Him, like a watch in the night. Christ can rightly say to every generation, "I'm coming soon, be ready, be prepared at any moment for the coming of the Lord."

God Acts in His Perfect Timing

But notice also that God works intensively and extremely actively, every single day of human history to accomplish unique purposes for that day. That day, “this is the day the Lord has made,” that day is unique and will never be repeated. And so, God has a specific purpose. With the Lord, a single day is like a thousand years. And so God has measured out the days of COVID-19, He knows exactly how long they're going to go on, He knows what He's trying to achieve with every day. He is working his secret purposes out. So if you're a Christian, you should be praying for those secret purposes to be worked out, don't just pray that the virus would end. You should pray for that, but say, "In the meantime, Lord, would you please accomplish in people's hearts everything you're trying to accomplish?" We should pray for that. We know that Christ came at just the right time, didn't He? He was born of a virgin. "When the fullness of time came, [at exactly the right time,] Christ was born of a virgin," Galatians 4:4. We know that he also died at exactly the right time, even down to the minute he died. Passover night, before sundown, right before they came to break his legs. And so Romans 5:6 says, "You see, at just the right time, when we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." So everything has been meticulously measured out. So also, your life, all the days of your life have been measured out. Psalm 139:16 says, "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." So all of these days have been measured out. So God is calling on us Christians to have patient endurance in the suffering of the Christian life because our sufferings are essential to the salvation of our own souls, and the salvation of other people's souls as well, converted or not converted, that's what God is working on. 

The Scope of Patience: The Coming Lord

Now, I mentioned the scope and patience of our waiting is the second coming of Christ. We need to focus, more than ever before, on the coming of the Lord. Look again at verse 7, "Be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord." History will come to an end at the second coming of Christ, and all of the suffering of the elect will end on that day. All of the brothers and sisters that patiently waited, and were even incarcerated waiting for their release, and it never came physically, they actually were tortured and executed, as it happens. They're waiting for the coming of the Lord, their sufferings have been great, but no matter how great their sufferings were, Paul, who had greater credentials of suffering than any Christian that's ever lived, still calls our sufferings “light and momentary,” 2 Corinthians 4:17. And he says in Romans 8:18, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." And so we need to think light and momentary, not worth comparing with the glory that is coming, that is the hope of our patience. We are longsuffering, waiting in hope, we are filled with hope. What is hope but a strong feeling in the heart that the future is bright based on the promises of God, and our future is indescribably bright?

We are going, brothers and sisters, to a perfect world. Revelation 21:4 says that “there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things well have passed away and the Lord is going to make everything new. “That's where we are going. A world free from all evil, free from all evildoers, a world free from Satan and his demons, a world free from the decay and corruption of this present age cursed in Adam, a world free from all disease and suffering, a world radiantly beautiful illuminated at every moment with the glory of God and of Christ and there's no need for the light of the sun, or the light of the moon, or the light of the lamp to shine on the new Jerusalem for the glory of God will give it light and the Lamb is its lamp. So when Paul says that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with that glory, we should be filled with hope. Other people who watch us, who look at us during this time should see us filled with hope so that they'll ask us to give a reason for the hope that we have.

The Coming of the Lord is Absolutely Certain

Now this coming of the Lord, this second coming in Lord, is absolutely certain. The second coming of the Lord is either alluded to or openly discussed over 500 times in the New Testament, it's incredible. For example, Revelation 1:7, "Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of Him. So shall it be, amen." Or Jesus Himself said, Matthew 24:30, "At that time, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory," Matthew 24:30. So this certain promise of the coming of the Lord should fill each of us with a radiant buoyant hope no matter what suffering we're going through right now. And James says that Christ's coming is near, look at verse 9, "The judge is standing at the door." He's right at the door.

So the rich oppressors that we talked about last week in James 5 should realize their judgment is imminent. Imminent. The Judge is at the door. For our brothers and sisters in North Korean prisons or in Chinese prisons that are eating filthy and inadequate food and drinking filthy and polluted water, and being tortured mentally and physically for their faith, the judge of all the earth is standing at the door. And for us who are enduring far less dramatic sufferings and afflictions, whatever they are, not just with this virus but just things that are going on in your life, maybe chronic pain, illnesses of other sorts. We were just saying a moment before the service began, wouldn't it be nice if all the other diseases took a break while the virus had center stage? But they don't. And people continue to have afflictions in other categories, brain tumors, heart disease, other things continue to go on. Some have lost godly spouses and they're struggling every day with loneliness. And then there's other afflictions common to life. We need to realize that the second coming of Christ is imminent, the judge is standing at the door. 

Example #1: The Farmer

Then James gives us examples of faith and patience. He begins with the farmer's patience. Look at verse 7, "See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains." Now, I would say none of us that are members of First Baptist Church, as far as I know, are vocational farmers. I've never been a farmer, I've killed a lot of plants that I intended to do well, but I've not been a farmer. My family would starve, no doubt about it. But farmers learn to be patient as they've done everything they can for the crop. They've plowed the field, got it ready at the right time, they planted the seed, they looked after it, they did all that they could, but then the harvest has to come based on something they have no control over, and that's rain. Without the rain, the harvest will fail. And so James mentions the early and late rains as the pattern of rainfall in Palestine that was essential to the final harvest. And so this picture of a farmer's patience, looking up, waiting for something he has no control over, that's a powerful image of the kind of patience the Lord wants us to have. 

Jesus used a lot of agricultural parables to talk about the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of heaven is like seed that a man went out and sowed, etcetera. There's a lot of parables like that, agricultural. Listen to this one in particular, Mark 4:26-29, "This is what the kingdom of God is like, a man scatters seed on the ground night and day. Whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself, the soil produces grain, first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head, and as soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it because the harvest has come." Our salvation is like that, and so is the advance worldwide of the kingdom of God. We have a certain role to play, like the farmer, but we cannot make it grow. As Paul said, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow." So the salvation of sinners all over the world is totally dependent on the grace of God and the grace of God alone, not on us. Now we have a role to play, we have to evangelize. Pray, set a good example, do the works that God's given us to do, that's true, but in the end only God can send the rain and only God can give the growth, and so we need to wait. 

And notice how he talks about patience as the strengthening of the soul. Verse 8, "You also must be patient and stand firm" or "strengthen your hearts," one translation gives, "because the Lord's coming is near." So you have to strengthen your hearts, this is the powerful image, establish your hearts. Think about a building, a structure, concrete with rebar in it or structural members in a building. Do that in your heart. Now, ordinarily, this strengthening of the heart is a work done, a secret work done by God the Holy Spirit within the hearts of believers, and so we should be strong. James talked in James 1:6-8 about the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed back and forth by the waves, double-minded, unstable. We can't be like that during trials, buffeted around, like, "What's God doing?" and getting upset and being all frustrated. No, no, no, strengthen your hearts in patience. Put that structural member in there. Now, again, that's something that God does in us. I love Ephesians 3:16, Paul says, "I pray that out of His glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” So that's exactly what James is calling on us to do. So it's a partnership. The Holy Spirit will strengthen us, as we make ourselves available to him in prayer, say, "Oh God, would you strengthen my heart? I'm so weak, I'm so impatient. Would you strengthen my heart?"

And as Andy mentioned earlier, I love that text in Isaiah 26, “He will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on him.” So stay your mind on God, or in Isaiah 40, it says, "The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall, but those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, they will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." So that could be you right now. Strengthen your hearts in patience and wait on the Lord.

Example #2: The Prophets

The second example he gives is of prophets that spoke in the name of the Lord. Look at verse 10, "Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord." James opens that long and tragic history up for our eyes. Again, we know what he's talking about. These prophets suffered universally, greatly, great opposition from the people that they were sharing with and they were speaking the word of God to. Stephen said in his great sermon in Acts 7, "Was there ever a prophet that your fathers did not persecute? Was there a single one?" Elijah was persecuted viciously by the wicked king Ahab and his demonic wife Jezebel, Isaiah was sawn in two, tradition has it, by Manasseh, the evil son of the godly King Hezekiah. Jeremiah was probably the most hated of all the prophets, and he was assaulted, beaten, he was thrown in prison, he was thrown in a miry pit. John the Baptist, for just telling the truth to King Herod that he shouldn't have taken his brother's wife as his own, was thrown in prison and then beheaded by King Herod.

This is the history of the prophets, and James wants us to consider. Consider the prophets, the patience that they showed, but they persevered in their ministry, and when they were finally done with their suffering and God took them to Heaven, they came into great rewards in Heaven. And so Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:11-12, "Blessed are you, when people insult you, persecute you, falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in Heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

So for us in our generation, we don't have a lot of persecution. Some of it is because we shrink back from boldly proclaiming the Gospel. I think the Lord is calling on First Baptist Durham to be more and more bold, bolder and bolder in the sharing of the Gospel, and more and more persecution is going to come. That's not our goal, but it's going to happen. We should be willing to take up the fallen mantle of the prophet Elijah, he went up to Heaven in a chariot of fire, and as Elisha did, took on that mantel said, "Okay, that's our role now. It's our time now, it's our time to share the Gospel, and we're going to be persecuted, but rejoice and be patient in it."

Example #3: Job

The third example he gives us is of Job. Look at verse 11, "As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You've heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about," one translation gives it. What was his final purpose, what was the end? How did it all end up for Job? The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. Perhaps other than Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul, no one in the Bible suffered more than Job. In a single day, wave upon wave of horrifying news came to him, wave upon wave of his losses and material losses, and then irreplaceable, his 10 children all killed in a single day. Hard to even imagine for me as a parent, more I meditate on it, I think has any parent ever received such news? And then in a second wave of attack, Satan came after his body, and his health was taken from him, and he was sitting there covered with sores festering sores, scraping them with a piece of a potsherd, a piece of pottery.

Now, we may think it's a bit strange that James mentions him as an example of patience and suffering because most of the Book of Job is his lamentation and complaining about it. For example, he gets going right away cursing the day of his birth. Job 3:11, "May the day of my birth be cursed. Why did I not perish at birth and die as I came out of the womb? Why are the suffering even given the light of day at all?" And then it gets worse in Job 19:6-7 he says, "God has wronged me and drawn His net around me, though I cry, I've been wronged, I get no response, though I call for help, there is no justice." That's a very serious charge to lay at God. And it was for this very reason that when God finally spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, He rebuked him. Job 38, “the Lord answered Job out of the storm and he said, ‘Who is this that darkens my counsel by speaking words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man, and I will question you and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’" And he goes on like that for chapters. He's rebuking him, but he's also lovingly healing him from questioning God, ever questioning God. God's commitment to justice was seen at the cross, and I know that Jesus hadn't died yet but there is no higher statement of a commitment to justice than the Father pouring out his wrath on his only begotten Son, whom he loved. And Job questioned God's justice. However, for all of that, he repented, he said, "I put my hand over my mouth," at the end of the book, he said, "surely I spoke of things I did not understand, and therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."

It could be that, not at that level, but that you need to do some repenting too. Maybe you've murmured and complained against God during this virus time. Don't do it, don't do it, but see what God finally brought about in the midst of all of that, you say, "How is Job an example of perseverance?" Well, listen to what he said in the middle of his trial, a trial far greater than you will ever endure. This is what Job said, Job 13:15, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." And then he said in Job 19:26, "The worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh I will see God." Now that's the perseverance of faith, and therefore, God in the end vindicated Job and restored all his possessions to him. More on that in a moment.

How We Get Through the Trial Matters

Now in the midst of this, we have the call to holiness in patience, free from grumbling and swearing. It matters a lot, dear friends, how you go through this time or any time. How are you going through it? What are you like? God wants us to control our mouths when we are in times of trial. The Israelites were constantly grumbling against the Lord. Remember when they were pinned up against the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's army was coming down, they looked like they were about to die, they cried out, Exodus 14:11 and they said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt you brought us here to die?" That was just the beginning of the complaining they did, and God hated their grumbling. At one point after they refused through unbelief to enter the promised land, they had to turn back, they started complaining about the manna that God was miraculously giving them. Numbers 11:4-6, "The rabble with them began to crave other food and the Israelites started wailing again and said, If only we had meat to eat, we remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost, and also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. [Remember those good old days?] But now we have lost our appetite. We never see anything but this manna." The good old days of being slaves in Egypt, how they had forgotten God's mighty hand and outstretched arm. It's very easy for us as sinners to charge God with wrongdoing, and to grumble against him.

And so God warns us not to grumble against him vertically in other texts. Here, he warns us not to grumble against each other. Look at verse 9, "Don't grumble against each other, brothers, or you will be judged. The judge is standing at the door." Isn't it amazing? When we go through afflictions, we start to take it out on others. Hard time going on in your life, you start to have marital problems. We heard this week, it's a great tragedy, but in China, where the virus began and where there was so much suffering and death, the divorce rate has skyrocketed. And I understand that we're on top of each other, we're with each other hour after hour, day after day, and problems come up, but we Christians have resources to be able to not grumble against each other and not complain against each other.

For me, I like to think about Jesus, He's up on the cross, hands and feet nailed, blood pouring out, he's in agony and several of his statements show his tenderness and compassion to others, like when he set up his mother to be cared for by John, his beloved disciple. And he said, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing," I think, speaking about the Romans, who killed him. And he said to the thief on the cross, "Today, you'll be with me in paradise." Jesus was suffering the agonies of the wrath of God but was still gentle, loving, horizontally caring for others. So don't grumble against the people in your life, in your home. We could be another several weeks together. Don't grumble against each other. The judge is standing at the door, he hears everything you say.

Do Not Swear

Now in verse 12, he commands us also not to swear, "Above all, my brothers do not swear, not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, or you'll be condemned." It's one of those interesting moments in James where it's hard to see the train of thought. It doesn't well connect with what we've been talking about, and it doesn't well connect with the next section, which we'll look at next week, God willing. So it's just a word from the Lord about swearing. And by this, I don't think he means using foul language, but taking an oath like, "I swear on a stack of Bibles," you know how people do that. And what that means is that your word can't be trusted. If you have to swear on a stack of Bibles to make certain that your word is upheld, that's evil. "Anything," Jesus said, "beyond letting your yes be ‘yes’ and your no, ‘no’ comes from the evil one." And so James picks up on that and says the same thing. Don't make vows. Just be faithful to what you have said you will do.

The Outcome Christ Wants

Now, what is the outcome of patience? Well, it's a rich harvest. Look at verse 11, "As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about, seen his ultimate purpose there, the Lord is full of compassion and mercy." God is so compassionate and merciful, he doesn't love seeing his people suffer, but he has a purpose, he has an end. And so what happened with Job? What was the final outcome for Job? Well Job 42:12-17, it says, "The Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first. He had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys, he also had seven sons and three daughters. After this, Job lived 140 years. He saw his children, and their children to the fourth generation, and so he died old and full of years."

Well, the blessings we are pursuing are eternal and spiritual, not physical, but Job's physical blessings point to that. Patient endurance in trials results in Christ-like maturity. We saw that in James 1, conformity to Christ. And the Lord is disciplining us and training us so that, as Hebrews 12:11 says, "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it yields a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." So our own maturity, if you humble yourself during a time of affliction, God is going to make you mature, so that at the end of your life, you'll be much more like Christ than you were before.

And then beyond that, we need to look to the unconverted elect. What is God's purpose in all of this? And that is that lost people may be saved. Very soon, we trust, we pray, this affliction will end, but people will remember it, they'll think about it and they'll remember what they felt. They'll remember that they looked at death. They thought about death more than they usually do. And that will be an opportunity for us in evangelism and in missions to share the Gospel. Let's do it. 

Redeem the Time

Let me say a few final words of practical application for the facing of this hour. Can I say just redeem the time? Redeem the time. When Paul's activities were shut down, he was an energetic go from place to place church planner, but then he was arrested and thrown in prison, sometimes for years. How did he redeem the time? Well, he witnessed to his captors, and he wrote Scripture. He wrote the Book of Philippians from jail, when the Apostle John was exiled to Patmos, he wrote the Book of Revelation. When Martin Luther was basically exiled to the Wartburg, an old castle, and he was up in the attic with the bats for three years, a very energetic, hard-working individual, who wanted to get out and about, but for his own safety needed to be there. For three years, he translated the entire New Testament into good German, which serves as the foundation of the modern German language. Now the Lord, I don't think, is expecting any of you to be that fruitful during the time of your confinement. But let's redeem the time, let's make the most of the time that we have. 

Study More Scripture

Start with your daily devotions. Don't shrink them, expand them. Read through the book of the Bible in ways you've never done before, pray more than you've ever done before, pray specifically for the issues related to this plague. I would suggest you do a word study in the word “plague,” see why God brings plagues. See how often they're connected to human sin. You may need to begin by confessing and repenting from any sins that you may have committed. We'll, God willing, talk more about that next time. Sometimes people are sick because they've sinned. And so that may be something that we need to ask, but we don't want to be Job's friends saying, “It's definitely because we've sinned.” But it's at least a possibility. So for us, even if we haven't committed any sins other than ordinary sins that are serious, but our conscience isn't testifying against us, we still should be confessing the sins of the human race, and we know that God brings plagues because of human sinfulness. 

Grow in Your Prayer Life

Let's be praying for the issues related to this virus. Pray for the caregivers, family and friends that stand alongside worldwide around people that are suffering, pray for those that are in the medical jobs, that they would be protected from illness. Pray for our brothers and sisters in those roles. Pray that the numbers, the COVID-19 numbers, will soon flatten out and diminish, pray for that. But also, as I said earlier in this message, pray that God's purposes in all this would be achieved. Pray that these extraordinary times will result in a huge harvest of souls of, as yet, unconverted elect people, that they will come to faith in Christ, be ready when all this ends to talk to people about the brevity of life, and the fragility of life and the fragility of our lifestyle and of our economy. I think people would be ready to listen. If you're parents, gather your children around and talk to them openly about these things, speak to them in the language they can understand, get them to pray for these things as well. And don't waste time with a big upswing of electronic entertainment. Don't waste time pouring into the electronic hole. Spend more time talking to each other, reading books, going out on walks, maintaining social distance of course, but just use the time well and wisely, and realize that God is merciful and compassionate, and when he wills, these days of trial will end and God's purposes will be established. Would you close with me in prayer? 

Father, thank you for the Word of God, we thank you for its timeless lessons, we thank you for the way that it speaks to us in every generation, we know that other brothers and sisters with the Black Death, the plague faced far worse afflictions than this, but we want to be faithful in this day and in this hour, help us to be ready at any time for the second coming of Christ, and help us to make the most of this opportunity to “redeem the time because the days are evil.” But we know that though the days are evil, God is full of mercy and compassion, and we look to you in Jesus' name, amen.

Do Not Fear the Virus

These are certainly extraordinary times, we know that this virus is affecting life all over the world, as I just prayed. We know that cruise ships have been quarantined, people have had a hard time getting back into their countries as they've been traveling internationally. We know the stock market lost roughly 20% of its value, and we know that specifically to us, worship services just like this one are canceled all over the world, across the country and across the world. These are extraordinary times. Just checked a website a few moments ago. The world count is over 162,000, the world death count over 6,000. But beyond that, there's a terrible fear of the unknown. And it's remarkable as we're moving through the Book of James, and we see the providence of God as last week we had the opportunity to study James 4:13-17, and we're reminded that we don't know what will happen tomorrow as Andy just mentioned a second ago, our life is a mist, it's a vapor. Instead we ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” And we need sometimes these reminders that everything we see around us is temporary. This physical world is temporary, but the next world is not temporary. 

We need to be reminded of that because the five cents world in which we live presses in on us every day, and it's hard to live by faith. We see our physical needs that press in on us, our pains, our aches, different things come in, and we're mindful of the fact that this world shouts and clamors for our attention. And sometimes we need to be reminded that this world is temporary but our souls are eternal. And if you're watching this livestream today and you know that you're not yet born again I would urge you to consider what Jesus said, "What would it profit someone if he should gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" Or what would someone give in exchange for their soul? Your soul is worth more than the whole world. And Jesus at one point was talking about persecution, so I'm going to transfer it a little bit to the virus where he said, "Do not fear those who kill the body and after that there's nothing more they can do to you, but I'll tell you who to the fear, fear the one who after the death of the body has the power to destroy both soul and body in Hell." Yes, I tell you fear him.

So what I would say to that is, "Let's not fear the virus ultimately, we're all going to die of something. But if you are not yet a believer in Christ, you should fear death because the Bible reveals plainly, “it is appointed for each one of us to die, and after that, to face judgment.” And the good news of the Gospel is that God sent his Son, the lord and savior Jesus Christ into the world to live a sinless life, he was fully God, fully man, “to be tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin,” but ultimately to give His life as a ransom for many. And that He was raised from the dead on the third day, meaning that Christians never need to fear death again. That if we're Christians, we know that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, we don't fear death because we know that Judgment Day, we will not be condemned. But what about you, dear friend? Have you come to faith in Christ, have you trusted in him for the salvation of your soul? 

The Most Dreadful Passage in James

Now, as we move through the Book of James we're coming to one of the most convicting passages in the entire Bible. You just heard it read, it's a severe warning that Almighty God is giving to the entire human race through his servant, James, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It's a warning to rich oppressors. And as you read these words that you just heard read a moment ago, these are words that really could cause sheer terror if you take them seriously. They are words that actually offer no hope whatsoever just within these verses. There's no actual call to repentance, there's no promise of forgiveness of sins, if you do. It's just a stark warning. Now, there are words of comfort and consolation in other places in the Bible and they're true as well, but here, just a severe warning. "Now listen, you rich, weep and wail because of the misery that's coming upon you." 

Threatened with Eternity in the Fire of Hell

And as you look at the text as well, the Lord Almighty, the Lord of Hosts is summoned, is mentioned, the commander of the armies of Heaven mobilized against these rich oppressors. And what is threatened in this text is nothing less than eternity in the fire of Hell. "Weep and wail,” the text says, "because of the misery that's coming upon you." This weeping and howling certainly reminds me of Jesus' description of the suffering of the torments of Hell in many places, but Matthew 22:13. It says, "Tie him hand and foot and throw him outside into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." So, for me as I read this text I think about that, the warnings about Hell and what it's going to be like. Jesus warned sinners many times about that, the misery that is coming upon you. The word misery is actually an eternal, infinite understatement for Hell's fire. The Book of Revelation speaks of a Lake of Fire. And Jesus says that the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. The Book of Revelation, Revelation 14:11 says, "The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever. There is no rest, day or night,” for those that are suffering the torments of Hell. And the text says, your flesh will be “eaten like fire.” This is the effect of being thrown in the Lake of Fire, yet, when it says the worm does not die, the flesh is not consumed, it doesn't ever end. It goes on forever and ever, it's a severe warning. 

It reminds me also of Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-25, there the text says this, "There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. And at his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus who was covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hell where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus by his side, so he called him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me, send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue because I am in agony in this fire.’ But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime, you received your good things while Lazarus received bad things. But now he is comforted here and you are in agony.’"

So I think there's a lot of similarities between that parable which continues beyond that point but also James Chapter 5. It says also that these rich individuals have fattened themselves in the day of slaughter. Listen to James 5:5, "You've lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence, you have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter." What an image that is? You've fed your flesh in such a way that it would attract special notice from the judgment of God. The image that's in my mind is of a lightning rod, which is specially designed by the engineers to be very high up on a building and attract the lightning strike. The image is more of, I think, of a pig pen and of hogs, pigs different ones, and you can imagine one very large hog that shoulders all the other pigs out of the way and just eats and eats until its stomach is full, and then the others can get whatever's left. And then when the time, the day of slaughter comes, that hog will get special attention. On the day of slaughter, it grew fatter and fatter and did not realize what was coming.

James as a Prophet of Doom

So this text speaks therefore of the inevitable outcome for rich oppressors: slaughter. And a slaughter that does not last for an instance but for all eternity. So James really is standing here as a prophet of doom. As he speaks to these rich individuals, these rich oppressors, he stands in a long lineage, a powerful heritage of prophets whom God raised up to speak a word of warning. Now though there are no words of mercy in the text, there's no command to repent, there's no opportunity for forgiveness in the text, yet there's still hope because God is warning people ahead of time, and there is implicit in that warning, an opportunity to repent while there's time and to find salvation through faith in Christ. But Old Testament prophets did this again and again. 

Think of Isaiah 5:8-9 says, "Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing, surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants." Or again, later in that same prophecy, Isaiah 10, verses 1-4, “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches? Nothing will remain, but to cringe among the captives, or fall among the slain. Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still up, raised.” Isaiah 10:1-4. Or again, the prophet Amos had much to say about social injustice and oppression in Amos 2:6-7, this is what the Lord says, "For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath, they sell the righteous for silver and the need for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as upon the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed." Or again later, Amos 5:11-12, "You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain, therefore though you have built stone mansions you will not live in them. And though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine, for I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts." So James stands on the shoulders of this lineage, of prophets of the Lord, prophets of doom who came along to warn rich oppressors of the judgment that was certainly coming on them. 

Jesus’ Warnings About Earthly Wealth

Jesus also warned of the dangers of wealth in this present age. In the parable of the seed and the soils, you remember the thorny ground soil, and what happened to the seed there, Mark 4:18-19, "Still others like seeds sown among the thorns hear the word but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things come in and choke the word making it unfruitful." Or again, Luke 6:24-25, Jesus said, "Woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are are well-fed now for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now for you will mourn and weep." And again in the passage about the rich young ruler as you remember who came and could not give up his wealth to become a follower of Jesus, he turned away and went away sad. Jesus said, to his disciples, Matthew 19:23-24, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." The disciples were amazed at that moment and said, "Who then can be saved?" And Jesus said, giving great comfort to us, "With man, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." 

Now we, in our present age here in America, we are all about accumulation, all about wealth acquisition. Jesus warned about this, in Luke 12:15, he said, "Watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." It seems like Madison Avenue and Internet, Amazon Prime, all of that set up to try to refute that. “Actually your life does consist in the abundance of your possessions.” We're basically sold that every day and we have to swim upstream against that constantly.

There is Nothing Intrinsically Wrong with Wealth

Alright, so, as James addresses this, he just says, "Woe to you rich" or he says, "Watch out, and now listen you rich," he doesn't add anything. I say that this is a severe warning against rich oppressors. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with wealth per se, it is tempting, but just because you're wealthy it doesn't mean you're going to Hell. Deuteronomy 8:17-18 says, God gives wealth, He gives us the ability to make it. Listen to what he says, "You may say to yourself, 'My power and the strength of my hands have produced wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth.'" So if there's something wrong with producing wealth, then that would not be spoken in that way. God wouldn't give us the ability. It is essential for us to earn money just to provide for our families, and meet our own basic needs. As a matter of fact, 1 Timothy 5:8 says, "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family he's denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” So, it's vital for believers to provide for their immediate family. Later in that same passage, it's talking about widows who need care from the church versus those that shouldn't need care from the church. And he said, "If any woman who is a believer has widows in her family she should help them and not let the church be burdened with them so that the church can help those widows who are really in need." So it's vital for every family unit to stand on its own two feet financially and not burden the church. And in order to do that you have to acquire wealth. 

Also the scripture makes it plain that it's wise to store up some money for the future. You can't live day-to-day, I said this last week, in James 4. We can't assume that there won't be life tomorrow, that life will almost certainly end today. That's different than presuming upon tomorrow. So as I quoted last week, again today, Proverbs 6:6-8, "Go to the ant you sluggard, consider its ways and be wise, it has no commander, no overseer, no ruler yet it stores up its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” So there's nothing wrong with having barns, having storage units, having a bank account or even having a retirement. Although we've seen what the virus can do. Twenty percent of people's retirement down in value in one week. Twenty percent. As the scripture says, "Cast but a glance at riches and they fly away." We know and we should know anyway if we're biblically mature we can't rely on money. But it's not wrong to accumulate it to a point. We should realize that God gives us the ability to produce an abundance more than we need for our immediate needs essentially so that we can share it with others. As 2 Corinthians 8:15 says, "He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little." 

Rich Oppressors Hoard Wealth Until It’s Useless

But the rich oppressors that are being addressed in this text have no such view of their wealth, not at all. It's not for other people it's all about them. That's the way they think. Their God was their money, and they did whatever they could possibly do to gain more and more, no matter what the human cost, and that's the whole point here. They hoarded their wealth until their wealth became useless. Hoarding is accumulating a pile of silver and gold, just watching it grow as though it had some intrinsic value to bring happiness.

Think about Ebenezer Scrooge who was overwhelmingly accumulating wealth. He was a miser. He didn't spend his money on himself even, he just watched the pile get bigger. And so James says in verse 2-3, "Your wealth has rotted and moths have eaten your clothes. Your silver and gold are corroded, their corrosion will test against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days." The image that James uses here is devastating and a bit ironic actually, speaks of wealth rotting. The only things that rot are living things, so he makes their wealth as though it were alive, and it had a prime moment like a piece of fruit or vegetables to be eaten and then it went way past that.

Remember how God provided the manna for the Israelites every single day, you remember that story. As they're in the desert and God miraculously fed them. And when He began that process of feeding them with manna, bread from Heaven, which they were supposed to go out every day and collect except for the Sabbath Day, that was an exception. But every normal day, they were just to go out and collect what they needed for that day. And God was very plain about that. He said, "Just collect what you need for yourself and your family, and do not store it overnight." But some of the Israelites didn't listen. They didn't follow the instructions, and so they hoarded it for the next day. And when they went to eat the next day, it was covered with maggots and it stank. So you get the image of wealth like that. It was hoarded and became maggot-covered and it stunk.

He also says that their precious metals, their gold and silver, have rusted. Which is really ironic because anyone who knows anything about gold say, "No, it doesn't rust, ever. It could be around for a thousand years and it's still shiny." Silver gets a black kind of sheen on but it can be wiped off, it doesn't rust straight through. But James uses that kind of language. It corrodes all the way through. It definitely reminds us of the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:19-21, "Do not store for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." So basically, the idea is material wealth has a shelf-life, spiritually. A spiritual shelf life, think of it that way. Your material wealth has value in this present age, as it's in service to the glory of God and to the benefit of your neighbor. But if you hoard it, it goes bad. It has a shelf life.

I remember recently, I think it was last week, hearing about a pastor in England who was helping his very elderly mother who lived in the same cottage, I think, for a long time. Went into her pantry and found an array of canned goods, and found a drink in the back that was best to be drunk by December of 1987. So I think he felt it was best to throw that out. I think you would agree that was a wise decision. That's why I think of shelf life. Wealth comes into your life, you've got a window of opportunity to use it for the glory of God, especially by helping others. God doesn't need money. And James says, "If you don't do that, it's going to go beyond its Use By date. And that fact, that spiritual corrosion, that spiritual rot will testify against you on the Day of Judgment.” That's what he's saying. They hoarded wealth in the last days.

Now, some people, I've actually had two people that have emailed me wondering if the coronavirus was evidence that we were in the last days. But we don't need the coronavirus. The scripture again, again like this passage here says, "We are in the last days." And we've been in the last days for 2000 years. The next thing that's going to happen, big picture, is the second coming of Christ. Judgment Day is coming. So, we're in the last days. If you're asking me, do I believe that the coronavirus shows that we are the final generation, that I cannot tell. Could very well be a year from now, we'll just remember this is an extraordinary time, but the thing, and we're praying for this, will just recede. But in any case, the last days are here, and this is a terrible time to be hoarding wealth because the last days have come.

Rich Oppressors Often Gain Wealth by Injustice

Now, I call them rich oppressors because they gain their wealth by injustice. Look at verse 4. "Behold” or “Look, the wages you fail to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty." That's why I call them rich oppressors. They not only hoarded wealth, they gained it through injustice. They have the power enough to defraud their workers who brought in their harvest, to defraud them with impunity. They had gamed the system so much through bribery and maybe the judges are part of the whole thing, and there was nothing these poor people could do. Maybe they just simply held on to the wage for a week or a month, and then eventually paid it or paid a portion of it. In any case, it was rank injustice.

Now, the Law of Moses set up a very clear command, a set of commands, about wealth owed to workers. Pay it immediately. Pay it when you said you would pay it. Pay it when they're expecting to get it. Leviticus 19:13 says, "Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him. Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight." Just not even overnight. Again, Deuteronomy 24:14-15, "Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy. Whether he's a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns." “Pay him his wages each day,” listen to this, “before sunset, because he is poor and is counting on it. Otherwise, he may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.” That's the backdrop of the very thing James is saying. "They've cried out to God against you and God is interested." That's a threat. The Lord Almighty has heard their cries. I can't help but think of the injustice of chattel slavery and the wealthy plantations that are part of the history of our nation in which slave owners got wealthy on the backs of their slaves and never paid them a cent for their back-breaking labor out in the fields.

I was reading recently an article about the wealth of Charleston, South Carolina. It was called Carolina's Gold Coast, it was speaking of rice plantations. From the 1720s to the 1860s, the rice plantations shaped and reshaped the Low Country geography there in the area around Charleston, South Carolina, and it made Charleston one of the richest cities in the world. Certainly, indigo, cotton, forest products, other manufactured goods, contributed to the economy, but nothing came close to the lavish wealth brought in by rice. But it was all predicated on slave labor. Slaves had used rough tools to clear immense wooded swamps, then they constructed massive hydrological systems, dams, dikes, floodgates, sluice gates, those kinds of things used to properly irrigate the rice fields. Then they had to plant the rice plants with their backs bent over double, and then when the plant stocks grew tall, they had to weed. Weeding rice fields in the blazing sun, and the overpowering humidity was torturous work. And after weeks of soaking rain, the Carolina gold rice, the stocks were waist-high, but tall weeds also grew up, threatening to smother the harvest. And so the slaves had to get in there and pull each of those weeds by hand. To make matters worse, these low-lying swampy areas were breeding grounds for malaria and yellow fever, and the mosquitoes that carry them. Thousands of slaves died of these diseases.

Their Wealth Was Self-Indulgently Spent

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Carolina Low Country was the deadliest disease region in the North American mainland. Some said at that time, South Carolina was a paradise in the spring, a hell in the summer, and a hospital in the fall. After working brutally long days, the Low Country slaves were still required to grow their own food, make their own clothing because, of course, they were paid nothing for their labor. And they lived in rags and they suffered from near starvation while the rice plantation owners became among the wealthiest people in America. One contemporary observer wrote, "The Carolina rice plantation masters lived their lives in wanton luxury, spending their days only to make money, to dance, to gamble, to run horses while the women only wanted to spend money, play piano, and contemplate their own beauty." Many of them live more or less permanently away from their own rice plantation, so they never saw the back-breaking labor of the slaves that enabled them to live their luxurious lifestyles. Some of them had incredible homes on The Battery in Charleston, some of the most elegant mansions in America.

To some degree, the Charleston rice plantations led the way in relying on slave labor long before cotton was the main staple of Southern wealth. So here again, the words of James. And see how they fit. "Behold, the wages you fail to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence, you have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter." And in the text, their wealth was self-indulgently spent. There's a life of luxury. The best clothing, the most affluent lifestyle. They spared themselves no luxury. They felt they deserved the best of meats and the finest of wines. And they enjoyed the life of leisure while others did their hard labor for them.

Again, I think about Amos. Amos 4:1-2 says this, "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, 'Bring us some drinks.' The sovereign Lord is sworn by his holiness. The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks, the last of you with fish hooks." And again, Amos 6:4-7, "You lie on beds inlaid with ivory and you lounge on your couches. You dine on choice lambs and fattened calves, you strum away on your harps like David, and you improvise on musical instruments. You drink wine by the bowl full, and you use the finest lotions, but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph. Therefore, you'll be among the first to go into exile. Your feasting and lounging will end." The day of the slaughter comes on people who live like this. Their self-indulgence has just been storing up wrath against them. As Paul says in Romans 2:5-6, "Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you're storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God will give to each person according to what he has done." 

Even worse, they used violence to gain wealth. Look at verse 6, "You have condemned and murdered innocent people who are not opposing you." So they're willing to go to the nth degree, condemning and murdering. I think about wicked king Ahab, you remember who together with his wicked wife Jezebel, plotted to take the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite. He didn't want to sell to them. And so Jezebel especially, but Ahab was a willing accomplice, orchestrated Naboth's murder by having some worthless men accuse him of cursing both God and the king, and then use the justice system to execute him, and then they came and took the vineyard.

Honoré de Balzac, French writer, said, "Behind every great fortune, there is a crime." Behind every great fortune, there is a crime. Mario Puzo began his novel, The Godfather, quoting these words, speaking of the fictitious crime family, the Corleone. Now, this may be an overstatement. It is an overstatement. There are some wealth, there are some wealth that's accumulated without crime. I think about how wealthy Job was, and he was blameless and upright, a man who feared God. Abraham was quite wealthy, and he acquired his wealth without crime. But it stands, and we must imagine around the world today, in ways that are appropriate to our 21st century setting, in which chattel slavery is illegal, should be. There is still economic oppression going on in ways we can hardly imagine. And so these words from James are living and active today.

Who is James Writing To?

Alright. Now, the question in front of us is, how should we, Christians, hear this text? How do we read this? Who is James writing to? Is it actually possible that someone who lives like this could, at the same time, claim to be a Christian? Now, many commentators say James is writing to churches. And so therefore, he thinks there are certain people that are attending Christian worship that are secretly living this kind of life. And it is quite possible that even now, all over the world, in the 21st century, there are people that are getting wealthy through this kind of oppression. Going on now. And yet they're claiming to be Christians. So people like that just need to read this warning, and heed it, and flee to Christ while there's time.

I think about the Zacchaeus. And even though there's no promise of mercy or grace in the text, yet, think about what happened with Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector who was defrauding people every day. And when he heard of the grace that was available, as Jesus was a friend of tax collectors and sinners, he invited Jesus to come to his home. Actually, Jesus invited himself over. "I must eat with you today." And Zacchaeus said, "Look, Lord. Here and now, I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount." Jesus said to him, "Today, salvation has come to this house because this man, too, is a son of Abraham." So that is quite possible.

Think of Nebuchadnezzar, the most oppressive man on planet Earth, who for some reason, I think it's because God was working through Daniel, I hope, and I trust to ultimately bring Nebuchadnezzar to a saving faith. When Nebuchadnezzar had this terrifying dream in Daniel 4, in verse 27, Daniel came and warned the king, he said, "Therefore, O King, be pleased to accept my advice. Renounce your sins by doing what is right and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then, your prosperity will continue." Nebuchadnezzar was humbled to the ground. A year later, a year of oppression later, God is so patient. He was stricken, his mind was changed, he ate grass like a cow for seven years. And when he came back, he was deeply humbled. And we trust, we have no record of it, we trust that he walked in that humility and faith the rest of his life.

So if you look at your life and you realize that you have lived a life of luxury and self-indulgence, and the Holy Spirit is charging you with sin, and charging you with self-indulgence and luxury, and charging you with fattening yourself in the day of slaughter, then repent! Though there is no promise of forgiveness here, there are many others in the scriptures. Jesus came to save sinners. If you know yourself to be sick, Jesus said, "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."

James May Not Be Speaking to Church-Goers

Now, I do believe that James isn't necessarily speaking to people who are coming to their Christian churches. I think he was just a prophet and his eyes were on the whole world. And even whatever he understood what he was writing, the Holy Spirit certainly had a multi-generational vision to warn rich oppressors. Jeremiah was a prophet to the nations, and he spoke oracles directly against pagan kingdoms without any expectation they would read his prophecy. So also Isaiah, Amos, all the others. And James could be doing that. He's not talking to anybody who's coming to Christian church on Sunday, but just talking to the human race. It's just as likely that James is seeking to encourage the poor in his congregation, that the rich oppressors who are crushing them and dragging them into court will someday be judged by God.

Like the persistent widow, you remember that? Luke 18:7-8. "Will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night. Will He keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly." So around the world, our Christian brothers and sisters are in different settings. And there may be some places where people are being directly oppressed. And they're yearning for relief. And God is using James 5, to speak a word of comfort to them that Judgment Day is coming for these rich oppressors.

How Should Christians View Money and Luxury?

Well, how then should we, Christians, see money? How should we see luxury? How shall we understand those things? If you have any amount of money more than you need for your basic needs, food, clothing, shelter, and that of your family, then you are technically biblically rich. And we have far more than that. We're among the wealthiest Christians that have ever walked planet Earth. And so it is good for us to read a text like this with a certain measure of fear and trembling. But we begin, I think, by being humble and thankful. In the spirit of Deuteronomy 8, it is, "Let's not be arrogant that we have wealth. Let's be thankful." Let's realize God gave us educational opportunities, he gave us gifts and talents and skills that enabled us to accumulate more money than we needed. We also lived in a country where there was freedom, there's political structure, there were things that kept anarchists from the streets and all that. It's been a blessed place to grow up and live. So Ecclesiastes 5:19 says, "When God gives any man wealth and possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work, this is a gift from God." So we should be thankful.

But beyond that, we should ask the Lord how He wants us to use our abundance for His glory. I would urge you, if you are a wealthy Christian, to read, maybe even memorize 1 Timothy 6:17-19. Listen to those words. "Command those who are rich in this present world...". Let me just stop there. Paul is talking to Timothy as a pastor, saying, "You are going to pastor wealthy people." Okay? They're not wicked going to hell because they're wealthy, but let me tell you what they should do with their wealth. "Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment." So, don't trust in your money. It's easier now than a couple of weeks ago to say, "Hey, we're not in a lavish expansive market now." Negative 20% in one week should teach you an important lesson. So don't trust in your money, but trust in God. "Command them to do good," 1 Timothy 6:18, "to be rich in good deeds and to be generous and willing to share. And in this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life." So be generous with your money toward the poor and needy. That's a consistent teaching. Ask the Lord to show you who he wants you to give money to. 

Support the Church

Certainly, we want you, as Andy mentioned earlier, to support our church. If you're a member of First Baptist Durham, please be certain that you take the steps necessary to keep giving your tithes and offerings. We need it. Our church needs to continue to support the works that we are doing, and we've pledged to do this in our church covenant, but beyond that, there's going to be opportunities to further missions, to give to ministries to the poor and needy, to others. Ask the Lord to show you who he wants you to be generous toward. Be sacrificial. Be faith-filled. We're part of a vast conglomeration of Baptist churches that pull our money to send missionaries. And so let's be generous and keep sending missionaries to unreached people groups.

Money is Not Yours Forever

And then think about your money in the proper way. It has a shelf life. And as Randy Alcorn said, "You can't take it with you, but you can send it on ahead." So if the Lord has a block of money He means for you to give away, and you don't give it away, He may just take it from you with car repair, or a house repair, or just a negative 20% on the market, He may just take it. So when you have an opportunity to give, give. And in so doing, you will store up treasure in Heaven. As Randy Alcorn said in Money, Possessions, and Eternity, he said, "Could it be that God increases your wealth not to increase your standard of living, but your standard of giving?" So let's be faithful, let's be generous with the money that God gives to us so that we can glorify Him.

Now, as I close, I do so mindful of our circumstances here, we are facing extraordinary times. Let's ask the Lord even this week to give us a chance to share the Gospel with somebody who's afraid, afraid of dying. Be alert to those opportunities. Let's speak the words of life. Let's be a light shining in a dark place, for his glory and the spread of his Gospel.

Close with me now in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time we've had to study your word. We thank You for the hope it gives us. We pray that you would enable us to be generous with our money, to not trust in it, to follow the clear advice in 1 Timothy 6:17-19. Father, we pray that we would make the most of the time we have and the resources that we have, but especially the Gospel. Give us a chance to share the Gospel with people who are afraid of death, so that they won't be afraid anymore, but find eternal life through faith in Christ. It's in your name, Lord Jesus, we pray. Amen.

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

Amen. So turn in your Bibles to James 4, continue our study in James, incredible book, so convicting and so powerful. In April of 1734 the greatest revival of the Christian religion, arguably in church history began in a quiet hamlet in Western Massachusetts where Jonathan Edwards was pastor of a small church in Northampton. And it began in that community for that time, with a shocking event, the sudden death of a teenage boy. And Edwards spoke about that. “There happened a very sudden and awful death of a young man in the bloom of his youth who being violently seized with a pleurisy, and taken immediately very delirious died in about two days. Which together with what was preached publicly on that occasion much affected many young people." Edwards biographer, George Marston, says this, "Jonathan Edwards’ whole life had prepared him to seize this moment. Having been twice on the verge of death himself in his teenage years, he had spent much of his own youth reflecting on the folly of loving earthly pleasure when on the brink of eternity." Edwards preached the funeral sermon for that young man from the text in Psalm 90:5-6. “In the morning they are like grass which groweth up, in the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down and withereth.” That's the text that he preached. And this poignant sermon brought many of the friends of the dead young man to tears. Edwards went on, at length, with the experiences many of them had had of walking through a field of wild flowers, which look beautiful but which soon wither. 

Recently I was in a beautiful mountain area in Europe and I saw these vivid purple flowers. And I wanted to bring a small bunch of them home to my wife, so I picked them and brought them to my hotel room. That evening I couldn't recognize them, I actually didn't know the color, so I threw them in the trash and my wife never knew anything about it. Sorry hun, that I didn't bring you your flowers, but they were withered within hours. And so it is these young people at this funeral had this sense of walking through a field of wildflowers and perhaps they've even picked them and had the same experience I had within hours.

He then turned from that image to warn the youth of Northampton against squandering their lives in the pursuit of worthless things. This is in the funeral message. He said this, "Consider, if you should die in your youth how shocking would the thought of your having spent your youth in such a manner be to them that see it. When others stand by your bedside and see you gasping and breathing your last, or come afterward and see you laid out dead by the wall and see you put into the coffin, and behold the awful visage which death has given to you, how shocking will it be to them that think, 'This is the person that used to live so vain and frothy a life. This was he that was so lewd a companion. This is he that used to spend of his time and his leisure hours in so much frolicking.'" He then concluded this funeral sermon very sweetly. "If you have gained an interest in Christ by faith,” that means become a Christian, “if you have gained an interest in Christ, your body shall flourish again, in a glorious manner. If you should die in the flower of your days when the body is most attractive and beautiful, it will actually rise again a thousand times more attractive and beautiful. Your happiness would be far greater than that of simply being fondly remembered for a time. Your glory will last forever." 

Well, Edwards used this occasion to gain a foothold in the lives and hearts of the young people in Northampton, and to minister the Gospel to them deeply and widely. Over the next few weeks they would gather together in small groups to pray, and it wasn't long before many of them were savingly converted. This was the beginning of the Great Awakening. Right there in Northampton, it transformed the youth culture in that town, and it was soon spreading to many other communities around. And when he wrote about it, and it was published in England it kindled similar effects in that country and it began to cascade around the English-speaking world.

Invictus

Now, this morning's text tells us that “our lives are a mist, a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” And therefore the wisest thing that any of us mortals can do is flee to Christ while there's time. To come to Christ for the forgiveness of our sins for eternal life. And I believe a good way to look at salvation is mirrored in the attitude of the text. It's being rescued from being the master of your own fate and the captain of your own soul. This phraseology came from a different kind of man than Jonathan Edwards. In 1894 William Ernest Henley lost his precious six-year-old daughter, Margaret. And in his grief and anger, he rather defiantly wrote a poem called “Invictus”, which means I have not been conquered. And this is what he wrote, "Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment is the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." 

Well, the essence of the rebellion of the human race against Almighty God is autonomy. That word literally means “self-rule.” Being the master of your own fate and the captain of your own soul. You can determine therefore what you will be and what you will not be. Where you will go, what you will do with your time, you'll decide all that for yourself, and how long you will live. So there's an essential arrogance and defiance about all that, about autonomy. One of the key ingredients to this human self-rule, this autonomy, is presuming upon tomorrow. Presuming upon tomorrow. Assuming that we will be alive tomorrow, and in the text, even a year from now, just assuming that we'll be alive. And that if we'll be alive a year from now, we get to choose to do whatever we want with our time on earth, and whatever we want in whatever city we go to. We get to make that decision. That's what autonomy is all about. We see it in our text. 

Saved from Autonomy

Now when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ saves a sinner, He saves that sinner out of autonomy. He actually comes and takes our stiff necks and puts them under his kingly yoke, under his kingly rule. And we, by the transforming work of the Spirit, consider that the greatest thing that has ever happened to us, that we've been delivered from being masters of our own fates and captains of our own souls. We actually have repented for the kingdom of Heaven has come near, Mark 1:15, that's how Jesus began His preaching ministry, "Repent, the time has come, the Kingdom of God is near." He didn't say these words, but he could have. And at the center of the kingdom of God is God the king. So repent and believe the Gospel, believe the good news. And as he says, so sweetly in Matthew 11:28-30, “Come unto me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” For many years I didn't understand what that yoke was all about until I did a biblical word study and found that when it wasn't a literal physical piece of wood, put across the necks of beasts, it was generally a metaphor for kingly rule. Again and again, kingly rule, and Jesus is saying, "Take my kingly rule upon you and learn from me. You have been serving another king, a wicked tyrant, Satan who flogs you and beats you, but I'm here to break and shatter that yoke off your shoulders and put another yoke on you.” Not no yoke, that's the lie from Satan. "You have no yoke on you, you're free." No, you're not. But you will find if you take your stiff neck, and yield to me and submit to me and put my yoke upon you, you'll find rest for your souls, and you'll find that my yoke, my kingly rule is easy, my burden is light. That's salvation. And therefore, we learn to say that God the creator, God the king, God the law giver, God the judge, he's the center issue of my life and all that matters is His will. That's it. What is the will of the Lord for me in my brief time here on Earth? The Lord then brings a serious consideration every day of the best use of our time and our energy and our money and our gifts and all of that for His glory.

Be Wise and Redeem the Time

Wisdom then very much consists of making a wise improvement of our time and of the opportunities that we enjoy. This is often spoken of in scripture, a great part of wisdom. Deuteronomy 32:29 “O, that they were wise that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end." Wisdom is to know where you're going, where is all this heading? Or again, Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days properly that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Or as Ephesians 5 says, "Be very careful then how you live. Not as unwise, but as wise, Redeeming the time because the days are evil, therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is." It's the same concept as the text we're looking at today. So that's what this text is about. Being saved from autonomy, self-rule, being saved from being the master of your fate, the captain of your soul, and learning to be wise about the fleeting time that we have here on earth, and the centerpiece of that wisdom is learning to say, "If the Lord wills, I will live, and if the Lord wills I will do this or that."

Prideful Assurance About What is Uncertain

Okay, so let's walk through the text, let's begin with the concept, the arrogance of presuming upon tomorrow, we'll look again at the words. James 4:13-17, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we'll go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money’ while you don't even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? It is a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone then who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it sins.” Alright, so we're picturing here, perhaps a businessman a merchant who travels a bit for his trade, goes from place to place, he's used to being prosperous and he's making plans for the future. And notice his attitude about the future. “Today, or tomorrow,” it doesn't matter, they're equally sure to him. “There's plenty of time. Actually, there's a limitless resource of time.” And notice his autonomous plans, "Well go to such and such a city, this city or that city, whatever I think is best. And we're going to spend a year there, and we're going to carry on business, we're going to make a trade and we're going to make a profit, we're going to make money, that's how it's going to go." 

Notice that this individual goes far beyond certainty about tomorrow to certainty about a full year beyond tomorrow. The one is as certain as the other in this mindset. In all of his plans, the will of God never enters in, and think about it, he is the master of his fate, he is the captain of his soul. He will live as long as he wants to live, I guess and spend his time as he chooses. He is presuming on the future. Notice also verse 16, one translation says, "You boast and brag or you boast in your arrogance," is another translation. So there's an essential pride to all of this. The human being is pridefully forgetting about God, he is making his own plans, he forgets that his very existence is in the hand of God.

We Live and Die According to God's Will

Look at verse 15, “Instead you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord's will we will live.’" Let me just pause right there and just say this is probably one of the most helpful things you can begin to say to yourself, every day. “If it is the Lord's will, I will live.” I don't think it'll do you any harm to say it multiple times a day. You don't have to say it to others. It will alarm them. Maybe they should be alarmed, I don't know, but you should be alarmed at least into “numbering your days properly that you may gain a heart of wisdom,” just say again and again, "If it's the Lord's will, I will live." This is biblical theology for Paul said in Acts 17, "In him [God] we live and move and have our being.” Colossians 1:17 says, "In him [Christ] all things hold together." The very atoms of your body are being held together by the ongoing will of Almighty God, whether you believe in him or not.

As Daniel the prophet said to the wicked king of Babylon, Belshazzar, who was holding a horrible, idolatrous, drunken feast, using the holy articles taken from the Holy of Holies in the temple, in Jerusalem, and using them to toast the gods of bronze, iron, wood, and stone. And then the hand, this mysterious hand appeared, and there was what we call, “he saw the writing on the wall,” comes from Daniel 5, and Daniel came in and said to this evil king, "’You did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways.’ That very night, Belshazzar the Independent died.” So the arrogant man who presumes in the future forgets this one fact. Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed to each one of us to die, and after that to face judgment.” Or again, Ecclesiastes 8:8, “No man has the power over the wind to contain it, so no one has the power over the day of his death.” It's not in your hand. You don't control it.

He also forgets that God is sovereign over the things that happen on his planet. He overrules every human decision for his own purposes and his own glory. Proverbs 19-21, "Many are the plans of a man's heart but is the Lord's purpose that prevails." So whether you believe in or not, God's purpose, every day, is being worked out providentially. So this arrogant person in the text boasts about something he doesn't possess, tomorrow. And he just goes out, and he's going to do what he's going to do. Now, I think James probably had this proverb in mind, Proverbs 27:1, "Do not boast about tomorrow for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” Sounds exactly like our text, doesn't it? “Do not boast about tomorrow for you don't know what a day will bring forth.” And why is this so foolish? Well, the boasting about tomorrow shows the independence from God, forgetting the transitory nature of our lives, forgetting how dependent on God, we are for our continued existence.

The Brevity of Human Life

And so James says it in verse 14. “What is your life? “It is a mist [or a vapor] that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” So our time here on Earth is extremely brief. God in judging the original sinner, Adam, said, "By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your bread until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return." Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2 had a vision, a dream in which he saw a statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, legs of iron, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron and feet partly and partly, clay. Those different metals represented different empires, four mighty empires. And then in the dream he saw all of them became like chaff on a threshing floor, and the wind blew them away without leaving a trace. That's four empires, the Babylonian empire, and the Medo-Persian Empire, and the Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire blown away without leaving a trace.

The Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the central themes, "Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity, it's meaningless," says the teacher. “What does man gain from all his labor, at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” Ecclesiastes 1:11, “There's no remembrance of men of old, even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.” Ecclesiastes 1:14, “I've seen all the things that are done under the sun, and all of them are meaningless. They are chasing after the wind.” 

So as I was meditating on this, "your life is a mist, it's a vapor," I was thinking about the parable of the rich man, you remember, whose fields produced a bumper crop and he had immediate logistical problem, “Where am I going to put it all?” “He didn't know what to do. He said, “Oh, I know what I'm going to do, I'm going to tear down my barns and build bigger barns and there I'm going to store all of my grain and my goods and I'll say to my soul, ’Soul, you have plenty of good things laid up for many years, take life easy, eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your soul will be required of you. Then who will get all the things you have prepared for yourself?’"  

We ought to meditate in light of the text we're studying today on those words, “You fool, this very night your soul will be required of you [demanded of you.]” Friends, not requested, demanded of you. And when God demands your soul, you have no choice. You could be in the death throws and say, "I can't die, I was doing X." Does not matter what X is. "I had plans to do Y." Doesn't matter, when your soul is demanded you will die. And people die suddenly, all the time. They die of car accidents. Jonathan Edward's case, it was a pleurisy, a fever that came on two days later, dead, you know, it happens. The older you get, the more of those scenarios you hear about, or even are personally involved with with people we know. And so, we're aware of how individuals can go from prime health to sickness and then death very quickly. And even aside from immediate death, there is the process of aging, which comes on people faster than they think, and so, their capabilities get reduced. And then some injury or some other illness comes and then they're in physical rehab for a while and they never really quite return to that, and they never got back to their prime strength and health, and those days are quickly gone, in which we can energetically powerfully serve the Lord. So James wants us to be humbled by our transitory lives, by how brief our time here is on earth. We ought to realize every day that our life here as a mist, it is a vapor. 

When I drive to work in the morning, every morning, I cross a body of water, it's a reservoir near my house. And there are some mornings that the atmospheric conditions, the sun, everything, there's a thick mist that floats up and kind of hovers there over the bridge and over the lake. And you cut through it, you drive through it and then if you have the opportunity to come back even within an hour, it's gone, it's been burned off by the sun. Now, you've had that experience, and that's what James says our life is, it's a mist, it's a vapor, it's brief. And so, as Moses said, "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom." We don't know how long we have. 

The Calendar of Our Lives

Let me just give you a kind of a geeky image that stuck with me from my engineering days. Bear with me. It's one of the prices you have to pay to have me as your pastor. So, we used to have, in the engineering department I worked at, we had this big ugly calendar of the whole year. And it was given to us by a hardware supplier. It's one of the ugliest calendar's I've ever seen. I like calendars with mountains and rivers and beautiful things, but this was a 3 x 4 matrix for the 12 months. January, February, March, April, May, June, etcetera. So there are 12 months, and I remember somebody got up with a red pen and put an X through the day we just did yesterday, so we're on the next day that doesn't have a red X in it. It was kind of depressing. And you're looking at it, and the red X is just making progress through the 3 x 4 matrix. And one day in my weird sort of way, I looked at it and I said, “Suppose that calendar represented my whole life, with January 1st being the day of my birth and December 31st the day of my death, where am I?” I don't know. I know what the actuarial charts say about where I am, okay. The average lifespan of someone in my condition, I know that, but, I don't know. And I'm never satisfied, I always push it to the next level. I wonder if that represents the day I began working at this company and December 31st the day I'll stop working at this company, where am I? Or parenting, the day that they're born and the day that they grow up and leave our home. Our days are numbered friends and they're brief and they fly by. And so the Gospel lifts our eyes above this present age to eternity, and it shows us that the world to which we are going is entirely different. Our eternal life is not a mist or vapor, not at all. It's eternal. And the world to which we are going, we will be there for all eternity. If you have trusted in Christ, it will be glorious and beautiful and radiant. If you have not, it will be eternal conscious torment, that's the Bible's doctrine of Hell. Flee the wrath to come. 

Be Wisely Prepared

So, what do we mean by presuming upon tomorrow? Well, let's set up some boundaries, okay? It does not mean you shouldn't plan for anything. There's a big difference between saying, “I'm depending on, or relying on tomorrow for spiritual reasons, and I am preparing for a day, that may come, and I'm preparing wisely.” So the Scripture actually does commend that we prepare for the future. Proverbs 6:6, says, "Go to the ant you sluggard. Consider its ways and be wise. It has no commander, no overseer, or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” So I'm not arguing that you should sell all your possessions, buy a white robe, and sit on the roof of your house and wait for the second coming of Christ. Actually, in church history, some have done exactly that, and they eventually came back down and tried to buy back their things. So we are to live as though every day might be our last, but we're also supposed to prepare and store up for the future. 

All missions are done this way. You prepare a mission trip, you don't say to the people going with you on the mission trip, we don't know where we're going or how we're getting there, but come. We're going to get on a plane, and who knows what'll happen. That, we don't do that. We plan short-term mission trips, career missionaries plan, they prepare, they get trained and that's appropriate. That's how we live in this world. And so we do prepare for the future, but there's a difference between preparing for the future, and presuming on the future. And so, the most important thing that you can do in hearing this is, be certain that you are born again, that you have trusted in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Don't put that off to another day.

Make Good Use of Today

You remember Felix had the greatest evangelist in church history incarcerated with him. He was imprisoning him, and he had access to him, and he took advantage of it. So he sat with Paul, the Apostle, the one who wrote the Book of Romans. “Do you know anything about the Gospel Paul?” “I know a lot about the Gospel. Let's talk about the Gospel.” And so, He discoursed with Felix about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come. And when Felix heard that, he became alarmed, and stopped him and said, "Stop. We'll talk about this at another time." Amazingly, God in His grace gave him another time, and actually many other times, maybe a year or more, maybe two. But in the end he never, as far as we know, repented and believed, and then handed Paul over to the next governor Festus and moved on. He put it off because he thought he would have more time. The Lord says to all of us, 2 Corinthians 6, “In the time of my favor, I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.” Then Paul says, “Behold I tell you now is the time of God's favor. Today is the day of salvation.” Or again, the author to Hebrew says, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.”

Repent and Serve God

So the wisest thing you can do then is hear this Gospel message, hear of the atoning work of Christ, here that all you have to do is believe and not by works, but by faith are all your sins forgiven and flee to Christ while there's time. For us as Christians we're stronger every day by people who think just like the person in this text. You know it's true. We go to work in secular places that people are basically thinking this. “We're going to do this, we're going to do that, etcetera,” and God never enters in. We're surrounded by people without hope and without God in the world. Our task in this Raleigh, Durham area, our task is to shine the light of truth into that darkness. So, I'm giving you kind of the talking points for tomorrow at work. Find some way to talk about the brevity of life. Find some way to talk to some lost person about their life is a mist, it is a vapor. Find some way. And then for you as Christians, put your own house in order. Put your own house in order.

Don’t Procrastinate

Is there something God wants you to do? You know there's something God wants you to do, do it. Do it. Don't wait. Some Christian people are postponing some spiritual aspect of their life, could be a sin pattern that they plan on repenting from and turning from, but they haven't yet. Or it could be a good ministry that God, they feel, is calling them to do, but they just haven't begun it yet, and they'll get to it, they plan of it, they have to arrange some things first. So we tend to do spiritual procrastination thinking we're going to have plenty of time in the future. And so, we procrastinate from addressing sins in our lives and from beginning positive, fruitful ministries that the Lord is calling on us to do. So, if you have a pulling, a magnetic pull towards some ministry, follow it, feed it, see where it will lay, don't postpone it. And if God is convicting you, if I say to you, "Is there some sin pattern by which you are violating your conscience?" And something pops in your mind right now, the Holy Spirit is convicting you right now, I don't know what it is. Don't delay repenting from it. Put it to death now, don't wait. But deal with it now. So, positively, if God's calling on you to do a ministry, don't delay, find out about it, take steps toward it, start doing it. Negatively, if there's some sin in your life, don't delay, repent. Put it to death. 

Learn the Lord’s Will

Now, there's some practical things that I want to give you about this. I believe you should have a quiet time every day. You should get up and feed your soul in God's Word. And in so doing, you'll do what it says in Ephesians, “find out what the will of the Lord is,” find out what His will is. So, you should say, If the Lord wills, I will live and do this or that. Okay? So, I've already covered, If the Lord wills, I will live. So, in your quiet time, you say, “Lord, thank you that I have this day, this is the day the Lord has made, you have willed that I'd be alive, at least to this point. If you will, I will finish the day out. So I'm putting my life in your hands. It is yours.” 

Secondly, if the Lord wills, I will do this or that. What are your plans? It's not wrong to have plans, but have you asked God for wisdom? Have you sought His face concerning your plans? Have you passed them by for his review? Have you said like Jesus did with the greatest single act of human courage there's ever been in history, “Not my will, but yours be done”? Jesus was exactly the opposite, he was saying to his father, If the Lord wills, I will die. And it was God's will that he died. And he was willing to drink that cup for us, that's how much he said, if the Lord wills, I will live and do this or that. So we follow after Him and say, if you will, I'll live for your glory. So what do you want me to do? And then, first and foremost, the Spirit speaks through his word, he's going to tell you what the Lord's will is. Just do a word study on, it is the will of the Lord to that, so that you be sexually pure, 1 Thessalonians, “that each of you learn to control his own body in a way that's holy and honorable, not in passionate lust, like the heathen, who do not know God.” So it is God's will that you be sexually pure and holy. So you can just go down. Find out, it is God's will, it is God's will that we serve Him with all of our time and our energy. 

It is God's will that we ask him, “Should I go to this or that city? Should I spend a year there if you give me that time? Should I make money? And if I do make money, what should I do with it?” And so, there are some clear things that God says, it is His will, well we'll just find out what the Scripture says. But then there are some things that are pertinent to you, they're unique to your life and you don't know. “Should I leave this church and go to this city and take a job offer that I have now that I finished my graduate program, or if there's an opportunity, should I or not?” The Bible is not going to tell you directly what to do, but it does say in James 1, "If anyone lacks wisdom, he should,” what? “Ask God.” Ask God. Should I take that job? Should I marry that person? Should I go on that mission trip? Should I do this, Lord? And listen to him. “And when you ask, you should believe and not doubt that he'll speak into the quietness of your heart and lead you and guide you.” 

Sins of Omission 

Finally, the text ends with an important statement on a category of sin called sins of omission. We tend to focus on sins of commission, things that you do that you know God doesn't want you to do. You violate some law. But this says, “if anyone that knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, he sins.” So, God wants us to be lights shining in a dark place. I mentioned this a few minutes ago. He wants us to be evangelistic. But are you evangelistic? Are you sharing the Gospel with lost people? Is this a regular pattern of your life? These were his last words to the church before he ascended to Heaven. Read the end of Luke 24, you know exactly what I'm talking about. He said, share the Gospel to the ends of the earth and then He ascended. So, if you know what you ought to do and don't do it for you, it is sin. So for us, let's not procrastinate.

Is there a lost person in your life, somebody that you are focused on, somebody you're seeking to lead to faith in Christ? Don't wait, share the Gospel with them, be bold and see what God will do in and through you. Friends let's make the most of the time we have here as a church. Let's make the most of the days we have left together. Let's realize they're brief, they're fleeting, and let's live for the glory of God. 

Preparing for the Lord’s Supper

Now we have an opportunity to prepare for the Lord's Supper. Let me say something about the Lord Supper. I believe that the celebration of this ordinance is an opportunity that we as believers in Christ have to encounter the living God. I do not believe in transubstantiation? I don't believe it actually becomes the body and blood of Jesus, neither do I take a bare memorial view, like we can't expect anything here. I believe that in proportion to our faith in the Word of God, we can have an encounter with the living God, prepare your hearts for it. You've already had the opportunity to confess your sin, but be mindful of the fact of any sins that you may have in your life.

If you are not yet a Christian, if you've not testified to saving faith through water Baptism, we ask that you refrain, that you refrain and just observe. But we pray that in later months that you may actually be able to partake with us. But if you are a believer and you've testified to it by water baptism, we want you to partake. So let me this close this sermon time in prayer, and then I'll ask the helpers to come and I'll read the words of institution. Let's pray. 

Father, thank you for the power of your word, thank you for the clarity of your word. Thank you for the insights that it gives us about the brevity of our lives. Thank you for the Gospel that saves us from eternity and not apart from you. I thank you for this church, and now, Lord, as we have the opportunity to not just having fed on God's Word by hearing it, but that we can partake in the actual elements we pray that you would be glorified and send forth your Spirit. Be with us as we celebrate now in Jesus' name. Amen.