Two Journeys

It is to the glory of a king to show lavish generosity. And the more lavishly generous, the more glory comes to the king, thereby. And we see this in scripture and we see it in history, Solomon for example, put on a lavish display of generosity for the Queen of Sheba, to impress her. And she, for her part, brought a lot of lavish gifts herself. So they were dueling in their generosity to see which could outdo the other in lavish generosity. But then in the Book of Esther, King Xerxes puts on a lavish and full and rich display of his wealth for 180 days showing just how generous he could be, and how rich. And it culminated in a rich seven-day feast in which all the nobles of his empire were invited and the palace was decked out richly with blue and white hangings and with silver decorations and everyone sat at table with the king and everyone drank from different goblets, however they wished, in keeping with the king's lavish generosity. And later in that same book when Esther came unannounced into his throne room and he extended the scepter to her, he said to his queen, “What is your request? Even up to half of my kingdom, I will give you.” What a bold statement.

But kings love to say these kinds of things. You remember King Herod, evil King Herod, said the same thing to a dancing girl after he was so pleased with that dance. He said, “What would you like me to give you? Even up to half of my kingdom.” She asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, but the king wanted to show his lavish generosity and so he made such a bold boast. So also the Caesars ruling the world loved to impress with lavish and generous gifts. When Hadrian visited the city of Athens, he lavished on that city innumerable costly gifts, and competed with others to show who could have the most generous civic and municipal gift given to the city of Athens. So there are all kinds of building projects that were done. Ultimately he won and was shown to be the most generous, Hadrian. When King James took the throne to rule Great Britain, he put on a lavish Christmas and New Year's celebration to display his wealth and his largesse to the people. There were lavish feasts and gifts for all the guests, indescribable foods, and there was even a play written by one William Shakespeare and he even acted in his own play. So the king, King James, very very generous.

Machiavelli, in a cynical study of the power of kings entitled The Prince, said this about generosity by kings, he said lavish generosity is a way that a king would show his power and it's usually self-serving. And it's sometimes dangerous, for these displays are usually expensive and paid for by raising taxes. And the people start to get resentful. Even worse, they might actually come to expect it. So, Machiavelli said it was best for a king to be generally stingy and just occasionally generous, especially if his was somebody else's money. So if you won a military victory and it was some other king's money, spend that money like water. So that was Machiavelli. Well, I do believe it is to the glory of our king, the king of kings, the glory of the God of the universe, to be lavishly generous to us.

God, the creator of the ends of the Earth has been lavishly generous to his subjects, more than any king there has ever been. Now, this week is what we call Holy Week, the time in which Christians can meditate on and weigh again, and feel the weight of the glory of God in Christ at the cross, and also at the empty tomb. The cross on which the Savior of the World died and the empty tomb from which he rose. But what I wanna do this morning, and that's just in the natural text, the next passage that we're going to read in Matthew, and so we see the hand of God and the providence in lining that up for us. But I wanna take a concept from last week's parable and put it side by side with the plain prediction that Jesus gives his disciples of his death and his resurrection. And that concept is that God is free to be as lavishly generous with his own things as he chooses. He can do whatever he wants with his own. And so, therefore, I want to talk about God's sovereign freedom to be generous in all things, and especially in giving his son the Lord Jesus Christ.

So look back at the parable from last week in verse 15. I'm gonna read, I think, the ESV, which I think is a better, a little more faithful translation. Mathew 20:15 says, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me, or do you begrudge my generosity?” Now remember the context, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Some worked only one hour, and some worked more, some worked even the entire day, 12 hours. Those that worked only one hour received a denarius as you remember, and those that worked 12 hours also received a denarius. They each received the same. The one who worked only one hour had received lavish generosity, really surprising and even shocking generosity from the owner of the vineyard. Those that had worked 12 hours and received the agreed on wage, a denarius were not so impressed. And the landowner said “it's not a matter of justice here, friend.” Oh no, it's a matter of generosity. Look what he says in verse 13, “he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair or unjust to you, didn't you agree to work for a denarius?’” He said, “I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with my own things, what belongs to me? or do you begrudge my generosity?”

So the lavish generosity of God, the freedom, the sovereign generosity of God is on display, in this parable. He can be as generous as he chooses to be. And he says, “I want to give.” That's his nature. “I want. This is my will, it's my desire to be generous. I want to give this.” And he says, “Don't I have the right to do it? Isn't it right for me to do whatever I choose, with my own things?” So it's a matter of sovereign rights and privileges. And then he says, “Are you envious because I'm generous?” So it's a matter of generosity.

So what do I mean by God's sovereignty, defined? Sovereignty of God is the doctrine that God is king over the entire universe. Every square inch of it is his. Every atom in it is his, for he made it. He can do whatever he wants with all of it. He owes us nothing. He does not ask us permission, he does not ask advice, he does not owe it to us to make us all equally gifted or blessed. He does not owe us a single word of explanation concerning what he does with his own. He is not accountable to us in any way, but we are accountable to him. And therefore, God can be as generous as he chooses to be with his own things. Now the tendency for us, in our sinful state, is to resent God's sovereign generosity and his freedom in giving as he sees fit. We tend to resent it. “Do you begrudge my generosity?” he says.

The doctrine of God's sovereign generosity is a very troubling one to human beings. They resent the way that God sits on his throne. And is in no way held accountable to us. Doesn't need to give us any explanation. They resent that. It’s especially poignant, I think, for many in the issue of salvation. They feel if God does such and such for one person, he must do equally the same for all. He's under obligation to do the same thing for everyone, he must give everyone equal access to his grace and his generosity. So they say.

Now, I say to you that God's generosity is absolutely required for our blessedness. If he is not generous to us, we will not be blessed. I say that in two senses, first of all, given our status as creatures, as created beings. God is glorified in creating us totally dependent on him. He created us that way, that we would be completely and totally dependent on God's generosity. Our very atoms are held together by a direct act of his sovereign will. Our biological lives depend on oxygen and water and nutrients that come from outside of us in. And if they're not out there, if they don't come in, we die. And so, God has created us completely dependent on him. We were created needy, and God is greatly glorified by this. It would be the case, even if we had never sinned.

God is honored by our dependence on him, so because we are creatures and he is the creator, we must have God's generosity, for our blessedness but even more now, friends that we are sinners. Even more now that we have rebelled against the king. When Adam sinned in the garden of Eden, all of his posterity, all of us, sinned in him and with him. We are members, therefore, of a sin-cursed race of rebels against the throne of Almighty God. We are all of us, each one of us, under a death sentence uttered in Genesis, in chapter 2, where it says, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die.” So also it's restatement later through the pen of the apostle Paul, “The wages of sin is death.” And we have sinned, friends. We have violated God's commands, not just in being descended from Adam, but in that we have actually violated his commands, his Ten Commandments. Or the summation of all of his commands. Look at that, the two great commandments, Jesus said, “The first, that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your strength. And with all your mind.” We have violated that commandment, we are sinners. And we should love our neighbors as ourselves, we've violated that, we have not done this.

And therefore we deserve condemnation. We deserve eternity in hell. We deserve the deepest punishment. Therefore for us to receive anything good at all is sovereign generosity on the part of God. If there's anything in this life that you enjoy, anything that brings you pleasure or happiness. Anything that lightens your burdens, it is a gift of grace, of sovereign grace given to you. And God didn't have to do it. That we should actually have sunshine and rain, and delicious food, and the beauty of the Earth and natural gifts and enriching and pleasure-filled experiences. All of this is nothing less than astonishing generosity from this sovereign God. So, we are totally dependent on God's generosity, in that first we are creatures and we depend on him for our very existence and secondly, because we are sinners. 

We must start here, because we are creatures we can make no demands whatsoever on God, whatever he gives we receive gratefully. And how much more now that we have sinned? God can be as generous as he chooses to be and we would have no right whatsoever to complain. We all received a stay of execution from the death that our sin deserved. God decided to allow history to continue. Not just general history, but our own personal history. We didn't drop dead, the moment we sinned the first time. And so God's given us time and with that also many, many blessings and anything we get other than condemnation is grace from God.

But let's look a little bit more specifically at aspects of God's sovereign generosity to us. I wanna talk first about common grace blessings, those things that are just generally given to human beings. Let's start with the heavenly lights, the sun, and the moon and the stars. In James 1:17, it says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of the heavenly lights, who does not change, like shifting shadows.” So it refers to the heavenly lights, the sun, the moon, and the stars, which Deuteronomy 4 says, “The Lord set in heavens as the portion for all nations.” So basically, all nations get to enjoy the sun and the moon and the stars and look up at them and see their beauty. And so Jesus extends it in Matthew 5:45 to talk about how life and nourishment and blessing comes from the sun and the rain. That God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good. And sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. This is just sovereign generosity on the part of God. Love to his enemies who do not acknowledge him.

And even beyond this, the Apostle Paul says, in Acts 14:17, “He has not left himself without testimony. He has shown kindness, by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons. He provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” And he's speaking this to a bunch of pagans, idolaters who don't acknowledge him at all, but the apostle Paul says, “God gives you these things richly to enjoy.” And then there are kind of unique physical blessings given to people, different blessings at different levels in people's lives. Let's look at physical blessings. Some are tall, some are short. Some are strong, some not so strong. Also known as weak. Some are really, really attractive and beautiful, some not so much. Some people are quick and agile, others a little bit more awkward, a little slower. So also in the issue of mental strength, some are brilliant, intelligent, others not so much. Some people have the ability to concentrate and focus, and they have received gifts of insight and education. There are financial resources, inheritance money, talent for earning money, blessing in business.

God gives these blessings as he chooses and he gives them in the measure he chooses and all of it is sovereign generosity. And it's patently obvious, I hope it is to you, that all men are not created equal when it comes to these things. Despite what the writers of the Declaration of Independence said. I'll go with the scripture rather than Thomas Jefferson, okay, on this one? But isn't it obvious? That we have not received equally of these kinds of blessings? Some live in particularly fertile soil, rich and black and nutrient-filled and the soil is soaked with the appropriate amount of rain. And so all they have to do is just kind of scatter seeds and everything just grows lavishly and it's an abundant harvest. Others have to scrape out a living from it looks like desert areas, and you wonder why they live there and they can barely survive. Some have excellent physical capabilities, they're excellent athletes, they excel on the ball-field on the basketball court, they're tall, they have incredible hand-eye coordination, very quick, and they're just skillful. I've seen others that are not so. I've had times like that myself.

But these are gifts that God gives or he doesn't. Some have clear minds, fantastic memories, sharp perception skills. They acquire new concepts with remarkable ease. Others struggled to concentrate, they forget things readily, they seem somewhat dense, they do not excel in mental tasks or in school. Now, God is free to give these gifts as he sees fit without asking us first, whether we'd like the gift package he gives us. He opens his hand, and gives them as he chooses. God sits on his throne and can be as generous as he wants to be, and it's for us to praise him and thank him for whatever we get. Whatever gift he has given and not to murmur against God. Or to boast about the gifts you have, for who makes you different from another? And what do you have that you didn't receive? And if you did receive it, then why do you boast as though you had not?

Yet, for all of that, God has been incredibly generous to the sinful human race. Far more generous than we deserve. We can see that generosity in these common grace blessings. How much more dear friends in the blessings of the gospel, in the blessing of giving his only begotten son poured out on the cross for us, resurrected from the grave for us. Let us stand in awe at his most breathtaking generosity. Put your hand over your mouth and be astonished that he would give his only begotten son for people like you and me. 

And didn't he have the right to do it? Doesn't he have the right to be as generous with Jesus as he chooses? He didn't have to give him but he did. And this is the greatest generosity that we have ever received. I think that's the logic of Romans 8:32, the infinite value of Christ, Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him, graciously give us all things?” Think of the logic of the verse.

“He who did not spare his own son, will he not also give us all things?” So his own son, infinitely greater than all things. That's the root concept of this verse is that the greatest gift God could have given, the greatest gift he did give, is Jesus Christ, not all things. His only begotten son, therefore, all the universe’s material wealth, all of its gold, and silver, and diamonds and starry host are as so much dust on the scales compared to the infinite magnitude of the gift of the only begotten son of God. And all of your talents and all of your abilities and all of your deficiencies and weaknesses and limitations, all of it is as nothing, dust on the scales compared to this gift, the gift of Jesus Christ. I've quoted it before, but C.S. Lewis said it so beautifully, “He who has Christ, and all the world has no more than he who has Christ alone.” So it is true. Now, God had the right to be generous with Jesus, he had the right and he was. This deliverance of Christ was done by the good pleasure of our Sovereign God. He was under no compulsion, he was under no obligation. God the Father gave God the Son freely and generously with lavish generosity and it was infinitely painful and costly because He gave Him up for us in death and destruction.

Look at the details of that in verses 17-19, “As Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside and said to them, ‘We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn Him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles, to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And on the third day, He will be raised to life.’” In this intimate moment in which Jesus opens up his mind about his impending death, we see some amazing aspects of just how generous this gift of God the Father is. Does not the father have the right to be this generous with his son? Yes, he does have the right. But we therefore have an obligation to pick up this jewel and turn it and look at every facet of its glory and be amazed and have a sense of wonder and awe at the gift of Jesus Christ: Crucified, dead, buried, and raised again on the third day. So let's look at some details. First, look at the aspect of intimate relationship with Jesus.

Look at verse 17, “He took the twelve disciples aside,” that means away from the crowd. He pulled them away just to talk to them privately. The twelve were his chosen ones, his apostles, those closest to Jesus. The crowds that followed him did so for a myriad of reasons. Most of all because He healed all their diseases and sicknesses and that was a value. He had fed the 5,000 and they were there the next day looking for another meal. So that's a motive, for following Jesus. It was quite a show I'm sure. And they didn't have cable back then, and so there just needed to be something to do in a day. And so you're gonna just follow Jesus, “Where is he going today?” “I don't know, you're never sure where he's gonna go.” “Well, let's find him.” And so just to be there to watch it and to see the healings and to listen to the teachings and no man ever spoke like this man and, there's all kinds of reasons for following Jesus, but it says in John 2, that Jesus didn't entrust Himself to them for he knew what was in a man's heart. He knows what's inside man, he didn't entrust Himself to them.

But he pulled and said to these twelve aside, and they were his apostles, and it implies intimacy, it implies closeness in relationship with Jesus. A sweet relationship with Christ, what a gift. What a gift, listen to John 15:15. He says, “I no longer call you servants because a servant doesn't know his master's business, instead I've called you friends for everything I learned from my Father I've made known to you.” That's what he's doing here in these verses. He pulls them aside he says, “Friends, I want you to know what's gonna happen. I wanna tell you ahead of time.” He could have just done it. But he wants to let them in on it. He wants to have that intimate relationship with him. And frankly, other passages give us more of a sense of this intimacy, they really do: In John 12, Jesus opens up his heart to them and actually speaks about how he feels about his crucifixion. He says, “And now my heart is troubled and what shall I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ It was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Oh, he's opening up his heart to them.

“It's hard for me to be crucified, it's hard for me, there's a part of me that's shrinking back but I want God to be glorified. Oh Father, glorify your name,” he's opening himself up. Intimacy. He does it even more in Gethsemane, you know that. He doesn't just take the twelve at this point, he takes Peter, James, and John aside with him, and the three in an incredible intimacy are invited to come and to be with Jesus in his time of unutterable agony. As he has revealed to him, I think, by the Father, just what it's going to be like to drink the cup of his wrath on the cross. And so he goes a little farther and he falls to the ground and says, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken from me, yet, not as I will, but as you will.” And then he goes back to the three and talk to them and back to some more prayer. He's just drawing them into his feelings, intimate relationship with Christ, what a gift.

He didn't have to give that. That was sovereign generosity in the part of Jesus, he didn't have to give that. And notice the word of intimacy, we, “we” are going up to Jerusalem, we're going up together. Now, Jesus had to go to the cross alone as it says in the language of Isaiah, he trod the winepress, alone, he had to do that alone. But he wanted to spend it with them.

Secondly, we see the aspect of prophecy, of prediction. The ability to predict the future is a unique gift of God, to the human race through the prophets. Only God really knows the future. Only God knows the end from the beginning, only God can establish the future.

Isaiah 46:10, “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come. I say my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please.” So, the Bible is full of prophecies of God making known the end from the beginning, and of establishing His plan and His purpose and doing all that he pleases. And the center of the prophetic word is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, that's the center of the prophetic message. Some of these prophecies come in patterns and types. Things lived out in the life of Israel. For example, the saving of Isaac, on Mount Moriah, in Genesis 22, when God tested Abraham and said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and offer him up as a sacrifice.”

And you remember what happened, how Abraham obeyed God and was just about to kill Isaac, and the angel of the Lord calls out, and Isaac is spared by a substitute, the ram in the thicket caught by his horns. What a picture of the cross of Christ. Or the Passover lamb in Exodus 12, on the night of that dreadful tenth plague against the Egyptians when all the firstborn of Egypt were dying, and though the firstborn of Israel deserved to die, they did not die because the Passover lamb was sacrificed, and the blood of the lamb was painted over the door posts, and the angel of the Lord moving over saw the blood and forgiveness and freedom was given. What a picture of the death of Christ.

So those are types. Sometimes prophecies were verbal predictions like in Psalm 22, “They have pierced my hands and my feet.” And Isaiah 53, which speaks so plainly of substitutionary atonement, of Jesus standing in our place, “All we like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” So those are verbally predictive prophecies. So here, Jesus gives a simple and about the clearest prophecy you can have about his own death and resurrection.

“We are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of man will be betrayed to the chief priest and the teachers of the law, they will condemn Him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified and on the third day, He will be raised to life.” What a plain, what a clear prediction of prophecy this is. Now this prediction was given in love to teach us a simple lesson and that is that Christ willingly, gladly chose to go to the cross for you and me. He willingly, gladly, chose to lay down His life. “No one takes my life from me,” said Jesus, “but I lay it down freely.” And so it says in John 13:19, “I'm telling you now, before it happens, so that when it does happen, you will believe that I am.”

Thirdly, we see the aspect of betrayal. Let's look at some of the details of the prediction. “The Son of man,” He said, “will be betrayed.” This is a very specific word. Some of those horoscopes and Nostradamus predictions and all that are very general. Ever read a horoscope, and it says, “Something unusual will happen to you, today,” and you're waiting all day long for that unusual thing, and if you want to believe in horoscopes you'll find it, “Something unusual did happen to me today.”

Well, this isn't like that. This is something very specific, betrayal. He's going to be betrayed. And it really just connects with what we've already established, intimacy, relationship, the chosen ones. You cannot be betrayed by a total stranger, you can only be betrayed by a beloved friend, somebody close to you. And so he says, “The Son of Man will be betrayed.” He makes this much more abundantly later on at the Lord's Supper.

The Last Supper while they were eating, in Matthew 26, “He said, while they were eating, ‘I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.’ And they were very sad and began to say to Him, one after the other, ‘Surely not I, Lord.’ Jesus replied, ‘The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about Him, but woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man. It would be better for him if he had never been born.’ And then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, ‘Surely not I Rabbi.’ Jesus answered, ‘Yes, it is you.’”

Betrayal, fourth, we see condemnation by the priest. Look at verse 18, “The Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priest and the teacher of the law, they will condemn Him to death.” The betrayer would hand Jesus over to his Jewish enemies, the leaders of the Jewish nation. The leaders were the chief priest and the teachers of the law. This is even more powerful, even more striking. These men spent their whole day, supposedly, studying the scriptures, immersing themselves in the written Word of God.

Jesus said in John 5:39 and 40, “You diligently study the Scriptures, because you think that by them you possess eternal life, these are the scriptures that refer to me. And yet you're unwilling to come to me that you may have life.” The priests were the ones who are supposed to ... Supposedly offering up animal sacrifices in fulfillment of the laws of Moses, all of those types, those predictions. Every animal sacrifice was a prediction of the death of Jesus. And so it says in Hebrews 10:11, “Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties. Again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin.” They should have known better, they should have known that the blood of bulls and goats could not in any way atone for human sin, they should have understood who Jesus was, why he had come, but they were the ones most set against him, they were his bitterest enemies. John 1:11, “He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him.” 

They therefore represent the rejection by the whole Jewish nation of Jesus from being their Messiah, they condemned him to death, amazingly and in so doing fulfilled the types of the animal sacrifice. It was only by their rejection and their condemnation of Him to death that Jesus would die, his blood shed for us. 

The next aspect is hatred by the Gentiles. They'll condemn him to death, verse 19, and will turn him over to the Gentiles. Though the Jews' hatred for Jesus was strong enough to kill him, and frankly, many times in his life and his ministry, they sought to do so. From the very beginning when he was there in Nazareth and he opened up Isaiah and that whole encounter ends with them pushing him to the edge of a cliff as to throw him over. And they wanted to kill him right there and then, but Jesus just miraculously moved right through the crowd and went.

Or the time in John chapter 8, when Jesus made this stunning assertion, “Before Abraham was born, I am,” and they just picked up stones to stone him right there and then. Or later in John's Gospel when he said, “I and the Father are one,” again, they pick up stones to stone him. They wanted to kill him many times. But it was God's will, it was God's sovereign will, it was part of his sovereign generosity to us, that it would be both Jew and Gentile together that would condemn the Son of God. A collaborative effort. A few years ago, as you remember when Mel Gibson's controversial film came out, the Passion of the Christ, you remember that, do you remember some of the controversy on that? That the film suggested that the Jews were in any way involved in the death of Christ was offensive to the Anti-Defamation League. They found the Gospel of John in general offensive. But they found the film offensive and I think because they couldn't do anything with the Gospel of John, what could they do with that? They did something with Mel Gibson's film. But do you not see the sovereignty of God in ensuring that Jew and Gentile alike were equally responsible for the death of Jesus Christ?

For in this way, Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. In this way, Jews and Gentiles alike are all rebellious against God, Jews and Gentiles alike could not see in Christ the glory of God. Jews and Gentiles alike are in danger of the fire of hell. And so God ordained that the Jewish leaders would condemn Jesus to death and turn him over to the Gentiles, for what?

Well, to be mocked. What do we mean by mockery? It's a sense of perverted humor. Finding humor in a very dark and wicked and sinful way. There's an arrogance in mockery too, as though you are above the one that you're mocking. And so, the Gentiles would delight in mocking Jesus. Frankly, so were the chief priests and the scribes and the Pharisees, and the Jewish crowd, as well. This mockery was predicted in the Old Testament. In Psalm 22:7-8, “All who see me mock me, they hurl insults shaking their heads. He trusts in God, let the lord rescue Him, let Him deliver Him, since He delights in him.” So, this mockery predicted by Psalm 22, fulfilled in life of Christ. Now, first it was the Romans, oh, and they made a science of it. They were expert mockers.

Mathew 27:27 and following, “Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the praetorium, and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. And they stripped him and they put a scarlet robe on him. And they twisted together a crown of thorns, and set it on his head and they put a staff in his right hand, and they knelt in front of Him and mocked Him, ‘Hail King of the Jews!’ They said. And they spat on Him. And they took the staff and struck him on the head again and again,” driving those thorns deep into his scalp, blood flowing down his face. Mockery. Luke 22:63-65 says, “The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him, they blindfolded Him and demanded, ‘prophesy to us, Christ, who hit you?’” Little did they realize that he could read their minds and thoughts and could have said, he could have told their whole life history, if he'd wanted to, but they're mocking him. King Herod did the same thing, do you remember when they sent Jesus over to Herod, and it says in Luke 23:11, “And Herod and his soldiers ridiculed and mocked him, dressing him in an elegant robe, they sent him back to Pilate.”

The crowds that lined the street pitched in. Mark 15:29, “Those who passed by hurled insults at him,"” and the chief priests and the scribes, and Jewish leaders stood at the foot of the cross to rub it in. It says, “In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law and the elders mocked, ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he can't save himself! He's the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross and we will believe in him. He trusts in God, let God rescue him now, if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” The soldiers who crucified Jesus mocked Him. Luke 23, “The soldiers came up and mocked Him. They offered him wine vinegar, and said, ‘If you're the King of the Jews, save yourself.’” Even the thieves crucified with Jesus, began the time mocking. Thanks be to God, one of them stopped. Thanks be to God, one of them repented in the middle and said, “Remember me, Jesus, when you come in your kingdom.” 

We've been saved from mocking Jesus, amen. We don't mock Him anymore, we fall before Him and we claim that he is our God. But he was mocked. Amazingly the Bible speaks in prophetic form of how graciously willing Jesus was to submit to this mockery. Isaiah 50:6 it says, “I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard, I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.” But yet, you know something? Galatians 6:7 said, “God cannot be mocked.” Jesus ends up looking regal to me, doesn't he to you? He looks glorious to me, He looks majestic to me 'cause I understand why he did it, and I see the glory of it, and I see the shame of the human race. We're really just mocking ourselves when we mock Jesus.

Well what's the next step? Well, he would be flogged. They'll turn him over to the Gentiles, to be mocked and flogged. Flogging is one of the most heinous tortures ever devised by man. It involves a short stick with long straps of leather. And at the end of the straps of leather, are bits of bone and lead, embedded in the straps of leather, and a skillful sadist who knows what he's doing, and what he's trying to do, could wrap these straps around the victim's back and plow deep into his back and expose the tendons and the muscles and the blood vessels and even the white bone. He could kill him if he wanted to.

Jesus spoke the single word “flog,” to be mocked and flogged. He spoke at about himself. What must have been going through his mind? The flogging almost didn't happen. Pontius Pilate wanted to release Jesus. He was innocent, he knew it was out of jealousy that the Jews had handed him over, he kept trying to set him free and finally he said, “Well maybe if I flog him, they'll wanna set him free.” And so, he had Jesus flogged, even though he said, “I flogged him so that you know I find no fault in him.” That makes no sense to me at all. That's why he did it. This is the flogging that Jesus predicted.

And then the final step of the agony, to be mocked and flogged and crucified. The most hideous form of death employed by the ancient world, invented by the cruel Assyrians. Picked up by the Romans for use only on foreigners, it was against the law to use it against any Roman citizen. It didn't matter how awful or heinous his crime, he would never be crucified if you were a Roman citizen. But a Jew could be crucified, and the mechanics of the death are well known to you: Hands and feet pierced, nailed to the wood. He's hanging there pushing up on His pierced feet so that he can gulp breath and sink back down until he needs another breath.

And in this way Jesus knew he would die. It had been written in the prophecies with specific word, “pierced.” Psalm 22:16-17, “Dogs have surrounded me, a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones, people stare, and gloat over me.” Isaiah 53:5 uses the same word, “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.”

This is the cost of the gift of the only begotten Son of God, for us. This is what it costs us friends, and how could any of us come to the throne and try to persuade God the Father to send such a gift for people like us. This is sovereign, generosity of the highest kind, this is infinite generosity. And he didn't have to do it. He was under no obligation to do it. Why was the son of God so shamefully destroyed? Well, he did it as our substitute. You look at all of that suffering, all of that rejection, that mocking, spitting, blood, pain, all of that, the shame, then you must say as a believer in Christ, I deserve that, and worse. I deserve that, and worse, I deserved eternity under the wrath of God. And He came as my substitute. He came to take my place.

God's sovereign generosity culminates in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, in a human body, in flesh and bones to come back and show himself to his apostles, and say, “A spirit doesn't have flesh and bones as you see I have.” God's sovereign generosity culminates in the gift of the resurrected Jesus Christ from the dead.

He was resurrected for our justification, it says in Romans Chapter 4, that we might be justified, vindicated of our sins. Have you trusted in Him, friend, have you looked to him? Do you realize you have no standing before this God except that he be sovereignly generous to you? Have you asked Him for faith to believe? It's in his hand to give. Ask Him for faith to believe, look to the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, look to the empty tomb for your hope for the rest of your life. This is sovereign free generosity. Great and lavish generosity, more than Solomon did for the Queen of Sheba. More than Xerxes did for his 180 days and then the seven-day feast besides. A greater promise than “Up to half of my kingdom I'll give you.” Better than anything that Hadrian did for Athens, better than anything King James did on Christmas and New Year’s with William Shakespeare included, this is the most lavish generosity, the greatest feast any king has ever spread for anybody. Come to the table. Come and believe in Jesus. Find forgiveness of sins in God's sovereign generosity.

Now, what application can we take from that other than come to Christ. I would urge you to see every blessing you have in your life as a gift of sovereign generosity that God didn't have to give you. Thank him for it, for every physical capability, for every piece of food you enjoy, for everything that brings you any kind of pleasure, or happiness or peace, whatsoever, it is a gift of grace to you and, see, every earthly limitation you have, all of those things you've fought against your whole life, the struggles you've had with your mind, or with your body, with your nature, your tendencies those limitations are a gift of God to you for they cause you to look to something better, something higher. To look to Jesus Christ.

And they cause you to not be jealous or envious of someone else. To say, “I have my advantages and my limitations. They have theirs. All of these things are given as a gift, a lavish gift of God, and I don't deserve any of it. I'm delighted at any good thing that God gives to anyone else.”

And therefore, focus your mind on his greatest gifts. All earthly gifts are temporary and not worth comparing with this one, the glory of Christ crucified and risen from the dead. In Christ alone then find your worth, your success, your beauty, your strength, your righteousness, your achievement in Christ, and Christ alone. And thank God hourly for this, what Paul calls indescribable gift, it will sweeten your life. To live a life of thankfulness to God for what he has done, of His sovereign generous freedom. Close with me in prayer.

I love the words of David Livingstone who was a courageous pioneer, a Scottish missionary in the 19th century, whose exploratory work in the dark continent of Africa opened the way for many other missionaries that followed to penetrate the African interior with the gospel. This is a man who endured immense suffering for the cause of Christ. He was once attacked by a lion on the mission field, crushing his shoulder to the point where its mobility would be hindered the rest of his life. David Livingstone married and deeply loved Mary Moffat, who was the daughter of a missionary hero and leader, but because of the difficulty of travel, the various sicknesses that ..., he would spend more than half of their 18 years of married life separate from his beloved wife. The couple lost a child to sickness on the mission field, and later, Livingstone lost his own beloved wife as well to sickness, directly related to their mission work. And during his time in Africa, Livingstone once went three years without any correspondence from the outside world from friends or family, because those letters just couldn't reach him where he was in Africa.

But for all of this on December 4, 1857, he was speaking to students of Cambridge University about his years of missionary service, and this is what he said, “For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blessed reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter. Away with the word in such a view, away with such a thought. It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then, with the forgoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life may make us pause, may cause the spirit to waiver, may cause the soul to sink. But let this only be for a moment. All of these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought not to talk when we remember the great sacrifice which he made who left his Father's throne on high to give himself for us.”

Oh, may that be my sweet attitude the rest of my life, “I never made a sacrifice.” Now, of course for some Christians, it may in some sense literally be true, sadly. There are some Christians that really don't sacrifice much for Jesus. Following Jesus doesn't really cost them much at all, they don't leave any place of safety or comfort for Jesus. If anything, Jesus and following Him has been an enhancer in their already pretty good life. But I'm not speaking of that, I'm speaking of a different kind of life, a life of glory and honor and praise in which we actually do take up our cross daily and follow Jesus, in which we put sin to death by the power of the Holy Spirit, courageously so, and grow in glorious personal holiness, against all the pulls of the world, the flesh, and the devil. And in which we follow Jesus for the benefit and the salvation of others who need to hear the gospel. I would like to make, actually, many such sacrifices, but I would love to have David Livingstone's attitude, “I never made a sacrifice.”

Some people make much of their sacrifices. You've probably been around someone who is in the process of doing so. They talk a lot about the labor and the effort and the struggle and how hard it's been and all this kind of thing. Can you imagine Mary pouring out that perfume on the feet of Jesus, “I hope you know, Jesus, how much this is costing me. This is well over a year's wage here. I saved up, I was gonna use this on myself, but now I'm spending it on you. Hope you recognize my personal sacrifice in the matter.” Away with such a thought, perish such an attitude! And yet how easy it is for us to slip into that kind of attitude, isn't it? Like Martha who is laboring one day to get a meal ready for Jesus, you remember that? Working so hard getting all the dishes ready, getting the house straightened, all that, and there's her sister Mary, sitting at Jesus' feet and just soaking in time with Jesus. And here's the attitude, Luke 10:40, “Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to [Christ] and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.’”

I think at that particular moment, she's not just put out with Mary, she's put out with Jesus. And she's not quite sure why it is that Jesus is rewarding her behavior at that particular moment. The Lord wants us to learn to make sacrifices. Yes, there are times like Martha to be very, very busy in the service of the Lord, but it's easy to lose perspective and we start to have a hard heart, even toward the Lord, and say, “Don't you care? Don't you see all the things I'm doing? All of my labors for you.” And to start having hard feelings toward other servants of the Lord and see their labors as insignificant, as though what they're doing isn't anywhere near as costly as what we're giving, that kind of thing. I believe it's in destroying that kind of attitude, for the reason of destroying that attitude, that Jesus told the parable we're studying today, the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, or of the Generous Landowner.

So let's try to understand the context. Peter is concerned about their own sacrifices, his and the other apostles, and the topic of treasure in Heaven had come up with the rich young ruler, and Peter is interested in the topic of treasure in Heaven. He said, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you, what then will there be for us?” And Jesus does in fact promise them lavish rewards, “At the renewal of all things,” He says, “When the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, then you who have followed me will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” So they're going to be lavishly rewarded, and anyone, everyone who follows Jesus will receive a hundred times what they give up, even in this life, and in the age to come, eternal life, he says. 

But at the end of that teaching, if you look at chapter 19 and verse 30, the last verse of the previous chapter, Jesus said this statement, “Many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.” This is a surprising statement. What could this mean? And I think He tells this parable to explain what He means, that many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first, look at verse 1 of chapter 20, “For the kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard.” So the word “for” means He's going to explain what He means in the previous verse, that many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. And I think this is very important because He repeats the doctrine at the end of the parable, verse 16, look at Matthew 20:16, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.” 

So I believe that any interpretation of this parable that does not explain whatever Jesus means by that, misses the point. This is the point, the point is that many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first or the last will be first and the first will be last. There's a kind of reversal coming, a different way of understanding things is coming, and you need to prepare yourself for it. And so I think He's getting the apostles ready to think differently about their life of sacrifice and service. Maybe they're going to be the laborers in the vineyard who spend 12 hours all day long, bearing the burden of the work in the heat of the day. How will they think about that? Will they be ready to understand the rewards that are coming on that final day, on Judgment Day?

So let's understand this parable. A landowner goes out and seeks laborers to work in his vineyard. He goes out early in the morning, he is zealous, he's proactive, he's looking for workers for his vineyard. And he's agreeing to pay these laborers a denarius for the day. Verse 2, “He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.” 

Now these are day laborers. They're perhaps at the lowest level of labor in the society, They're not household slaves, they don't have a permanent place in the household, there's no protection for them at all, except that the law of Moses in Deuteronomy 24 made certain that those day laborers would get their wage at the end of the day. But then all bets are off, all arrangements are over, there's no permanent contract. As soon as that day of labor is over, they're unemployed again the next day. That's who he's hiring here.

And the denarius that they agreed to is nothing remarkable. It's actually the common rate. A denarius was equal to a day-wage for a common laborer out in the vineyard, so there was nothing that remarkable about it. He agreed to the going rate, a denarius, and sent them into the vineyard.

But then as the day unfolds the owner of the vineyard, the landowner, decides he wants more and more workers, so he continues to go out again and again and hire more people. Look at verse 3 through 5, “About the third hour, he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is right.’” Literally whatever is just, I will be fair in my handling of you. So these workers take this man at his word. There's no agreement about a denarius or anything, just trust my justice and go. And so they went.

The same process characterizes the whole day. Verse 5, he went out again about the sixth hour, the ninth hour, and did the same thing. Finally an hour before sunset, there's almost no time left, he goes out one last time, “About the eleventh hour,” verses 6 and 7, “he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long, doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’” Now again, there's no promise of pay, there's no denarius agreed to. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even say I'll pay you anything. He doesn't say like he did with the second hiring, “I'll pay you whatever is right,” he just says, “Go and work in my vineyard.” So these men just go, hoping against hope that they might get something for their labor. And they go and work for that hour.

Now it's time for pay. In verse 8, “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’” This is the first surprise, that the ones that are hired last are honored in that they get their wage first. They are preferred, they are chosen to be paid first. And this, I think, is at least in a literalistic sort of sense, the honor that Christ was referring to in 19 and verse 30, “Many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first,” and again in verse 16, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.” So these men that are just hired at the end of the day, after not doing anything all day long, they just come and work for one hour, and they are honored by getting their wage first, everyone else has to wait.

But we also see the surprising generosity of the landowner. He gives them a denarius for one hour of work. This is entirely unexpected. There's no way they could have demanded it, no way they could have had a sense that this is what they deserved. They must have been overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude toward the landowner as they received whatever it is they get for their labor. It's actually to some degree I think a 12-fold increase of wage. Twelve times what they could have expected to get because they only worked 1/12 of the day. It's really astonishing generosity. Now the other workers, those hired second and third in the middle part of the day, we have no idea what happened to them. I guess the assumption is that they also received a denarius. But we have nothing said about them, in any case.

But now come the laborers who have been there all day. Look at Verses 10 through 12, “So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. And when they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner, ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us, who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’”

Now this is an ugly little moment in Biblical history, an ugly little moment of human nature being revealed. But oddly enough, now just be honest, doesn't their complaint actually make a little bit of sense to you? Don't you feel like, actually, you know, if I were a lawyer, I probably could press this case. I think there's something about equal pay for equal work and this seems like a case of discrimination to me. Aren't there laws about that? And something's wrong, there's some kind of favoritism going on here. I have to admit it makes sense to me, but then the flip side makes sense too. How could we argue against getting what we agreed to get?

And so we're a bit puzzled by the whole justice thing here. It seems unfair, your attitude at least it seems in Jesus' mind, is abominable. The owner literally says their eye is evil, they are jealous in some sense, their focus is completely on themselves, their sacrifices, their labor. They've worked harder, they've worked longer, they've borne the burden of the work, they've borne the heat of the day. I find it interesting, as you study the parables of Jesus that have to do with labor, how many times the workers bring some kind of charge against the master or king or owner. It happens in the parables, the Parable of the Five Talents, Two Talents, and One Talent. Remember that one? The one with the one talent hides it in the ground, and when he gives his reason for why he did it, he said, “I know that you're a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed,” you are harsh, you're unjust, you're unfair in what you do.

You get the same thing in the Parable of the Ten Minas, just almost exactly the same words in Luke 19:21, “‘I was afraid of you,’ he said, ‘Because you're a hard man, you take out what you did not put in and you reap what you did not sow.’” And then there's the elder brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. You remember his attitude. He's standing on the outside looking in, he's not coming into that party, no way. Prodigal son has returned and the father throws a party for him, and the older brother is enraged, at the father's lavish generosity. And he's standing on the outside and will not come in, and the father comes out to beg him to enter, and he said, “Look! all these years I have been slaving for you and I've never disobeyed your orders, yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, well you kill the fattened calf for him.”

What a poisonous attitude, all three of these parables display the poisonous human attitude toward God's sovereign generosity. I wanna talk more about that theme next week, God's sovereign generosity, how He is free to be as generous as he wants with his own things. We'll talk about that more next week. But there's a poisonous attitude here.

So the landowner has to assert his right to be generous, verses 13 through 15, “He answered one of them, ‘Friend, I'm not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’” Now there's a lot of truth in what he says there. I'm going to go into it in more in detail next time with God's sovereign generosity. But there's no matter of injustice here, friends, not at all. This is a matter of generosity, this is a matter of grace, a matter of freedom, and the owner has the right to be as generous as he wants to be. There's no matter of injustice. Take your denarius and go away. You got what you worked for, you got what you labored for. Justice is yours, you get what you deserve. And Christ's final word on this in verse 16 is, “So the last will be first and the first will be last.” 

Alright, so how are we to interpret this parable? I think there are two good options. One of them I think is a little bit better than the other. My own mind has changed on this parable, and I don't know if I'll succeed in changing yours, but these are two biblical themes that step forward to offer interpretations to these parables, both of the themes are true, but is this what Jesus was telling the parable for? That's the question I'm asking.

So what is the first way of interpreting this parable? Well, the focus of that interpretation is that everybody gets the same reward no matter how much they work. You work 12 hours, you work one hour, you get the denarius. Everybody gets the denarius. One hour of work, the denarius. Twelve hours of work, you get the denarius.

The focus then is on the denarius, the reward, and this interpretive approach says that this has to do with eternal life and those blessings of the gospel, which are equally enjoyed by everyone, no matter how much work you put in for the kingdom. And so your labor, your work for Christ, your sacrifices, your efforts does not directly connect to the eternal reward. You don't get more of that reward if you work harder. It's simply by grace. And so in some sense it's talking about the blessings of eternal life, the blessings of the gospel, that everyone has access to equally, in no way connected to their work, their labor. I think this is possible in verse 29 of Matthew 19, Jesus says, “Everyone who's left houses or brothers or sisters or father, mother, children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” So eternal life is at least somewhere in Jesus' view, He's thinking about it. It could be the denarius then represents eternal life, and that everyone gets the same access to that if they simply believe in Jesus.

So if you're a sinner, you've come here today, you've never trusted in Jesus, completely disconnected from any work you may ever do or hope to do, the Lord offers you freely eternal life. He offers you full forgiveness of all of your sins, past, present, and future, you can't work for that. He offers you adoption into the family of God, that you could be a child of God. You can't work for that. That he gives you the indwelling Holy Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing the full inheritance, that when you die, your spirit will be made perfect, and you will be in the very presence of God. At the glorious resurrection day, you will have a resurrection body, every bit as fair and glorious as anybody else's, not in any way connected with your labor or how hard you worked.

And then there will be a multitude greater than anyone could count, standing around that throne, from every tribe and language and people and nation, and they will be before the throne and they will be falling down before God, and any crowns that they have, they'll be throwing before Jesus, some more and some fewer, but it doesn't matter. We're all on our faces before Jesus, giving Him glory and praise, and everyone gets free access to that who has trusted in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins.

And so I'm pleading with you, if you've never trusted in Jesus, you've never believed in Him, that you might trust in Him for the forgiveness of your sins, that you might receive these blessings, that you might be able to drink water from the river of life that's going to flow clear as crystal from the throne of God, that you might be able to eat from the tree of life that stands on each side of that river and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, that you might actually partake and see those glorious sights, just as clearly and beautifully as anyone else who ever labored for Jesus, that it might be yours.

And these are given freely by faith, apart from works, you can't earn them. It doesn't matter how long you serve Christ, with what great sacrifice, how many years of labor or minutes even of labor, it's available for you. I would say the chief witness to this truth would be the thief on the cross, wouldn't you? The thief on the cross is there next to Jesus, he's dying, he looks over to Jesus and he says, “Remember me, Lord, when you come in your kingdom,” and he says, the Lord Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” What did that man do? What could he do? His hands were nailed, they couldn't move, his feet were nailed, they couldn't move. There were no good works he could do.

And oh, how offensive is that theme to some non-Christians by the way. Somebody on murderer's row, all they have to do is pray a prayer and they can be forgiven of everything and go to Heaven when they die, have equal access to the table of God? “Oh no, no, That's unjust, that's unfair. I don't want any part of a God who would do that.” Well at the core of that attitude is that you have to earn your salvation, friends. Don't you see? You've gotta earn it, you gotta go do some good works. The thief on the cross couldn't do any good works and so they're offended by that way of thinking.

John MacArthur follows this line of interpretation. He says in this parable, Jesus wants his disciples to understand that everything they get from the master is pure grace, given sovereignly and freely, apart from anything they deserve, they cannot earn it. It's given equally and freely to all to whom the grace comes. “Believing tax collectors, prostitutes, criminals, social outcasts will have the same Heavenly residence as Paul, Augustine, Luther and Wesley. There are no servant quarters, there are no lower-class neighborhoods in Heaven, everyone will have a room in the Father's house, specially prepared for him by the Son. Every believer is a part of the church, the bride of Christ, every believer is a child of God, and a fellow heir with Christ, every believer is blessed with ‘every spiritual blessing in the Heavenly places’ in Christ.”

Well, I think all of that's true, I think it's gloriously true. I think it's marvelous for us to meditate that our labors, the labors of our hands, have nothing to do with the blessings of the gospel. They're just given by grace, contrary, frankly, to what we truly deserve. Eternal life is given equally to all, regardless of their labor and service to the kingdom. But is this the purpose of the parable here? Is this why Jesus is telling the parable? I actually don't think so. First of all, the denarius was given to those who labored for 12 hours as a just payment for what they deserved. They would have looked at it that way, they got what they deserved, it was justice, they had earned their denarius. And therefore, I actually don't think that those truths that I've just been saying so vigorously, and they are true, is really being taught here concerning the denarius. I don't think the denarius represents Heaven, I don't think it represents eternal life.

Secondly, the “everyone is equal in the kingdom” view fails to deal with the reason why Jesus told the parable, and that is that some are gonna be honored above others in a surprising way. Some that we think of in this world as first are actually gonna be last, and some that we think of in this world as last, are actually gonna be honored first above everyone else. 

So therefore, I think that the parable is to distinguish between the servants and the vineyard and the basis by which he's going to give the rewards. It's about God's sovereign right to judge and assess our labor for the kingdom. In 1 Corinthians 4:5, it says, “Judge nothing until the appointed time. Wait till the Lord comes, he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will reveal or expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time, each will receive his praise from God.” Praise from God is the reward, motive of the heart is the connection.

What is going on in the heart during the 12 hours of labor? What's going on in the heart for that one hour of labor? That's the difference, that's what I think this parable is about. Could very well be that that one hour put in by those workers who didn't know whether they'd even get anything at all, who were just glad to be there. Nobody had hired them all day long, they were just glad to be there and just were putting themselves completely in the hands of the owner and hoped that they might get something for what they did. Might have been a sweeter hour and more of an honor and a glory to the landowner than the 12 hours cranked out by those that were hired first. I actually think so when you look at the attitude of those that come in and say, “We have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day, and you've made them equal to us.” They had jockeyed for position, they thought of themselves as better than the others.

I think people are going to be surprised by God's way of assessing on Judgment Day. I don't think it's gonna be a complete mystery. I think the Lord's given us these kinds of parables and instructions to tell us, that humble cheerful servanthood done to other brothers and sisters and for the glory of God will be highly rewarded on Judgment Day, apart from any accolades you get in this life. We know that. But do we really know it? And I think there's gonna be some people that are gonna be surprised on Judgment Day. So who's the chief witness for this interpretive approach? Well, I think it's the widow who put in the two copper coins. You remember the story in Luke 21. Jesus was watching the rich put in their gifts into the temple treasury, and “He saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. ‘I tell you the truth,’ said Jesus, ‘this widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth, but she out of her poverty put in all that she had to live on.’”

So what Jesus is saying is, When rewards are given for giving, financial generosity, she's gonna be at the head of the line. No one would have predicted that except that Jesus instructed us concerning it. That Jesus is actually analyzing not the quantity of work done by us, but the heart quality of it. Do we have a loving, submissive, generous, cheerful heart while we serve the Lord or not? “God loves a cheerful giver,” it says in 2 Corinthians 9:7. I don't think the 12-hour laborers were cheerful as they labored. 1 Corinthians 13:3 testifies to the truth of what I'm saying here, “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have not love, I gain nothing.” That's an incredibly challenging teaching, isn't it? That there is a way you can make huge sacrifices in this life and still gain nothing for it, 'cause it wasn't done with the right heart attitude. Your motive wasn't what it should have been.

Well, what should our motive be, what should our attitude be? Well, how about that of Jacob when he was working seven years to get Rachel to be his wife. You remember that? For seven years, he labored that he might have the right, that he might earn the right to her hand in marriage. And it says in Genesis 29:20, “So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her.” Oh Lord, may that characterize my years of service here on Earth, that I so love Jesus, that I so love His name and His glory and His honor and the advancement of His Kingdom, that I so love His people, His chosen people, that they might hear the gospel and be saved, that it seems like just a few days, or even a few hours of service by comparison.

So what application can we take from this? Well first, can you just begin by giving thanks to God that you even have a place in the vineyard at all? You realize what grace it is to be able to serve Jesus, to be able to do anything for Him at all. Imagine if he put you on the sideline, but all of your brothers and sisters were allowed to do productive labor. Wouldn't you be clamoring to get in the game? Wouldn't you want to be able to do something for Jesus? And would it really matter to you what it was? If the Lord sent two angels down from Heaven and gave one of them responsibility of governing the world, and the other the responsibility to sweep up its streets, would they not equally serve with the same joy and gladness, whatever command the master gave them?

And that's how our rewards are going to be assessed. We are His workmanship, we're created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God lays out in advance for us to walk in. Those are our good works. Nobody else can do them. You can't do any better than do the good works He's laid out ahead of you, but you perhaps can do them better than you've been doing, with a more cheerful attitude, with a sweeter disposition, with an attitude of love and thankfulness to God. That's what I think this parable is about. So make many sacrifices, make many sacrifices, but don't make much of your sacrifice. Be like David Livingstone, say it's a privilege to serve. It's not even worth talking about my sacrifice. Say like Jesus said the servant said in another parable, “We're only unworthy servants, we've only done our duty.” There's nothing I have done here on Earth that really deserves any reward whatsoever. Prepare your heart for the surprise of Judgment Day. God's thoughts are not our thoughts, but he has told you enough. The one who serves will be considered great in the kingdom of Heaven, and the one who is slave of everyone will be considered greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.

And so, therefore, I would urge that you present your body every day, as a living sacrifice to God, that you be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you test and approve what God's will is for you, and you get up and energetically, sacrificially do the good works He's laid out in advance for you to walk in. Do them all. Do them cheerfully, do them humbly. Consider other's works better than yours. Consider other people's sacrifices as far greater than yours. But at the same time, ask the Lord for greater responsibilities. “He who is faithful in little will be faithful in much.” And if he sees you be faithful, cheerfully faithful with the things He's handed to you, he may give you an opportunity to make, listen to this, even greater sacrifices for Jesus. And when that comes, you'll be able to humbly to say, “My sacrifices don't deserve anything. I'm just privileged to serve.”

George Whitefield, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean thirteen times in a sailing vessel to preach the gospel, noticed that people were making much of his name and his reputation. He said, “May the name of George Whitefield perish. And may the name of Jesus Christ live forever in glory.” And he said, “I want this on my tombstone, ‘Here lies George Whitefield, what kind of man he was the day will discover.’” At that time my heart motive will be revealed. That's when I'll get my reward, and not before. Close with me in prayer.

On October 28, 1949, a young man, a college student at Wheaton College wrote these words in his diary, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” You actually have a copy of it on the front of your bulletin. Came across it on the internet. It's just incredible the things you can find on the internet these days. Of course, the student was Jim Elliot. And he was meditating on the great value of appreciating heaven on earth, a heavenly mindset that would enable anyone to transcend the illusions of temporary pleasures, temporary gains, temporary treasures. To transcend that illusion, and to make the sacrifices necessary to gain eternal pleasures, eternal gains, eternal treasures. 

Just thinking about that story of the unjust steward, in Luke 16, who has for just a very short time his job. And soon he's going to lose his job, and he's too proud to beg, doesn't know what to do, and so he therefore takes that very narrow window of opportunity and makes friends for himself in a very, I think, dishonest way. And Jesus tells this parable to tell us in effect, we don't have our stuff for very much longer.

We don't have our position for very much longer, we don't have anything that we have in this Earth for very much longer. Use it well. You've got a very narrow window of opportunity. And so, Jim Elliot was meditating on that and he came up with this incredible statement, “He is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

Now, his future wife, Elisabeth Elliot, wrote of how this man, Jim Elliot, lived out that principle. “Seven years later,” she wrote, “on a hot Sunday afternoon far from that dormitory room where those lines were written, he and four other young men were finishing a dinner of baked beans and carrot sticks. They sat together on a strip of white sand on the Curaray River deep in Ecuador's rainforest, waiting for the arrival of a group of men they loved but had never met. Savage Stone Age killers known to all the world now as Aucas.”

Well you know the story, Jim Elliot and his friends laid down their lives that day, that which they could not keep, to gain many things that they could not lose, to gain an eternity in the presence of God, to gain a rich welcome from Christ as martyrs for his cause. Eternal rewards given directly from the hand of Christ to them, which they enjoy to this very day, and the eternal friendship and brotherhood of those same Auca Indians who killed them with feathered spears and left their bodies floating in the river. Through their sacrifice, and also later those of their wives and other missionaries, those same killers were led to faith in Christ. And now dwell eternally with them in heaven. 

They gave that which they could not keep, to gain what they could never lose. And it's interesting how he says, “He is no fool” who does this. As though outwardly it seems somewhat foolish to live a life for Christ, and I think it does. And frankly if there's no kind of principle of foolishness to your life, you're not living properly. You need to look like you're living a foolish life for Christ. Like it just doesn't add up, it doesn't really make sense why you do what you do. You need to live for a future kingdom. And for the rewards that come for serving Christ faithfully in this life.

Now, every single person who's listening to me today has an array of earthly blessings entrusted to you by God. And you have them for just a very short time. What are you willing to do with them for that narrow window that you have those possessions? What are you willing to sacrifice for the glory of God and of Christ and His kingdom? Now this issue, this whole issue is raised by the apostle Peter in the text we're gonna look at today in Matthew 19 in verse 27. He says there, “Lord, we left everything for you. What then will there be for us?”

And he asked this question in context. Now last week, we looked at the encounter Jesus has with the rich young ruler. We talked about him as seemingly the perfect seeker. He was young, he was rich, he was a man of authority and influence. He was pious, religious, seemingly humble, very respectful of Jesus and seeking eternal life. He comes up to Jesus and says, “Good Teacher. What good thing must I do to gain eternal life?” But we found in Jesus' answer that this rich, young ruler didn't really understand anything concerning this significant issue of eternal life.

He didn't understand true goodness. Really, he didn't understand God, he didn't know who God was. He didn't understand who Christ was 'cause Jesus said, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There's only one who is good.” Do you know who I am? He also didn't understand who he was, by his clear conscience as he looked at the laws of God, and he said, “I've kept all of these since my youth.” He didn't understand himself, he didn't understand his own sinfulness, and therefore in all of this, he did not understand salvation.

At core, that man was an idolater. And the real idol, frankly, wasn't money, it wasn't material possession, it was himself. He was worshipping himself above everything else. And Jesus exposes his idol with a stunning command and a promise. In Matthew 19:21, Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.” Well, you know, when the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth. He walked away from Jesus. And so Jesus then at that moment gives an incredibly stunning warning about the danger of material wealth.

Jesus said to his disciples, “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.” So, the lesson for all of us is that idolatry is a very grave threat to our eternal souls. Idolatry is rampant, it's incredibly dangerous. And the disciples were perplexed by this 'cause they had always assumed that material blessing meant the blessing of God, that if they were wealthy, that God was blessing them.

“And they said, ‘If this is the case, who then can be saved?’ and Jesus said, ‘With man, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’” Amen. What an incredible teaching that is. We cannot save ourselves. Only God can save the rich man and the poor man alike. Now rich people do have special obstacles to come into the kingdom, we should not minimize that. But God can save anyone by his power.

Well that leads to Peter's question in verse 27, look at it if you would, “Peter answered him, ‘Lord we have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?’”

He's probably stunned at the interchange with the young man, and the new insight that material wealth brought actual challenges and obstacles to entering the kingdom. At the same time he's heard Jesus make an amazing promise, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” Perhaps his ears perked up at that. He had heavenly treasure on his mind. Oh, that you might have it too. I want you to have heavenly treasure in your mind when I get done with my sermon today.

And so he asked this question, “What then will there be for us?” The apostles had made that sacrifice. They had done the very thing that the rich young ruler was commanded by Christ to do. Peter could say, “We left our boats, we left our nets, we left our fathers and mothers, we left our tax collector booth. We left our families, our wives. We left the esteem of our neighbors, our home towns. What then will there be for us?” Now, Peter is I think unfairly criticized by many who comment on this passage. Somewhat humorously, in my family, whenever one of my kids asks me to do something for them, I say, “What's in it for me?”

They never have a good answer to that, I've noticed. “Nothing. Would you just bring it anyway?” I actually sometimes say it to my wife, “What's in it for me?” I haven't gotten any good answer, but I do it jokingly, because it's so repugnant and so opposite the Christian mentality that we're to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow Jesus, and all of that. And so the idea that Peter would stand on behalf of us all and speaking the words we all want to say, thank you, Peter. Saying, “What's in it for me?”

And so there are very lofty commentators on this text. They come along and savage Peter for his selfishness, and his mercenary spirit, and his grabbiness at this particular moment. But let's look at some things that I think would reverse that attitude. First of all, notice Peter isn't just asking for himself, he doesn't say, “What's in it for me?” He, in effect, says “What will there be for us?” So he's not just talking about himself, but all of the apostles who had left all of the - their previous lifestyle.

Secondly, and far more importantly, notice this, Jesus does not in any way criticize Peter's question, not at all. As we will see, He's gonna modify Peter's understanding of how the rewards come, and that will go on into next week's sermon also with the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. He does want him to understand on what basis the rewards will come. But He doesn't, in any way, minimize a desire for rewards. Actually, if anything, He greatly increases it, because He lays out in this immediate text overwhelming rewards. Lavish promises. 

And so the basic concept here, if it's wrong to desire rewards then why does Jesus keep tempting us so. Why does He keep laying out such incredible promises of reward if we really ought not to want any of the things he's promising? So I think Peter is unfairly criticized.

So Jesus does very much promise rewards. Look at verse 28 and 29, Jesus said to them. “I tell you the truth. At the renewal of all things, when the son of man sits on his glorious throne, then you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, and everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake, will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

So Jesus just lays out lavish promises of rewards, right here after Peter's request. He begins by talking about eternal rewards given to the apostles, and He starts with a sense of certainty about these rewards. Right away, He says, “Truly I say to you.” He gives an oath, a verbal promise. This is a very serious thing. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” In other words, you can take this promise to the bank and cash it. This promise will be good, you'll find it to be so. “Truly I say to you.”

So I was meditating on this and I want to give you a kind of a parable, or perhaps an illustration. Imagine way back when, there was a royal prince in the midst of a war. And he is captured, but he manages to escape and he's running for his life. He gets out of enemy territory, and he's crossing some neutral land in some neutral kingdom. He stops quickly at a farm house where a peasant lives with his family. He's out of breath, covered with mud, and he asks if he can borrow the family's one horse to ride away to safety. And as an inducement he writes a promise saying, “When I get back to my kingdom, I will reward you handsomely. Not only will you get your family horse back, but I'll give you 20 pieces of gold, I'll give each member of your family some royal clothing, and you will, from that point forward, be a friend of the royal family of my kingdom.”

And as he's saying this, he writes these words out and takes his signet ring, and a candle that's burning on the table, and he seals it and hands it to the man. Will our royal prince be good for this promise? What do you think? At that particular moment, the prince, running for his life, covered with mud, doesn't look like much. He doesn't look very powerful, he doesn't look very rich, he doesn't look very capable of fulfilling the written promise on the page. 

And so only by faith can we perceive that Jesus will be good for this word. We just look on the page and it just looks like words to us, unless you have faith and say, “Jesus some day is coming back. And He's gonna sit on a glorious throne, and oh, would it be good to be a friend of the family then?” And how sweet would it be to sacrifice as much as I can to bring His kingdom in between now and then. 

Friends, you just have a narrow opportunity to do it, make the most of it. Jesus is handing you right here a promise. And not just here, but anywhere in scripture that speaks of rewards. He's handing you a promise, and He'll be good for it. So there are two types of rewards that Jesus mentions in this encounter. There are eternal rewards and there are temporal rewards. Temporal rewards are those things we get here in this life, eternal rewards are those things that will come in the new heaven and the new earth, the future.

And so what are the eternal rewards first promised to the apostles? And by the way, those two rewards are not equivalent, they're not equal at all. The temporal rewards are significant, but they are greatly outshone by those eternal rewards, and we should set our heart ultimately on those. So, what eternal rewards has He promised to the apostles? Well first notice the time of the reward. “At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne.”

Now, this word “renewal” is a fascinating word. It occurs only twice in the New Testament. It's made up of two Greek words, “palin” meaning “again", and “genesis”, meaning “creation”, a re-creation. Oh that makes my heart leap. I know that from Romans 8, we're living in a world that's cursed with sin. The whole world is subject to futility and frustration and decay. And so also is human history. Oh, but there's coming another world, a re-creation, a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth.

And the Bible uses this word in Titus chapter 3 to speak of what happens inside the heart of any person when they come to faith in Jesus Christ, isn't that marvelous? Titus 3 in verse 5, says, “He saved us, not because of righteous things we have done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal [or re-creation] by the Holy Spirit.” So the moment you become a Christian, you are a new creation inside you, and that new creation can never be extinguished, it can never die, it cannot perish or spoil or fade. You're a new man, a new woman in Jesus.

And nothing can change that. Has that happened to you, friend? Have you been regenerated? Have you been made a new creation by the power of the Spirit of God? Oh, that by looking at Jesus today, you might become a new creation. By trusting in Jesus, who shed His blood on the cross for our sins, yours and mine, may you become a new creation today.

But here, it's speaking, I think, not just of what happens in an individual person, but what's gonna happen throughout the universe. “At the renewal of all things,” He says here. This is most definitely speaking of the new heaven and the new earth. Revelation 21:1 says, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” Speaking of that new heaven where we will live with God, that new Earth where in resurrection bodies, we'll walk in glory and we'll see beauty we can scarcely imagine. That is the time of the reward. And notice the occasion of the reward, “When the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne.” Literally the throne of His glory.

Jesus in the time of His incarnation was some called “God incognito.” It was easy to miss Him. He looked like just any other man. He could sweat and he could bleed and he could die. He could suffer and he could die. He looked like just an ordinary man, he was God incognito. But there's gonna come a time when he will return in resurrection glory. And he will sit on His throne in heavenly glory and all the angels will be with Him.

So what do the apostles get? He says, “You who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Jesus sits on a throne representing his position of honor and glory and power so also these apostles will sit on thrones representing glory and honor and power. Now, what does it mean that they're gonna sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel? I really don't know. I can't wait to find out though.

I do believe there are positions of authority in the kingdom. I don't think we're all gonna be equal in authority. I think that there will be rulers in the kingdom of heaven. Of course we will lose tyranny, tyranny will be gone. Pride will be gone and if anyone's over you, a created being is over you, you will be delighted about it and you'll enjoy it and if you happen to be over other created beings you'll carry yourself like Jesus did.

But I do believe there'll be positions of authority, and so these twelve will sit on these twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. So the future glory for the apostles is established also in the Book of Revelation, in the very foundations of the walls of that city. Now it says in Revelation 21:14, “The wall of the New Jerusalem had twelve foundations and on them there were the names of the twelve apostles of the lamb.” So future glory is promised.

An answer, simple answer to Peter's question, “Lord, we've left everything. What then will there be for us?” Infinitely more than your leaving deserves. Infinitely more than you could possibly imagine. I'm going to lavish glory and honor and power and joy on you more than you can possibly imagine indefinitely by grace, more than you deserve. So that's the answer to Peter's question.

But then he goes on to promise temporal rewards to anyone who'll make a similar commitment. 

Now, the fact that they are temporal is not so clear in Matthew's gospel, you have to go to the parallel accounts in Luke and in Mark also. In Luke 18, it says, “‘I tell you the truth,’ Jesus said to them, ‘No one who has left home, or wife or brothers, or parents, or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive as many times as much,’” listen, “‘In this age and in the age to come, eternal life.’”

So he makes a division then between the things you get in this age and those things that you will receive in the future. Now the quantity of this reward, this Earthly reward, is rather staggering. Look again in verse 29, “Everyone who's left houses, or brothers, brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or fields, for my sake, will receive a hundred times as much.”

Now the specific nature of the reward is clear, you get back what you gave up. Mark makes this clear. Mark, 29:30, “I tell you the truth, no one who's left home or brothers, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age, homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields.” So He's very clear what He's talking about. You leave your family, you leave your home, you leave all of these things, and you go to serve Me, you're gonna get a hundred times as much back. Now, what could this mean? Is this the foundation of the health and wealth gospel? Can we take this to the Lord and say, “Lord, You said one hundred fold. If I give $10, I'm gonna get back 100 times as much.”

That's not what it's saying here. Not at all. I think in order to understand this, you have to go back in Matthew chapter 10, when Jesus sends the apostles out and He challenges them, and he says, “Do not take any bag for your journey. Don't take any stuff, don't take any tunic, or extra sandals, or staff. Don't take anything in your hand, just go. Because a worker is worth his keep, and in whatever town or village you enter, search for a worthy person there and stay at his house until you leave. And if that home is deserving, if it's worthy, then stay with them and let your peace rest on that home until you finish your work.”

And at the end of Matthew 10 He says, “He who receives you, receives me, and he who receives me, receives him who sent Me. He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and he who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man's reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will never lose his reward.” Well, there's your hundred families.

There's your hundred mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. As you itinerate, as you go from place to place serving the Lord, you're gonna find a whole realm of new relationships with people who love Jesus, and who open their homes to you and take you in and feed you meals and love on you, like you can scarcely believe. And no they're not yours to keep. That's okay, it's not theirs to keep either. We don't keep any of this stuff.

But through hospitality, through Christian service, we receive a hundred times as much in this age. The Apostle Paul received that again and again. In Romans 16, in verse 23, it says, “Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings.” So here's Gaius, this man who's hospitable and takes the whole church in and takes care of them. Or again in Romans 16:13, Paul says, “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and also his mother, who's become a mother to me, too.” 

So Rufus's mother is Paul's mother, he's received back at least one more mother now. And so, it goes as we sacrifice, as we go forth to serve the Lord, we're gonna find a network of relationships all over the world and, friends, I can testify to this. I have received the benefit of this in Kenya, in Pakistan, in China. I've received the benefit of this in Eastern Europe, in Greece, all over the world that I've been, in Haiti, places all over the world, brothers and sisters in Christ have sacrificed to take us in and take care of us and love on us.

And so, this is a promise you can most certainly take to the bank. This is the hundred-fold promise that Jesus gives. But that's not all. He also promises in the age to come, eternal life. Eternal life. Now, that should be enough. That should be enough friends. What is eternal life? Jesus said in John 17:3, “Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou me has sent.”

So we're gonna get God, we get to know God, we get to see Him face-to-face and be in His presence, we get to bask in His glory. And we get to see his handy work, we get to see the new Jerusalem with all of its beauty, we get to walk on verdant hills. The new Earth in all of its splendor and glory and beauty. And we get to be at peace with a multitude from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, in the age to come we get eternal life. Is that all? No, there's more. Amazingly, the Lord has promised that he will bless specific acts of service done by faith while in the body here, he will reward them on judgment day. And I think that's at least in part, what he has in mind here.

Jesus said this in John 12:26, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, my servant also will be,” listen to this, “My father will honor the one who serves me.” Now, that ought to stagger you. If you know yourself to be the sinner that you are, if I know myself to be the sinner that I am, that he would honor any of us, who are worms and less than worms, who have been rebels, that he would honor any of us is astonishing grace. But this is the very thing He's promised. He's actually going to honor people who serve Him in this life.

Oh, that you would yearn for that honor. That you would store up as much of that honor as you possibly can in the brief time you have here on earth.

So what are Jesus' conditions for rewards? Well first we start with faith. Like I said, you have to believe that the prince who has written this promise is gonna be good for it, that his word truly I say to you, you can take it to the heavenly bank, and it will be good, you have to trust that, but you have to go beyond that.

You have to believe that the rich, young ruler's question is utterly inappropriate, “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” We cannot use any good thing to get eternal life. You need to see that by faith, you are not going to be saved by your service to Jesus. You're not gonna be saved by leaving everything to follow Christ, you're not gonna be saved by giving money to the poor, you're not gonna be saved by any of your good works. So you get your rewards first and foremost, by understanding by faith that they do not earn any forgiveness of sins. You cannot pay for your sins by your good deeds.

We are justified by faith apart from works of the law. It says in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace are you saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast.” We were out yesterday going door-to-door inviting people to the health fair. And we keep bumping into this same false religion. The same false religion we keep bumping into it again and again, we can find it anywhere. And that is justification by works. The idea that you can do good works to pay for your sins, “I'm basically a good person. My good deeds outweigh the bad.” I hear this again and again.

And the Bible refutes it. Only by trusting in Jesus, who shed His blood for us can we have forgiveness of sins. Oh, look to Christ. A number of you perhaps were out there in the streets yesterday, you promised that you'd come to worship today, you said you'd be here, so I'm speaking to you. You'd promised you'd come and now I'm saying to you, look to Jesus and trust in Him, and His promise is to you, you'll have eternal life, but not by works.

And by faith, you also have to believe that the future is better than the present. That the best is yet to come, that when you die, after having lived a life of sacrifice and suffering for the Lord, there'll be in some sense, an outstanding balance sheet, just in terms of the works. That we do not receive in this life the rewards. The apostle Paul put it this way, “If for this life only, we have trusted in Christ, we're above all men to be pitied.” It's been a bad life if I don't get to be resurrected and I get to be taken in the glory and receive rewards for what I've done.

Randy Alcorn told the story of two farmers who owned farms side by side. One of them was a bitter atheist and the other was a devout Christian. And the atheist, constantly annoyed at the Christian's incessant references to his God and God's blessing and God's provision and all that. Annoyed by that, it was winter, he said, “I'll tell you what. If spring comes, let's each plant the same crop, the same acreage, and you pray to your God and I'll curse Him, and let's see who has a bigger harvest come harvest time.”

Well, harvest time came around that year, and as it turned out, the atheist had a significantly larger crop. And he was filled with pride. And he was filled with mockery, and he started to mock the Christian and his faith, “What do you have to say for your God now.” The other farmer replied, “My God doesn't settle all His accounts in October.” [laughter]

And so it is with rewards. He doesn't settle all His accounts here in this life. There's some people that, for the sake of Christ, they forsake their families. Their families, perhaps in the Muslim world, would like to kill them. They're in great danger even from their own families. They live a life of faithful service to the Lord for a very short time, and then they are killed for their faith. What did they get in this life for their service to Christ? There are moments of peace. There's a sense of assurance, there were some things that came along the way, but my friends, it's for the next world that we sacrifice, not for this one.

So he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose, though it may appear to be foolish to do it. Are you appearing foolish to your non-Christian friends? One of the big fears I have for American Evangelicals is that it's generally a good deal to be a Christian in this culture and society. You don't really sacrifice much, you don't need to. You gain a bunch of earthly things, heavenly things, not really much on the mind, but we have that too. Look forward to that. Everything is good, it's all good, etcetera. Not much sacrifice and not much suffering. 

But Jesus said there needs to be sacrifice. Look at verse 28, “You who have followed me,” He said. Verse 29, “Everyone who has left houses, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children or fields for my sake,” without the principal sacrifice there can be no rewards. And to receive the reward a servant must be willing to give himself up to the will of the master.

And you have to be willing to suffer. Mark's gospel adds a single word, the word “persecutions”. So listen again, “I tell you the truth, no one who has left home, or brothers, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or fields, for me and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age, homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields, and with them persecutions.”

We cannot expect to be richly rewarded by Christ if we've suffered nothing for Christ. Amy Carmichael, a missionary to the orphans in India, wrote of this suffering in the perspective of coming to Christ after having lived a life of comfort and ease in the church. This is the poem, “Jesus speaks to us: Have you no scar? No hidden scar on foot or side or hand? I hear you sung as mighty in the land. I hear them hail your bright ascendant star. Have you no scar? Have you no wound? Yet, I was wounded by the archers, spent, leaned me against the tree to die, and rent by ravenous beasts that encompass me, I swooned. Have you no wound? No wound? No scar? Yes, as the master shall the servant be, and pierced are the feet that follow Me, but yours, yours are whole. Can he have followed far who has no wound? No scar? Can she have followed far who has no wound? No scar?”

What are those wounds? They might be physical, they might be psychological, mental. And we're so afraid of them, aren't we? We're so afraid to get those wounds, those scars, to be hurt in serving Jesus. Oh, that God would give us the faith to lay aside that fear, and live for the future glory of His honor and His reward. 

Now the question I wanna ask is, should we even desire rewards? Should we say, “What then will there be for us?” It seems idolatrous, it seems mercenary, it seems selfish, it seems anti-Christian. Should we desire rewards? Well, I came across a C.S. Lewis quote in John Piper's book, Desiring God, that's so poignant on this very issue. This is what Lewis wrote, “If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it, is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics, and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum, because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea ... We are far too easily pleased.”

Lewis went on to argue that it's not mercenary if the thing you desire is connected with the effort made to receive it. For example, a woman who marries for money, may be seen to be mercenary. But a woman who says, “I'm marrying this man because I believe with all my heart that he will make me happy as my husband, that he will bring me joy in marital bliss, that's why I'm marrying him, because I think he's gonna make me happy in this marriage,” there's nothing wrong with that.

Conversely, how wrong would it be for a woman or a man to stand before the congregation on the wedding day and say, “I want all of you to know that I actually do not believe that this person will make me happy in the future. I don't think that they're going to bring me any joy at all. I don't think I'm going to enjoy this marriage, but I'm going to do it anyway.” Would you look at that person as a courageous, powerful, loyal person? Not at all, I think of them as a fool. Why are you getting married then? You should desire your own pleasure in the wedding.

And furthermore, the Lord has after all promised us these rewards hasn't He? Is it honorable to take something that the Lord is handing us? Imagine a spouse getting an anniversary gift together and buys the most expensive wrapping paper and makes the whole thing look so beautiful, and hands it over to the spouse. It's heavy and it feels expensive, it looks expensive, and the person receives it and says, “Well, hun, I want you to know, I don't care at all about what's in this box. There's nothing in this box I want, I just want you.” That's not a good moment in the marriage, I think. [laughter]

The spouse will be deeply and bitterly disappointed. And frankly, the gift will be set aside until we get this whole gift thing worked out. I worked on that gift, I labored. I thought what you would like, I thought what you would enjoy and I got it for you. You should want it. And so it is with our rewards. Friends, you should want what Jesus wants to give you. You should labor for them. You should yearn for them. And so Jesus gives us unblushing promises of reward.

If you're persecuted for the faith, he says, “Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in Heaven.” He said don't let anyone see you're giving, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so you lose your reward, you'll have it here on earth no, no, no. When you give do not announce it with trumpets, give it in secret, so that your Heavenly Father may see what is done in secret, and he will reward you.

And when you pray, don't be like the hypocrites who are standing out on the street corners. No, no, go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen and your Father who sees what is done in secret, He will reward you. I have come to understand that our rewards for our lifetime of faithful service to God, they're not idolatrous at all. See idolatry is worshipping something God created apart from love for God, focusing on that thing and not God, you can't do that with the rewards he intends to give you. You know why? 'Cause those rewards are relationship with Him over the thing that was done.

“Well done, good and faithful servant. I am pleased with what you did, I saw the money you gave to the poor. No one else knows what you gave. I saw it. Well done, enter now into the joy of your master. I saw that you went into your room and closed the door and prayed to your Father who's unseen for missionaries or for some brother or sisters going through some physical trial or some disease. I saw what you did, no one else knows what you did. Well done. I'm pleased with that.” That's the reward. How could that be idolatrous? And for myself, I'd like as much of it as I can. I wanna live for that.

Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, no, no, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal, for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” So how can you store up treasure? You do it by good deeds, done, and in the humility that comes from righteousness, knowing they do not pay for your sins, your sins are paid for, by simple faith in Jesus.

But having had that matter settled, now you live in obedience to God, sacrificially willing to suffer for Him, and then you start storing up treasure in Heaven. I think you should be ambitious about that. I think you should want as much of it as you can get. And so the young man Jonathan Edwards put it this way, in one of his resolutions, “Resolved to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, and vehemence, yea even violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert in any way that can be thought of.” You know what he's saying there? “I wanna store up as much treasure in heaven as I possibly can, even if it means violence, with myself, and with my idols, and my comforts, and pleasures in this life.”

So what application can we take from this text? Well, delight, set your heart fully on this, that God would be pleased with every action of your life, that you would live for rewards every moment, live by faith, every moment, use your time wisely, every moment, set your desire on heavenly pleasure, not earthly comforts. Don't be a half-hearted creature, fooling around with sex and ambition and power and money when infinite joy is offered to you.

Let's rise up, oh church of God, and have done with lesser things, and give heart, and soul, and mind, and strength to serve the king of kings. And embrace sacrifice, assess your life. Peter said, “Lord, we have left everything to follow you, what then will there be for us?” Friends, have you left anything to follow Jesus? Has there been a principle of sacrifice? Does it cost you anything to be a Christian? Be willing to sacrifice your time, and serve the Lord.

When there's an outreach, Saturday or Sunday, or Wednesday, be there, make a sacrifice. When there's an opportunity to witness at work, then seize it. If you have a spiritual gift, then use it. If you have money, then use it. I've given you a sample of Randy Alcorn's 40 questions to ask about how you spend your money. I could just read through them now, please take this, on a yellow sheet. We don't have time to read through them now.

But I'd urge that you take these questions, and pray them back to the Lord and say, “Lord, could it be that you've given me this money for this brief time, and if I don't give it away now by faith, I'll lose it. I'll have to repair my car or some thief will steal it, or I might even die before I have a chance to give it. I have a narrow window of opportunity. Lord, help me to be generous while there's time.”

And then finally I just wanna urge, probably the most natural application from this is be willing to leave everything to follow Jesus. There's certain kind of people that literally do this. Not everyone has to do this, because there has to be some people to receive them, right, and receive the rewards that Jesus promised. But some are called to leave everything. Could it be I'm speaking to some young college student, a youth, maybe even somebody in the career stage, or even beyond. And the Lord is speaking to you today about missionary service. Many have gone from this church, this church has become a launching pad of missionaries, and I'm glad for that. May it happen a hundred times more.

But it could be that God is calling on you to lay down your life for the Muslims, or for some Indians or for people in China. It could be that the Lord is calling on you to think again about how you're spending your life.

Well, he was, it seems the perfect seeker, he was rich. Verse 22 said he had great wealth, think of all the ways he could use that money for the kingdom, all those poor people that he could help, all the missionaries he could support, all the church plants that he could sponsor.

He was young. Verse 22 again, says the young man, so there he was, he was young. He had all of his years ahead of him, so it seemed, all his time to spend on the kingdom, all that youthful zeal and energy and enthusiasm and idealism, vision for the kingdom. Just think of all that he could do in the years to come, for Christ.

He was a ruler. Luke 18:18 says, a certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” So he had a position of influence the Greek implies, he was a government official of some sort. Just think of how he could use that influence to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to shape and mold the future direction of the country.

He was pious, he was deeply concerned about his soul, he said he had kept all the commandments of God from his childhood. Clearly, someone for whom religion and religious issues were paramount, he was in some sense humble, he recognized that there was something missing in his life, he wasn't satisfied with his life or his piety. Verse 16, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” Verse 20, “All these I have kept,” the young man said, “What do I still lack?” So there was a certain measure of humility in recognizing that he lacked something, he was on the outside looking in.

Usually a rich, young powerful man, like this feels he has the world by the tail. Whole life ahead of him, just like that, Rich Fool in Jesus' parable, who said to himself, “Self, you have plenty of good things laid up for many years, take life easy, eat, drink, and be merry.” That wasn't this man's attitude. This man knew himself enough to know better. And he was highly interested in Jesus, he sought him out, he was looking for Jesus. It's not easy to get to Christ back in those days, constantly surrounded by a huge multitude of people. Rich, young ruler tracked him down, presented himself to him. He was seeking Jesus, Jesus didn't need to seek him out.

He was respectful, even somewhat worshipful towards Jesus. In Mark 10:17, it says, “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. Good Teacher,” he said, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” So he's falling on his knees before Jesus respectful, very respectful for Jesus. And he was eager it seemed for eternal life. “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” Eternal life is not usually a thought in a young man's heart, but his future condition was of great importance to him.

So in all of these ways, and perhaps some others, he seemed to have been the perfect seeker, what happened? He walked away sad. Did Jesus, the great physician of the soul, botch the case? If Jesus were a trainee in some of the evangelism seminars, I've been to, they would have come to that conclusion. You don't do this to this kind of a seeker, especially a rich one. You don't want them walking away sad, you do everything you can to draw them in. One might say, “Look at this prime candidate, for the Kingdom of God and look how you blew it. He came to you eager for the Kingdom of God and you sent him away miserable. What were you thinking?”

Randy Alcorn put it this way: “We would certainly handle the situation differently than Jesus did. First, we would probably commend the rich young ruler for his interest in spiritual things. Then we might tell him ‘Just believe, that's all. Just ask God into your heart. You don't really have to do anything.’ When he said, ‘Okay, I believe,’ which no doubt he would since it cost him nothing. We would have considered him from that moment forward a follower of Jesus Christ. Think how blessed we would feel knowing that God's Kingdom was greatly enhanced by the conversion of this well-known and wealthy man. Soon there would be articles and books about him. He'd be on TV and radio talk shows, he'd be put on mission and church boards, speak at rallies, he'd receive invitations to share his testimony at churches and conferences across the country likely making him a richer young ruler. … Notice that Jesus didn't tell the young man to give 10% to the poor. (If he was a law-abiding Jew, he already did that.) Neither did Jesus say ‘Set up a trust fund, keep the principal intact, and give the interest to the poor.’ The young man would gladly have done that. Instead, Jesus stopped him dead in his tracks by telling him to give up everything and follow him.”

Well, the end results of this encounter was that this prime candidate, so to speak, walked away from Jesus sad, he came to Jesus all filled with enthusiasm and Jesus squashed him with a request that very few people in history could have measured up to. But let's remember something about Jesus Christ, shall we? He is God in the flesh, therefore he is omniscient, he doesn't look at the outward appearance of things, he looks at a man's heart, he is unerring in his ways, everything he does is right, and he is able to peer into the heart of a man and understand what that man needs.

Says in John 2, when Jesus was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, “many people saw the miraculous signs he did and believed in his name, but Jesus would not entrust himself to them for He knew all men. He did not need anyone to tell him about a man because He knew what was in a man.” And so Jesus supernaturally read this rich young rulers heart, and diagnosed his spiritual condition and his spiritual need. He needed an idolectomy, he needed a deadly idol cut out and removed from his heart. For those of you that are not medically trained like me. He needed the idol cut out and removed. And what was that idol? That idol was materialism, the idol was money.

And Jesus knew it, and so, He probed this young man's heart. The rich young ruler’s question was this in verse 16: “Now, a man came up to Jesus and asked ‘Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?’” Putting together the full account from Mark and Luke, this question is full of the word good actually. Mark 10:17, “As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him, fell on His knees before him. ‘Good teacher, what must I do to get eternal life?’” So the man says both “good teacher” and what “good work” must I do to get eternal life.

So the question is filled with the idea of goodness. But the question shows a fundamental flaw in this man's thinking. He clearly believes as we shall see, that he is not far from the Kingdom of Heaven and just needs one good work to put him over the top. He thinks all it's gonna take is some significant deed, some act of love or something like that, some heroic act of obedience, and he will be good for the kingdom of heaven. Check that box and we'll be fine.

Now, the fullness of Scripture teaches that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. “There is no one righteous, not even one, no one who understands, no one who seeks God, all have turned away.” And the Bible tells us that our sins cannot be atoned for apart from the shedding of blood, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. We cannot use our good deeds to pay for our sins for two reasons. First, we don't have any, we'll get to that in a moment. And second of all, we can't do it any more than a murderer on trial for his life for a crime he admits to committing can exchange a promise or pledge of future good deeds or even evidence of past good deeds to pay for that crime. They are irrelevant. And this rich, young ruler as I just said a moment ago, doesn't seem to understand how sinful he is.

For it says in Isaiah 64:6, “All of us have become like one who is unclean and all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” So this man's understanding of eternal life and of salvation is seriously fundamentally flawed. It's also very popular to what many of us think. What good thing must I do to get eternal life? He didn't think he was sinful, he thought obtaining eternal life was simple. Just add some good work, and there it is. 

So Jesus asks him a significant question. “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only One who is good.” We who dwell here on earth cannot begin to fathom the depth of this answer. We have a hard time believing what Jesus is really saying here. We creatures are good only by having something added to our nature. God alone is goodness itself. Our goodness is like a drop. His goodness a vast and, I say, infinite ocean of goodness. He is good in his essence, he is eternally and immutably good, he is infinitely good without a shadow of evil in his character whatsoever. Closely related to the idea of His goodness is His holiness.

Only the Scriptures can give us a sense of the perfect holiness of God. Revelation 15:4, up there in heaven this is what they say, “Who will not fear you, O Lord, and who will not bring glory to your name for you alone are holy.” Scripture presents the infinite, the perfect holiness of God, with generally two metaphors: that of elevation or height and that of fire or brightness. God is elevated high and lofty, exalted separated from all creation. Isaiah 57:15 says, “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place.’” Isaiah 6:1, “I saw the Lord on a throne, high and exalted.” Isaiah 40:22 says, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the Earth, and all its people are before him like grasshoppers.” Psalm 97:9 says, “For you, O Lord, are the Most High over all the earth, you're exalted far above all gods.”

And so we see elevation, infinite separation between God and His physical creation. God also is portrayed as bright, burning light. Exodus 24:17, “Now, the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.” Deuteronomy 4:24 says, “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”

Now, this brightness of God's glorious holiness is augmented by the fact that no one can look at it and survive, even the seraphim of Isaiah 6, say they cover their faces. God told Moses “No one can see me and live.” Paul said that God “dwells in unapproachable light,” and because we don't have a right sense of this great holiness and loftiness and exaltation and light of God, we don't have a right sense of the perfection it takes to be in His presence, and how completely defiled we are in sin. And so Jesus starts right there. Why do you ask me about what is good? In effect you're throwing the word "good" around and you don't know what you're talking about. “There is only one who is good.”

Mark 10:18, “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus says. ‘No one is good -- except God alone.’” Do you know what goodness is? Do you know who God is? Do you know who I am? Do you know who you are? That's what he's getting at right at the beginning. The core problem this man has is he's deeply sinful and has greatly, greatly underestimated the holiness of God. We'll all find out on Judgment Day. We'll all find out how exalted and holy and pure he is, but it'll be too late then, for salvation. We need to know now by faith, how exalted and holy he is. Oh, that my words might give you a vision of that if you've never trusted Christ. That you might have a vision of just how high and lofty and holy he is and how you are completely unfit to stand before him without Jesus's help, without his righteousness imputed to you you will not survive the encounter.

And even deeper this man didn't know who Jesus was. Why do you call me good? Don't you know that no one is good but God alone, do you understand who I am? Don't just come and call me good teacher. Jesus was ironically the only good man that ever lived, in this sense, the only perfectly good man that ever lived.

And this rich, young ruler was standing in the presence of perfect goodness, and so Jesus, in a perfectly good way deals with this man's problem, and he does it by handing him the law of all things. What a strange moment in evangelistic history. If you want to enter life obey the commandments. Wait a minute, I know what you'll say. Romans hadn't been written yet, he didn't know that there's no one justified by works.

Oh, he knew. Well, what is he doing? This is standard Judaism, it's all it is. Leviticus 18:5, “Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them, I am the Lord.” However truly broken-hearted Jews like David, for example, in Psalm 51, knew that the obedience of the law was impossible for him. And he needed forgiveness from God. Paul knew this righteousness by the law well, he'd spent his whole life trying to attain it and never could, he found it impossible. And so he wrote in Romans 3:24, “By the works of the law, no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” Peter was the same, he called the law, in Acts 15:10, “a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear.”

Simple reason, let's put it this way, present and future obedience cannot pay for past disobedience. You can't exchange the two. And we have all disobeyed. Christ knew better than any human being alive that no righteousness by the law could save our souls, that's why he entered the world, that's why he would go to the cross, he knew better than anyone that the law cannot save that's why he was there, for it says in Galatians 2:21, “If righteousness could be gained by the law, Christ died for nothing.”

Oh he knew. So why did he say it, if you want to enter life obey the commandments. Well, he's exposing the man's self-righteousness, he's exposing the man's independence, he's exposing the man's sin.

And so look what the rich young man says, “If you want to enter life obey the commandments,” verse 18, “‘Which ones?’ the man inquired, and Jesus replied, ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Alright, so the man begins by seeking to justify himself by asking which of the commands did God have in mind? Well, obviously this is off base since the same God has given all the commandments, the same God has said, “You shall not murder,” also said, “You shall not commit adultery.” If you do not commit murder, but you do commit adultery, you've broken the law. James tells us that. And yet, for all of that, Jesus just goes right along in the conversation and complies by giving him a truncated list of God's commands. Five of the 10 Commandments, all of them horizontal dealing with human beings, other human beings. And then the summation of all that, the second great commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Amazingly, this rich, young ruler felt no twinge of conscience whatsoever when he heard these laws. None. “‘All these I have kept,’ the young man said, ‘from my youth,’” Mark 10:20.

Oh, the blindness of sin. It's what causes me to tremble as I preach today. Let me cut to the point. I think all of a struggle with idolatry, every one of us here, perhaps even with materialism, just like this man, and we are blind to it, we don't see our own sin in the matter, we think it's the other guy, it's the rich young ruler, it's not me. Can you really say you don't struggle with idolatry, you have no idols in your heart, you don't struggle with money, material possessions? The blindness of sin. Did this man perfectly obey all of these laws, all of them from his youth, every one of them? He loved his neighbor as himself every moment of his life, he honored his father and mother?

Let's bring mom and dad in and ask, how has it gone with rich young ruler? Has he perfectly obeyed this commandment? Well, there were some moments that it wasn't the best, but he's a good boy. Alright, we'll get to good later with mom and dad. That's a whole other discussion.

Had this man's heart really been so pure, so free from sin, so perfect. Oh, what a shock will Judgment Day be for multitudes upon multitudes gathered in the valley for judgment. Oh, how shocking it will be to find out what the standard really was. When I evangelize and I tell them... Jesus commentary on the law. “You've heard that it was said ‘You shall not murder,’ but I tell you, if you were even angry at your brother, you're in danger of the fire of hell. And you've heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ but if I tell... I tell you, that if you even look at a woman lustfully, you've committed adultery in your heart.” People will think that wasn't on the test. It's an unfair question, but this is the standard of perfection, and holiness. And yet, the man says “All these I have kept. what do I still lack?” 

And so Jesus goes now to the heart of the matter. Look at verse 21, “Jesus answered, ‘If you want to be perfect, Go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.’” 

Jesus drives a stake right through the man's pride. The goal is perfection. Do you wish to be perfect? Do you want to be perfect? We learn in the Sermon on the Mount that you must be perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect. If you're not perfect, you will not go to Heaven. You can't spend eternity in the presence of such a Holy God, and not be perfect. Do you want to be perfect? Well then, this is the path for perfection for you. Even if he had kept all the horizontal laws dealing with other human beings, there was still the vertical component of his relationship with God, and now, Jesus goes to that issue right away. 

The root issue here is idolatry, in Exodus 20:2-5, “I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, You shall have no other gods before Me, you shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the waters below you shall not bow down to them or worship them for I the Lord, your God, am a jealous God.” And Colossians 3 in verse 5 identifies greed as idolatry.

So the basic issue of life for every one of us as created beings, as human beings is to whom will we give our highest affection our highest allegiance, to whom will we bow down, who will we serve? Romans 1 uncovers the central matter of sin and calls it idolatry. Idolatry is worshipping and serving any created thing, more than the creator. Romans 1:25, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things more than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen.” That's the great exchange of idolatry, you exchange the truth of God for a lie.

Recently at the 2020 conference at Southeastern Mark Driscoll was talking about this, and he shared an insight that he believed, at least he understands it to be this way, “They exchanged the truth of God for the lie.” It's not just any lie, it’s not just one of many lies. It is the lie and that is that a created thing can take the place of God in your heart and satisfy you, it can be the center of your life.

Mark Driscoll went on to tell a story about a mission trip he made to a remote village in India and as he was there in this remote village, he was becoming increasingly disgusted with the idolatry he saw, in fact, he saw them sacrifice a chicken to some kind of a chicken idol, and there were feathers everywhere, and all that, and he was talking to the wife of one of the pastors there, about his time in India and about different things, and he had already resolved in mind, he'd never go back to India, he was just so turned off by what he saw. This pastor's wife and he were talking and he said, “Have you ever been to America?” She said “Just once, but I'll never go back.” “Well, why not?” “Because of all the idolatry in your country.” He said, “What idolatry? I just got done looking at a chicken god, okay, with feathers everywhere. What idolatry are you talking about?” She said “You Americans worship your stomachs, there are restaurants everywhere. You worship sports, there are huge stadiums filled with thousands of sports fans who are worshipping. You worship entertainment. So all the family rooms have at the center, the most expensive television that you can buy. You worship sex, so the culture is saturated with it. There are actually idols everywhere.”

Wow, what a moment [chuckle], what a moment. Could it be we have a hard time seeing our own idols when we can see other people so clearly we're often blind to it. When a Christian young woman pursues a relationship with a non-Christian guy she's committing idolatry. She's worshipping at the altar of the good feelings that guy can give her. When people commit sexual immorality they're worshipping at the altar of central pleasure; when a man downloads internet pornography he is doing the same. It's idolatry.

When an ambitious professional sacrifices his family so he can become a partner in a law firm or a CEO of Fortune 500 company, or just succeed in some ways, worshipping at the altar of power and worldly success. It's idolatry. When a young mother wraps her whole existence around her children, so that her walk with Christ is neglected, her marriage is neglected, and if one of her children should die, and she's angry at God and comes to doubt him, then her idolatry, has been exposed, she's idolized her children. They're everywhere, these idols are everywhere. It is the great danger of our time here, in the world. Thousands and thousands of other examples of idolatry, where people exchange the truth of God for the lie and worship and serve created things more than the Creator, who's forever praised. We're blind to our own idolatry and so is the rich young ruler. His idol was money and he was unwilling to give it up. And unless he gave it up, he could not be Christ's disciple, and so Christ as a skillful heart surgeon exposes the blockage in his heart.

The gospel of Mark reveals that Christ for all of his toughness, here actually loved this young man. It says in Mark 10:21, “Jesus looked at him and loved him,” incredible verse. He's moved with compassion for him. I think it's similar to the feelings he had of compassion for the leper who's covered with disgusting effects of his disease and sores and wounds everywhere and Jesus is moved with compassion And touches him. I am willing to heal, this man is just as filthy inside spiritually and yet Jesus is moved with compassion, wants to reach out and touch his heart. And so that's why he gives these striking commands for all of His promises as a seeking future disciple, he cannot follow Jesus with this idol in the center of his heart. It's impossible. He cannot serve both God and money, as he says in Matthew 6. 

He could not accept a so-called convert a man whose heart is still en-wrapped with an idol and so he gives some overwhelming commands and an eternal promise. Look at verse 21, “If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 

Sell everything, give to the poor, follow me. These must have been like hammer blows to his heart. The encounter is not exactly like any other that Jesus has in the gospels, but it's similar to others. For example, as He walked by Peter, John, James, and Andrew by the sea of Galilee, he says, “Come follow me, and I'll make you fishers of men,” and they left at once their boat and their nets and followed him. He walks by Matthew's tax collector booth and he says “Come follow me.” And at once, Matthew gets up from his life as a tax collector and walks away and follows Jesus. He says, actually, to anyone who would follow him, “If anyone who would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” It's the same command, it's just a version of it for this particular rich young ruler.

The command to sell everything as much like Christ's marvelous parable, the treasure in the field. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field when a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy, went off and sold everything he had and bought that field.” In his joy, he did that, Sold everything. So he could have the field. The idea is that entering eternal life, entering to heaven of a right relationship with Almighty God through Jesus Christ is worth anything. Anything at all that you need to give up to get it. “Follow me” means to do what I was willing to do. Do what I was willing to do. “For you know the grace of our lord Jesus that though he was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich,” 2 Corinthians 8. “Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death -- even death on a cross.” Jesus, then is the ultimate rich, young ruler, who is willing to give it all up, that he might gain us.

That he might gain a multitude from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, who will worship around the throne And so he gives this man, these amazing commands. Follow me, do what I was willing to do Live the life of self-sacrifice and then he gives them an amazing promise. Sell all your possessions give to the poor. And you will have treasure in heaven, treasure in heaven, The desire for treasure is not evil frankly, actually, the desire, if the treasure is the right one, the desire is absolutely required, it is of the essence of sin that we don't desire the treasure that Jesus has in mind here. Treasure is something of great worth something that attracts the eye that draws in the heart where your treasure is, there your heart will be, that's the treasure. And the treasure, my friends, is God himself.

Genesis 15:1, “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Fear not, Abram. I am your shield, I am your very great reward.’” I'm your treasure, I'm what you get. You get me for all eternity, you get me in face-to-face fellowship you get me and perfection, you get me forever. But it goes beyond that. You also get me in some specific ways, in that I'm not unjust and I will not forget anything you've done. And if this man had by faith sold all of his possessions, and they were many, and gave them to the poor to alleviate in some small measure, the suffering of the poor in this life, the Lord would never have forgotten it and he would never let the rich young ruler forget it, to all eternity. I remember what you did well done, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” enter into the joy of your Master. Let's celebrate that one forever. 

You'll have treasure in Heaven if you do it, so the treasure in heaven is God's pleasure in our righteous acts done by faith here, not to forgive for the forgiveness of sins, that's impossible, but by faith to the service of God, he'll never forget it. Here in this place, then, we see the opportunity of wealth. Do you see it? You have money, You have it for a little while, use it wisely. Store up treasure in heaven with it, give it away. For the sake of the kingdom, give it away. In difficult economic times, give it away. In abundant economic times, give it away. That's the opportunity of wealth. 

But in the rich young ruler’s response, we see also the peril of wealth. Verse 22, “When the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth.” He goes away, he walked away. If this young man is languishing in hell now, oh, what he would give to have this moment back, to do it all over again. He made his choice between two jealous masters, Christ and money, and money won. And what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? And what would a man give in exchange for his soul? The rich young ruler chose poorly and notice that now he has none of those things. I don't know where he is, but if he's in hell, he's not rich anymore, and he's not young anymore, and he's not a ruler anymore. That was just temporary. And it's interesting, as he walks away, he's sad. Don't you find that amazing? He's getting what he wants, he's making the decision the way he wants, but he's not happy with it. You know why because it's an idol and doesn't satisfy, and he knows it.

But he just can't seem to bring himself to give it up. It doesn't make you happy, you know what makes you happy? God, and God alone, You have created us for yourself, O Lord, and the heart of man is restless until he finds his rest, its peace, its joy, its meaning, in God, in God alone. How unlike the man, and the treasure hidden in the field parable who, for joy, sells everything, How unlike Zacchaeus who gladly stands up at that lunch with Jesus, and says “Look Lord! Here and now, I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” He is so happy salvation's come to his house. So why is the rich, young ruler sad? Because he knows that he's made a bad choice he just can't seem to stop it.

And so then Jesus turns and gives His disciples a stunning lesson, that is only God can save a rich man. Jesus declares the danger of wealth. The general assumption of Jesus's Day, is that wealth is a sign of great blessing by God, God has blessed you with this wealth. So also today the health and wealth gospel teaches the same lie. Jesus actually identifies it as a great danger to the soul. Look at verses 23 and 24: “Jesus said, then to His disciples, ‘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.’”

Let me just cut to the chase, about the camel in the eye of the needle. It's impossible. I know there are other stories out there, I just wanna say Jesus is citing an example of something that is impossible. It cannot be done. You can spend a long time trying to get that camel through the eye of the needle, but it isn't gonna go and everybody knows it, it's an impossible thing, that's what Jesus is highlighting here, it is actually impossible for a rich man to be saved apart from the work of God.

And the disciples are stunned by it. Look at verse 25: “When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked ‘Who then can be saved?’ And Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’” Every true conversion is a miracle of God's grace. But rich people face special obstacles to entering the Kingdom of Heaven, that's what Jesus is saying here.

More on that in a moment. Let's look at some applications, and all I wanna do is just take a few of the phrases from this text and apply them. 

First, the phrase “No one is good but God alone.” Meditate much both on the goodness of God and the wickedness and the evil of man. Understand what Jesus is saying here. Do not make much of your own righteousness, meditate rather on the perverseness of sin and the pervasiveness of sin in your life. Understand that the doctrine of the total depravity of man, is foundational to the need that people have for Christ. People are not essentially basically good and they just need a little help, no they need Christ And worship the God who is good; swim in the ocean of His goodness. I often think of God as somebody who's ready to whack me every time I do something, Have you ever thought that way? That God's up there and he's just trying to get us. I always wait for the other shoe to drop. I've had a blessed life. I keep waiting for the curse to come, alright.

God is good. If there is any whack coming in my life, it's because I need it and there's some sin in my life and he needs to deal with me but he's immensely loving. We should meditate on how wide, and long, and high, and deep is the love and the goodness of God and swim in that ocean and forget your own goodness. Jesus has already commented on that. 

Secondly, “If you wish to enter life,” Jesus said. Do you want to enter life? Are you lost? Do you have idols in your heart and you know you have never come to Christ? Trust in him, flee to Christ. Leave your idols behind, and if he tells you to do something hard, then do it. Trust in him and His righteousness and His death on the cross for your salvation. I worry about idolatry, I worry about idolatry in the church, I worry about it in this church, I worry about it in my own heart. Is it possible that many rich, young rulers, have entered American evangelical churches never having been stripped of their idols? And they were assured by people who graduated from those evangelism schools that they have been saved and that they're fine now, and they're going through life never having come face-to-face with the covetousness and greed in their own hearts? Examine yourselves to see if you're in the faith. Test yourselves, see if there are any idols in your heart, and ask God to free you from them. 

Thirdly, Jesus said, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven.” We all know that this is not a universal commandment. He said to Zacchaeus, who offered only to sell half his possessions, “Salvation's come to this house.” It's not the same for everyone, but this much is the case: Jesus will have no rivals, and if he's going to be your Lord, He must be Lord of all. And we must understand that there are poor people out there that are suffering, there are poor Christians that are going through persecution and hunger and suffering. And the Lord has, in some way, blessed the American evangelical church, with an abundance of wealth that we might be generous to others, even in times of economic stricture. And if we are, we will never lose our treasure in heaven. 

Fourthly, “it is hard for a rich man to be saved.” Paul said, “Command those who are rich to be generous and not put their trust in wealth which is so fleeting. People who want to get rich fall into temptation, in a trap and many foolish and harmful desires, that plunge men into all kinds of ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” So Jesus said, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” It's hard for a rich man to be saved and we are rich men. So it's hard for us to be saved.

But finally “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Focus then, on the sovereign power of God to save a sinner like you and me focus on that. When you go out to evangelize, can I urge you, please, to consider carefully, your involvement in the health fair outreach next Saturday? The health fair isn't next Saturday, the outreach, we're going out to invite people to come to the health fair. It's a ministry in and of itself.

If the people never come to the health fair, it's okay as long as they come to Jesus, that's not a bad thing, you know that don't you? If they come to Jesus and come to faith in Christ and never come to the health fair, I'm sure the doctors in our church will be totally okay with that and the dentists too. But we have an opportunity to go out in a good cause, in a way that gets us easily into conversations with people right around this church and talk to them about Christ. Won't you come? That's next Saturday afternoon and Sunday after church, either one of those days. But as you go out, keep this in mind, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” God has His people in this community. We can go out and find them. 

But as we do, let's leave the results to God, and when you pray, keep this in mind, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Don't trust in yourself, your prayers, your own righteousness or any human thing, but trust in God, who can do incredible things. 

Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time we've had to study the case of this rich, young ruler and all that he means to us. Lord, he is a warning to us. Father, I ask that you would please give us repentance, help us to see the idols in our hearts, help us to know when some created thing has shouldered you out of the center of our lives and has edged you out of the uppermost place of affection in our hearts. Help us to love you above all things, help us to be open-handed and generous to the poor and needy. I pray that there'd be a river of generosity and benevolence flowing from this church to this community and to the ends of the earth. Through mission, support of missions, through benevolent works done here to the poor and needy, even in this, in our own congregation. Please do it, we pray for your sake, in your glory. Amen.

So I consider myself a very blessed man. I have five children, and every week as I've mentioned before, I have the privilege of getting Daphne dressed for church. She's three years old and with us today. This morning, knowing I was gonna preach on this text I said to her, “Do you know that Jesus loves you?” She said, “Yes, Jesus loves me. He died on the cross with blood on his face.” And I said, “Yes, and he was raised from the dead on the third day.” And she said, “Raised from the dead on the third day?” I could tell the phrase was new to her and hasn't really thought it through. And so it's a joy and a privilege to watch the words of the gospel rise up in her little heart over the years. I've seen it happen with our four older children. So they learned the language of salvation. And more than that, they learn a living Savior behind each of those words. Amen. What a great privilege.

But it's also struck me recently, what a sobering thing it is as well, because these little ones that are entrusted to us are eternal beings. And they are infinitely more God's than they'll ever be ours. It was he that crafted them together in their mother's wombs; it was he that holds them together every moment of their lives, and they will stand before God on Judgment Day alone in that sense, to give an account. And they will spend eternity in Heaven, or Hell. They are eternal beings. And what an incredible privilege it is for us to encounter them at that early age to begin sharing with them the good news of faith in Jesus Christ. John McArthur tells a tragic but powerful story of a family in his church, Grace Community Church there in California.

He said, some years ago, a family in our church experienced a great tragedy, the mother and two daughters were planning to fly the next day to New Zealand to join the husband and father who was on a preaching mission there and as the wife was learning some new crochet stitches to use on the long flight, the girls went outside to play. A few moments later, the mother heard the screeching of automobile tires, but since there was no crash, she thought little of it, that is until the older daughter came running into the house screaming and crying that the little sister Tanya had been hit by a car. The girl was unconscious but showed no signs of serious injury. Well, the mother bent over her, Tanya breathed a heavy sigh and turned her head to the side. At the hospital, the neurosurgeon told the mother that the girl had suffered massive brain damage and had little chance of surviving. Relatives and friends prayed fervently and the mother kept a vigil with her precious little daughter throughout the night, praying with great intensity that God would spare and restore her daughter. But she also prayed that above all God's will be done, even if it meant taking Tanya to be with himself. A relative who was a doctor, explained that Tanya’s breathing and heartbeat were functioning at the hospital solely by artificial means. He said her body is being kept working but Tanya isn't there anymore. She is with the Lord.

With a radiant face, her mother said to the Lord, "Have Thy will, not mine." To her friends and loved ones she explained, "I shall not forsake my Lord. Because if I did, I would be saying Tanya is gone, forever. I will do as David did in the Old Testament, when his child was taken, he washed his face, changed his clothes and went about his business satisfied that God knew best." At that moment, she was determined there would be no more begging God to bring her little girl back. Tanya was in the Lord's care and her mother believed she had entered into his presence, when lying unconscious on the street, she sighed and turned her head. The mother testifies that she was filled with an inner strength that was foreign to her, supernatural in origin. She recalled that for several months previously, Tanya had prayed, "Lord, I want to go and be with you while I'm young." When her mother asked why she made that request, Tanya smiled and replied, "Because I want to sit on Jesus' lap when I get there and I don't wanna be too big." On remembering those words, the mother said, "New assurance and peace surged through my sorrowful soul."

We serve a Lord who's incredibly tender and gentle to the little ones, isn't he? And that's the picture we have in today's text. And it's incredible, an amazingly high percentage of his chosen ones come to a saving knowledge of him early in life and what a great privilege it is for us who interact with those children, parents, brothers and sisters, church workers who interact with those children at an early age.

Now, in today's passage, we're gonna catch a glimpse of Christ's heart for little, little children. We're going to catch some of that heart, I hope, for ourselves. We're going to understand the preciousness of those first few years of a child's life, to learn how significant it is to bring those little ones to Jesus' day after day, for him spiritually to place his hands on them and pray for them and bless them. We're also going to try to understand the powerful attitude that had taken root in the hearts of his disciples that Jesus had to rebuke and correct. The attitude goes as follows, adults do important things, and there's no time for little children and all of that. We need to come to Jesus again and learn the value of little children, and see the preciousness of the brief time we have, with them like that and to make the most of it. And finally, this sermon is to encourage parents of little children in they're awesomely important responsibility to evangelize and disciple their children from the first moment of their relationship with them.

First Baptist Church has been blessed, lavishly by the Lord over the last number of years. Is that an understatement? Lavishly? I was thinking of what would be the best way to say it. Dozens and dozens and dozens of little babies, that's about right. And maybe more than that, we're not up to hundreds and hundreds yet, but the Lord is blessing abundantly... And it is a blessing, isn't it? And so I'm speaking to parents, lots of parents of little children who have the privilege of intersecting with eternal beings, these little children created in the image of God during this key time in their lives.

And I wanna begin just by understanding this encounter from every angle. From the angle of the parents, the angle of the children, of the disciples and of Jesus. Look at Verse 13, "Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them, but the disciples rebuked those who brought them."

So let's try to understand these parents, these were Jewish parents seeking to raise their children in the Laws of Moses. They cherished their babies like any parents do and they desired that their babies be blessed. Now in the Greek, both Mark and Luke give us a strong sense in the imperfect tense, that this was a continual process. Parents kept bringing their children over and over for Jesus to place the hands on them and pray for them. And by this time, I think Jesus' reputation as a teacher who delighted in little children was well-known. These Jewish parents having heard about Christ's ministry, they were still very much short of understanding who he was, I believe.

But according to the Talmud, the Jewish instruction based on the law of Moses, Jewish parents were to bring their children to respected Rabbis for prayer and blessing. Now usually, that would happen in the synagogue, so they'd go to the Rabbi at the synagogue and they would... The Rabbi would pray for their children and bless them. But there was a sense of greater blessing from a more prominent and God-blessed Rabbi and who could be greater than Jesus at that time? Jesus' reputation as a prophet from Nazareth and Galilee had spread far and wide. And Jesus was doing miracles and even more than this somehow had a tender heart for children, all of this well-established. So the parents came from all around, continually bringing their little children for Jesus to place his hands on them and on pray for them.

Now, these little children that are brought, new in life. Parents know that the bitterness of life as they grow older and they know the purity of the hearts of their little children, they know how much God will have to protect them and bless them, for them to be fruitful and prosperous in this sin-cursed world. And they want all the help they can get. Parents, you know what I'm talking about. So they said, "Let's bring them to Jesus, and Jesus can pray and bless them and God will protect them."

So there's so much for the parents. Let's understand the children; who are these children? The Greek word is “paidia” and it is the youngest stage of life. The word is used for newborn infants all the way up to the toddler years. So we're talking about little, little babies now, we're not so much... This sermon isn't so much about parenting all the way through, but it's about these little infants, these little babies and toddlers. Luke goes even further in making this clear in Luke 18:15, and says, “People were also bringing babies to Jesus to have him touch them.” So there are these babies, these infants and toddlers as well.

So even the most tiny human being, maybe just a few days old, barely able to open its eyes and focus, is of infinite worth and value to Jesus. Now, Jesus does not have a sentimental view of children, he knows that they are descended from Adam. He knows it better than anyone that they have a sinful nature; children do not have to be instructed in how to disobey their parents. It's part of the original equipment, I'm finding. No offense intended any attending here. But it just comes. It's natural because of the sin of Adam. They naturally have a tremendous bent towards self-focus, and selfish interests. They have a powerful sin nature and Jesus knew this better than anyone, but he also understands that children have at that early stage, a tremendous drive, it seems a natural bent toward God. Towards spiritual things, towards supernatural things. Toward invisible things. A natural yieldedness to him. A desire to learn about him. Though they cannot see him. Little children then have a deep attraction to the invisible God, so much for the little children.

Let's try to understand the disciples. “Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them, but the disciples rebuked those who brought them.” What were the disciples thinking? In some sense, you kind of feel sorry for them, especially Peter, as their weaknesses, and sins, and mistakes keep getting displayed generation after generation, we get to talk about them. So why were the disciples rebuking the parents? I wonder what words they used to do the rebuking perhaps they were frustrated. Their time alone with Jesus was being spoiled by all these crying infants, one after the other, coming, making noises and doing annoying things. Messing up their schedule and their plans.

In any case, it seems the issue of this: The teacher's time is too important for little babies, was preeminent in their minds. Now, often times you see this kind of thing in the inner circle of some great figure, a political leader, military conqueror, or some great general, an important statesman, a CEO of an important company, a well-known singer or entertainer or famous athlete. There's a coterie of kind of bodyguards and hangers-on around that individual all the time. And you can't get near them. I've often thought, “Oh, I'd love to go back in time and be with Jesus.” You wouldn't get within the same county. Just tons and tons of people around him all the time. And Jesus has his inner circle as well. Now this entourage will put their hands up as you try to get near. Put a stop sign up. Now, especially these important people, these great men have no time for anyone who cannot further their great agenda. They're great men meeting with other great men. Doing great things and have no time for little people and for distractions. And so little children, they think especially are a waste of time.

Sadly, they might not even have time for their own children. Even to have children, or if they have them to spend any time with them at all. I was reading recently about the family lives of royal families in Europe over the last 150 years and it's pretty tragic in this very area. This one area, for example, in the English royal household, a hundred years ago, King George and Queen Mary spent less than 30 minutes a day with their own children. 30 minutes a day. The children were raised entirely by nannies, they would frequently cry or shrink back from their biological parents, they'd barely recognized them. They felt much more comfortable with their nannies.

I read a recent story translated out of a Dutch newspaper telling a similar tale of woe about the royal family of the Netherlands. The central figure of that story was a nanny who cared for the little princess Louisa Marisa, and she said that 10 days after this little baby girl was born, the royal family left her to go on an official trip to the US. And that more or less from that moment on the baby was the nanny's to raise almost entirely. And so, also, for the other children born to the family and these little children would cry when being held by the mother, and reach for the nanny and wanna be taken back by the nanny. Now as they grew, they started to understand who their mother was and she would promise a goodnight kiss but would be distracted by important business, so that it would sometimes take up to an hour for her to go upstairs and kiss them at night. And here are these little children fighting to stay awake so they can have this one little kiss with their mother. The only encounter they'd have with her all day long.

Anyway, so many people look on children as an unwelcome intrusion from the vastly important business of their lives. And perhaps the disciples felt this same way when they rebuked the parents for bringing the little ones. “Our Master is too busy saving the world to hug your children.” And almost certainly, this response flowed from their own pride, in their own importance as well. And therefore, this is a very serious issue that must be rooted out of the hearts of the disciples. It's not a minor thing. If Jesus doesn't check this response in his disciples at this point, they will develop into the kinds of leaders who walk around in the marketplace with flowing robes and long to be greeted by others at the marketplace and to be called Rabbi and don't have any time for little people. It will shape and pollute their entire ministry, if this root of bitterness isn't weeded out. They cannot be bothered, not just by little children but by any small person, any insignificant person. It will shape their entire ministry. And it wasn't what Jesus was about. So much for the disciples.

Let's try to understand Jesus. Jesus' reactions really are quite remarkable. I often think about that, Jesus is probably the most unpredictable person in history. I'm not saying you shouldn't ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” It's an important question, but sometimes I have no idea what Jesus would do. Because he does surprising things. And it says in Mark 10:14, “When he saw this, he became indignant.” He was indignant. The word means to be aroused to a certain level in anger, to be vexed, to be annoyed, to be irritated. That's part of the larger display we have of Jesus' emotional life; our Lord is an emotional being. Perfect emotions, yes. But he had emotions.

B.B. Warfield wrote a great article about the emotional life of our Lord and talking about this encounter, he likened Jesus' response to that of anybody having a physical irritation, like a teething baby or a man walking down the road with a rock in his shoe. Jesus is annoyed with his disciples, he's mildly angry at them and their blatant misunderstanding of his heart and his mission. Now, for me, as a pastor, as a man, one of the most remarkable and amazing things about Jesus is how incredibly interruptible he was. I mean, here he is, he is in fact saving the world, he doesn't have much time to do it. It's only gonna be a short ministry, some calculate it to be as short as three years. And you hardly ever, if ever see an encounter where somebody comes to Jesus, and doesn't get what they came for. Or an encounter with Jesus, it's remarkable, he's incredibly interruptible.

He never rushed. Every encounter was precious, and he made the most of every single one of them. Even with these little babies. So he cherished these little children, he was absolutely not annoyed with the interruption, was delighted with it, I'm sure.

So look what he says in verse 14, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” So let's pick it apart, phrase by phrase. First, “Let the little children come.” Now, this implies that the natural bent of these little children is Godward. That if you'll just let them, they'll come. And I think it's true, more than at any other time in their lives.

One commentator put it with great tenderness in this way, this is what he said, “As the flower in the garden stretches toward the light of the sun. So there is in the child a mysterious inclination toward the eternal light. Have you ever noticed this mysterious thing, that when you tell the smallest child about God, the child never asks with strangeness and wonder, ‘Who is God? I've never seen him.’ But listens with a shining face to the words as though they were soft, loving sounds from the land of home. Or when you teach a child to fold its little hands in prayer, it does this as though it were just a matter of course. As though there were an opening for that child, of that world of which the child has been dreaming and longing with anticipation. Or tell them, these little ones, the stories of the Savior, and show them the pictures with scenes and personages, of the Bible [and] see how their pure eyes shine and how their little hearts beat.”

And there's just this drive, this interest that little children have for spiritual things, and Jesus wants to make the most of that. Let them come. Let them come to me. Again, proximity to Christ is everything. Jesus frequently says, “Come unto me.” “Come to me,” he says. He says it to the fisherman by the Sea of Galilee. “Follow me,” He says, “And I'll make you fishers of men.” In Matthew 11:28 he says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.” Jesus is gonna say in the next passage, we'll look at in Matthew 19, to the rich young ruler, “If you want to be perfect, sell all your possessions, give to the poor. And you'll have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.” In John 6:37 Jesus says, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and those who come to me, I'll never drive away.” To his enemies, He says, “You refuse to come to me that you may have life.” John 7:37, “On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and called out in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.’” And in John 12:32, he says, “But I, when I'm lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”

And so he says “Let these little children come,” encourage their God-given desire to be near me, feed their spiritual appetites, let them do what their heart wants to do before the world, the flesh, and the devil come and harden it, and corrupt it and make it so difficult and put so many obstacles in their ways, and twist their desires. Let them come near to Christ for eternal life, let them come to know Him and cherish Him, and love Him. Feed their spiritual appetites and yours. Isn't that something you can feed on that? They're excited about Jesus. You should be too. They wanna know more about Jesus. You should, too. So you kinda piggyback on your little kids, and they'll rekindle your love for Christ. Feed it, feed that appetite. You can't feed it too much. Parents are always worried about too much with their kids, always too much sleep, worried about that. Too much food, too much crying, too much play, too much fluoride.

Too much salt or sugar in their diets, too much thumb-sucking, too much TV, too much music, too much of anything can be harmful. Let me tell you something, there's no such thing as too much Jesus. Cannot be. Oh, there's definitely too little Jesus. There's no such thing, as too much Jesus. Jonathan Edwards commenting on Song of Songs 5:1 says, Song of Songs says this: “Eat friends, drink, and be drunk with love.” Commenting on that in terms of our relationship with Christ, he said this, “Persons need not and ought not set any boundaries to their spiritual and gracious appetites. Rather they ought to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and obtain more spiritual pleasures. Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can't be too great for the value of these things. Therefore, endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of enticement. There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food.”

So, as parents of little children, we ought to be first of all, ravenously pursuing Christ, ourselves putting our love for Jesus on full display in front of those little children and secondly, we ought to be fanning their own love for Christ into a flame more and more, there is no danger here. Friends, feed their appetites to know Jesus. “Let the little children come.”

Secondly, he says, “Do not forbid them.” Do not forbid them. This is prohibition clearly, in context, Jesus is just telling his misguided disciples to stop doing what they're doing, and allow the parents to bring as many children as God will, but in a deeper sense, he doesn't want his disciples playing the role of the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23, in verse 13, he says, “Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You shut the Kingdom of Heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” Don't play that role with the little children, let them come. Don't hinder them, don't make it hard for them. Now, the word can mean forbid, Don't forbid them, but it could also mean hinder. Don't make it hard for them, don't slow them down.

So how do we hinder children, little children, from coming to Jesus? Well, first and foremost, above all, we hinder little children from coming to Jesus by not telling them about Jesus, we can know nothing about Jesus apart from the written word of God. They don't have Jesus naturally in their hearts, and so in order to let the little children come to Jesus, they need to hear stories about Jesus, they need to be taught who Jesus was. Says in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” And so, from the moment they come home from the hospital, tell them about Jesus, read them Bible stories about Jesus, they must know about Jesus, His miracles, His teachings, all of the stories. Tell them again and again about Jesus, don't hinder them by starving them this Gospel of Jesus. They will sit for hours and hours. I've tested this. You will get tired of it before they do. I have proven that, alright? They will keep asking and keep wanting to hear more and more, so feed them. Feed 'em stories about Jesus.

We hinder them also by stifling their enthusiasm for Christ. If you put their childish excitement down you're hindering them. You should fan those affections into a flame, you should make much of the little pictures they draw and the little things that they do to express their love for Jesus, put them up on the refrigerator, put them on your door, and have them there years later. Like when they get married, you still have them, those little pictures. Now, if you found a picture and didn't know who drew it, was just on the ground, it wouldn't mean anything to you. It's not art of the highest order, but for you it means everything, because they're expressing their heart and their love for God. By the way, that's a picture of our worship for God, too, it's not worship of the highest order that's up in heaven, but he takes it from us 'cause he loves us so. And he welcomes our worship, imperfect as it is. So get those pictures and put them up. We hinder them by quenching the spirit, spirit is fanning their love for Jesus into a flame. We act like a wet blanket slowing it down, by refusing to take their spiritual hunger seriously by blowing off their questions that they may ask. Make the most of that time. We can hinder them by exasperating them with harsh or unjust discipline. I know that the Bible speaks of corporal punishment. It's an important part of training.

The Bible also says in Ephesians 6:4, Fathers do not exasperate your children, instead bring them up in the training and the nurture of the Lord. We can hinder them by curtly cutting off their childish questions, like during family devotion for people to say, “Oh. Just childishness, irrelevant. It doesn't ever seem to connect to what we're saying. Don't let him speak, he's too young, don't let her participate, too little.” Don't do that, let them come, let them express an interest let them participate.

And then finally it says “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Now, the Kingdom of Heaven is the theme of the Gospel of Matthew. It's mentioned throughout the Gospel. 32 times in the Gospel of Matthew, that exact expression, is used, “the Kingdom of Heaven.” Four times we get the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom itself, by itself, as mentioned four more times. Once Jesus mentions Your Kingdom in prayers such as Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He uses expressions like the Kingdom of my Father. He frequently introduces parables with the phrase, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like.” Now, what is this Kingdom of Heaven?

Well, the central concept is, that God the Creator of the ends of the earth rules actively over all that He's created. He is a king, he sits on His throne, He's a good king, a loving King, he gives laws by which we are to be governed, He will hold us accountable to those laws. He is also our Judge, and he is our Savior having sent Jesus into the world, and he is saving us from outside of the Kingdom in, from rebellion against the laws of God, to glad submission to the throne that is at the center of the Kingdom of Heaven. Now people must enter the Kingdom. This is the language used again and again. Matthew 4:17, Jesus began to preach “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near,” so you need repent and come in, enter the Kingdom. Matthew 5:20 says, "I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law you will by no means enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Matthew 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who's in Heaven,” and of the tax collectors and the prostitutes Jesus said to the Scribes and Pharisees “they are entering the Kingdom of God ahead of you.” So we must enter the kingdom of God 

Now, poignantly here, Jesus says “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” That means the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of people like this, of newborn infants, somewhat, as it were. So let's talk about the infants themselves, the actual babies.

John McArthur put it this way, “It's not that small children are regenerate and then lose their salvation later, if they do not receive Christ as Lord and Savior. It's rather that His atoning death is applied on their behalf if they should die before they are able to choose on their own. It may be that infant mortality rate is so high in many countries where the Gospel has not yet penetrated because the Lord is taking those little ones to Himself before they can grow up in a culture where it is so difficult to encounter the gospel and believe.”

And if that's true, and I think it is, isn't it marvelous that there's already people from every tribe and language and people and nation, around the throne? Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying we don't go and preach the Gospel, we must, we're commanded to, but I think many of them are already there and that's a delightful thing. But I don't think, as John McArthur said, that they lose their salvation later, but they have it at the infant stage. 

But secondly, the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of people who are like little infants, themselves John Calvin said, “This passage broadens to give kingdom citizenship to both children and those who are like them,” a child-like faith, a willingness to come and be saved, to act like a lisping infant as though you were born yesterday and know nothing. Because that's kind of the truth isn't it? When compared to the Ancient of Days you just humble yourself like a little child. We already bumped into this concept earlier in Matthew 18:3, he said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven,”

So I want to address any that are here today that have never trusted in Jesus. You've heard the testimony of these three young men, they testified to saving faith in Jesus. What about you? Have you ever changed and become like a little child? And entered the Kingdom of Heaven through simple faith? Have you trusted in the blood shed by Jesus on the cross as a forgiveness for your sins, for your violating of the laws of that king? King of the Kingdom of Heaven? Have you trusted in Him? Are you ready to go and be with Jesus if he should call you today? Like he called that little girl? Suddenly, by a car accident. Are you ready? Have you trusted in Jesus?

Now, the danger for the disciples is that they're gonna be hardened through pride; in hindering the little children is showing they really don't understand the Kingdom of Heaven. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And so he says, “Let the little children come.” Let's evangelize these little children, let's talk to them about the Kingdom, before their hearts get hard. Reese Kaufman, who's the CEO of Child Evangelism Fellowship, he's the President, and he said “We spend so much time in adult evangelism trying to get them to be in that little childlike state. Little children are already there.” Let's take advantage of it and speak sweetly to them of the Gospel.

And so in verse 15, Jesus finishes by placing his hands on them and he goes on for this, the power of the incarnation. Jesus frequently touched people, sick people, lepers, a mother-in-law who had fever, he touches her. And here he touches these little children and he blesses them. In Mark 10:16, he takes the children in his arms, and he puts his hands on them and blesses them. In the Jewish culture patriarchal blessings meant so much. Remember how Jacob swindled Esau out of Isaac's blessing, the placing of the hands and the speaking of words of blessing became almost prophetic at that stage of what was gonna happen with Jacob in the future. So also, Jacob on his deathbed, he rouses himself up out of his deathbed, to place his hands on Manasseh and Ephraim who are Joseph's sons, his grandsons, and speaks a patriarchal blessing on them. Jesus does the same thing and he touches them. Little children need touch. I really do, I think we all do. Isn't it a delight to pick up a little child and hold him or her in your arms? You hear these tragic stories of these orphanages in third world countries and other nations where, totally neglected, they're being biologically fed, but nobody's holding them, nobody picks them up, and cares for them and they have lasting problems as a result.

Jesus holds them and touches them. These little children. He yearned to touch them and minister to them. Now, these little infants, were pre-lingual, you can't speak to them, But it says in Psalm 22:9, David speaking he said “Yet you brought me out of the womb, you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast.” So, at a very early stage, they're learning how to trust. At that point they're learning how to trust mommy, though they don't know the words of trust or mommy or any of those things, they're learning how to trust. Later on that trust will be transferred through the words of the Gospel to Jesus Christ. But even in an early stage a nursing mother is doing pre-evangelism, for that growing baby, and so Jesus touches them.

So what applications can we take from this? Well, first and foremost, just from that tragic story as we began, I want to urge you to consider your little children as the eternal beings they really are. They're going to spend eternity in Heaven or hell, they have been given to you for a short time, If the Lord should take one of them in infancy, or in childhood, don't murmur against God. Remember what I said at the beginning of my sermon? They're infinitely more his than they are yours, they are. We don't have a claim against God, in reference to any child; they're His.

Now, he gives them to us for a period of time, and we can love them and nurture them. Let's be focused, intensely focused from an early age on their salvation. Now you could say “They don't even understand. I'm gonna wait until they're…” Well, until they're what? Two? Three? At what point will you start telling them about Jesus? I would urge that you do it while they're still in the womb. Train yourself. Get yourself ready to be an evangelist and then as soon as they come out, you start telling them about Jesus, read them stories and people will think You foolish. A seven-week-old and you're reading them the Bible. But at some point they’re suddenly gonna be three and all of a sudden they can start saying about Jesus with blood on his face, and soon they're seven and they're speaking a little bit more maturely about the gospel and pretty soon they're like, these young men that were baptized, earlier here today. Start early.

What responsibilities do you have? Let me just give you these 10 briefly. First of all, receive your children thankfully. They are a gift of God, from him. Receive them thankfully. Thank God for them and don't be arrogant over them. Don't act like a king or queen or emperor or empress with them.

Secondly, love your children deeply. Let your heart melt frequently concerning your little children.

Thirdly, understand your children positively and negatively. Positively, they are created in the image of God, and have immense potential. Negatively, they are descended from Adam and you'll find out soon, most definitely. Don't idolize your children, understand them.

Fourthly, teach your children, constantly. Deuteronomy 6 says, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” I have some booklets that I did on two sermons on Deuteronomy 6 and they are available free of charge out here in the North Tower. Sermons I preached on how to saturate your children's daily lives with the word of God, just pick them up. I think there's about 20 of them out there.

Fifthly, be Christ-centered daily. Say things like, “Jesus made that pretty bird. Isn't it wonderful that Jesus gives us days like today? Let's thank Jesus for the food. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Saturate them with Jesus Christ.

Sixthly, discipline your children wisely with tenderness, with compassion, with diligence, with consistence, with love.

Seventh, pray for your children consistently. Pray for them consistently. Pray for them every day; bring them to Christ. Charles Spurgeon in his sermon “Children Brought to Christ and not to Baptism,” he said this, we can't physically bring our children to Jesus. The way we do it spiritually now is through prayer, bring them to Jesus, so that he can place his spiritual hands on them and pray for them.

Eighthly, Model Christ for your children faithfully. Let them see the love you have for Jesus and the way you seek to live with him day after day.

Number nine, involve your children in church early. When they're ready to come, bring 'em to church. I mean here, big church. And I wanna speak to this congregation, there are many parents here that bring their children into the sanctuary. Praise God for them, do not play the role of the disciples in this story. You don't wanna play that role. Don't despise them, don't wish they weren't here, don't wish you didn't have to listen to their sounds. Parents, you know enough to take your children out of the sanctuary if they're making too much noise. Take them out. And when they're quiet, bring them back. I would urge you, the other six days. Work hard on them to get them quiet okay? Six days a week, work, work, work, work, work. Fruits of the labor on the seventh day. You understand that. Okay? But bring them, bring them. And can the rest of us realize that the overwhelming majority of congregations throughout the world, they're all worshiping together? In Kenya, I was there, 1986, there are babies everywhere, there are children everywhere. They don't have separate children's church, they don't have all that. They just all worship together. Bring them early.

And tenth, encourage your children tenderly. Be gentle with them, and tender and get them ready for their life.

I wanna speak a brief word about children's baptism. I can't think of another place where I could say it. First of all, I wanna say this: Spurgeon in his sermon “Children Brought to Christ and Not to the Font”, meaning to baptism, he's addressing the topic of infant baptism, there, not children's Baptism. It's a different issue. He does say this, and I'm warned by Spurgeon, concerning this, this passage I'm preaching on today has “not a ghost of a whisper of a shade of anything to do with baptism.” So you may wonder “Why am I bringing baptism up?” Well, just because people ask frequently about child baptism. May I say, to you this child baptism is a uniquely Baptist problem? Presbyterians don't have the problem, they baptize infants. Methodists don't have the problem, they baptize infants, Anglicans and Episcopalians, they baptize infants, Lutherans baptize infants. We don't. What are we looking for? Well, we're looking for a credible profession of faith in Christ. What does credible mean? Now, there's an interesting question. When it comes to little children, it's particularly interesting. It is not hard to get a little child to pray a sinner's prayer. You know what I'm talking about? It's not hard to do. 

I do not, for one, believe there should be multiple baptisms in someone's life. I think it should happen just once. We do not believe, as Spurgeon was preaching vigorously against, in something called baptismal regeneration. That you have to have the water of baptism or you going to Hell or limbo as the Roman Catholics might teach. I don't believe that. Bible doesn't teach that. Thief on the cross was never water baptized and he was with Jesus in paradise. You don't have to be water baptized. It's important that you not refuse to be baptized, that's very important, but little children growing up in a Christian home aren't refusing to be baptized, they're ready and willing for anything that their parents lead them to do. 

So therefore at what age should they be baptized? Now there's a question. Would you recommend that the elder sets a threshold age? Okay, you tell me what that age would be and then I'll search in a concordance and try to find a Bible verse to support that number. I don't think we'll find it. There actually won't be any New Testament encouragement for setting the threshold date.

And you know what would happen, it would interject an artificial force into the life of this congregation where when that age comes you'll feel a certain pressure to have your children baptized. It happens over and over. What then, what then? We're cast on the Spirit of God or cast on the elders to make wise decisions or cast on on the parents to make wise decisions. Understand your theology. It is not baptism that saves, it's faith that saves. So saturate their lives with the Gospel with the Gospel with the Gospel and let the Gospel grow up in them and at the right time they can be baptized and if you bring them to the elders we'll talk to them, we'll find out what's going on in their lives, we'll seek as best we can to deal with them. But here's this. Don't bring them too early please. Now, if you're pressing me to know what early is, I don't know what too early is. I just say there should be charity in this and there's no harm in waiting, and when the right time comes and you're certain that the word of God has taken root in their hearts and is bearing fruit above, then bring them.

And I would appeal for like I said Charity and love on both sides. There's too much harshness that goes on sometimes in controversial issues like that one, all I'm saying is, evangelize them, bring them to Christ and at the right time, you'll be... It'll be obvious to you when it's time for water baptism. Final word, I just wanna say thank you to children's workers here in this church. Praise God for you, I'm thankful for you. Jesus sets an example here of blessing other people's children. We do not minimize the role of parents, we maximize it, but others can make an impact too, can't they? And so it's a sweet thing for families to worship together and stay together. It's also a sweet thing for others to interact with those little children and make some kind of an impact, and we have some godly men and women, they're doing that every week. And I just wanna say thank you on behalf of the congregation to you for your sacrifices. Close with me in prayer.

I remember early in our marriage, Christy and I went to a marriage conference put on by a family life ministry, and I remember there was a slide that they put up on the screen and it stuck with me. I've remembered it to this day. It's of a husband and wife on their wedding day, they're in their wedding outfits and they're looking happy and they're holding hands together. And you're seeing them through the cross hairs of a high-powered rifle or an artillery gun. You're seeing a happy marriage from Satan's perspective. And it stuck with me the idea that my marriage is going to be a focal point of Satan's attack in my life. And the more I see the significance of good solid marriages in a church, in a community, in a nation, and in the world, the more I realize what a priority this is for Satan. It's an incredible priority for him to damage marriages and destroy them. And therefore, it's a very strong priority of a church to help marriages thrive for the glory of God. This is an important part of my ministry as a pastor to preach the full counsel of God's Word, so that marriages can thrive in this church. And that's my delight. Today for the second week, we're looking at the topic of marriage and divorce that Jesus teaches on these issues.

And we looked last week at the passage in Matthew 19:1-12, as the Pharisees came to Jesus and asked him what I called a treacherous question, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" I noted that Jesus was standing on the territory at that point of Herod Antipas, and that Herod had had John the Baptist executed for preaching so vigorously against his sinful marriage to Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, and so, I have a feeling that the Pharisees were trying to trigger the machinery of the state against Jesus and have him killed.

But Jesus ignores all of that concern, he just wants to tell the truth, and so he knows he's going to die on the cross, he's not going to be beheaded by Herod Antipas and so, he just tells the truth and he gives this timeless answer, in Verse 4-6. “‘Haven't you read,’ He replied, ‘that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female and said, “for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one. Therefore, what God has joined together let man not separate.’"

Now remember I gave you in a very simple way, Jesus' answer to the question they asked. They asked the question, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" His answer is clearly, absolutely not. But he gives a deeper answer than that. He gives four-fold foundation to it. We looked at those carefully last time.

I'm just gonna mention them again this time, but foundation number one was the sufficiency of Scripture. If you wanna know God's perspective on marriage, you go to the Bible. The Bible is sufficient for everything's... Everything concerning marriage. And we saw last time what scripture says, God says. The Creator didn't just make them male and female, He made them male and female and made statements about them. He said, "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother," so you wanna know what marriage is about, you go to the Bible. 

The second foundation is God's original intention in setting marriage up. What was God intending? And Jesus says, "Haven't you read that at the beginning Creator made them male and female... " In Verse 8 he says, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning. So we looked at what God's original intention was in marriage. And I actually didn't thoroughly unfold that, I'm not going to thoroughly unfold anything concerning marriage today. The topics are so deep that you're going to be left with more that could be said, more scriptures we could go through, more questions you would have, but we did talk about that. And so, God's purposes are multifaceted in marriage, not just procreation, having godly children, but also I think sanctification as we'll discuss later, and other purposes as well, including great commission work to the ends of the earth. But God has a purpose.

Foundation number three is God's personal activity or action in marriage. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate. We saw from the beginning in Genesis how God created Eve from the body of Adam and did so it seems at another location, a remote location and brought the woman to the man. And I think that's very important, because that shows also I believe a pattern of God bringing a godly wife into the life of a man. And so, God then does more than that, more than just providentially bringing them together, I think, very significantly and supernaturally and mystically at the moment when the couple makes this promise to one another, when they make this pledge before God, God sees them as one, he joins them together. That's foundational to my understanding even of second marriages and other marriages, that God joins them together.

And then foundation number four, the two become one flesh. This union is deep and real. It is mystical, physical, yes, spiritual as well. For Paul says, it pictures Christ in the church, Ephesians 5:32, all of that we talked about last time, and therefore, Jesus' timeless answer, what God has joined together, let man not separate. So that's what we covered last time. That was the pure, simple standard of marriage that God established.

But that doesn't answer all questions. There are more questions to answer, always more questions to answer. What about this, what about that, and what about the other? And if you're in counseling or pastoral ministry, you're going to face that river of questions. It's never going to end really, but the questions in this case, two of them come right up off the narrative, right out of the text.

And so it says in Verse 7, why then, they asked, did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? So this question is coming from Jesus' enemies, from the Pharisees.

So they asked this question, why did Moses command divorce? Now, notice that despite the clear answer that Jesus has given with its four-fold foundation, its deeply rooted answer, they're still not satisfied and they wanna press on, it's not enough, they have more questions to ask. Now, I think it's important for Christians who sit under the authority of Jesus Christ at some point to let Jesus' answer calm their hearts and end their questions. At some point you do that. Are we here to argue with Jesus or are we here to allow him to speak authoritatively to us, even in the most controversial issues? That's a key question for a disciple to ask.

Now, Jesus' statement was so absolute that made even the conservative stricter teaching of Rabbi Shammia, as we remember, he said that the... That Deuteronomy 24 was saying that a man could only divorce his wife for marital unfaithfulness, but Jesus seems to go beyond that, doesn't seem to permit divorce for any reason. And so they come back with this Command. Moses commanded they said that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away. Now notice, they have twisted this. Deuteronomy 24 has been twisted in the hands of Jesus' enemies. Remember that Moses was not so much regulating divorce and remarriage as he was forbidding the remarriage of a twice divorced woman back to the original husband. That's all it covers in Deuteronomy 24.

So Jesus gives an answer to that question. Look at Verse 8-9, Jesus replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you the truth that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman, commits adultery. So Jesus gives His answer with really four clarifications. Let's look at these four clarifications. Clarification number one, let's be clear on this. Moses never commanded anyone to get a divorce. As a matter of fact, you'll not find any such command in the entire Bible. We are never commanded anywhere to get a divorce. Moses permitted divorce. He didn't command it. And Jesus here is not commanding divorce in the case of porneia, marital unfaithfulness. He's not commanding it either.

Clarification number two, divorce is rooted in the hardness of human hearts, in the hardness of heart that all sinners depict. Sin is always the root cause of divorce. Now I'm not saying at this moment that there is no innocent party in any divorce. I'm not saying that, there are some absolutely heart-wrenching cases in which a Christian husband or wife has been cruelly sinned against by some spouse and then struggles valiantly to save the marriage, but ends up losing that struggle. But I say, even in that case, divorce is still rooted in someone's hardness of heart. It's the root cause of divorce. Now, what do we mean by hardness? Well, hardness means a failure to yield to God, God commands, the individual does not yield but stiffens their neck against it. It's a matter of habitual rebellion. Resisting God, that's what hardness of heart is about. And so, Jesus says, this permission that Moses gave for a divorce was not in God's original intention, it was not this way from the beginning. 

Clarification number three that Jesus makes, is that unlawful divorce and remarriage is adultery. It said so again and again in Matthew 5, in Mark 10, in Luke 16, here in Matthew 19. It's not taught in just one place. Jesus says, if you divorce your wife for any reason other than porneia, we'll get to that in a moment, and you marry another woman, you commit adultery. So that's a very, very strong statement. Clarification number four, divorce is sometimes permissible. Now, here we get into the fun things, if you wanna call it fun. Here I break company with many godly pastors and men whose ministries I respect, in doing so, I join other godly men whose ministries I respect. There's no surviving that one. When you see two pillars in the church whose ministries you admire and respect in every other respect, and they disagree on this question, well then, you say forget them, Lord, what do you want me to do? [chuckle] And you listen to their arguments, you pray, and you do your best to discern. And so I give my judgment on this text.

This is what's known as the controversial exception clause in Matthew 19, and the implication for many, including me, is that this exception clause says there is a lawful way to get a divorce. It is controversial, because there is no exception given in Mark or Luke, in the parallel passages in the synoptic Gospels. Synoptic means that Jesus' life is looked at from three different perspectives, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and Matthew and Mark and Luke give different accounts of the same encounter. And so, as an exogee to the New Testament you have to do your best to put those accounts together and understand them, and it's not always easy to do. In Mark 10:11-12, Jesus gives the answer. "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her." Verse 12, "And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery." Luke 16:18, same thing, "anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery. And the man who marries the divorced woman commits adultery." And so, some godly scholars and pastors and individuals say based on this, divorce is never lawful, never permissible.

That when you stand in front of God and you make a commitment for life, God holds you to it for life, as long as your spouse is still drawing breath somewhere on the earth, you are in God's eyes married, God is holding you to it. I think it's a reputable position. I just don't agree because of the weight of the word ‘except’ here in Matthew 19. If we accept all scripture as God-breathed, we must not pit one scripture against two. We must instead, try to find a way to harmonize all of them as though it is true. All of them are God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training and righteousness. Therefore, when two parallel texts or three parallel texts say the same thing, but one text adds additional information, then you must adjust your mind on those shorter accounts to include the additional information. “All scripture is God-breathed” including the exception clause. 

Now, some scholars, they're not ignoring the exception clause, they say that Matthew had a special issue in his Gospel, in that earlier Joseph fought to divorce the pregnant Mary. And so the word is used there and they were betrothed and the word is used there, so they say that this covers the betrothal period, etcetera, not marriage itself. Again, a reputable position. I just don't hold it. I don't think the issue so much as what is Matthew trying to do but did Jesus say this? And Matthew told us that Jesus said it, and so therefore, I really am trying to understand what Jesus is saying. I don't think he's trying to protect Joseph's reputation here, he'll leave that to the Holy Spirit and His reputation is fine. I think instead he's giving a legitimate exception. Now, there's a similar situation in another text, stay with me here. You don't have to turn and look there, but just listen. In Mark 8:11-12, the Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. Listen to this, to test him they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, "Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it." Period. None.

But in Matthew it says, in Matthew 12:39, he answered a wicked and adulterous generation asked for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it, except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. Did Jesus say, except for the sign of the Prophet Jonah or not? I say he did, because Matthew tells me he did. There's no controversy about this. The scholars don't go back to Mark and say he actually didn't say the exception clause, they just say that Mark shortened the account. All the accounts are shortened, you know that don't you? John tells us that if everything were written, even the world couldn't contain all the books that would be written, all of them are shortened, and that's fine. But we have to work and labor to harmonize them, so therefore, I believe there's a legitimate exception. Well, what is the exception for? Now we get on to the next challenge. It's for ‘porneia.’ That's the Greek word, what does it mean? Well, NIV translates it marital unfaithfulness, others give us sexual immorality. It covers a broad range of sexual impropriety, not just adultery, but fornication and other issues as well. Any kind of sexual unfaithfulness.

Now again, notice Jesus is not here commanding people to get a divorce in the case of porneia, he's just saying it is permissible through the exception. And I believe that since Jesus is right here in this text dealing with the question of remarriage, that in that case, remarriage is permissible. Some say he is permitting divorce, but not remarriage. I find that a bit problematic, because he's discussing remarriage right here. Furthermore, John MacArthur brings up the point that in the Old Testament, if somebody had been caught in this kind of sexual immorality, adultery, they would have been stoned to death, whereupon the surviving spouse would have been a widow or widower and free to remarry. So, why penalize the New Testament graciousness of God, in which the adulterer is allowed to live? That's his logic. I find it forceful. Later on in the New Testament, Paul will add another case and that is the abandonment of a Christian spouse by an unbeliever who doesn't wanna live with that person anymore. Again, whenever you have additional information, you don't reduce it or say something's wrong with it, but you add it to your growing understanding of God's insights.

Hence Jesus' answer. Well, the disciples aren't satisfied with this, and they ask a question, question number two. This one comes from Jesus' own disciples, look at Verse 10. “The disciples said to Him, ‘If this is a situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.’” Human nature as usual taking things too far. We always do this, we go too far. The disciples in this case, then have clearly overturned a blessing of God. Remember how God said in Genesis, “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him,” therefore, it is good for a man to find a godly wife, that is a good thing. The disciples here disagree, they say, "Well, if that's the condition if you can't ever get out of it, it's better not to get married. It is good not to marry." About a week before I went to be married and then had my honeymoon, I was working with a non-Christian guy named Dave, and we were talking about what he called my impending marriage, I called it my upcoming marriage. So he was talking about my impending marriage, and he mentioned the ball and chain I was about to put on. You've heard that kind of expression before. Elton John wrote a whole song. Someone saved my life tonight, I was able to escape marriage. This is the way that non-Christians look sometimes at marriage, a ball and chain. And here the disciples are saying, we've gotta get out, we've gotta have freedom. We need to be able to escape.

Like an animal caught in a trap, willing to gnaw off the leg to escape, we gotta be able to get out of it. And looking for autonomy, always desirous to be the ones to make the final pronouncement on our case, we make the final decision. We want an escape route, we wanna be in charge, and God does not intend to give that to us, not here. In the Christian church, marriage is at least in part, intended to serve God's greater purposes. He is a witness, he upholds the covenant we make before him, and he has an interest in the matter. It's not just the two individuals, what God has joined together, let man not separate. God is interested in this.

And one of God's greater purpose is sanctification for each partner, that we grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ. Friends, that is not easy to do. Have you noticed? At least it's not for me. It's hard to face your sin, it's hard to face how much you need grace and mercy, it's hard. And the process is so painful within the context of marriage that we would take the escape route, if God gave it to us. We would not stand and fight our sin and the devil and the world, we would run. So also the process of raising a family is very difficult. It's a daily challenge, and many individual find it so challenging that they can't do it and they run from it. 

God is not making it easy to run from these challenges. There's a story commonly told about Spanish Conquistador, Hernán Cortés, that when he and a small force of about 700 men, landed in Mexico, 1519, he burned his ships so that the men would not be able to chicken out and run back to Spain. I wonder what that must have felt like in 1519, standing on the shores of Mexico, watching your ships burn. I wonder if it might have felt like being on Mars, and watching the LEM burn, something like that. Well, here we are. Make the best of it.

But in effect, Cortés was saying, we must be victorious. We've gotta wait and make our way through it. And so I think to some degree, God is burning our way out, he's saying, "No, there is no way out, stand." We'll talk more about that later.

But Jesus gives a multifaceted answer to this too. Jesus was not a simple person. And these are not simple issues. And when they came and said it is better not to marry, Jesus' answer in effect is, "That's true sometimes." It is actually true that sometimes it's better not to marry. He doesn't simply say, "You're overturning the good gift of God, it's always good to marry." He actually says in some cases it is better not to marry.

Look what he says in Verse 11 and 12, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way, others were made that way by men, and others have... " NIV gives us, "Renounced marriage because of the Kingdom of Heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." Disciples are saying it's better to be single. Jesus actually accepts the statement. For some people it is better to be single. He himself is the prime example of that, he never took on a human wife. For him, it was better not to be married. So also the Apostle Paul cites himself is an example of singleness, some people believe that he had been married earlier, and was a widower, and chose not to remarry for the sake of the kingdom.

But it is a gift and Jesus says not everyone can accept it, in Verse 11, the Greek word literally means, make room for it, make a place in your heart for this concept, I'm going to be single the rest of my life. Not everybody can do that. He cites different cases. Some are born eunuchs, namely those who will never marry, and they're born that way, perhaps because of physical or mental defects. A child could be born with a mental handicap and they would not be legally permitted in this state to marry. So they're born that way, they will not get married.

Others, Jesus said, are made that way by men, perhaps he was referring to the Persian or the Babylonian courts in which there was emasculation involved and someone was made a eunuch in order to serve in a harem. I think that's what he's referring to here. And then thirdly, he says others have literally made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Now there was a man in church history, named Origen who literally did this. And I think the NIV translators knowing that tried to help us not to make that mistake and say instead they have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Again, the apostle Paul says if you can do it, if this is your gift, then do it. He says, actually, it's an advantageous situation because a husband is worried about the things of this life, how he may please his wife. And then the wife for her part, has to worry about how that she can please her husband, if it can even be done. She's gotta at least worry about it. Notice I didn't say anything on the other side, very careful about that, but as if it could be done, that's... It's a focus. And what he's saying is that if you can be free from that focus, it's better for the kingdom of heaven, that's what Paul argues in 1 Corinthian 7. But he says, either way, it's a gift. One man has one gift from the Lord, another man has another. Jesus uses this same kind of language, the one who can accept singleness should accept it, that's all He's saying.

Alright, well that's the teaching, we've been through every verse now it's time for some applications, and some... I'll try my best to give good judgments statements. I'll do my best as a pastor. First of all, and some of this, we covered last week but it's okay to cover it again.

All of us should celebrate the gift of marriage. We should not have hard thoughts about marriage because of this, like the disciples were tempted to do, we should be happy about marriage. It's a good thing, it's a delightful thing. As a matter of fact, we're gonna spend eternity married to God, so therefore it must be a wonderful thing if it marvelously describes our eternal state, with God, with Jesus as part of the bride of Christ. It is Satan who wants us to think hard thoughts of marriage in many different ways. So if you're married, thank God for marriage, for the wisdom and goodness of God in bringing the two of you together.

If someday you will be married then thank God for that blessed state and look forward to it with holy expectations, more about that in a moment, but thank God for the good gift of marriage. If you're struggling and having a challenging time in your marriage, still basically thank God for marriage and for your spouse. So much changes when you thank God. If you're a widow, or a widower thank God for the time that you had married and that it was a good gift of God.

Secondly, glorify God in your marriage. If you are married, then make your marriage a display of the glory of God, think of your marriage primarily as for God's glory just like you should think about everything in your life, as primarily for God's glory, your money, your time, your body, your gifts, all of it, for God's glory, every encounter with another person, for God's glory, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, for God's glory. So your marriage then is for God's glory. That's why it exists.

And if you're married, understand that your marriage then will be a battle ground. As I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, Satan's got you in his cross hairs, he wants to make you miserable, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, it's Jesus that came to give you life. You might have it abundantly once you have an abundant marriage. So you need to keep in mind that your struggle is not against flesh and blood. As I've said before, I say it again, I think married people need to understand that almost more than anyone else. No, instead, your spouse could be, should be your greatest ally in your sanctification struggle. The struggle is not against them, it's again Satan.

Your mentality then should be that God puts you together primarily for the purpose of putting himself on display, that His attributes might shine forth, both in how you treat each other and in the way you help sanctify each other for the glory of God and the way you make your family a launching pad for the great commission. For all of those reasons, that's why you were brought together. Now, what about this statement, "God wants me to be happy, that's why I'm getting a divorce." I've heard this kind of thing before.

Friends, can I tell you something? I think God wants you to be happier than you can possibly imagine. Psalm 16 says that “in his presence is the fullness of joy,” that's what he wants you to have, the fullness of joy, but even Jesus, who for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame. He may not want you to experience happiness today. Maybe not even for the rest of the week, maybe not even for the next month. He may want you to work on some things, and he knows full well that working on those things is going to be very painful, for the both of you, it's gonna be hard.

So yes, he wants you to be happy, even in this world, but maybe not today, don't make that an idol, don't make that... And make the glory of God your focus. Certainly don't get a divorce based on this logic, that God wants you to be happy and you're not happy with this person right now. So often divorce is essentially selfish. She doesn't meet my needs, he doesn't understand me. We have irreconcilable differences. It all sounds so selfish to me. The best remedy then to selfishness in marriage is to see your marriage as having been crafted by God for His glory and His purposes.

Thirdly, I mentioned this last week, I'm mentioning it again. Think of divorce as unthinkable. Burn the ships, it's unthinkable. I'm not minimizing the exception clause here, I'm not. God does permit it; he doesn't command it, but he permits it. But I want you to think of divorce as unthinkable, theologically unthinkable as I mentioned because the Trinity is eternal and no member of the trinity has ever sought or will ever seek to get out. They are forever one. Secondly, because Jesus says, the husband of our souls, is the husband of the bride of Christ, has promised, he will never leave us and never forsake us, and that's a picture of the permanence that marriage should have in this life. And thirdly, because we're going to a place where we won't divorce one another, horizontally, we're gonna live with each other forever, and we'll be a much better people then so it will be fine and you'll be a much better person too.

So it'll be fine, but we're gonna be with each other forever. It says in 1 Thessalonians 4, "And so we will be with the Lord, we will be with the Lord forever." For those three reasons then, then think of divorce as theologically unthinkable, but think of it as practically unthinkable too. See God has brought us here to work on things, we're not gonna give up, we're gonna fight for this marriage, we're gonna fight for one another's sanctification. In this world of sin, the purpose of the standard of divorce as unthinkable so shocked the disciples they said it's better not to get married. But the standard is there to protect us from our cowardly sin natures.

We give up too easily. When two sinners come together to get married, their mutual sin habits will conspire to make life challenging. It will. I'm not gonna say any more than this 'cause I intend to have a happy lunch with my family later on and we're gonna be fine, but life gets challenging. Stuff bubbles to the surface. And you know what? I was much holier before I got married, than afterwards. I was really amazingly holy in my seminary room, living alone. I really was. I was remarkably patient, and kind, with the other guys who were also living single on their own. And when things got a little difficult, "Have a good day," and then that was it, and I was remarkably...

Friends, I'm holier and more sanctified now than I was then, but I feel myself much more sinful now. I was smug and arrogant in my singleness, thinking I was further along in sanctification than I really was. Oh, the stuff that bubbles to the surface. Married couples, you know what I'm talking about? The stuff that just bubbles right to the surface, it comes up, it was there all along. God wants you to deal with it. So think of divorce as unthinkable when you're having a conflict, please don't mention divorce. Make it a law that you're not going to mention it, you're just not gonna talk about it, it's not gonna be in your minds.

Now, I wanna talk to various case studies and situations that may be in this church. I wanna speak to those who have never been married but would like to be some day. I want you to respect the sanctity of marriage, and maintain sexual purity. You will never regret setting too high a standard for yourself in this area, you will not regret it, but many have regretted compromising with a boyfriend or girlfriend before they got married. And the real danger here I say to you that there is forgiveness for any sin. Jesus declared it plainly, and if you have already committed fornication, if you've already sinned sexually, you're no longer a virgin, there are some dangers you face. First is believing that there is no forgiveness for you and that Jesus' blood is insufficient to purify you, that is a lie, from Satan.

Jesus is gracious and welcomes sinners. He was a friend of tax collectors and sinners, but there's a second danger, and that is, you may develop a habit of rebellion against God, because once you've done it once, it's easier to do it again and again and again, and your heart may become so hardened that you'll drift vigorously away from Christ. It's a great danger. So, I would urge you to set up a standard of purity now based on what Jesus teaches here, and be pure from this point forward, and if you have maintained your purity up to now defend it with everything that you have. And wait for the Lord to give you the gift that he's intending to give you.

Now, if you're a young man waiting for the Lord, you're gonna be waiting differently than if you're a young woman waiting for the Lord. A young man, yes, he may say, "God joins them together. So I'll wait here," alright, kinda like Isaac waiting for Rebecca to come on a camel. Alright? Well, look, Isaac and Rebecca had a wonderful marriage, and all that. Don't wait for your bride to come on a camel. It's not likely to happen, you need to go out and get her. Prayerfully seek the Lord when you're ready to be married, when you are ready to support a wife financially, economically, you should be pursuing God, say, "God have you given me the gift of singleness, or are you giving me the gift of marriage?" And if it's the latter, and usually it is, then seek God for it, and be bold.

If you are a young woman focus your heart entirely on Christ as the lover of your soul, you don't need a husband to be happy and fulfilled, any more than a young man needs a wife, for that. Christ is what we need, amen? Mary sat at Jesus' feet, Martha bustling around. "Martha, Martha, you're so worried about so many things, but only one thing is needful." Do you know what the one thing that's needful, Jesus. Don't you love that that song, wasn't it sweet? That Ashley sang, it's beautiful. Give me Jesus, that's what you need. And so wait for your husband like that, give me Jesus, and pray for him and seek the Lord that He might bring this young man into your life, and keep yourself pure while you wait.

Now, to married people, again, celebrate the gift of marriage, delight in it, even when things are tough, study everything the New Testament says about how to have a healthy marriage. I'm not preaching on Ephesians 5 this morning. But couples study it, learn Colossians 3, find out how to have a good marriage, and follow it.

If I could say to, especially to the men, but really to both, guard yourself very, very carefully from the threat of porneia, adultery, sexual immorality. Yes, it's gotten very, very tough for men to maintain purity of their eyes in this world, it's very tough these days, with Internet pornography and cable TV and all that, Jesus said, gave this exception that for porneia, a marriage may be lawfully dissolved in my opinion. That makes porneia deadly dangerous, and we should fight with everything that we have. Put safeguards between you and the computer.

Be open and vulnerable, allow people to look at what you do. Protect yourself, it's worth fighting for, make the focus of your marriage to live for the glory of God, for husbands to seek to develop their wives to full maturity in Christ for their sanctification, for wives to pray for the same and to influence the same for their husband that the wife may help the husband in his vision for ministry, that she is a helper suitable for him.

And work hard on your communication. Most people tell us, secular counselors, Christian counselors tell us that poor communication is one of the number one deadliest things in a marriage, talk to each other, pray together. It says concerning husbands that they should treat their wives with respect as equal partners and heirs with them in the gracious gift of life so that nothing will hinder your prayers. A bad marriage can make it hard to pray together.

Like John Bunyan said, I love this, "Prayer drives out sin or sin drives out prayer." Oh, may prayer drive out sin, so you can pray together, communicate together. Now to those whose marriage is in trouble, as I've said, divorce should be unthinkable. Understand that times of trouble are inevitable, the security of marriage is to give a solid relational foundation for you to work out your salvation and your marriage with fear and trembling. Make your troubles then an occasion for coming together in prayer. Don't let the troubles divide you, let them unite you. It is so tragic, I hear these stories about children that are tragically killed or die of leukemia, and then the husband and wife get a divorce within the next two years, that's just so tragic, because they didn't learn to come together around that incredible trial and pray their grief through and work on it together, as each other's best friend.

Make your troubles an occasion for coming together. The fact that there's no godly escape from marriage actually helps you stand in the face of your problems rather than seeking to escape them. And get godly counsel, lean on the body of Christ. We're starting in 2009, God willing, a counseling ministry here in this church. My guess is that one of the most powerful ministries we're gonna have, is to help troubled marriages come to a healthy solid ground. Take advantage of these brothers and sisters that have spent a lot of time preparing to give good godly counsel. Take advantage of that. It's coming to you very soon.

Now, what if there's been adultery? What if there's been porneia? Do we have to get a divorce? Well, the answer is no, you don't have to get a divorce. May I divorce my adulterous spouse? Yes, I think that's what we already covered. Yes, you may, you don't have to, if you can fight for it, fight for it. Use the parable of the 10,000 talents, do everything you can to forgive. If the partner is willing to continue, then continue. And know that God has given you everything you need to continue in that marriage: The 10,000 talents, the indwelling spirit, the fact that the Lord has forgiven so much in your life, you have what you need. You don't have to get a divorce, you may, but you don't have to.

Now, suppose you are the innocent party and the individual you're married to is determined not to be married or you've already gotten a divorce, and you were the innocent party in that regard. Your spouse abandoned you, perhaps he or she was unfaithful to you, they didn't want you anymore, you fought to save the marriage, they were determined to leave. I want you to know that God's mercy is there for you. I know some of you by name, and it has literally caused me to cry for you, and I'm sorry for you.

I do believe that Lord has shown some of you some remarkable grace and it's caused me to be in awe and it's encouraged me in my faith. As it says in Isaiah 43, "Fear not for I have redeemed you. I've summoned you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you, when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze.”

I also believe in contra-distinction with some godly men that you are free to remarry if your spouse abandons you, and you are the innocent party, others disagree. You'll have to come to your own conclusions. If I'm wrong, you'll still be accountable to God and his word for making a right decision. Be a Berean on this and take what I say and compare it to scripture and be sure that what I say is true.

But do the same with those who would be more restrictive than I would. It's not good to be more restrictive or less restrictive than the word of God, amen? Let's find out what the Word of God says, and the answer is there. We didn't need a 67th book of the Bible friends, it's here. Jesus said to the Sadducees, "You're in error because you don't know the scripture, the power of God." Let's study the scriptures and follow them. 

Now, suppose you've sinned, suppose you did get a divorce, you were not the innocent party, you were the guilty party even, or you didn't even know any of these teachings, you just in a light way, kind of threw away a marriage, and then later came to Christian convictions or... There's 100 different scenarios that are so painful. What then? Well, I'm well aware that that can happen. How can I not be, that there are perhaps even some listening to me today who have experienced divorce and you know in your heart that what you did was wrong.

I'm here to declare to you that there is mercy and grace and forgiveness for you as there is for anyone and everyone. But there are ways to receive it, and I think we have to start with calling sin by its proper name. Jesus calls it adultery let's call it adultery, that's what it is. Let's not shy away from it. Jesus didn't shy away from telling us the truth. A physician doesn't misdiagnose, he says, "You have cancer, this is the treatment." He's a good physician, he tells us the truth.

But understand this and this is so beautiful, I believe that God in all of His Holiness, the one who can't even look at evil, and cannot tolerate wrong, he looks at a world of evil all the time, and he seems to deal with it better than some Christians. He is able to move on. Take the case of David and Bathsheba, that is not a way for a man and a woman to get together, not at all. David standing up on a roof sees Bathsheba, he lusts after her, he takes her, he sleeps with her, she becomes pregnant, he tries to cover it up, it will not be covered up. He then murders Bathsheba's husband and marries her and takes her and what a perverse way to get married.

God brings him to conviction. He calls it adultery and bloodguilt, gives it its proper name, through Nathan, God says, "You will not die but because what you did caused Israel to show contempt, the child born will die." And David, of course, as you remember fasted, prayed, sought the Lord, wept, the Lord took the child. There are ramifications for our sin. Then do you remember what happened, David comforted his wife Bathsheba, comforted her, and she conceived and bore a son named Solomon, and God sent word through Nathan the prophet, “Call him Jedidiah, which means ‘Beloved of the Lord.’” 

That's God moving on, friends. And when you're in a second or third or fifth marriage and you realize it's been a life of adultery, one after the next... Now I'm in this godly... This marriage now, to a godly person, I've come to this place. What do I do now? Well, you don't get a divorce, and go find the first spouse, 'cause that's the very thing that's forbidden in Deuteronomy 24. Instead, you must repent, deal honestly with the sin, accept your forgiveness and then stand pure and blameless before God, from that moment on. And make the best of your marriage at that point, and I do not believe it's repeated acts of adultery every time that you are maritally intimate with your fifth spouse. I don't believe that. The issue is, have you genuinely, honestly, dealt with the sin and called it by its name, and sought repentance, and forgiveness?

If you have opportunity within the context of a church ministry to talk about that, I'm not talking publicly, like I'm doing here today, but I'm saying you're discipling some younger couple, or somebody's talking, please tell the truth about it. You don't help young married couples, by saying, "Well, I got a divorce. There's no big deal. Actually it was pretty... And God forgave me." And that's the very thing Satan's telling them as they're struggling through their marriage, that it's easy to get a divorce and that... Don't tell them that. Say, "It was a wrenching thing, it was a sin, but God's grace is greater than my sin, and He forgave me, and reconciled me and restored me."

Tell the truth biblically, and you will be an instrument of righteousness at the church, and not an instrument of division and trouble. Bottom line, and I wanna end with this, what a glorious good gift is marriage, amen? What a good gift it is, it's worth fighting for. It's worth fighting for, it's worth putting your life into it so that you can see the beauty of a consummated Christian marriage, even as I remember Annie Garrett, 10 years caring for David Garrett, as he had Parkinson's disease and she sat by his bedside and cared for him for 10 years. What a beautiful marriage that was at the end of their lives. We could have that kind of beauty in this church. Close with me in prayer.

Alright, so this morning I practiced this sermon and it was 56 minutes and 44 seconds long, okay? So it led me into a quandary. I can do one of two difficult things. I can hold your attention for 56 minutes and 44 seconds, or I can try to split this sermon in two on the fly. Either one of those are difficult to do. I've chosen to do the second, and so I'm going to preach in my normal way at the normal length, and I don't know where that's going to be, but I think what's going to happen is, I'm going to establish this morning from Matthew 19, the clarity of Jesus' teaching on what marriage is, from the way God intended at the beginning. So I'm going to set up the standard that Jesus sets up. And then next week I'm going to deal more thoroughly with the questions of divorce and remarriage that so plague us and are so difficult and painful for so many. So next week then I'll have to re-establish again with clarity that clear standard that Jesus established, and then try to answer as many practical questions as I can.

The problem at the end of this sermon is that I seek to apply it as well, and I will want to apply some things that I might have to say again next week, so please bear with me. As Jesus said, the night before He died to His disciples, "I have much to say to you, more than you can now bear." Alright, [laughter] so let's go with it that way, okay? So I've decided to go that approach.

On my dresser in my bedroom there's a picture of Christy and I taken on May 14th, 1988. I asked her permission to say those words to you before I came up here. She has granted that permission. It's a picture of the day that I received the greatest earthly blessing I've ever gotten in this world. Christy said often we look like children in that picture, and I think about that, we look so young. I don't think we fully understood what we were getting into at that point, I don't think we still fully understand what we've gotten into. [laughter] But I know this, that a river of blessings has come to me from the commitment I made that day, as I stood before God and man and made a promise to her that I would be her husband, she made a promise to me that she would be my wife, and God has held us to that promise for over 20 years now, continues to hold us to it, and it's been a river of blessing.

Those of you that are married, I ask you to think back to your wedding day, that day that God gave you the greatest earthly gift that He could give, another human being created in the image of God, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish from that day on and forever until death parted you. Remember how happy you were, you remember what hopes that you had, what longings you had for the future. Remember how beautiful each of you looked. You never looked better physically in all your lives. Wore your best clothes, you looked wonderful. I've seen lots of you in that condition. Lots of weddings. And you looked incredible, wearing special clothes for the most important act of your lives in this world. And how many pictures were taken that day? Some videos maybe, capturing your happy faces, the hopes in your hearts. How is it now? How is it now?

I wanna say to all of you married and unmarried alike, I want you to go back in your minds to that very first wedding day, God had made a perfect world. We can scarcely imagine the radiant beauty and glory of that pristine world, a perfectly blue sky, a radiant sun, glowing vegetation, all the flowering plants, fruitful trees giving off their fragrance, boasting of their succulent fruit. The Garden of Eden, a lush paradise of sights and sounds and smells and sensory pleasures by the fountain of delights the God who made them all for our pleasure and our enjoyment. Magnificent beasts with all their strength and variety, the creeping things, the soaring birds with their magnificent plumage, and there God put the man that He had fashioned from the dust of the earth, a living and breathing man now tasked with the responsibility of watching over and protecting the Garden of Eden, taking care of it, serving it, tasked also with the responsibility of naming all of those animals, and tasked with the responsibility of filling the world with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, of replicating the image of God throughout the world, of filling the earth with that image.

It was a task that Adam could not fulfill alone, he needed a helper suitable for him. And so God caused him to fall into a deep sleep, and while Adam sleeping God took a rib from his side and closed up the place with flesh, and God wondrously crafted a woman from the rib and brought this magnificent gift, categorically the last thing God ever created.

Some would say the best, I would have to agree. But I won't argue the point theologically, God saving in that sense the most magnificent creation for the... And I think Adam would have agreed when he saw her, a beautiful woman perfectly suited for Adam, a helper suitable for him, and he responded the only way that a man can when he sees the woman he's gonna spend the rest of his life with, with poetry. "This at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man." I often wondered how Adam knew that in that he was asleep at the time, but I think it was that God told him about her, God understanding a woman perfectly, as only God can do. [laughter] Adam had an education that lasted hundreds of years after that, but God explained from the beginning what she was and where she had come from. So God had given Adam the greatest physical gift he would ever receive, and Eve would become eventually the mother of all the living. 

But sin soon entered the world through Adam's rebellion, through his sinful negligence, his failure to act, sin of omission of immense proportions as he stood there saying nothing while the serpent tempted his wife. And we have been suffering bitterly ever since, and divorce is part of that sin package. And it is the sad focus of our time in the Word this morning and next week. 

So how is it now with marriage? How is it now? Well, there is, some have called it an epidemic of divorce. Some years ago, a journalist for a national news magazine asked this rhetorical question, "Are there any person's left in this land who have not had a friend or child or parent describe intimately the agony of divorce?" The statistics are shocking. Annual divorce rate is 3.9 per thousand people of population equaling well over one million new divorces every year. Sadly, the divorce rates among self-described Christians are not very much different from those of non-Christians. With one million new divorces every year, of course, comes two million newly divorced people plus several million perhaps new children of divorce.

Every single person involved in this process is hurt deeply, some use this language that they have been wounded for life, scarred for life. One commentator I read said this, “Every divorce destroys a little world, a little society with its own culture and traditions and history and network of relationships. A miniature world has been crushed forever.” The tragedy is unspeakable. Men and women feel rejected to the very core of their being, ripped apart from inside. The most significant promise they ever made broken, the most significant relationship in their lives ended in tragedy. It's bitter beyond all measure. And they remember all the moments with bitterness and sadness, the photo of the couple on their first date, a love letter tumbling from the pages of a book, a box of memorabilia from the wedding day, video of the wedding itself, all the smiles, the kisses, promises made, hopes for the future. The honeymoon, their first home together, started their life together and how tragic now, the photos of their first child coming home from the hospital, the three of them smiling around the Christmas tree, the baby's first Christmas smiling for the camera.

And now all of it is destroyed and they can't look at those photos pleasantly. It's somewhat in that way like a suicide, where you just can't look at the photos of the person the same way ever again. And in that way, again, I think far worse than if it had ended by a tragic auto accident or a terminal illness, this world, this little world has come to an end through the choices to some degree that each person has made and their own foolishness, their own sin has brought it to an end. We cannot calculate the agony that these one million divorces pumps into the national atmosphere every year. Now, divorce used to be rare. Why was it rare? Well, in past years, the vast majority of marriages held secure and stable, it doesn't mean that people were any less sinful than we are now, but there were certain pressures brought to bear in a positive way to the marriages. John MacArthur lists some of these pressures.

He says, first of all, the extended family was a powerful moral force. Relationships to parents continued to exert tremendous pull long after marriage. Married couples felt the pressure to work out their differences rather than bring shame on their parents by getting a divorce. So also there was a much stronger network of relationships extending to grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etcetera. These relationships did not merely put pressure on the couple to save the marriage, but they also offered resources that the desperate couple would need at that difficult time. Advice, prayer, moral example, money, a shoulder to cry on, etcetera. This network has become gradually weakened over the last number of decades. The fluidity of our society, frankly the multiplication of divorces itself as we've mentioned tends to create more divorces. So also the proliferation of anti-biblical ideologies, like moral permissiveness, feminism, humanism, proliferation of television, movies, internet, etc., have pumped out a worldview that is hostile to the biblical worldview, and divorce is one of the by-products.

MacArthur also lists community expectation back in the day. The surrounding communities expected marriages to survive for the most part, and responded generally to divorce negatively, divorce laws therefore were difficult. Divorce was hard to come by, community ethics stood in favor instead of working out the issues and maintaining marriage.

Strongest of all the influences that John MacArthur lists are... the spiritual or religious aspect. Churches universally taught the Bible truth on divorce and remarriage. All branches of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant, orthodox strongly supported healthy family life and just as strongly opposed divorce. But this has all changed, especially in the church more and more people feel compelled in the name of Christian love and compassion to change the clear biblical teaching on divorce. I read recently that a Christian entertainer got a divorce, claiming that her husband stood in the way of her career advancement. She said she did not believe her divorce related to her religious views as a Christian in any way, and even if it did, she believed God would forgive anything she did, and loved her the same either way. More and more Christian counseling, both of the formal and informal sort, has imbibed this kind of approach, and the general prevailing worldly perspective, and has turned to helping people through the divorce process and has turned to giving worldly advice rather than biblical advice. Helping people through with minimal pain, helping them prepare for their future lives after the divorce.

Some Christians in the name of love then become hostile to anyone that teaches the biblical standard on divorce and remarriage, and calls it legalism. However, other Christians, seeing all of these things, what is going on in society in general, raise the biblical standard beyond the biblical norms. In a zeal to protect what the Bible says, they established strictures that I think go beyond what Jesus says in this text. John MacArthur, speaking of that phenomenon, either way it says, “But that which is contrary to Scripture can never be either loving or spiritual. A human standard may be more lenient or more restrictive than Scripture, but it can never be better.” Do you believe that? The Bible is the measure for all things and can never be more lenient, it can be lenient, it can be more strict, but never can be better. “When God's word is ignored or perverted in any area, tragedy is always the consequence, the matter of marriage and divorce standards then are no exception." 

Now, generally in our culture, there are deeper questions about marriage that go beyond even this issue of divorce and remarriage. More and more confusion exists on what marriage is. Hence, we are starting to talk about things like gay marriage. I saw a humorous piece recently about a clerk who is working in a town hall issuing marriage licenses to an ever stranger series of people who are applying. First of course a regular couple, a man and wife wanted to become husband and wife, and then came two men who wanted marriage license, then two women, then a man and a boy, then a woman and a girl, then three people together, ended up with a man who wanted to marry himself, [chuckle] and at that point the clerk resigned his position. I believe in this general societal discussion on what marriage is, it is impossible for us to carry it on in the end without an absolute standard of truth and right and wrong. It's really just going to be impossible. In this pluralistic society in which we live that kind of thing may well come. Because we are talking about a definition that comes from God. It is God that defines marriage, and the further we get away from, "Thus says the Lord," the more confusing the discussion is going to be.

It's going to be very difficult for Christian apologists who do not argue from Scripture to talk about what marriage is. I don't know how they're going to do it. I don't think they should. I think they should say, "Thus says the Lord," and say what marriage is, and just keep doing that, 'cause it is the truth.

Now, this morning, we're going to face this painful question together as brothers and sisters in Christ. We're gonna sit at Jesus' feet, we're gonna allow Him to teach us about marriage and divorce. I believe every one of us who has been married, is married now, will face painful issues concerning our marriage, and we're going to be called on by the text as always to repent. There's a constant call from Jesus to repent. All of us will need to do it. We're going to look at Jesus' standards of marriage, and all of us are gonna look in and find flaws. And so therefore, it's my joy to proclaim forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even over this issue. There is grace, there is mercy, and there's forgiveness for any sin and blasphemy Jesus said. But still there needs to be repentance. Jesus loves us too much to allow us to continue in sin.

So we're gonna let Him speak the truth to us, no matter how painful it may be. We're gonna allow Him to heal some of the most painful of spots in our souls, and hopefully we're going to prevent, as a church, future pain and agony. All of those things are in my mind as I preach this morning.

So let's look at Matthew 19 and the context. In Matthew 19:1-2 it says, "When Jesus had finished saying these things, He left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. Large crowds followed Him and He healed them there." So for about two years, Jesus has been ministering almost exclusively in His home area of Galilee. Now, for the last two months in the narrative, He'd been focusing, it seems, almost exclusively on training the 12 for their future responsibilities as leaders, Apostles of His church. He now goes south to the most important appointment of His life, and that is His arrest, His condemnation, His death on the cross, and His resurrection on the third day to save us from our sins. So that's why He's traveling south.

The region beyond the Jordan that He's in now in this text is part of the territory of Herod Antipas, the very man who had arrested John the Baptist for preaching that his marriage to Herodias, his brother Philip's wife was unlawful. Herodias and Herod did not take it kindly and arrested John the Baptist and had him executed for it. Now, I believe the Pharisees came seeking to get Jesus into similar trouble. I think they were trying to have Him killed. It clearly says in the text that they're asking a question in order to test Him, or trap Him, they're seeking to get Him into trouble.

And so, look at Verse 3 at the treacherous question. "Some Pharisees came to Him to test him. They asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?'"

They're not looking for information and they don't want a debate. They really just hated Him, and they wanted Him killed. The backdrop in Judaism to their question is a long-standing debate between Jewish Rabbis on a text in the Old Testament. The text is Deuteronomy 24, and in that text, based on that text, the Jews believe that every Jewish man had the right to divorce his wife. The text talks about a condition in which a man finds something indecent in his wife and writes her a certificate of divorce and sends her away, and then she goes and then becomes the wife of another man, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and sends her away. She cannot then go back to her first husband and marry him. Would not the land become utterly defiled? That's what Deuteronomy 24 says. Now, as they wrestled over that text, the Rabbis had different opinions on what it was that was the indecent thing in Deuteronomy 24. What was it that was indecent, and on the basis of that the man wrote his wife a certificate of divorce?

Now, the stricter school of the Rabbi Shammai felt that the indecent thing that the first husband found had to be adultery. He found adultery in her, but it doesn't say adultery, but that's what they interpreted. Now, the more lenient School of Hillel interpreted it more widely and said it referred to anything offensive to the husband, even to the point of the spoiling of the husband's dinner. The Pharisees tended to follow this latter and broader interpretation to follow Hillel, and allow divorce for any and every reason, whatever the husband thought was best. A later Rabbi along the same line named Akiva interpreted the words of Moses, "if she finds no favor in his eyes", to mean that if the husband simply found a prettier woman, he could divorce his first wife and marry her, because she no longer finds favor in his eyes. So you can tell that even back then feelings ran very high on this topic. No matter what answer Jesus gave, He would antagonize somebody. Maybe especially they were hoping, I think, Herod Antipas, who had the power to kill Jesus. So you can see that divorce was a hot topic in Jesus' day, just as it is in our day.

So look at the timeless answer of Jesus to this question, Verses 4-6, “‘Haven't you read,’ He replied, ‘that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, “for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” So they are no longer two but one. Therefore, what God has joined together let man not separate.’” Now, I'm about to give you four foundations, timeless foundations to Jesus' answer, and then His answer, but just for clarity's sake I just want to draw out what's happened here. They came and asked Him a treacherous question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” Jesus' answer is, “Absolutely not.” I mean, that's a summation of it. His answer is no. Now, there's more to say on that, and we will say more, but just if you're looking at the question they ask, “Is it lawful to divorce a man... For a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” Jesus' answer is no.

But He does give foundations to His answer. And I wanna look at those four foundations. These are four immovable foundation stones on which our concept of marriage should be based.

The first foundation is the sufficiency of Scripture to address this issue, foundation number one, the Scripture itself. "Haven't you read?", He says. Now, these were the Pharisees, they spent their whole time working on Scripture. This is what they did. And so Jesus is really to some degree critiquing them for missing this. "Haven't you read?", He said. He begins this dispute by setting the ground rules. The answer will be found only by a right reading of Scripture. Therefore I take from this, just as a pastor, as a preacher, and as a counselor, and a Christian man, Scripture is sufficient to answer all questions of marriage and divorce and remarriage. And we don't need another book, we don't need any more information, we need to understand the Scripture rightly, that's all. Jesus teaches us the sufficiency of Scripture.

I think this is the big flaw with much Christian counseling these days, they get more information about marriage from psychological studies and clinical research and prevailing patterns of therapy in the field than they do from the Scripture. In this way they are widely divergent from Jesus' methodologies and counseling centers. True Biblical counseling answers the problems of marriage the same way it answers the problem of all of life. "Haven't you read?" Or Romans 4:3, “What does the Scripture say?” Now, I want you to notice some aspect of Jesus' view towards Scripture. Now this is one you might miss if you read too quickly. I'd like to ask that you take... Keep your finger here in Matthew 19, and go back to Deuteronomy... Sorry, Genesis Chapter 2. Genesis 2, Jesus quotes Genesis 2 at the end of the chapter, Verse 24. So just keep your finger in Matthew 19, we're just gonna be in Genesis 2 for a moment. But quoting Matthew 19:4-5, this is what Jesus says. 

“‘Haven't you read that at the beginning the creator made them male and female and said, “for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”’” Now, Jesus here says that the creator, God, does two things, not just one thing, He does two things. “‘Haven't you read,’ He said, ‘that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female,’” so He makes them, the Creator makes them male and female and said, "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh." So the creator not only creates them, but He makes a statement about them, that's what the force of the phrase "and said". The Creator made them male and female and said for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. Now, if you look at Genesis 2:24, you do not see the introduction phrase such as "the Lord said" or "the Lord God said" or "Lord God answered", "the Lord God replied", or any of those introductors that you see frequently in the Genesis narrative. They're not there.

What is the significance of that? You know what it is? It's Jesus' mind towards the Bible. Every single word in the Bible is God's word to you. The Creator is speaking to you today about marriage. That's Jesus' attitude towards Scripture. This is the one who'd rather die than Scripture be broken, friends. He has a very high view of Scripture, I would say He has an infinitely high view of Scripture. He has a higher view of Scripture than I do, he has a higher Scripture view... View of Scripture than any one of you does, that's Jesus' view of Scripture. We ought to come more and more up to His standard. And so, Augustine says in The Confessions, "Indeed, oh man," this is putting this mentality in the voice... The words of God. "Indeed, oh man, what my Scripture says, I say." Now, should you thereby get rid of your red letter editions to the Bible, which have Jesus' words in red and all the other words in black? No, you can keep them, that's fine, but please don't put any higher value on the red letters than you do on the black ones, or the purple ones or the green ones or whatever color the editors chose to print the Word of God, and it doesn't matter to me. 

What matters is what the Scripture says, okay? So just notice in Genesis 2, it's not the Lord God that says it, Moses wrote it just in the narrative. But in Jesus' mind, it's God that's saying this to you. So go back to Matthew 19. God wants to speak to you today about marriage, and so He's saying, What my Scripture says to you, husband and wife, I am saying to you."

Foundation number two, God's original intention of marriage. What did He intend by creating marriage? Look what Jesus said. "Haven't you read that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female?" We need to go back to the beginning. What did God intend? What God did with Adam and Eve, therefore in Jesus' mind was intended to be a pattern for every marriage that followed. It is the pattern for all marriages, right from the very beginning. At the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. 

When Jesus says, "For this reason," He's saying, this is a lasting principle for all time. Adam didn't have a father or mother, Eve didn't have a father or mother. These words are inserted in the Genesis narrative, though there were no fathers or mothers at the time, to teach us all, the whole human race about marriage. It's a lasting principle. So foundation number two is what is God's original intent in marriage? Jesus calls God the Creator, the Creator does everything for a purpose. He will argue then that divorce was no part of God's original purpose. Look at Verse 8, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning." Do you see that? He's arguing from original principles. What was God's original intention? And God's original purpose was one man, a male, one woman, a female, coming together in a complete physical union, one flesh for the purpose of filling the earth with His glory, the knowledge of His glory with His image.

Genesis 1:27-28, "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God, He created him, male and female, He created them, God blessed them, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it.'" So essential to God's purpose in creation of marriage is procreation or children. He wants children, He wants the birth of little ones. Though it is not God's only purpose in marriage, yet this is why the gender, I think, is mentioned here, male and female. This completely rules out so-called homosexual marriage, which I liken to speaking about a square circle. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Homosexual marriage is nothing, it doesn't exist. God defines marriage and procreation is part of it, right from the very beginning. God wanted children, He wanted lots of children. He wanted lots of human beings who would fill the Earth with the image of His glory, and they would know His glory and worship Him, that was God's purpose. 

And so, in the covenant marriage relationship from the beginning with a male, a father, and a female, a mother who would train them, at least in part, to get ready for their own future marriages. That was a bad slip there. Not to get rid of them, alright? But rather get them ready for their future marriages, alright? There does come a time that they leave, and they cleave together and they form their own home. And so for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is the precise reason I believe that God hates divorce, it violates His purposes and is therefore violent to the spouse. Listen to Malachi 2:13-16, this is the prophet speaking to sinful Israel centuries down the line, this is what the prophet says, “Another thing you do, you flood the Lord's altar with tears, you weep and wail because He no longer pays attention to your offerings, or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask why? Well, it is because the Lord is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her. Though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit, they are His. And why one? Because He was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth. ‘I hate divorce,’ says the Lord God of Israel, ‘and I hate a man covering himself with violence, as well as with his garment,’ says the Lord Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.” Do you see how God equates divorce with violence there? At any rate, to understand marriage, we must go back to God's original intention as related in the Genesis account, and as commented on throughout Scripture.

Foundation number three is God's direct action in making marriages. Christ says that the Creator physically prepared them for marriage by making them male and female, their physical bodies were well suited for God's purpose in marriage. Parenthetically, some aesthetics within Christian church history have written against any kind of sexual involvement as though it were somehow dirty or unclean. As if it were intrinsically evil, because it is fleshly. The Scripture stands vigorously against their viewpoints. God created marital relations within the context of marriage. That anti-flesh bias is more from philosophy than from the Bible, end of parenthesis there. The creator made them male and female, and then Jesus says, brought them together so the two would become one flesh. It says very plainly in the Genesis account that God made the woman at some remote location, wherever that was, I don't know, and brought her to the man and the two became one flesh. And so, there is a distance between the two when they're single, and then God closes that distance and providentially brings the two together. And so God makes marriages, that's what Jesus is saying here. What God has joined together, let man not separate. That's the third foundation. 

The fourth foundation is that the two become one flesh. What happens in a marriage in God's mind? The union is deep and real.

It's not merely a piece of paper as some unbelievers who co-habit together say, "It's just a piece of paper." I've heard them say this to me. Frankly, if it's just a piece of paper, then Satan would behave differently than he does around it. He would behave differently, he would stop tempting Christian kids have relations before they get married, and tempting Christian spouses to stop having relations after marriage. He behaves radically differently after you say "I do". He changes his entire strategy. He doesn't think it's just a piece of paper, because God doesn't think so. So, we are deceived when we think it's just a piece of paper. No, the two become one flesh. God does something very profound, very mystical. Yes, it is physical. The marital bed is pure and undefiled and physical, but God also creates a unity where there was none before. It is so profound that the Apostle Paul likens it to the spiritual unity between Christ and the church, quoting the same Scripture, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."

This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church, says the Apostle Paul, Ephesians 5:32. Even more amazing, then, Christ's unity with the church is itself a picture of the trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in perfect unity with one another, it's a picture of all human relationships after that. As Jesus prays in John 17:21, "That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, and may they be also be brought to complete unity." So therefore, these are the four foundations, the sufficiency of Scripture, God's purpose at the beginning of marriage and setting marriage up, God's providential actions in forming marriage, and then the unity that He speaks of here, the two become one flesh.

Those are the foundations, now comes the answer. Christ gives this timeless answer, "Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate." And answer to the treacherous question, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?", the answer is simply and clearly absolutely not. 

We have no right to undo what God has joined, to rip it apart, separate it, cleave it apart in any way. Because Scripture is God's perfect word to you, because in Scripture God's original intention of marriage is made plain, because God is active directly in marriage from the very beginning and even now is personally involved in making marriages, and because the two become physically, spiritually, mystically one. "Let man not separate what God has joined." Now, there are more questions to ask. Indeed, the Pharisees and the disciples ask more questions, we won't answer them today. God willing, we'll have time next week. We might say, "Of course, this is God's standard and it would be best if all of us followed it, but things happen. Will God still love me? Will He still forgive me? Will He still bless my life if I violate this standard?" Well friends, that's an entirely different question, isn't it? In Jesus' world view, it's somewhat like asking, "How much poison can I drink before I die? How many times can I shoot myself before I bleed to death? If I scoop fire into my lap, will my whole body be burned or only part of it?"

Whenever we violate God's standards and go our own separate way, either as individuals or pastors or as a church, there are deep and painful consequences. Now, is the grace of God acting through Jesus Christ sufficient to cover this river of sin? I tell you, yes, in an infinite number of rivers besides. In a single day, Jesus atoned for the sin of the whole land. And that is the glory of the Gospel I preach, that there is forgiveness, that God's grace can put together a broken life, it can put together a broken heart. That God is able to work through second and even third and fourth marriages when the people come to repentance and bring their sin to God and be honest about it, He can establish a new home. God moves on. We'll talk more about that next week. Look at the case of David and Bathsheba and the birth of Solomon. Study it in advance. God moves on. But what if it hasn't happened yet? What if it hasn't happened yet?

What does God's grace do for you? Doesn't it behave very strongly with you and tell you, "Don't get a divorce. Work on that marriage."? I have much to say about that, more next week. I just wanna give you a couple of applications and we'll talk more about divorce, remarriage, and how to work on a marriage next time, God willing, but I wanna begin by just urging you to celebrate the gift of marriage. This is a good thing. I think it's so interesting that the Lord says, "It's not good for the man to be alone." The disciples contradict and say, "Well, it's good not to get married." Well, who's right then, God or the disciples? Is it good or not good to get married? I'll go with God. What do you say? It is good to get married, it's a good thing. Now, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but God comes to give life and give it abundantly. So let's celebrate the goodness of marriage. I think you ought to celebrate, if you're a married couple, celebrate it every day, thank God for your spouse. No, I really mean it, thank God for your spouse.

Thank God deeply and richly and fully for your spouse. Thank God for marriage, thank God that He invented it. Thank God for your life together. Thank God for it. Secondly, can I urge you to glorify God in your marriage? Glorify God, let your marriage be a lamp, a light shining in a dark place. Let God put it up on a stand, make it glorious. Go back one sermon to the 10,000 talents, if you need help on forgiveness, but forgive each other, forgive each other deeply and fully and richly and love each other and work on your marriage so that it can be glorious. I have more to say about that next time. Thirdly, I want you to think of divorce as unthinkable. Think of it as unthinkable, don't bring it up when you're having an argument, don't talk about it. It's unthinkable. Again, I wanna talk more about that next time. But just no, the Lord said, no, we're not going there, we're gonna work on the problem, we're gonna work on our communication. We're gonna work on our sin, we're gonna pray for each other, we're gonna love each other, we're gonna fast, we're gonna do whatever it takes, but we're going to work it out.

Think of it as unthinkable, I'll say more about that next time. Just like I did with my pro-life sermon a few weeks ago, I just wanna finish with just a word to those of you that have been just deeply hurt by this topic. I hope not un-wrongly hurt by my sermon. I just wanna promise you that the grace of Jesus Christ is sufficient for you. Wisdom of God and the Word is sufficient for you. There is a path ahead from this point forward in which you can live a life completely pleasing to God, and that's a sweet thing, isn't it? God's mercies are new every morning, they're new every moment. If we turn to Him honestly, we seek forgiveness, He will give it. Trust Him for that and pray for me over this next week as I put together what's left of this sermon into something coherent next week, and let's talk some more about this topic then. Close with me in prayer.

Well, you don't have to know me very long before you find out that Ben-Hur is my favorite movie. And it is my favorite movie, it's a great story. And in that story, it's a historical novel that was written by General Wallace in the 19th century, a picture of redemption, “A Tale of the Christ” is the subtitle in his novel. But in the movie, which most of us have access to and we, many of us, have seen, Judah Ben-Hur is a Jewish nobleman, wealthy, a Jewish man, he's got a beloved mother and sister, lives in Jerusalem.

And as the movie begins, a boyhood friend who was a Roman, a man at this point, named Messala comes back. He has been made lieutenant governor of Judea, and he returns and the two of them try to rekindle their friendship, but it isn't long before they realize that they have grown apart, they have different ways of looking at life, they have different ways of looking at the world. And when Messala tries to use Judah Ben-Hur as an informant against the zealots among his people, the bitterness starts to set in.They quarrel, they divide, and their friendship comes to an end.

But the bitterness just grows and grows throughout the movie. As the new governor enters the city, he rides right below Judah Ben-Hur's house and a stone falls from the roof, it causes the governor's horse to rear. Governor's thrown from his horse, injured seriously, but doesn't die. Soon the Roman soldiers are pounding on Judah Ben-Hur's house, they open the door, and they come in and they arrest Judah and his mother and his sister. Very tense moment. And at that moment, Messala appears. And Judah is immediately relieved and he thinks that this clear mistake and injustice will be dealt with right then, and he makes a direct appeal to his boyhood friend, Messala, to let he and his mother and sister go, because it was just an accident. 

But this man stands there with a heart of stone and eyes of coal, and says nothing and the three of them are hauled off at that moment. All three are condemned. Mother and sister to languish in the prisons there in Fort Antonia, and Judah Ben-Hur is condemned to row in the slave galleys, leaving from Tyrus. As he's making his way in chains down to the port city of Tyrus, he's about to expire from thirst, and a man just shows up, you never see his face, and as he's lying there on the ground about to die, this man pours water on his face and then lifts his head up and pours water down his throat and revives him, basically gives him life.

Well, for three years Judah lives a life, a brutal life of a slave on a galley and with every stroke of the oar he vows vengeance against Messala. And his burning hatred for Messala keeps him alive. Through one circumstance or another he gets freed from being a slave, he ends up becoming the adopted son of a Roman nobleman and makes his way back to Jerusalem, and he has one task, there's only one thing he wants: he wants revenge, he wants vengeance for Messala.

He would also like to find his mother and his sister and as he goes and confronts Messala, it turns out that Messala has no idea where they are. And as he sends to find out about them, we come to learn that they have become lepers, and he sends them to be in a leper colony there. One of the climaxes of the movie, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala ride in a chariot race, climactic chariot race and Messala is thrown from his chariot and trampled by his own horses, and it's a mortal wound. And as he lies there dying, Judah Ben-Hur goes to see him and he, just to twist the knife in a little bit deeper, let's Judah know that his mother and his sister are now lepers living in the valley of the lepers. And at that point Judah's hatred intensifies greatly, but Messala dies and now he's just filled with hatred and a yearning for vengeance. And the only avenue he can find for it is to basically take down Rome, if he can. It's a suicidal hatred and vengeance.

However, as he's carrying his leper sister into Jerusalem, he sees the same man who years ago had poured water down his throat and saved his life, but now he's carrying a cross up to Calvary, it's Jesus, and their lives intersect at that particular moment and he leaves his mother and sister with a friend and goes and stands there and watches Jesus die. And as he's dying his blood flows down the cross and is carried by the rain water down the streets, and somehow reaches the mother and the sister and they are miraculously cleansed of their leprosy. Judah doesn't know it, but they're cleansed. But something more miraculous happens, something more astonishing. And as he watches Jesus die, he hears Jesus speak these incredible words. “Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing.” He stands there transfixed and soon transformed. He returns to his now healed family and tells them that he too has been healed of his hatred, his unforgiveness, his suicidal thirst for revenge, and the movie ends with Judah's awestruck words, “As I stood there, I felt his voice take the sword from my hands.”

It's my prayer today that this sermon, this parable will take the sword of unforgiveness from your hands. I'm convinced that every one of us wields it from time to time, sometimes for years. And I think it's every bit as suicidal as was Judah's against Rome. I think it's a bitter poison that ruins life, ruins marriages, it ruins relationships, it ruins churches. It's bitterness, and Jesus and his love would have us free from it, so he uses a very heavy-handed parable to do it. Because that's what it takes to free us up from that suicidal thirst for vengeance.

We live in a world that doesn't know anything about forgiveness. It's a world, the lost, the non-Christian world isn't comfortable with the topic of forgiveness. If you ever try to go apologize or seek forgiveness, I mean, genuine forgiveness from a non-Christian, they will cut the conversation off very quickly. They don't know what to do with it, they don't wanna deal with it, and so they just quickly say, “Oh, don't worry about it, it's nothing.” They minimize. They do not deal with it. We live in a world that delights in unforgiveness and in vengeance. Many, many movies these days are focused on the issue of vengeance and the joy in getting revenge on somebody who's hurt you.

But Jesus from the cross teaches us a better way as we've already heard. He didn't just teach in Matthew 5, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” he did it from the cross. “Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing.” By the way, I am convinced that those for whom Jesus prayed are in heaven now. Jesus doesn't throw away words and if they're forgiven, they're forgiven. So, how sweet would it be to see the Roman centurions, and all that party that was around Jesus crucifying him up there in heaven and actually see a little bit of fruit toward the end after Jesus dies when the centurion says, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” There's the fruit of Jesus' prayer, what an effective prayer ministry Jesus has, amen? What a sweet thing it is, but he has shown us the way.

Now, Peter begins this whole conversation with a question of accounting. “How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” So he's bringing this question of forgiveness.

Now, let's set it in context in Matthew 18. You remember as the chapter opens, the leaders of the church, the apostles are there, and they're having an argument with one another about which of them is the greatest. And Jesus calls a little child and has the little child stand in their midst and says, “I tell you the truth, unless you are converted and become like a little child, you'll not even enter the kingdom of heaven, the essence of the kingdom of heaven is brokenness, humility, meekness, lowliness.”

He goes on from there to talk about the danger of sin, because they are going to be the under shepherds, they're gonna be the ones that are caring for the church, and he wants them to know, the real issue isn't which of them is the greatest, but that their ministry is gonna be a ministry of shepherding little ones just like this child concerning sin.

So he talks about the danger of sin, he gives a warning to the world because of the things that cause people to sin with that picture of the millstone being hung around the neck. He talks to them personally about the danger of sin. “If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one hand or one foot, than to have two hands and two feet and be thrown in the fire of hell.” The great danger of sin.

Talks about the ministry, they're going to have as undershepherds and going to look for the one that wanders off. And we do wander off, don't we? And so these undershepherds shouldn't be bickering and arguing about which of them is the greatest, they should go look for the wandering sheep. That's their ministry.

Then Jesus gives us this whole issue of dealing with sin in the church, which we took three weeks to look at, and if your brother sins against you, then go and reprove him or rebuke him, show him his sin, just between the two of you. And so we ran through that whole issue concerning church discipline, even to the point of verse 17, “if he refuses to listen and even to the church, then treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” Verses 18-20 speak clearly about the church's rights and responsibilities in dealing with sin. “Whatever you bind on earth to be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth to be loosed in heaven,” and talks about the need we have to pray for one another. “So if you agree about anything you ask for it will be given to you, for where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” So, he's just dealing with the issue of sin all the way through this chapter.

And so, therefore, Peter's question is quite reasonable. Now, how many times shall I forgive my brother? Let's say we go through the whole church discipline pattern and the brother repents and comes back, but then he falls back into sin again. Now, how many times are you gonna go through that? Up to seven times? So that's how he asks.

Now, I believe that the context here isn't so much that of forgiving enemies and unbelievers outside of the church. He says, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” But I think that there are principles that go and extend even beyond the walls of the church, but let's focus on the issue of forgiveness within the church, forgiving other Christians. I think that's the focal point here, an in-house, a family matter about forgiving other Christians. Although, I do think we can extend it even to enemies as we've already seen.

And so, we have this issue of accounting. How many times shall I forgive him? And he gives a recommendation. “Up to seven times?” he says. Now in this, I think almost certainly Peter felt he was going above and beyond the call of duty.

In his day Jewish Rabbis limited forgiveness to three times. I think they use references from the Book of Amos in this; Rabbis took statements that God makes about sinning nations in Amos 1:3, eight times we have this kind of thing, but Amos 1:3 says, “For three sins of Damascus and even for four, I will not turn back my words.” So the rabbis zeroed in on this, and one rabbi said, “He who begs forgiveness from his neighbor must not do so more than three times.” So that's three strikes and you’re out long before baseball was invented.

So also another rabbi said this, “If a man commits an offense once, forgive him, if he commits an offense the second time, they forgive him, if he commits an offense a third time, they forgive him. The fourth time, they do not forgive him.” So, that's pretty solid teaching from the rabbis, three times.

Now, what's going on with Peter? Well, I think that Peter has been watching Jesus' sweet, merciful, loving ministry for all of these years, and he knows that three times just can't be enough. He's seen Jesus be gracious to tax collectors and prostitutes, he's seen Jesus be gracious to his own enemies who are trying to kill him. We've seen him be gracious to Pharisees and Sadducees and lepers, and it's just a river of grace and mercy and so, he says, “Well, we've gotta up the ante. Maybe double it and add one,” okay? How about seven times, up to seven times, is that good enough?

But Peter is still thinking like a man does. He's thinking in the ordinary human way, of forgiveness measured in the ordinary way, and by ordinary human accounting techniques. Imagine keeping a tally sheet saying, alright, you're up to four times now. More than half way here, you only have three left. Use them well. That kind of thing. This is just human arithmetic, and we know from 1 Corinthians 13, it says, “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

And so, Christ wants to expand Peter's heart and mind and takes him to the infinitude of God's forgiveness of us as sinners. Based on that, commands us to forgive freely from the heart. He gives an overwhelming and a stunning answer in this parable of the 10,000 talents.

And basically, the answer I get is, there is no limit, there's no limit. Jesus says in verse 22, “I do not say to you seven times, but 70 times seven.” 70 times seven. The Greek, definitely, I think tends not merely to 77 times as the NIV gives us, but 70 times seven as we have in the King James, New American, RSV, and ESV. So you're up to 490 times, if you're still wanting to keep a record, okay? But that's for everybody. So you can imagine carrying around the record books, okay? You gotta keep a record, and if you have a large family, you need a lot of books. And if you're in a church, you need even more books, you need a wagon full of books for 490 times. You're up to 280, we've got 210 left. It's ridiculous. Clearly, he's pointing to open-ended, unlimited forgiveness. That's what he's doing.

And he gives us the Parable of the 10,000 talents, it's a shocking parable. And I think, as I looked at it, there are four real shockers in it, four real stunning aspects of this parable. First of all, the size, the magnitude of the servant's debt, it's really stunning, 10,000 talents, we'll talk more about in a moment. Secondly, the unconditional forgiveness by the judge that he just at a word forgives it all. Just out of mercy, forgives it all, that's stunning to me. Thirdly, the unforgiveness of the servant after that is stunning, really is the central stunner. Jesus is  meaning for us to be shocked by it. It's really stunning.  And then the final fate of the servant. He gets handed back over to the jailer to be tortured until he should pay back the original debt. Stunning and with theological implications and difficulties. We have four shocking aspects of this parable.

So, let's go at it verse-by-verse. He starts the parable in a common way, he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like...” At the center of this kingdom is a king, and so therefore, as in all of his parables he wants you to come face-to-face with the king. Understand who the king is. And so, there was a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. So we have the first act of this three-act drama.

Okay, the first act is the trial before the king or the accounting, let's say, we'll call it an accounting before the king. All servants are accountable to the king. In the ancient world, the king's authority was absolute. And he was your king and your life was in his hands. Every subject of the kingdom was under his dominion and everyone was accountable to him.

And so, look at verse 24. “As he began the settlement, a man who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him.” It is essential for you as a Christian to see yourself in this light. I am a servant of the king and some day I will stand before him and give him an account. So, this servant who's called in is probably, I think, a high ranking official, perhaps even a nobleman, very high in the kingdom. How else would he come into such a huge debt? And so, he's an important official in the kingdom, but he's still accountable to the master. He must give an account for everything that he's done.

Now this man's debt is astounding, 10,000 talents. Let's try to understand that. It's really an overwhelming debt beyond pretty much, I think, beyond calculation, let's calculate anyway. Bear with my engineering heart for just a moment. A talent was anywhere from 52 to 83 pounds, generally taken to be 75 pounds. So you have 750,000 pounds of some precious metal, generally gold. So let's go with gold, since the tendency of this parable is toward the extreme anyway, so it's 750,000 pounds of gold. Simply doing the math that I didn't check the market this week, I don't know, but let's go with market prices from a week or two ago. You've got $12,400 per pound times 750,000 pounds. So that's $9.3 billion, that's a lot of money. Imagine owing $9.3 billion. But let's go beyond that. Information from the ancient tax record of the time shows that Roman provinces of Jumia, Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, the income from those four provinces was around 900 talents annually. This man owed 11 years of taxes from four regions of the Roman world.

Or again, if that's not good enough for you, how about this? The amount of gold that Solomon used to build his temple was just over 8,000 talents, this guy owed 25% more than the amount of gold Solomon used to build his temple. Solomon in his heyday was taking in 666 talents of gold every year, that means Solomon would have to save up all his gold for 15 years to pay it off. This man wasn't Solomon, this man is in deep trouble. And even beyond that, the Greek word for 10,000 is related to the word for “myriad.” So, if you can just say, forget the calculation, he owed an incalculable debt. One might even say infinite.

Now this man is in deep trouble. It's hard to imagine how any individual could amass such a debt as that. He is unable to pay, one of the great understatements in the entire New Testament. Unable to pay and the king orders that he and his wife, and his children and all that he has be sold to pay the debt. Now, it's not gonna pay it off. I don't care if he and his wife and all his children work the rest of their lives, it will not add up to that kind of sum. It really is just a punishment.

Immediately the servant falls on his face before the king and pleads with him. “Be patient with me,” he says, “and I will pay back everything.” Now this is amazing, it's astonishing, there's no way he can repay this. Solomon himself couldn't have repaid if he saved everything he had for 15 years, and so the king is moved by compassion and pity for this man in this situation. He makes a shocking pronouncement. In verse 27, “The servant's master took pity on him, cancelled the debt, and let him go.” Just like that, just like that, all that money is gone.

Now we know the parable of the prodigal son, it's the father that's prodigal, it's the king that's prodigal. All of that forgiven, just like that, forgiven. Oh, how lavish, and how generous is God. I know we're in the middle of a parable, but I can't stay there that we could owe that much to God and he can just forgive it like that. By simple faith in Jesus, our sins can all be forgiven, it's so astonishing. Oh, how much God deserves our praise and thanks and worship and adoration that our debt has been forgiven just like that by the mercy of God. We'll talk more on that later.

So the servant walks out of the king's throne room a free man, he doesn't owe anybody anything. So now we come to act two of this drama, “He finds another servant who owes him 100 denarii. He grabs him and begins to choke him, ‘Pay back what you owe me.’ The fellow servant falls on his knees and begs him, ‘Be patient with me and I'll pay you back.’ But he refused, instead he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.”

Now, this is a repugnant scene almost beyond imagination. You're supposed to feel a sense of revulsion, like, let's say David did with Nathan, when Nathan came and told the story about a man who took somebody else's sheep and killed it. You're supposed to feel disgusted, but then Jesus says, you are the man, you are the woman. This is who you are when you won't forgive. It's a disgusting story really. He finds his servant and he begins to choke him, just one of his fellow servants. The Greek gives a strong sense of equality before the king, they're on a par, they're just servants of the king, and he begins to choke him.

Now, this man owes him 100 denarii, it is a mistake to minimize that sum, it's a mistake. Because you'll then forget or think improperly about this parable and not understand what's going on. A denarius was a day's wage for a laborer. So you work all day long, you get one denarius. This man owed about a third of a year's wage for a laborer.

So in our day and age it might be somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. So let's say $15,000, it's wrong to look on it as pocket change, a buck 98 or something like that. It's not that, it's maybe $15,000. And imagine, somebody owed you $15,000 and he's not gonna pay you back. It would be upsetting to you. If you minimize the 100 denarii, then you'll also think the parable doesn't have anything to do with this situation in your life or that situation or the other. These are very serious things. That was a minor thing. No, it's a significant sum, but it is nothing compared to the sum that the king forgave the servant. That's the point. As significant as you think it is, it's still nothing compared to what the King has forgiven in your case. That's the whole point.

So, he begins to choke him and, as though he's gonna kill him, something like a collection thug for a mafia racket, he's gonna break both his legs. And what happens next is really quite striking. The servant falls on his knees before him and says, “Be patient with me and I'll pay you back.” Does that sound familiar? It should, it should have sounded familiar to the servant who's choking him. That's exactly what he had done before the king. But the difference is, this man refuses, instead he has the man thrown into prison till he should pay back everything he owes.

So now we come to act three of this drama, act three. The other servants are shocked at what they saw, and they go to the king and they tell the king everything that happened. The king is enraged, and he calls that servant back in. “‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to, shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’” Now, the English word “should” gives a sense of moral imperative. You owe this, you ought to do this, you're in some kind of an obligation. You're in some kind of debt to the king. 

There's a sense of moral obligation here. Hence the title of my sermon. Title of the sermon is the doctrine of the sermon and that is this: “Forgiven Sinners Owe Forgiveness to Other Sinners.” That's the doctrine. Forgiven sinners owe forgiveness to other sinners. And God will hold you accountable for that.

Now, the servant says nothing in act three. There's nothing to say. He is there under the power of the king to hear the king's sentence over him, and there's nothing he can do about it. Verse 34, “In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed.” Now, there is an open question as to whether the servant is now back under the original debt again, the 10,000 talents and it brings us into the theological question of is this a picture of our own salvation with God, down to theological details, like justification by faith, apart from works of the law? And how do we deal with that? Do we go in and out of indebtedness with God, justified one day, not justified the next, back justified again, based on how well we forgive? It cannot be friends.

Justification is a timeless, a once for all declaration by Almighty God that you have been forgiven of all debts, past, present and future. Well, how do you line that up with this parable? I think what's going on here is that Jesus is telling this parable to say, if you don't forgive, you haven't been forgiven. You're not forgiven. You're still under the debt and you always were. And so, if you live a life of unforgiveness, you're not saved, you're not justified, you're not regenerated. No, Christians pay attention to this parable. We take the warning, and we live a life of forgiveness, and we hunt down on forgiveness in our hearts, we hunt it down and we kill it as the murderer of our own souls that it is. That's I think what Jesus is saying here.

So he gives a final warning, verse 35, “This is how my Heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” Now, some may feel that this parable is quite heavy-handed on Jesus' part. Somewhat like he's taking our arm and twisting it behind our back saying, 10,000 talents, you must forgive everyone else, but the phrase from the heart removes that vision or that image.

We should be glad to forgive, we should be delighted to forgive. We should be delighted to be free from bitterness friends, we don't have to walk around hunting people down who owe us things. We can forgive readily, we can forgive quickly, we can live a clear free life. I liken it to, in the Book of Genesis, Jacob talks about the anger of his sons who murdered a whole village because they defiled the sister. And at the end of life, when he's blessing each of the tribes, he talks about the anger and how it has clouded the hearts, their lives are clouded with hatred and anger. I don't want a heart that's clouded, do you? I wanna be like clear mountain water, you know, you scoop it up and you look through a clean glass and it's just as clear as crystal, and the glory of God can shine through it. We should be glad to forgive. Not grudging about it, delighted to forgive.

You know what the key is? The key is the 10,000 talents and the master's pity on you. That's where it comes from. You want power to forgive, go there and work on yourself until you believe the 10,000 talents. You're probably up to 180 talents right now, okay? Alright, alright, I owed God 180 talents. No, you didn't 10,000. No, not quite. Alright, maybe 800. Well just keep working on it, keep thinking, keep praying and little by little, you'll start to see the greatness and the magnitude of God's forgiveness for you in Jesus Christ. And all that you've been forgiven.

Now, I know in this life, you will not come to the full measure. The psalmist says, “I praise the Lord for his salvation every day, though I know not its measure.” You'll find out on Judgment Day, you'll see it. When you see the holy God sitting there on the throne, and you see your life properly and you will see it, then you will be filled with joy and tears of gratitude to Jesus for all he forgave in your case. Right now just take the 10,000 talents on faith, alright? Take the 10,000 talents that you owed God an infinite debt, start there and it will make you a happy forgiver, and you will be glad to forgive anyone else.

So, what are the lessons and implications from this parable? Number one, God is a king; we are all his slaves accountable to him for everything in our lives. Lesson number one. 

Lesson number two, God has an accurate record of all of your sins and mine.

Lesson number three, naturally, our sins are infinite in his sight, an incalculable debt.

Number four, God is willing to cancel our infinite debt. How is that, friends? How can it be? Well, let me just pause and tell you about Jesus. Not the parable teller alone here, but the one who actually pays the 10,000 talents, and not for one individual, but for a countless multitude from every tribe and language and people and nation. Millions and million strong. You can't do the math. And he did it in one afternoon in the shedding of his blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. He shed his blood. “Father forgive them, Father forgive them,” that's what the blood cries.

And if you're a sinner here today and you owe God that 10,000 talents, you have never accepted Jesus' forgiveness, you are in an infinity of trouble, and you face eternity in hell. That's the measure of the infinite debt, eternity in hell, that's how I know it's an infinite debt. But the good news of the Gospel is that, if you just fall on your knees and before the king in the name of Jesus say, forgive me. Oh, let's your blood be for me. Let your salvation be for me that he'll save you. But when you get up from that, he's gonna say, you owe every other sinner you ever meet the rest of your life, you owe them free full forgiveness. Deal? And he only says it 'cause he loves us, 'cause it's right.

And so, lesson five, yes, other's sins against us, make them our debtors. They do owe us 100 denarii, it's a good chunk of money. But let's not forget, there's other horizontal things going on, like, you owe somebody else 100 denarii, multiplied by more times than you wanna hear about, right? So yes, they owe you. You also owe a bunch of other people too, and probably them as well. It's just debt all around, because there's just so much sin, alright?

Lesson number six, we have a powerful tendency not to forgive those horizontal debts. There's something that just rankles us about it and we don't want to do it. We are in effect playing god with a little g. And how much of a lesser God are we than he. He's so gracious, so merciful and loving and we just will not forgive. We say no. Send them to prison, playing little God, that's what we're doing.

Seventh, if God cancels our debts, we owe it to him to cancel other people's debts.

Lesson number eight, if we don't forgive at all, we have none of our sins forgiven in God's sight, and we will go to hell.

Number nine, if we don't forgive specific sins or have difficulty forgiving sins, are slow to forgive, sluggish in some way, our relationship with the king is thereby hindered.

And tenth, forgiveness, if it's genuine, must be from the heart. Those are the 10 lessons I got out of it. You might be able to get 10 more. But let me take all those lessons in this parable, and apply them specifically to this church.

First of all, I just wanna ask, have your sins been forgiven? Have you come to the cross? Have you trusted in Jesus? Don't walk out of here with that 10,000 talent debt, trust in Jesus.

Secondly, I wanna ask you this question, are you a forgiving person? Are you characterized by forgiveness, is that who you are? Would your spouse say that about you, would your children say that about you? Would your parents say that about you? Your friends? Are you generally, freely, and graciously a forgiving person? The implications of this parable is that those who have been forgiven much, love much and those who've been forgiven much, forgive much freely.

If you don't forgive readily, there's a clear implication you may not be saved yourself or if you are, then you have some specific sin problems. Let's look at two of them. Pride for example. You make too much about yourself, you think too much about yourself. Well, you don't know what it's like, you don't know what happened. Well, tell me what happened. Well, it was a family reunion, and my brother made a joke about me, everybody laughed, I laughed too, but it wasn't funny. And every time I get a Christmas card or something or a phone call from him, I remember. Friend, you're making too much of yourself. You are not the center of the universe. Your reputation is not as important as you think it is, and so, you have a pride problem.

Secondly, you probably have a power problem, you know why? Because when you don't forgive, you're in charge. Everybody's gotta walk on eggshells around you, they gotta come kowtowing to you and ask for things from you. And it's kinda a good feeling, you know, you'll kinda be in charge, it's a power play. Friends, it's disgusting. And the sad thing is, all of us have the pride and the power, all of us, that's why we don't forgive. I think the cross of Jesus Christ is a remedy, don't you? Stand before it and be free, be free of pride. The cross is designed to humble you, and me too. Be free of it, be free of power, give it to Jesus, he's the king, not you. Just let him be God, let him forgive.

Third thing I wanna ask is, is there anyone you haven't forgiven? Think right now, just think in your mind, is there somebody you haven't forgiven? Did somebody pop in your mind? That person you're thinking about right now, you haven't forgiven them probably. If a lot of people are popping in your mind, you have a lot of work to do. It's spring cleaning day here at First Baptist Church, you have a lot of work to do.

You have to find out who you haven't forgiven. Let me help you, let me help you think. Let's start at home. Let's start with the husband and wife relationship. Husbands, have your wives sinned against you? If they haven't sinned against you, you're newlyweds, you've been married for one second, okay? And even then, I'm not sure, you know, there are moments. I actually saw a YouTube of a bridegroom as he was taking a vow, taking a cellphone call right there. I couldn't believe it. I think if I'd been the pastor, I would have stopped it and said get another man, okay, you need more counseling. Alright? He took the call, he took the call. They probably had years of counseling ahead of them after that, okay? He took the call.

Well, at any rate, husbands and wives, have your wives sinned against you, husbands? Forgive, forgive. Wives, if your husbands sinned against you, you need to forgive them, Jesus is saying so. And it pollutes your marriage, it pollutes your parenting, it pollutes everything, if you're holding on to old memories of things that happened in the past.

What about parents and children? Staying at home now, we're still at home. We've got growing children, we've got teens at home. We've got children age 8 to 10, whatever. Even at that early age there can already be issues of bitterness and forgiveness. Parents can be bitter towards their own children. Children can be bitter towards their parents and think that they're not parenting them well. Siblings horizontally, brother to brother, brother to sister, sister to sister, sister to brother. Is there unforgiveness going on? Is there anything you need to forgive? Are there incidents? They borrowed your outfit and didn't ask, and then stained it and now you can't wear it, it was your favorite. Forgive. Whatever it is, forgive.

Let's move out to extended family. Let's talk about grown children with aged parents. There is all kinds of room for bitterness and unforgiveness in that kind of a relationship. The aged parents might be bitter toward their children because they neglect them. They don't call enough, they don't show enough care, enough concern, enough consideration. It may all be true, again, 100 denarii is a lot of money. It's a lot of money. And they should be honoring, they should be loving, they should be doing more than they are. It's true, but you still need to forgive. Grown children of parents. Maybe your parents put some habits into you or showed some bad examples that you're fighting even now, maybe you remember some abuse, you remember perhaps some alcohol problems or some other things, and there's just bitterness in your heart towards your elderly parents, maybe that's why you neglect them. You still need to forgive. Extend it out to grown siblings. Brother with brother, brother to sister, sister to sister, sister to brother. Bitterness, unforgiveness, things that were said, things that should have been done.

How about the church? That's a home base of this parable. Let's start with the elder/pastor and church member relationship, okay? There are no perfect elders, no perfect pastors. The sins that pastors hear the most about generally are sins of omission, not sins of commission. Things that the church thinks the pastors should have done. They probably should have done them. They're not perfect men. You need to forgive anyway. Give up on the bitterness, it doesn't help you. And elders need to give up on bitterness against church members as well. Things that were done and said and that hurt, and they're painful. Which people showed a lack of understanding and spoke out of ignorance, words of judgmentalism, needs to be forgiven.

How about horizontally, church member to church member? Do you know what I'm talking about? Are there any issues, any unforgiven debts, I mean, things that were said, things that were done, hurtful things sometimes years or even a decade old or more?

Extend it out to the world. Christian or non-Christian alike. You may have a boss that is, you don't even know what he's like. Forgive him, forgive him.

Ken Sande has written a book called Peacemaker. I think we ordered maybe 10 or 15 of them. They're in the resource center. This is the best book on reconciliation and dealing with problems in relationships, conflict resolution that I've ever seen. Very thorough, very well written. I urge you to get it. He's actually written a number of books along the peacemaker line. This is the main volume, but there's also Young Peacemaker, peacemaker for children and then other different books, and we've got some of them there. I would urge you to get it.

But the children's version stuck with me more than any other. He defines forgiveness in four easy to remember terms, and I've never forgotten and I wanna give it to you. “Good thought, hurt you not, gossip never, friends forever.” When those four things happen, you've forgiven somebody.

Good thought. I'm not gonna harbor bitterness, and have bad thoughts in my heart toward that person. I'm done with it. I wanna be clear as a mountain stream, I wanna be clear of it. I will not think dark thoughts about that person anymore. Good thought.

Hurt you not. I'm not going to go on some kind of rearguard action or a covert operation in the middle of the night with my face black and trying to hurt this person. That's what Christians do. I mean, it's covert operation. A little bit of, and you know how to do it, you know how to play the game or hurt somebody without people knowing, that's what you're doing. Give it up, don't hurt them, bless them, seek to bless, seek to love, to lavish.

Good thought, hurt you not, gossip never. You know what we do, we start getting some allies together. Tell the story, tell it again, tell it a third time. By the way, every time you tell it, you look sweeter, and purer and more like, light, sunlight and they look darker and more evil and it's really frankly not hard to rally allies when you do that kinda thing. Friends, it's gossip, and it's sin, and you make a commitment, I am just not going to tell this story to people, I'm not gonna say anything, I'm not gonna gossip. Gossip never.

And this fourth one, the sweetest of all: friends forever. Look forward to spending eternity in heaven with that person. Think about it, pray for it, and then make it as much like that here on earth as you possibly can. Good thought, hurt you not, gossip never, friends forever.

I wanna finish with a couple of questions on forgiveness and will be done. Should I forgive somebody who hasn't asked forgiveness and doesn't think they need it? What should I do about that? Well, in the context here, if your brother sins against you, go and reprove him, work with him. Bring him to repentance. There is a point in that. But suppose they don't think they've done anything, should you still forgive them? The answer is absolutely yes.

Forgiveness is something you do in your own heart, to free you from bitterness. Suppose the person is dead, are you then jailed to bitterness the rest of your life, a dead parent or whatever? No, you're not. You're able to forgive, even if they never came to you and asked for it. Yes, you can forgive and you ought to, even if they don't ever ask for it. Now, you should labor that they ask for their good, that they could be reconciled, that they could walk, but you don't need it, that's the whole point, you're free already.

Secondly, what about repeat offenders, what if they keep coming back and coming back? Well, I think we're back at the beginning of the sermon, aren't we? Isn’t that what Peter said, “How many times shall I forgive my…” Alright, you guys have up to 490 times, okay, so that you forgive up to 490. The point is, as many as often as they need it.

And third and most poignantly, what about my memories? What about my memories? Let's talk about a very serious sin, like adultery in a relationship, the husband and wife, the offended person wants to continue in the relationship, wants to cover the sin, but they ask this poignant question, “What do I do with my memories?” Well, one of the things, the key things that I've learned about atonement is that God doesn't actually remove the sin as though it never happened. Why? Because he knows it did, he's not writing an alternate universe history in which it never happened. What he does is, he covers it in something more precious. That's the language that's used of atonement. It is the day of covering. And so it says, “Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are” what? “covered.” That's what you do for others. Cover the memory, cover it with the blood of Christ, cover with the grace and the mercy of God. Cover it, cover it, cover it, and as often as it pokes back up, cover it again, cover it until it doesn't need covering anymore. Cover it forever.

Pretty soon there's gonna be a Bible for Life class, elective class on the need, reality, and power of forgiveness, Dr. Bob Hatch is gonna teach it. I urge you, if you can get away, to come and listen. This could be an issue for you. Close with me in prayer.

So this week the staff had an opportunity, privilege, of going to a conference up in Minneapolis, evangelism conference at John Piper's organization. He organized it. Why it had to be in Minneapolis in February, I don't know, but there it was. Some people get to go to Southern California, some people to Hawaii, some to the Grand Caymans, we go to Minneapolis in February. But it was an incredible conference.

And on the way as we were on the plane, providentially I had the opportunity to share the gospel with a young woman, a woman in her mihttp://www.thefieldschurch.org/mediafiles/uploaded/0/0e1840389_050904.mp3s, her name was Jennifer. And the Lord just providentially put that together. She was across the aisle from me and we talked for two hours on that flight. Before you pity her, realize that she could have slid over and sat, there were no seats next to her, she wanted to talk. And we had the opportunity to talk about the most precious and the most important things there are in this world, about the gospel, about her walk with Christ, about her eternal soul.

She had a very traumatic childhood, very traumatic. And it's led to an even more traumatic adulthood now. She's had a couple of children out of wedlock, she was flying to see them from - she was down in the South, she was flying up to Minneapolis to see her children. In recent years, however, the biggest problem in her life was her addiction to crystal meth. Methamphetamine, a devastating drug that absolutely enslaves people and ruins their lives. And what amazed me about her statement to me, is that she felt, she said she'd been clean now for two years, but she said she felt no less attraction to it now than she did two years ago, when she first quit. Still has that much hold on her.

And as we talked, at one point, she pulled out a combination scrapbook and journal which had all kinds of things in it, and she showed it to me, I thought that was incredible that she was opening up her life to me, and she opened up to a particular page, and there was a poem that her sister had sent, concerning the danger of crystal meth and its addictive power. The poem is entitled “I Am Meth.” And I read it, and as I read it, literally tears came to my eyes, and I felt a dark kind of chill come over me. And I'd like you to bear with me as I read that poem, I found it on the Internet and I'd like to read it to you.

It's entitled “I Am Meth.” “I destroy homes. I tear families apart. I take your children and that's just the start. I'm more costly than diamonds, more precious than gold. The sorrow I bring is a sight to behold. If you need me, remember, I'm easily found. I live all around you - in schools and in town. I live with the rich, I live with the poor. I live down the street, maybe next door. I'm made in a lab, but it's not like you think. I can be made under the kitchen sink, in your child's closet, even in the woods. If this scares you to death, well, it certainly should. I have many names, but there's one you know best. I'm sure you've heard of me. My name is crystal meth. My power is awesome. Try me, you'll see. But if you do, you may never break free. Just try me once. And I might let you go. But try me twice and I'll own your soul. When I possess you, you'll steal and you'll lie. You'll do what you have to, just to get high. The crimes you'll commit for my narcotic dreams will be worth the pleasure you'll feel in your arms, your lungs, your nose. You'll lie to your mother, you'll steal from your dad. When you see their tears, you should feel sad. But you'll forget your morals and how you were raised. I'll be your conscience, I'll teach you my ways. I take kids from parents and parents from kids, I turn people from God and separate friends. I'll take everything from you. Your looks and your pride. I'll be with you always, right by your side. You'll give up everything, your family, your home, your friends, your money, then you'll be alone. I'll take and take till you have nothing more to give. When I'm finished with you, you'll be lucky to live. If you try me, be warned, this is no game. If given the chance, I'll drive you insane. I'll ravish your body, I'll control your mind. I'll own you completely. Your soul will be mine. The nightmares I'll give you while lying in bed, the voices you'll hear from inside your head, the sweats, the shakes, the visions you'll see, I want you to know these are all gifts from me. But then it's too late, and you'll know in your heart that you are mine and we shall never part. You'll regret that you tried me, they always do. But you came to me, not I to you. You knew this would happen, many times you were told, but you challenged my power, you chose to be bold. You could have said no and just walked away. If you could live that day over, now what would you say? I'll be your master, you will be my slave. I'll even go with you when you go to your grave. Now that you have met me, what will you do? Will you try me or not? It's all up to you. I can bring you more misery than words can tell. Come take my hand, let me lead you to hell.”

Absolutely chilling, as I read that. There was a blank page facing this poem in her journal. I asked permission if I could write a response. She happily agreed, and handed me the journal and a choice of pens, she's very artistic. I chose just a regular pen, that's me, I'm not very artistic. And I wrote this: “Yes, this is all true; but Jesus said this, ‘Everyone who sins is a slave to sin, but if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.’ John 8:34 and 36.”

Why am I sharing this with you today? Do I think that crystal meth addiction is a big problem here at FBC? No, I do not. Do I think it's likely soon to become a big problem here at FBC? Probably not. If you asked me whether I thought I could become addicted to crystal meth, I have been trained by the gospel to say, absolutely, yes. Because there's really no sin I'm finding that I don't have some connection with, in some way. And that if the Lord withdrew his gracious protection of me, and let Satan and his demons have at me, I could be a crystal meth addict within the week, if not sooner.

But that's not really why I read that poem to you. Rather the “I Am Meth” poem personifies the drug as a taunting power that communicates with its victims and has enslaved them. It speaks as an intelligent force, and so it reminds me, generally, of the power of indwelling sin. If we could only see it now. The spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm, Satan and his demons arrayed against us. If we could only see that magnetic alluring power of the world, if we could see it with our own eyes, even worse, if we could see somehow as though it were a living thing, sin living in us, what would we think then of the battle that all of us are in for our souls, in sanctification? As we grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ, we battle every step of the way with the power of indwelling sin.

Romans 7:15, Paul says, “I do not understand what I do. What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Romans 7:17, “As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” Sin living in me. With Paul, we can cry out, “What a wretched man I am, who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature, a slave to the law of sin.” That is reality, friends, and I need to hear just as much as Jennifer, “If the Son sets you free, you'll be free indeed.” I need to know that, I need to know that Jesus can free me from this indwelling sin, don't you?

And if you don't think you have a problem with it, you don't know yourself, you don't know the power of indwelling sin. Friends, we need all the help we can get, we need all of the avenues of grace that God has lavished toward us, we need them all and we need a good healthy local church that knows that. We need to be for one another what God intended that we be for one another. We need to watch over one another in brotherly love, we need to care about what each other's going through. How sin is making an assault.

Now for two weeks, we've talked about church discipline, I've called it “Dealing with Sin in the Church.” We looked at Matthew 18. I'm not gonna go into detail in these at all. Urge you to look at the text, but there it says, “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault. If he listens to you, you've won your brother over. If he doesn't listen then go, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses, and if he doesn't listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he will not listen to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” It's a process of dealing with sin, all the way to the final step of what we generally know as church discipline.

Last week, we looked at 1 Corinthians 5 and supported the same point where Paul says three times something like this, “You should have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this.” Or he says, “Hand this man over to Satan so that his sinful nature may be destroyed, and his spirit saved in the Day of the Lord.” Or he says at the end, 1 Corinthians 5:13, “Expel the wicked man from among you.” Says it three times, he's utterly clear about it. If this unrepentant sinner, he will not turn, he will not yield, he is a cancer in the church. He is a virus, he must be put out for the benefit of the whole church.

I gave you five motives, the glory of God above all. The possible salvation of the sinner, that they might come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will. The protection of the church from the encroaching power of sin, the preservation of the reputation of the church and of the Lord in that community, so that the church can be salt and light and continue to do its gospel work in the community. And then, fifthly, the restoration and reconciliation of relationships in the church. For all of those reasons, we have to do church discipline.

Now I wanna give you a third key passage, and then I wanna talk for the rest of the time today on practicalities of this issue. Practicalities of dealing with sin in the church, and more specifically the final step of church discipline. I wanna talk about that today, but look with me at Hebrews 3:12-14, which you heard Jim read. Hebrews 3 is a letter of warning, written to some Jewish people who had made professions of faith in Christ, but now under the wilting pressure of persecution from the Jewish community, they were now shrinking back from their commitment to Christ, they weren't going to church anymore, they didn't wanna be named as Christians, they were pulling back. And so the author of this epistle writes this letter of warning to them concerning this.

It says there in Hebrews 3:12-14, “See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God, but encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the confidence we had at first.”

It's the second of a series of three warnings that come in progression that the author gives us. Hebrews 2:1 says, “We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.” This one here talks about the danger of turning away from the living God through a sinful unbelieving heart. Then in Hebrew 6 it says there, “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the powers of the coming age; if they fall away, to be brought back again to repentance, because to their own loss they're crucifying the Son of God all over again.”

So he gives us some steps to apostasy: Drift away, turn away, fall away. And this is, like that poem, crystal meth, this is the enslavement of sin, as it grabs hold and starts to move people away from a profession of faith in Christ.

And the remedy here is, at least in Hebrews 3:12-14, an active, loving church filled with brothers and sisters who care enough to step in and not let it happen. It's a matter of love. And so, look at verse 12, “See to it brothers,” it says, “that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart.” So that he's talking about the context of the church, this is a church issue, and it's a call to spiritual vigilance within the Christian church. “See to it,” literally watch, be vigilant. Look. See. Have your eyes open, please. Pay attention to each other. See to it, brothers. So this is something we do for other Christians, “that none of you,” it says. We are to care about the whole church. We're to care.

Now, we may not be actively involved in every case or whatever, but we should be caring about whether the whole church is walking well with Jesus. We're to be concerned about that, and that people would finish their salvation journey, that they wouldn't just begin, but that they would actually finish. That we would share Christ's zeal that none would be lost of all that God gave him. Jesus said, “Of all that the Father has given me, I will lose none but raise them up at the last day.” I don't believe that any true Christian truly justified by faith can ever fall away from Christ. I don't believe that, but I believe that these warnings are essential to our ongoing salvation. We need these warnings, like you need the reflectors along a dangerous curve, and you need the guardrail, it helps you make the curve. We need the warning to keep us going the way we need to.

And so, we need to care. Remember the Good Shepherd leaves the 99 on the hills and goes to look for the one that's wandering off. We need to care about whether an individual Christian is wandering away from Jesus, it should matter to us. We should be aware.

“See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” The issue here is that power of indwelling sin. It's the attack, the assault of sin, and it has a work on the human heart. And it causes the human heart to become hardened toward God, to turn away from God, to be unattracted to Jesus. He's not appealing anymore, he's not enticing anymore, we don't love him anymore. And so there's a general gradual hardening of the heart and a turning away, it says, from the living God. He's not a dead idol, he is the living God, he's the only God there is. And now something's happened to make a created being, someone who began the Christian walk, it seems at least, now turn away. They're no longer interested.

See to it that that doesn't happen, that that doesn't happen with anybody in this church. “But encourage one another daily as long as it is called today.” There's the remedy. Encourage. It's a strong word in the Greek. It shows up in that teaching in John's gospel about the Comforter, or the Counselor, the Paraclete is actually almost a literalistic translation. The work of the Holy Spirit then is to be energetically active in our lives, encouraging and consoling and instructing and warning us. He's just there, and he is our guarantee that we're gonna make it through this world. But here now, it's addressed to us, we are to take the Holy Spirit's part, we are to be filled with the Spirit and do this kind of encouragement in each other's lives. “Encourage one another, daily,” it says.

Now I don't read in here any kind of future for FBC to be meeting seven days a week. Phew, I'm glad that's not happening. Seven days a week. But I think we can encourage one another seven days a week. We can be active in each other's lives. This is a daily issue. We fight a daily battle, don't we, with sin? Every day, we fight. Encourage one another daily. And why? So that no one would be hardened by sin's deceptiveness, or deceitfulness, like crystal meth. Like any sin, it doesn't come to you honestly. It doesn't come and say, “Hello, my name is sin. I am here to destroy your world. I'm gonna take you on a journey, and we're going to go hand-by hand. I'm gonna take you down a dark path. And when you're done, your marriage will be ruined. Your parenting will be ruined. Your job, you'll be out of a job, you'll have no respect or esteem left of any of your acquaintances. You'll have no life left. And I would like to continue, I'd like to take you right to the grave and beyond. I'd like to take you to hell.” It doesn't do that. It says, “Hi. I'm sin. I'd like to show you a good time. I'd like to entice you a little bit.” It's deceitful and it's a power to harden us.

So the exhortation said is that we should run this race with endurance, right to the end. “We have,” look at verse 14, “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.” A bit of a mysterious verse, friends. It speaks of a past event. We have come to share in Christ. But then it puts a condition on it. Now that's odd. Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, if. Well, if he was. If I got it right on the test. Did it happen or not? Well, that's a big question.

Did you come to Christ, or not? Did you? Did you really come to Christ? Is there a doubt in your mind? Well there can be, when you start to live a certain way, you start to sin, you start to get into certain patterns, there starts to be some doubts. Am I really a Christian? We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the confidence we had at first. Genuine Christians do.

You know who these warnings are for? They're for the elect of God. They're for the genuine Christians, they heed them. The others, they don't, they blow them off. You know who takes these things seriously? I do. And if you're a child of God, you do too. And we listen, and we will stand firm to the end, won't we? Because we know that there's a danger of apostasy. And so that's the function here. Alright, so what are we to do? Well, we're to obey those verses. Encourage one another, get involved in each other's lives, love one another, care, know and be known, get involved, pray, listen, talk about real things, spiritual things, develop intimacy with one another, so that you can help each other.

Now, I wanna talk about some practical issues of church discipline. Now church discipline, you generally think of only that final step, getting voted out, excommunicated, those kind of things. Well, first of all, I think, I hope I've established in Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 that that is biblical, it is right, it is a good thing to do if need be, but what I wanna do with you now is to show that the church has been given an array of tools or instruments in each other's lives to deal with sin at a deep level all the way, comprehensively, before you get to that final step, the ultimate step of church discipline. And I wanna talk about that.

There are two different kinds of church discipline, there's formative church discipline and there's punitive church discipline. Formative happens beforehand, early on in the sin process, so that the sin gets nipped in the bud early. So that sin can be dealt with early on before it gets to have a deep root system. So formative is going on all the time, and it's all part of church discipline or, if you prefer, discipleship, church discipleship, they're related. And so it's going on all the time. And then punitive is that final step, dealing with an unrepentant sinner, you get to that final stage. Punitive.

Now, what I wanna give you here is a sense of a toolbox of dealing with sin that the Lord has given. What I did was I looked at different verbs that there are in the New Testament of what we are to do and be for each other. And so I studied all of these different verbs and all that, and I started to see different tools. Now, that's me, I'm a guy. I think like tools, okay, you got a job to fix, it's something to fix, you gotta fix the washing machine, like I did when I got back from my conference this week. “I get to fix the washing machine. Oh joy!” And so I got out my tools, “I get to use my tools!” I wish I could tell you that was my attitude, but at any rate, I had tools, and you pull out the right tool for the right thing, the socket wrench for this and the screwdriver for that, etcetera.

Or, if you prefer, we have some medical people. You have your surgical instruments out on the tray and you know what each of those instruments is for. You're skillful, you're trained, you understand, and you pick up the right instrument, maybe you're a dentist, you know the right instrument, and you know what it's going to address.

Or perhaps you like to cook, and so your kitchen is arrayed with all kinds of kitchen utensils, and you know what you use in order to cook. You know what to use to peel the potatoes, what to use to cut them up, what saucepan to use, I'm out of my depth here, so I'm gonna move on. You know, you get the point. So different things you use for different tasks.

And so here it is also, God has given us different things we are to do for each other depending on the sin situation, or the threatening sin. So this is all long before you get to that final stage of church discipline. Do you see what I'm saying? It's a whole life together that we have.

There's a hint of this in 1 Thessalonians 5:14. Listen to the verse, it says, “And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, and be patient with everyone.” So here you've got different categories of people and you're given a different task to do with each one, right? You're told to warn those who are idle, you're told to encourage those that are timid, and you're told to help those that are weak. So you have to be discerning to know who is idle, who is weak, who is needy in various ways, and you can pick up the tool and use it properly.

Alright, so let's start with these different conditions. Let's say a person just needs information about the spiritual life, they just don't know. They are ignorant in some way of God's will. It's not a moral issue, they just have never learned. The Bible tells us to teach or instruct or inform that person. So we'll start there. The sin then would be that they would over that long period of time continue in an ignorant state of things they should know by now. And so therefore, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:1, “Now about spiritual gifts, brothers. I do not want you to be ignorant.” So how does he remedy their possible ignorance? He teaches them many things about spiritual gifts over three chapters, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, 14 are all about spiritual gifts in the church. He teaches them.

Alright, so it says in Colossians 3:16, “Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom.” So, that's the first step. You discern that somebody just doesn't know something, and they need some help. That's what Priscilla and Aquila did with Apollos, he just didn't know some things about Jesus. And so they instructed him.

Secondly, suppose a person is doing well in their Christian life, they're being fruitful, things are going well. Should we do anything? Well, is there any possible sin? Yeah, they might stop doing well. Or they might just plateau, when they could really be doing even better. And so therefore, the Scripture tells us to encourage such a person or even praise them, “Honor such a man as this,” Philippians 2, Epaphroditus. He almost died for the work of Christ, so honor him. So there's a sense of encouragement that happens. We should be praising and encouraging one another at the human level, not ultimate worship, but we're just saying, “Well done, you're doing well, thank you. That's a good ministry you're doing.”

So we have this, 1 Thessalonians 4:1, “Finally brothers. We instructed you how to live.” That's the instruction, we already told you how to live in order to please God, instruction, “as in fact you are living.” So there he encourages them. You're doing it, good job. Well done. “As in fact you are living. Now, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more,” keep it going, keep it going, keep it going. Alright, second. So we deal with the person who's doing well and they're being fruitful.

How about thirdly, a person who just needs to get going in the Christian life? They know what to do, but they really haven't been doing it, They haven't gotten off the dime. They need to get going in the Christian life and so, they're delaying obedience in some area. The New Testament then would use language like “exhort” or “urge” or “spur on.” I love that one, spur one another on toward love and good deeds. What a picture. I got spurs, that jingle jangle jingle, I got some spurs here, I'm gonna spur you on to love and good deeds, alright. Hey, look there's good ways of doing that spurring in bad ways. I've been spurred in some ways I thought were bad, but they were effective any way, they did get me going. Alright, but it's a matter of exhortation. 

Alright, think about Hebrews 6:1, “Therefore, let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.” He's urging them, he's exhorting them to move on so that they won't continue in spiritual laziness. So again, there's that urging, like a coach saying, “Come on now, you know what to do, do it, let's get going.”

Alright, fourthly, suppose a person is going through a great trial in their lives, suffering a great trial. They cry a lot, they're having a hard time. The New Testament tells us to comfort or to console such a person so that they won't become discouraged or depressed and be susceptible to Satan's attacks. Comfort them, console them, okay, so that they can be encouraged. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our trouble so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” In other words, God brings us into trials, makes us hurt for a while, brings some kind of comfort and consolation. We remember that, and then we are now equipped to go and do that for somebody else.

Now do you see why it's important to pick up the right tool for the right job? Woe to us if we misdiagnose. If we use spurring on or exhortation when somebody could use a word of comfort and consolation, an arm around them, some weeping and some prayer. Rejoice with those who rejoice, yes. But mourn with those who mourn. We've got to be wise here, let's know each other enough to know what the situation calls for. But there is a great danger when somebody's going through a tough trial that they'll become discouraged and depressed and be vulnerable to Satan's attacks, and we need to help them not be. Let them know that there's a body around them to help them.

Fifthly, if a person is starting to go wrong in a new habit that is just beginning to form, beginning to nibble a bit at the bait of a potentially serious sin pattern that may lead to sin. The New Testament tells us to warn or correct or admonish. Those are stronger words. This I think is the beginning of that Matthew 18 process. If your brother sins against you, now go deal with him. “Reprove him” is the word there, show him his fault, deal with him, please. Because this is a dangerous thing. Warn him. So he says in 1 Corinthians 4:14, “I'm not writing this to shame you, but to warn you as my dear children.”

Sixth, suppose a person is determined to go wrong. I mean, you've been through all of these other stages with them, you have worked with them, you have done Matthew 18 with them, and you're trying, they're willfully progressing deeper. The Lord then would pull out the word “rebuke.” Alright? Rebuke. It's not something you use quickly, it's something that you've been through other steps and they're just not listening. And so it's like a verbal slap, a warning, okay. Titus 1, as Titus was there ministering in Crete, Paul writes him about the Cretans. He said “even one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’” Wow. “This testimony is true,” said Paul, “therefore, rebuke them sharply so that they will be sound in the faith.” You see the motive again, the motive is to bring health, but you're at that level where you've gotta rebuke them sharply, okay?

And then finally, sadly, if the person after all of this is unrepentant, then they must be removed from the church. Do you see where it fits then, guys? That there's this whole array of things we're to do for each other, and church discipline the final step. But the church must have this tool, it must. And if it doesn't, it actually changes everything. We need to have the right, the power, the authority to expel sinful people from among us after all the work has been done. And so we do.

Now in terms of formative discipline, the greatest ministry is the ministry of the Word, the ongoing ministry of the Word is the greatest power for formative discipline in the life of the church. So good, clear preaching, good work in your Bible for Life classes, home fellowships, your occasional Bible studies, men's Bible studies, women's Bible studies, all of that. The ministry of the Word, just in the halls as you teach and admonish one another, that work is the most important of all in this area of formative discipline.

So also is the ministry, the ongoing ministry of spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts has a power for dealing with sin. It just does, it's just formative discipline all the time. Let me give you an example. Suppose somebody just has a sweet gift of hospitality, they just have a wonderful gift of hospitality. I'm convicted by that, I am. I'll go to their home, the meal is phenomenal, the warmth, there's a sense of welcome, a magnetism there. People just have that gift, you know what I'm talking about? They just have that gift. And even though I may not have the gift of hospitality, it makes me wanna do better, you know what I'm saying? I just wanna be more hospitable when I'm around that. Somebody has the gift of encouragement. I may not have that gift, but it makes me wanna encourage more. You know what I'm saying. So the ministry of spiritual gifts in the life of the church helps us deal with sin, all the time, it's powerful.

So also do intentional discipleship relationships. Alright, I think that just the regular ongoing life of the church is important that we know each other in Bible for Life classes, that's important. Let's get to know each other, but there's not a lot of time. And it's not a great forum for intimacy there. Alright, regular church attendance is essential, very important, but again it's tough for intimacy. Home fellowships are really important in this. Do you see that? Build relationships in your home fellowships, share your requests with one another. Help each other.

And I also believe in intentional discipleship and accountability relationships. Men with men, and women with women, never crossgender, never. I mean not counting husband and wife. That goes without saying, and I will say that even in the husband-wife relationship, there can be a deepening and enriching spiritually, where you can hold each other accountable more, in a sweet way. Don't forget to be kind, please, alright, but just that loving relationship. But others, outside that marriage relationship, men with men, women with women, you're developing those deep relationships, know and be known, and develop intimacy over the years so that you can hold each other accountable.

CJ Mahaney in his book on humility, talks about the close accountability relationships that he's developed with his staff. And these men are really serious about holding one another accountable. It's very serious. And they deal with all kinds of stuff. And one time, it's a very humorous story, he tells that he was struggling with something, and he told about some incident and shared how he was sorry for his sin and just wanted them to pray and kind of hold him accountable. But they're like, they were just getting started at that point, they were intrigued, like, “Tell me more.” “Well, I've told you what you need to know” “No, no, no, no. Tell me more. Now what happened, what were you feeling?” They were digging in, alright. And he started to get a little offended, a little prideful, and there was just more work that needed to be done, and they were rooting around and they found something deeper and pulled it out. Not a pleasant process. Very humorous, the way he tells it, you have to get the book to read it. But the thing is there was that kind of intimacy and a willingness not to just accept the surface answer “Hey, I'm doing great.” Or the sacrificial sin, it's like, “I'm really struggling with such and such,” but what you're really doing with is this. But you’re giving this one up. Know and be known. 

Now, I wanna deal with some common questions concerning church discipline and then apply this three-week topic to people of different categories in the church and we'll be done. First of all, in Matthew 18, it says we should go if our brother sins. Does this refer to any sin at all or only to serious sins? Well, again, as I said in that sermon, you need to be discerning, you need to ask for wisdom. We can't have the metal detector set to go off at a gum wrapper, as I said. So you've got to know what kinds of things are starting to root in and form a habit in somebody's life that you can help with or is there something you just need to bear with and put up with? So ask God to give you wisdom, don't go for everything.

What kind of relationship should the church have with somebody who's been disciplined, somebody who has been evicted from membership? Well, again, I mentioned at that time but we should carry on a normal human relationship with them in this sense, if they need medical attention we should give it to them. We shouldn't be unkind or rude to them. We should hold the door for them as they walk in, etcetera. We're not trying to be rude, unkind people, but there should be a constant abiding sense that there's a barrier between us. There's an issue. Because I love Jesus, and you don't, it seems. You're not willing to repent of sin. Oh, how I wish you'd come back. I want you to come back. But there's a problem between us.

Another question is, can a disciplined person attend church? Absolutely, they can attend. Jesus said treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Pagans and tax collectors are welcome here at First Baptist Church. Bring them in, bring them in, alright? Our central ministry isn't directly to that kind, but I think at all times, we're gonna seek to preach the gospel and seek to bring people to faith in Christ, and they can come. Yes, they can come, but they can't take the Lord's Supper. They can't vote at member's meetings. They are not members of the church anymore. And we can't really say to them, “Oh magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together.” There's a definite problem there, but yeah, they can be in the building.

Can a disciplined person be restored to full church membership? Absolutely, friends, that's the hope, that's the prayer that they will be liberated from sin and come back. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 5, this guy is disciplined, it seems he repented and came back in 2 Corinthians 2. Paul urges them to welcome him back. So we're desiring to see that.

What about lawsuits? Could the church be sued? Yes, the church could be sued. I could give a long answer to this. I won't right now, but it is an issue, and ever more so. But let me ask you a question, is it legal in some of these closed countries, for those Christians to assemble on Sunday morning and sing praise songs and worship? The answer: clearly no, that's why they're closed countries. They could get arrested for worshipping. Should they worship anyway? Yes, they should. Alright, so let's not be bound by fear, but we should be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Let's try to find out what the laws are and let's try to be careful, alright? We are very clear in our new member classes that if you join us, you might have to be disciplined, and we try to be clear about that so that people know ahead of time.

Now, I wanna cover some important discipline cases. The number one case of church discipline in this church up to this point, and it will continue to be so, the number one thing we discipline or vote people out for is failure to attend church. And it will continue to be so. They are forsaking the assembling of themselves together. I am not talking about homebound people or people with medical issues, neither am I talking about people who have excused absences for a long time because of business or other issues. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about able-bodied people who are not attending church, either in this community or wherever they are. They are not attending church.

So basic exhortation, attend church. Keep coming to church, friends, keep coming. I believe that failure to attend church is a masking sin for a deeper heart issue. They don't wanna come because they don't wanna come, and they don't wanna come because the hardness of sin has already started to take root.

Secondly, there's the issue of non-attending members of this church who are adult children of regularly attending members. So we've got regular attending members and they've got grown kids who are still on the roll here at this church, but they're not attending church anywhere, and the adults are regularly attending here, and it's a sensitive and touchy issue. They want to keep the names on the rolls, but they're not attending anywhere. And all I'm saying is the real issue is, are they converted? Have they been born again? Yes, they were baptized maybe when they were 12, some things happened, all that, but they're not going to church at all, they're not walking clearly with the Lord. They should be dealt with as anyone else.

And I guess what I'm asking is, if you're in that condition and you have an adult child who's not attending anywhere, please don't make it difficult for the elders in the church to do what they need to do. Actually, you should be active and involved in that same thing, saying, “You need to be involved in church, and if you're not, we need to vote you out.” You should lead the way in that and not hinder it. So look after your grown children. I know there comes a point where all you can do is pray, you can have some influence, but the church does have responsibility. There's no reason we should carry those names on our roll if they're not regularly attending here. And if they are attending somewhere else, that's fine, we need to clarify those records, and we need to get that information done, okay?

What kinds of sins do we do public church discipline for? Well, entrenched patterns of unrepentance, Matthew 18. Sins of divisiveness. Titus 3 says, “Warn a divisive person once, warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them.” Okay, so sins of divisiveness that rip or rupture at the unity of the church. Sins of elders are dealt with in a special case. “Don't entertain,” it says in 1 Timothy 5, “an accusation against an elder, unless it's corroborated by the testimony of two or three witnesses, but those that have sinned are to be rebuked publicly,” it says, “so that others may take warning.” 1 Timothy 5. And then the spreading of false doctrine. Very serious and deadly for the church. Acts 20, Paul says, “Be on your guard, men will rise up from your own number to draw away disciples after themselves.” Watch out.

Alright, finally, I want to just apply these things to various folks. First I wanna speak to the unbeliever. I wanna speak to somebody here who has never trusted in Christ. You may say, “Well what is all this? Why would you even do this? It seems kind of unfriendly, unloving.” The reason is, I go back to the crystal meth thing at the very beginning, because sin is deadly. Sin is deadly, it wants to have your very soul, it wants to bring you to hell, it is dangerous. And it says, “Whoever has not received Christ is under the wrath of God already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God,” John 3:36. You're in great danger. I just urge you to repent, look to Christ, he shed his blood, his blood is sufficient. The Son of God shed his blood for sinners like you and me. Trust in him, apart from works, you can just trust in him and he will bring you to heaven, He will give you eternal life. Look to him. And just realize if this church deals so seriously with sin, then how much more someone like yourself who the Bible says is dead in transgressions and sins.

Secondly, to address individual Christians who are here, you may be visiting, you're a Christian, not a member of this church. I would urge you, first and foremost, and this is for all of us, seek personal holiness above all things. Yearn for it, be hungry and thirsty for righteousness in your own life, fight sin. This is an incredibly important issue. Be willing to do whatever it takes to address sin. Jesus said, “If your right hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” And be humble. Humility is essential. Don't say I don't really need this, I'm doing fine. It says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,” so be humble and he'll give you what you need.

And then concerning membership, I would say, be a member of a good church. If you're not a member of any church, I'd urge you to seek membership. If you live locally here, become a member here at this church. A number of people, I think, that regularly attend for a long time, but they don't commit in membership, I would urge you to commit in membership. So that you can be watched over, and that you can watch over one another and we can have that covenant relationship together. So be part of a church. We've got the new members weekend coming up. Be part of that. 

To FBC members I wanna say a couple of things. First of all, please accept your responsibility for the holiness and the ongoing sanctification of other members of this church. Accept your responsibility for that, care about it, obey Hebrews 3:12-14, “Watch over one another in brotherly love, carry each other's burdens.”

Secondly, just very practically, if I could urge you to get a copy of the church's phone directory and pray through it daily. Just pray through it daily. That's what the elders are doing. There's 28 pages, I think it is, that works out well with the month, a page a day for the month, and then cycle around again. Pray for everyone in the church 12 times a year, at least.

You know what that's gonna do to you? You're gonna start noticing other people more. You're going to start caring about what's going on in their lives. Do it, not just the elders. We're doing it, you do it too. Get a phone list and start praying every day for the members of this church.

And if you see sin in a brother or sister's life, begin immediately by praying for them. God will give you wisdom whether you're to go, but begin praying for that sin issue. And when you pray for that sin issue, I had urged you to do what Jonathan Edwards did in resolution number eight, of all of his 70 resolutions. He said, “Resolved, whenever I see a sin pattern in someone else's life to think first and foremost that no one is as vile and wicked as I am, and that I myself struggle with the exact same kinds of sins.” Well that's gonna work that kind of humility in you. But please pray, and if you go, then go with that humility and go with that kind of brokenness.

And accept your responsibility in corporate church discipline, understand that mushy sentimental love that sees a damaging sin pattern in a brother's life but says, “Live and let live, it wouldn't be loving ...” it's no love at all, my friends. It is self-serving cowardice. Be courageous enough to go if the Lord is leading you to go. Go in love, go gently, but please go.

To the elders, of whom I am one, the greatest call in all of this to me is that I need to be holy, and the greatest thing that I can give to the church in this area is my own personal holiness, that I would fight the good fight. Pray for me that I would fight the good fight, and don't just pray for me, but pray for the other elders. But to the elders here, I say to you fight that good fight, walk in holiness, in newness of life, and shepherd the flock that's entrusted to your care in this area.

To other congregations who may be listening to this message online, if I could just say one thing, please don't, without any kind of inquiry or without any kind of investigation, accept disciplined members from other sister churches. You do not help the cause of Christ when you do that. Ask a person who's presenting themselves for membership, “Are there any outstanding discipline cases between you and your present church?” Ask that question. And if there are, send them back to that first church to deal with it. Now there are specific issues on my mind with that, with even some local churches here, and I'm just saying that ought not to be.

And finally, if you are ever disciplined, if this ever happens to you, if this church or any church should vote that you be excommunicated, I would urge you to stop everything you're doing in your life and seek God with everything you have. And keep in mind this Scripture, 2 Corinthians 13:5,
“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith: test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you, unless of course, you fail the test.” Test yourself to see if you're actually in the faith, and repent quickly and come back. We want you back. Close with me in prayer.

So I'd like to focus your attention on 1 Corinthians 5 this morning. I was meditating on a phrase, a word in Psalm 104 which says, “How many are your works, O Lord, in wisdom you made them all.” The wisdom of God is put on display in physical creation, in ways we can scarcely imagine. The weaving together of ecosystems, of cycles of life, of different species, higher and lower orders, that all of it is woven together in a marvelous fabric of wisdom is beyond comprehension. We can study it and we can be amazed at it, but all we can do with the psalmist, Psalm 104, is say, “in wisdom you made them all.” The manifold wisdom of God in physical creation.

But I find a far greater wisdom in the gospel and the way that God has chosen to deal with sin, because it's a more complex problem. Sin is a diabolical thing, very, very difficult to defeat. And God in his wisdom has established the Gospel of Jesus Christ and after 11 chapters of explaining it in Romans, Paul says, “Oh, the depth of the riches, the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?” The wisdom of God in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so marvelous that God would send his only son, that Jesus would take on a human body, that he would live a sinless life and die an atoning death in our place under the wrath of God, and that he would be raised from the dead on the third day.

And now sitting at the right hand of God, he intercedes for his people until every last one of them are perfectly saved. The wisdom of God and salvation coming to us in stages, in justification at the very beginning of the Christian life that we are declared not guilty of all of our sins by simple faith in Christ, apart from any of our works. That we stand holy and blameless in the sight of almighty God, simply by a gift of grace. And nothing can change that. We're secure in that. And how beautiful is that?

And then, the wisdom of God in sanctification, that in our daily life performance, we are called to live up to the calling we have received. We are children of the living God, we are sons and daughters of a Holy God, and it is to the glory of God that we work out our salvation with fear and trembling for God is at work in us. So we see the wisdom of God there.

But in Ephesians 3:10, Paul says that God has done all of these things in order that the manifold wisdom of God should be made known, or revealed, in the church. The church is a display of the wisdom of God. Ephesians 3:10 and the wisdom of God is put on display in how the church ministers the gospel, both to the lost and those that have declared themselves Christians through faith in Christ. The wisdom of God in the church.

I've been meditating on that and thinking about it and how deep it is. And it led me to ask the question as we're looking for the second week on dealing with sin in the church, what is a church, what does Paul mean in Ephesians 3:10 by the church. What is the church? Is it wherever two or three are gathered in Christ's name, is that a church? Is it where an evangelist stands up on a platform and preaches boldly and clearly the true gospel of Jesus Christ to a mixed group out in Central Park in New York City, is that a church?  How about a college fellowship on a Friday night, meeting together in the name of the Great Commission, and hearing good Christian songs played by a skilled musician using a guitar and maybe some percussion and discussing practical life issues related to college life as Christians, is that a church, Friday evening? What is a church?

Well, during the 16th century when the reformation was going on and the Roman Catholic pope declared that anyone that followed Martin Luther and what came to be known as Protestantism was kicked out of the Roman Catholic Church, and even more significantly, when the word of God was translated into the common tongue of the people and everybody started studying it and trying to understand the Scriptures, really for the first time, this issue of what is the church started to emerge. What is the church universal, the body of Christ, what is that? But then also, very importantly, what is that local church, that gathered assembly of people that comes together?

Protestant theologians isolated three features of a true church. Number one, where the word of God is preached faithfully in the name of Jesus Christ. Secondly, where the ordinances of baptism and The Lord's Supper are rightly biblically administered, and thirdly, where church discipline is faithfully and biblically practiced. There you have a church.

Well, those people are smarter than me, so I'll just accept that. I don't know if I could come up with a better definition. But I'll accept that. The word of God preached in the name of Jesus Christ and you have baptism and the Lord's supper, and then you have church discipline. Now, in church discipline that we're looking at for the second week, implied in that is, membership, I think. So I might wanna put that in there, perhaps as a fourth. That the people covenant together they agree together to be a church in the name of Christ. And I think that's implied in the third one.

I think probably the greatest contribution of Baptists in church history to the understanding of scripture and the way of God with us as sinners has been in answering the question of what is the local church. Baptists, reading the New Testament carefully, determined the local church, as much as possible, be comprised of born again people. As over against the state church in Christendom there in Europe where infants would be born a certain region and they were automatically part of the regional or national church. Whoever was the king, if he was a Protestant, then he would be baptized into the Protestant faith, and if he was a Catholic, he would be baptized into the Catholic Church and that was their understanding.

Baptists said “No, no, it's a gathered church of people that are believers in Jesus Christ, and they come together to be a church together for one another.” And Baptists saw two great safeguards to this believers' church, this born again church. Two great safeguards, and it was first and foremost believer baptism. Baptism should be administered only to those who can give a credible profession of faith in Christ. And then second, the issue of church discipline, recognizing - and I can testify to this - it's easy to fool a pastor, friends. You just need to know what to say when we ask how do you know that you're born again? And there's a certain language, a certain dialect you can, if you can speak the language of Heaven, you can fool me. Won't do you any good on judgment day my friends, but you can fool me, and I'll accept you and I'll baptize you. Okay, but what if then some people begin to live like unsaved people? What if they start to sin and they will not repent? And so baptists saw, and I think we should see church discipline is a safeguard in the wisdom of God, to the health of the church.

Now, last week, we began by looking at the issue of God's holiness. God said, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy,” and we saw that holiness is very much at the center of the nature of God. God is holy, infinitely separated and above all that he physically created and spiritually created, infinitely high and lifted up. And God also in a very special way for us in our history with sin and wickedness, having eaten, our first father, eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God is separate from evil, he's holy and separate from evil.

And I established that we find our greatest health and happiness and fruitfulness in holiness. That's where it is friends. You wanna be happy, then be holy in Jesus. You wanna be fruitful, then be holy in Jesus. And we're heading to a world I said, of perfect happiness because it's a world of perfect holiness, absolutely perfectly conformed to God and to Christ. That's where we're heading. Oh how much I yearn to be there now, even now. Not because I'm afraid to preach a sermon on church discipline, I'm not. But just how sweet would it be to be there and to see the Holy God and not be incinerated by it, but to be equipped and empowered to see Almighty God with our own eyes.

Now, last week, we looked at one of the two great passages on the issue directly of church discipline. There are other passages as well but last week we looked at Matthew 18:15-20, and today to continue that teaching on dealing with sin in the church, I wanna look at the second great passage on church discipline, 1 Corinthians 5. Next week I want to add one more sermon on church discipline in which I answer case studies in particular, details of application that inevitably rise up in people's minds. What about this, what about that, what will it mean that kind of thing? There just wasn't time this morning to do all of that.

So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to walk carefully through, after some introduction, I'm gonna walk carefully through 1 Corinthians 5, which Daniel read for you. I'm just gonna go verse by verse and try to explain it. And then I'm gonna draw out from 1 Corinthians 5, five great motives for a local church to be involved in church discipline and that’s where the message will end. And next week we'll talk about practical applications of dealing with sin in the church.

Now, in order to do this, I think it's right for us to have a sense of our context as a people, where do we fit in, not only in church history, but just in human history, in American history, what is our prevailing spirit? And as I look around in our culture, the prevailing spirit of postmodern America is tolerance and relativism. We live in that postmodern era, where there is an absolute uncertainty about absolute truth. That's one thing we can be absolutely clear about is that there's no clarity about absolute truth. So that's one thing we can embrace. And so that leads us to relativism: there's truth for me, and truth for you, and truth for somebody else. And it all is on a sliding scale graded on a curve, that kind of thing, and there's no fixed marks in the metaphysical world and the issues of righteousness and holiness, and right relating to God and all those things we really can't know.

Along with that, we have in America especially a fierce individualism, a celebrating of the individual, the individual rights, individual powers and capabilities, individualism. Every person an island and the idea of mutual accountability tends to be shunned, not embraced. We have rights. We think about that much, the rights of the individual. Supreme Court found in 1965 an inalienable right to privacy, which became the foundation to the Roe versus Wade decision eight years later. So we have this idea of personal rights and freedoms that kinda thing.

We have also that theme that's not unique to us, I think it's really been there since the fall, but of questioning authority: what right do you have to tell me what to do? It's old, that one is old. As they said to Moses, “Who gave you, who appointed you ruler and judge over us? What right do you have to judge me? Who are you?” So, that's old. It's been around a long time, authority in general is suspect and how much more then a spiritual authority that deals with shameful and personal issues like sin? If any authority would be shunned, it would be something like that.

And so we have this issue of tolerance in America. America is in an interesting culture with an interesting history, many different people from all over the world thrown together, and the only way to make it work and pluralism is a sense of tolerance that we need to get along with each other. And some have even gone so far as to call tolerance the greatest virtue, which I find a bit odd when you think about it. What do you tolerate but something that's offensive to you or something you think is wrong? And so to call that the greatest virtue, I think, is really impoverished. There's so many greater virtues like beauty or some other things like that, but that tolerance would be seen to be the greatest virtue, I think it just comes out of the fact that Europe spent so much time shedding blood over religious issues, and I think they didn't want to do that here. So Ayn Rand in her novel The Fountainhead actually made this statement: “We must have tolerance for the opinions of others, because tolerance is the greatest virtue.”

American educators have imbibed this at one level. They mix together for the students in public school, a potent cocktail of self-esteem and tolerance, those things going together. I'm not finding that most lost people need help in the area of self-esteem, which the Bible calls, in that way, pride. I think that kind of thing we do very well. I think we actually need to be humbled. So we come to the cross of Jesus Christ. I think that's the great work of the law and the Holy Spirit. So that we lose our self-esteem in an absolute sense and know that we need Jesus. But then there's this issue of tolerance and so that even we have curriculum that are put together a schedule of teachings that teach people to be tolerant even in some very controversial areas, like homosexuality. And so that's the water we swim in.

Now, what's our historical context? Well, we are Baptists and it's good for us to know that until the 20th century, Baptists completely embraced the pattern of church discipline that I'm preaching today. This church did. There's clear records of it in our historical records of groups of leaders in the church getting together and going and dealing with discipline cases in this church, First Baptist Church, it was done. A friend of mine, church historian, Greg Wills commented, “To a 19th century Baptist, a church without discipline would hardly have counted as a church. Churches held regular days of discipline when the congregation would gather to heal breaches of fellowship, admonish wayward members, rebuke the obstinate and if necessary excommunicate those who resisted discipline. In so doing, congregations understood themselves to be following a biblical pattern laid down by Christ and the apostles for the protection and correction of disciples.” He said that mith century Baptists disciplined on average, Baptist churches, 2% of their membership annually as a regular pattern. Well, what happened?

Well, I think there were, there was some legalism that came in, some Baptist churches did discipline on questionable moral issues like card-playing and dancing. And Greg Will said that dancing was the rock that caused the ship of church discipline to founder and sink. It just became too difficult, there was a culture there and in the end, they threw out discipline, because there were so many dancing cases that came up. You may be wondering where I'm going with that. I'm not going anywhere with that at all, either for or against. I'm just moving on.

But more than anything though, I think it was the church's commendation to the growing changes around us socially and culturally that I've already listed. That started to infiltrate the church and as a result, church discipline started to go by the boards. J. L. Dagg said, “When discipline leaves a Church, Christ leaves with it.”

Picture the glory of the God of Israel rising up in Ezekiel's vision from the temple and moving out from Israel and going away. As J. L. Dagg said when discipline leaves, you can picture Christ that way too, he's gone. Failure to deal properly with sin has devastating consequences, both individually and corporately. Sin is a deadly plague, it's not a minor annoyance. When we allow sin to grow and spread, unchecked, we are pleading for a disaster. Churches grow cold, they become worldly, they lose their power, they lose the Gospel, they are not powerful in God's hands anymore to save lost people. Sinners are no longer converted professing Christians are in constant danger of backsliding and nothing checks it and in the end the churches are not much different than the world.

Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl, instead they put it up on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

The church of Jesus Christ then is supposed to be the salt of the earth, stopping the spread of corruption in this corrupt society that we live in. But if salt loses its saltiness, it becomes worthless, it cannot do that function. The church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be the light of the world. We're supposed to stand and shine like stars in the universe as we hold out the word of truth in a very dark time.

And so Christ has given us clear steps for dealing with sin in Matthew 18 and then through his apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 5. These are two key passages in church discipline, both are essential in understanding Christ’s will for dealing with sin and the body of Christ. But they have a different focus. 

As I mentioned last week, Matthew 18 deals more interpersonally and privately. It's an issue, one to another, just the two of them can deal with it privately, and it can be dealt with that way. But if not, then it goes up to the highest level. And then 1 Corinthians 5 deals with a public scandalous sin that might bring the church into disrepute immediately. So there's a different focus, but the same structure of understanding of the church's role.

Last week, we went through the steps that Jesus covers. Your brother sins against you. You go and show him his fault just between the two of you, You work it out with him, you show him evidence, you bring in the scripture, you go in gentleness, you go in humility. But you go and you try to win your brother back and if he listens, then you've won your brother back but if he's not gonna listen to you, then you're supposed to take one or two others along and you're already starting to get that sense of a court trial that's getting arranged so that witnesses can be there for the encounter. They also can bring another perspective. And so, you go again and you try to win the brother over. But if he doesn't listen to them, then you have to tell it to the church and then if he doesn't listen to the church, you treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Those are the steps that we looked at last time.

Now, Paul gives similar commands but I think a bit different case in 1 Corinthians 5. And what I wanna do is just walk through this and just try to explain it verse by verse. It's a chapter that perhaps not many have studied carefully. I would think it wouldn't be necessarily one of your first chapters that you would memorize if you're going to memorize a chapter, but it's a very important chapter. And I think that tragically to some degree, it seems like many evangelical churches have effectively ripped it out of their Bible as though it didn't even exist. Well, it does exist, and the Lord is going to hold us accountable. And as we listen to this, we're going to get a sense of the apostle Paul's sense of his own authority in Jesus. He is not speaking as a man, he's speaking as an apostle of Jesus Christ, he's really speaking for Christ, and Christ is speaking therefore with great authority to us concerning this matter.

Now the context here is a particularly shocking sin and the Corinthian church's blasé reaction about it. That's the context. Look at verse 1, Paul himself is shocked. It seems something that might make pagan Corinths sit up and take notice. Verse 1, “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife.” So Paul is clear elsewhere, that sexual immorality, is a very grave and serious sin. Here, though, he goes even further, he says, this particular sin is of a kind that the pagans don't even have. And he says, it's a sin that's being reported. It's actually reported, so there's a report of this. It's spreading around, it's known. This thing is going on, it's already gotten out. Some kind of illicit relationship. We can't imagine what it would be. Probably a man with his stepmother, I think is the best way to understand it, but it's clearly just a shocking sin.

And even worse, according to Paul, the Corinthian church is characterized by pride, and you are proud and that's how I would hear it. There's a sense of almost... How could it be that you could actually be proud? Now, what does he mean by this? I don't think he's necessarily proud of the sin. Hey, we've got a good sinner, we've got a sinner more than anyone else has in Corinth. Not that at all, rather, that I think in spite of this gross sin, still their pride is unshaken. They're still confident in who they are.

Pride suffuses, the issue of pride suffuses. This goes right through the letter that Paul gives here. Comes out in their party factions. “I follow Paul, I follow Cephas, I follow Apollos, I follow Christ.” There's that sense of a pride there, comes out in the spiritual gifts, the way that they're boasting about the sign gifts. Speaking in tongues and all that. There's such a boasting issue there. It comes out in their abuses of the Lord's Supper, the pride is there as well, comes out, I think, in their slowness to contribute to the needy among the poor in Jerusalem. Comes out there, comes out all over the place, but here I think they should have been filled with grief and shame.

Paul's job then is to shock them. Verse 2, he says “You are proud! Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this.” So now we come at last to church discipline, there it is, you should have put this man out of your fellowship. That's what we call church discipline, that's what he's saying they should have done.

So Paul in verse 1 and 2 describes the situation and he prescribes the remedy. He also describes, I think, the attitude of the disposition. It's not a happy thing, it's nothing to laugh about, it's nothing to celebrate, it's grievous. It should bring us grief, to go through this. I think one of the reasons that America loves YouTube and scandalous reports of politicians that fall into sin and all that, is it kind of stokes people's pride, and makes them feel okay about the way they live. And so these stories kind of marinate in the public consciousness for days because people like that kind of stuff. And why I think it connects with our pride and makes us feel good about ourselves.

We shouldn't have any of that in the church, we should be filled with grief because we see sin in light of eternity, in light of the throne of Jesus. We see sin in our own hearts. We don't feel prideful as over against this person. I would never do anything like that. We don't feel that at all, we're ashamed, we tremble. We wonder if we might be next. We yearn for the protection of the church, and the protection of the Holy Spirit, we take even more seriously, the fight against sin, that's the attitude. So he gives them not only the prescription but the attitude. You should be filled with grief as this is going through. You should be weeping. There should be a sense of, “Won't you come back?” You're pleading with somebody to repent, that's the attitude.

Verse 3, Paul gives his formal apostolic judgment in the matter: “Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit, and I have already passed judgment on the one who did this just as if I were present.” Notice that Paul uses judgment language, he's going to do it at the end. Look at verses 12 and 13. “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

So he uses this judgment language here. Certainly therefore this is a limiting or bracketing passage to be compared with Jesus's statement: “Judge not, lest you be judged.” We need to hold them together. Scripture interprets scripture. We don't throw one out or the other. There's something to be learned from both and we don't say God has told us never to judge. Well, that is just not true, it just isn't true. There's clearly from the Sermon of the Mount, from Jesus' statement, a kind of judgment you must never do. And it's clearly in 1 Corinthians 5, there is a kind of judgment you absolutely must do, and we have to just understand what each of those is. And so you just do that in context, and try to understand, but to just reject out of hand that the church should never get involved in judging or judgmentalism, or any of that, is just not true, Paul uses that language here. “I've already passed judgment on them,” he says. And you ought to do it formally, even though I'm not there, you ought to do it.

Now, notice that Paul says, “Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit.” He was with that church, though, not physically present, he was with them as an apostle of Jesus Christ, in power through his letter. He is with us still friends, his power is still here, even though he's not physically present. And it's not the power of Paul, it's the power of Jesus speaking through him. Do you believe in that? Do you believe that God speaks through the prophets and the apostles? Isn't this God speaking to us, then? He's here and Paul clearly wanted this sin dealt with immediately and directly.

And so he gives the remedy commanded in verse 4 and 5. He first told them what they should have done, now he commands them to do it. He said, “You should have already done it” but now he commands them to do it. “When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus, and I'm with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved, in the day of the Lord.” Paul is giving, then like a judge making final assessment of the case. He says “You should do this,” this is what the church should do, he's commanding them. The discipline must be done in public assembly, He said, “When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus,” assembled together, “when the Church is assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Secondly, Paul says he is with them in spirit as they've already said, the church is honoring his apostolic authority by reading his letter and following it. He's there, we're taking it seriously. And he says “The power of the Lord Jesus is present.” This goes back to Matthew 18, where he says, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,” and it's really heavenly authority that the church has here. “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” Very ominous.

And I think as you look at it, the early church understood the holiness of Jesus to deal with sin in his church. Think about Ananias and Sapphira, right? Ananias and Sapphira, Acts chapter 5, a couple in that church there, had sold a piece of property, kept back part of the money for themselves, brought the rest of it to the church, everything fine with that, until they lied about the amount. The apostle Peter said “Is this the amount?” And they said, actually one at a time, first Ananias “Yes, this is the amount.” And Peter said, “How could you lie to the Holy Spirit?” And he just drops down dead. Right? Nobody touched him. Nobody did anything. Paul just said, “How could you do that?” And God just struck him dead. An amazing moment.

So also in the Corinthian church, Paul lets them know, maybe they didn't know this, but he said, “I want you to know that a number of you are sick and some have fallen asleep, some have died because of the way you're treating the Lord's Supper.” That's how serious the Lord's Supper is, and the Lord will deal with sin. And so, there's a threat that Jesus could actually cause some people to drop dead if they don't deal with sin. Does God do that kind of thing? Do you believe in a God who does that kind of thing? A God who actually strikes people dead because of sin? Well, the answer is, absolutely. All the way through the Bible, he does this.

So the issue is deadly serious. Paul says then, “Hand this man over to Satan.” Now, this is a difficult phrase for some, but I think it just means “put him out of the fellowship,” that's what he's telling them to do. And I think the idea is you've got this inside, outside, inside language later in verses 12 and 13. So the idea of inside the church, there is safety like Noah's ark. That's where salvation is, that's where the safety is, inside the church. Outside is Satan's world. Outside Satan is god of that world, he's the roaring lion out there. In here, there's safety, friends. This is the church of Jesus Christ. “Hand this man over to Satan” means “put him out of the church.” I think that's what it means.

But it's deeper than that. I think it's the idea that he is one of Satan's children. “You are of your children, the devil,” Jesus says. And so it's the judgment of the church that you should go to the one whose child you are. And I had a discussion with somebody recently and we're talking about this, and they have different interpretations. I acknowledge the church isn't omniscient in this matter, that the church doesn't always know, but in this case here in 1 Corinthians 5, he's dealing with a scandalous sin, there's unrepentance, not dealing with any of that sin at the deepest level. There's a serious question, clearly a serious question about whether this individual's born again or not. And it's the church's judgment that they're not. So that's what “Hand this man over to Satan” means.

And what reason is given? Verse 5, “Hand this man over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and the spirit saved on the day of the Lord.” The ultimate desire is that the individual might repent, come to their senses, escape the trap of the Devil who has taken them captive to do his will. That they might be brought back into the safety of Noah's ark, back in the safety of the church where they can survive the judgment of God. Before the Judgment Day comes, that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord, that’s speaking of Judgment Day. It's a desire that the individual sinner might come to their senses and repent and be saved. More on that in a moment.

He then gives the analogy of the yeast, he says “Your boasting,” verse 6-8, “Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast as you really are. For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore keep the festival. Not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

So this is an analogy of yeast or leaven, yeast is a one-cell fungus that splits readily, multiplies quickly. You put it into flour and when the conditions are right, with the flour and the water and the temperature, the yeast permeates through the whole, the whole loaf, and as it does, just through it, the enzymes and all the process, carbon dioxide gas is formed and bubbles come, and then when it's baked, then the alcohol goes away, and you're left with the bubbles, and that's what makes cakes and breads fluffy.

But in the context of the Bible frequently, then yeast is a symbol of something that permeates and spreads rapidly through a hidden means. Jesus used it to speak of the kingdom of God spreading through the world. I think there, it's positive. But in most other cases it's negative. It usually refers to evil permeating and spreading. And so therefore, he's going back to his Jewish roots here, with the Passover and at the Passover time, they were to rid all of the yeast out of their house. Get rid of all of it. Because what would happen is, a woman would take a little piece of leavened bread and break it off and hold it there and have it for next time.

They didn't have Kroger or Food Lion or Winn-Dixie, and go down and get the yeast, in a little package. Dry yeast. And just mix it in. So they would take off a little portion. Well, if that goes on long enough, don't there start to be some questions about... I mean there are, in my mind, I mean, I'm not sure I would eat that after five, six, seven months of doing that. So, there comes a point where God just wants it all purged. Get rid of it, start over, start fresh. And so therefore there was this Passover command. Paul's reaching for that image. And so, the danger then, if I can speak directly apart from the analogy, the danger is if they don't expel this wicked man, soon, the whole church is going to be, in some sense, infected with his sin. It's going to spread, it's a disease, a plague, and if you don't get rid of it, the church stands in danger of being generally infected with it.

Paul links the sacrifice of Christ as the final fulfillment of the Passover symbolism, so Christ has been sacrificed so that we can be pure and holy, and free from sin. So therefore we need to keep the festival. We need to get rid of our spiritual yeast of malice and wickedness and be pure. And he says, “As you really are.” That's a very important statement. That's a clear statement, I think, on the believer's church. The church is, the real church, is a pure thing. The real church is free from wickedness and sin. In God's eyes, and ultimately will be after salvation is done. That's what you really are now. Act like it. Get rid of the wicked man, that's what he's saying, 'cause he's not part of you. That's what he's getting to.

In Verse 9-11, the prohibition he gives us from associating with immoral so-called brothers. “I've written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people, not at all meaning the people of this world, or immoral or greedy and swindlers or idolaters. In that case, you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer or a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.” Now Paul gets very specific here about the end result of this expulsion. The sinner who claimed to be a Christian, but who lives in this repulsive immorality is a great danger to the church and that kind of man you have to avoid, he says, at all costs.

Now, Paul is clear that he's making a big distinction between someone like this who claims to be a Christian, but is living the sinful wicked way, and somebody who's just a lost person in the world. And he's saying, “Look I'm not calling on you to leave the world, you can't leave the world.” Jesus says in John 17, “Father, I'm going to you, and they're still in the world.” He meant to leave us here. Jesus himself ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. Paul is gonna say we shouldn't be unequally yoked with them, in close covenant and committed relationships with them. But we can be with them, we can eat with them. Jesus did. We can interact with them, but this man is a different case now.

This man claims to be a Christian, but he's never repented; he is basically trampling the Son of God underfoot, to use Hebrews language. He is defiling the blood of Jesus Christ, and he's dangerous. And he says, “with such a man do not even eat.” Now I'm gonna talk next time about the practicalities of what that means. The Amish call it The Ban or Shunning. In my opinion, I think some of those groups go too far.

Jonathan Edwards in his sermon on this helpfully explains it doesn't mean that we don't give basic human kindness to a person like this. Not allowed to hold the door for you, so you let the door bang in his face. Nothing like that. He drops something, you help him pick it up. It doesn't mean either that our biological relationships or our marital relationships have come to an end because of the church's actions. Doesn't mean that either. Husbands and wives are still to carry on, but I think that in a specific way, it does mean something has changed now. A very serious thing that's happened, even in those biological relationships. Brother to brother, sister to sister, that kind of thing, that we recognize. This thing has occurred and you are rejecting Jesus. You're rejecting Christ. That's a very serious thing. “With such a man,” he says, “do not even eat.

And then he uses this inside-outside language in verse 12 and 13. “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.” In my opinion, 1 Corinthians 5:12-13 are the clearest strongest verses in the Bible on the propriety of a clearly defined church membership, so that we know who is the church, who are we dealing with. That implies a list of people that we know who's in and who's not. These are the clearest verses in the Bible for that. And he says “you deal with the people that are on your list, they are in your church, deal with them, God will deal with the rest.” And then he gives the command one final time “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

Now, quickly, I'd like to give you from this five purposes of church discipline: Above all, purpose number one, the glory of God in all things. We are to be the light of the world, we are to shine God's attributes, his radiant nature, out to the world. We do church discipline that we may put God on display as the light of the world. To shine his glory for that reason, for the glory of God, we do this, and because he has commanded that we do it, we glorify him by obeying him and trusting him.

Secondly, we are to be concerned about the salvation of the individual sinner. There is a hope that that person having been through this process might come to their senses, realize what has happened and come back. In my opinion. That's exactly what happens with this individual. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul says, “Welcome him back, he has repented. I've forgiven him, bring him back.”

And so, even in this terrible case, there's a chance of repentance and restoration. Therefore, practically speaking, disciplined people in Baptist churches are frequently still seen there. The next week they couldn't take the Lord's Supper, they were excommunicated, but at the same time, they would be there, they would be listening to the preaching and many times they would come back, they would repent.

The salvation of the individual, verse 5, “so that his Spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.” The ultimate threat here, friends, is not church discipline, you know that. The ultimate threat is hell. Judgment by Christ ultimately, because you've not truly repented and trusted in him. And so back in Matthew 18, we already saw “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” That's the real threat.

And so James 5:19-20, says “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 ways will save him from death, and cover over a multitude of sins.” What a good work it is, then, what a good work to reach out to a sinning brother or sister and bring them back into the church.

Third motive is the purity of the church. A little yeast leavens the whole lump. It permeates the whole thing. We have got to protect the church from the spreading influence of sin. Sin not checked, not dealt with, causes the rest of us to be a little bit weaker in our fight against sin. Our marriage is a little weaker, our parenting a little weaker, our personal holiness a little weaker, because the church isn't dealing with it.

Fourthly, the restoration of unity in the church. Sin produces a rupture in the beautiful unity of the church, a rupture in the relationships and the fabric. If the church deals properly with sin, then restoration in the church's fabric of unity can occur, and the church can be one as a display of unity, as the Father and the Son are one.

In a couple of weeks in two weeks, not next week but the week after, we'll look at the parable of the 10,000 talents and true forgiveness. And how sweet it is when there can be that kind of genuine heartfelt forgiveness that goes on in restoration.

And fifthly, the reputation of the church and of the Lord in that local community. This is a scandalous sin. It is reported, people know about it, it's disgusting. If the church doesn't act, then what happens to the reputation of that church? It goes down. They will not have power to preach the gospel. But on the other hand, a church that takes holiness seriously is empowered and prepared to preach the Gospel seriously, and call sinners to repent.

Now, some have said “Nobody'll wanna join the church. If you have this kind of a standard you might actually get disciplined for unrepentance, sin and all that, why should you join a church?” And that's a deep question, but the implication is that the church is gonna suffer even numerically from that. Friends, it is not the case. Not at all. In Acts chapter 5, after God struck Ananias and Sapphira dead, it says in Acts 5:12-13, it says, “no one else dared to join them.” Well, that makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, they lied about some money and then they dropped dead. And so there's this general fear of the church. But keep reading. “No one else dared to join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.” That's their reputation. The church was highly regarded by the people. “Nevertheless,” verse 13, “more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.” Isn't that amazing? The church has power to preach the Gospel, people getting saved, because they fear Judgment Day and sin, and they take matters seriously.

Those are the five reasons why we should be involved in church discipline. Now, next week, I'm gonna talk about practicalities. Your mind may be filled with them right now. “But pastor, what about this? Or what should we do about that? Or what'll happen? Or what if we get sued?” Or any of those kind of thoughts may be running through your minds. I will hopefully deal with some of those plus a third passage that I think will be helpful next week from the book of Hebrews.

As I conclude, today, it may be that some of you are in need of a word of comfort. Struggling hard with sin, and it's a hard struggle isn't it? Fighting it hard, and it's difficult. Please remember, if you're a true child of God, your righteousness is Jesus Christ. Not how well you struggle. It is justification by faith in Christ alone, and his imputed righteousness, in that we stand. That's the solid ground under our feet. God is not against us, he's with us. He's helping us in the fight. Don't misunderstand. Grace is enough. An infinite ocean of grace is available like the Pacific Ocean. And your sin as I said before, like a fire, and every fire can be extinguished by the ocean of God's grace through Jesus Christ.

Could be, however, that you've never come to faith in Christ. You don't know what I'm talking about, but you've heard the seriousness of hell and judgement day and you know you're not ready. Well, even today, just now, you can be ready, you just look to Jesus who shed blood is sufficient for your sins and trust in him, and believe that God raised him from the dead and you will most certainly be saved.

We're gonna close right now with a wonderful hymn, “Grace Greater Than All Our Sin.” Think about this passage in James 4, God gives us more grace. That is why scripture says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Then submit yourselves to God, come to that ocean of grace, wash in it, be cleansed in it, confess your sins, and be restored. Grace greater than all of our sin. Close with me if you would in prayer.