Sola Fide
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. Grab a Bible and go to the book of Romans. If you have one of these blue Bibles in front of you, it will be on page 547 in the book of Romans. We're here this morning.
You're here. I'm here because at some point we've asked the question that we were supposed to ask. We've all come together asking the same question. Some of you are here this morning. Maybe this is the first time you've begun to ask this question and you've come this morning. And the question is the same question that comes out of the mouth of the rich young ruler when he meets Jesus.
It's the question that the Philippian jailer has after an earthquake where he sees the authority and the power of God and he's talking to Paul. It's the question that everyone asks after Peter's sermon on Pentecost. It's what must I do to be saved? That's the question. You may have worded it different. You may have thought about it differently, but that's the question.
It's what Carl Jung refers to this. He's a Swiss psychologist. He refers to this religious instinct that humans have this desire, this longing, this searching in them to have religious answers. It's the question that all religions are answering. What does God want from me? If there is a God, what does he expect from me?
What am I supposed to do? What must I do to be saved? What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? That's the question. And some of you are saying, I'm not asking that question. This person brought me here.
Well, I will tell you that it is the question you need to have an answer to. That if you actually were able to meet God and ask him one question, you may be curious about things like Bigfoot and UFOs or the next winning lotto Numbers, but this is the question you actually need answered is how can I be saved? Because that one has eternal implications. And I'll tell you that the Bible's answer to that, I'm going to give you a short answer, and then I'm going to give you a longer answer. You thought maybe it would just be a short answer, but I'm a preacher and that will never happen. I'm going to give you a short answer, and then I'll give you a longer answer.
The short answer is that in order to be saved, you need to be able to stand in front of God who is a judge, who weighs the hearts of humans. You need to be able to stand before God and be righteous. As Leviticus says, we have to be holy as he is holy. Or as Deuteronomy says that we need to be blameless before God. Or as David puts it in Psalm 24 where he says that he who has clean hands and a pure heart. Or as Jesus says in Matthew chapter 5, that we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.
That's the standard. Now, if you're like me, like if I was going to take a test, if I was going to get my electrical license, and I went in and they said, you know, you got this amount of time and this many questions, there's 50 questions, there's 100 questions. My first question I have for them is, how many do I have to get right? Where's the cutoff? We're talking 50%, 75%. So the question that we should have is how holy, how blameless, how clean are my hands supposed to be?
How pure is my heart? When you say perfect, you meant like C plus range, right? It's like we want to argue that somehow it's graded on a curve. Like, you know, it's like, like it works the way it works when you're running from a bear. If you're ever running from a bear, you actually don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than the other people with you.
And that's kind of how we want this to work. It's like the salvation work like that. Like if I can just find people who are worse than me and I'm in the top 50%, is that okay? And when it says blameless, it means blameless. When it says holy, it means holy. When it says perfect, it means perfect.
That's the standard righteous. This is the theological word is that we would need to be justified before God, meaning that when we came in, we would need to have no sins that we have committed and we would need to have practical, positive righteousness, no sins, no negative righteousness. And we would need positive righteousness. I mean, we've actually done good in the world. So never having sinned and done what we were supposed to.
Good luck. Let's pray. That's the question. That's the short answer. But there's a longer answer that's more beautiful and more helpful than good luck.
Let's pray. And it's that question that drove Martin Luther, who we've been studying as we've talked through these five solas of the Reformation, these five theological truths that came out in the Protestant Reformation as the Protestant church broke with the Catholic church that we hold dearly because they come from the scriptures. It's this question that drove Martin Luther to, uh, to the church and ultimately to kind of where we are today. So let's pray. And then we'll, we'll start in now. We ask for your help this morning.
As we study this, we pray that this truth would be visible, tangible, tangible, that we would see it's a beauty and that we would accept it and trust you in Jesus name. Amen. So Martin Luther had this question, how can I be saved? It's why he became a monk. He thought it was the best route to being saved. Uh, we said earlier, lightning struck near him and knocked him over.
He yelled, St. Anne protects me. I'll become a monk. And he did. He becomes a monk and he's trying to be good enough to be saved because what they were telling him is you had to practice penance. You had to practice confession.
He would go into the confessional. He would confess. He'd be on his way out. He'd remember more sins. He would go back. He, he was haunted by the reality of his sin.
And the truth is he wasn't crazy. He actually saw himself pretty clearly that if you could really look into your own heart, you would see depravity. And so he, he was trying to wear out and carry out. How do I get saved? How do I make myself okay? And he was stuck studying the book of Romans and we've shown this passage, but this is where he was.
He was in Romans one and he was reading this over and over again. Romans one verse 17 for in it. That's the gospel. It says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God for salvation. So in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.
As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith from faith for faith by faith. And he was stuck here. He didn't understand how the righteousness of God was revealed in this way, that God is righteous in this way. And then he began to realize that righteousness of God being revealed is that it's granted to us that his righteousness is given to us. And his understanding of how you became righteous was that you did it. You worked it out.
You repented enough. You did enough good works. And he starts realizing that righteousness is, that it is given from faith, that we receive righteousness from faith and that it's given for faith and that we live by faith. And when he wrapped his head around this, he said, it was like the gates of heaven swung open to him that he was saved, not by his work, but by faith alone. And that's what we're looking at is this idea of sola Fide, which means by faith alone, that we're saved by grace alone through faith alone, that it's God's grace working on our behalf, but that it's faith that is the channel that brings that grace to us.
And so he wrote 97 theses. Addressing this great theological rift between what the Bible says and how we understand the Bible and what the Catholic church was teaching at that time, he wrote 97 theses on how to study the Bible and understand the Bible. He wrote it on grace and faith. And he said, you know, this is, he was dropping a bomb on the Catholic approach to understanding of, of life and sanctification and faith and how we were saved. He was saying, we've answered this question wrong. The question that we're supposed to get right.
We've answered wrong. He wrote 97 theses, which were just his end conclusion points. And he wanted to debate them. He wanted to discuss them. He was ready to show his work. He, he dropped this out to basically say the Catholic church is wrong.
This is how we're saved. And they said, the response was underwhelming. He thought, I've just thrown a hand grenade in here. Everyone's going to care. They didn't really debate a whole lot. He was winning over some people in Wittenberg to this idea that we're saved by faith, by grace alone through faith alone.
And then the cell of indulgences happened. And he threw what he did not think was a hand grenade into a situation that turned into a hand grenade. And he was like, you like those 95 theses? I have 97 other ones I'd like to share with you. Here's what happened with the cell of indulgences. Indulgences is this idea, it's Catholic idea that when you sin, there are consequences.
Consequences we're tracking so far. That's true. There are consequences. And they taught that there were time bound consequences and eternal consequences. Also true. We're on board.
Protestants are still nodding along. Yes, there are eternal consequences of sin. There are time bound consequences. They said that there are time bound consequences that are paid out here on earth. True. We agree with that.
Like if there are just consequences to sin, if you punch someone in the nose, there are consequences, immediate consequences to their face and then follow up consequences. Maybe they punch you back. Maybe they call the police. Maybe the job interview didn't go so well. I don't know. There are consequences.
But they taught that those consequences weren't the natural result of the way God designed the world, but that God would actually keep record of what you have done and dull consequences back out to you to make you pay it back off. And that he would not only do that here, but he would also do it in purgatory. As soon as they make this argument, we back out. God isn't paying you back specifically to make you pay off your debt. It's just the natural way that there are consequences to sin. It's the way God designed the world.
And there is no purgatory where you pay off mid-level sins that didn't send you to hell, but that you have to be there for a certain amount of time. But they taught this. And so they taught that what you could do was an indulgence. You could say a certain number of prayers. You could go on a pilgrimage. You could do good Acts.
And what that would do is put good back into the world. You brought bad into the world. You could put good back into the world. And as you put good back into the world, God would remove some of the consequences he was going to give you either here or in purgatory. They taught you could go on pilgrimages. Then at one point they started saying, well, you could give to like help good causes.
Like there was a hospital. You could help pay for that. And then they were like, well, you know what? We're actually working on a church building. And so in Rouen, France, they have a part of a church building, a cathedral called the butter tower, because during Lent you weren't allowed to eat butter or dairy, but they started letting you pay a little money and they'd give you like a butter ticket. And that's where we, the way we use the word, like I'm going to indulge in some ice cream.
That's where they, that gets tied to that. This indulgence of you paid some money. We're going to build our tower. You can, you can have some butter. Then enter the archbishop of Mainz.
He paid a lot of money to become the archbishop because it was a very powerful position. The church wasn't just the church. It was also in charge of politics. So he paid a lot of money to become the archbishop of Mainz. He was now in a very powerful position, but he wanted to recoup some of his money and Pope Leo the 10th wanted to finish St. Peter's Basilica and make it a lot nicer.
And so they hatched a plan. We're just going to sell indulgences for cash and split the profits. And so they hired a guy named Tetzel to begin to be their indulgence preacher. And he's traveling around Germany preaching and he's preaching. Basically, these are indulgences that if you pay us a certain amount of money, we'll give it to you. And if you keep it, if it's for you, you'll, you won't have to go to purgatory.
And if you pay it on behalf of someone else, we'll let them out of purgatory right now. So they was teaching. Um, and he had, he was like a, he was hawking these things. He was a salesman. He had different phrases he used. He said, if you buy one of these, you're cleaner than when you come out of baptism.
If you buy one of these, you're cleaner than Adam before the fall that the cross on the indulgence has as much power as the cross of Christ. But the one he's most famous for is as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory Springs. And I was like, man, that's catchy. It rhymes, you know, it's true. But I was like, well, you know, it rhymes in English.
He was saying this in German. So was it as catchy? I looked it up and I hadn't been as excited about anything in a while. It's amazing in German. It still rhymes. If you don't speak German, I'm about to crush this.
If you do speak German, I'm sorry if I say something offensive, but this is the phrase in German. So bald, that's geld in cast and clinked. Die still in den Himmel springt. Clinked and springt. I was so pumped when I saw this. I think we should put more T's at the end of words.
So he has this phrase that he's saying, this is how you do. This is what happens if you'll buy one of these. This is how salvation works. And I was so excited about this that we've come up with some of our own. When the money goes in the slot, your sins are forgiven on the spot. The check goes in the wall.
There's no more sin on y'all. Set up recurring gifts online and then your soul will be just fine. You better have a Venmo if you want to sin-mo. So proud of those. Anyway, it would be absolutely crazy if we actually taught that. That if we were like, you know, we need to place our faith in Jesus.
He's the one who redeems us. Or there's a cash option. But that's what they were doing. And so Martin Luther writes 95 theses about this. His 97 weren't a big hit, but he was like, this is ridiculous as well. So he's doing the same thing that he did.
He's not thinking this will blow up. He's just trying to say this is wrong. Some of the arguments he makes are, first of all, he says the Pope is in charge of Pope things, not purgatory. If the Pope tells you that you have to pay some kind of penance, then the Pope can give you an indulgence to not have to pay that penance. He's in charge of the churches doling out and removing of things. He says, but God's in charge of purgatory.
Later he decides there is no purgatory as he continues to read his Bible. But at this point he's not there. So he says, God's in charge of purgatory. He says, the Pope can't get you out of purgatory. Secondly, if the Pope could get you out of purgatory, he should just be doing this because he loves people, not for cash. He should pay out of his own pocket if it costs money.
He should pay his own money to get people out of purgatory if he has that power. He should want to sell St. Peter's Basilica to get people out of purgatory. This is what he writes. This one was not well received by the Pope. This one makes it to him.
He attacked the Pope. He attacked his wallet. And it becomes a big thing. And he was like, you like those 95 theses? I got 97 more on something that I think is way more important. So as soon as he got some, people started hearing him and reading this.
He started pressing this idea of there's salvation by grace through faith. And this is how it comes to us. It blows up over this idea of indulgences, which affects this. But it wasn't his primary argument he was trying to make. He's more famous for the 95, but his 97 matter more because it's a theological argument. So he comes through and he says, this is how it works.
And all we're going to do now is I'm going to show you in the book of Romans where this is. And we're going to walk through that we are saved by faith alone. We are not saved by our works. So in Romans chapter three, turn to chapter three. We're going to pick up in verse nine and we're going to move our way through Romans. I'll show you some passages in Galatians, but we're going to work our way through Romans.
First thing you need to know to understand how salvation works, to answer this question, what must I do to be saved? We're supposed to be righteous. You're supposed to be holy. You're supposed to be blameless. That's the standard perfection. Out the gate, you need to understand something.
You aren't. Romans three, Paul says this. He's talking about the law, meaning the ways that we would behave, that God has told the Old Testament Jewish people, that this is the law on how you would be holy is how you'd be blameless. And he starts talking about them having this. And he's already making the argument that everybody has sinned. But he says, what advantage has the Jew, meaning the people who were given the law, or what is the value of circumcision, meaning this covenant that was made with them?
Sorry. Verse nine. I'm way, I'm up at the top of verse, chapter three. He's making this argument as he goes through. Then he says, what then are Jews any better off?
Verse nine. No, not at all. He's saying that this was given to him and it was a blessing, but it ultimately doesn't make them better off when it comes to salvation. The law does not do this. He says, for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin. As it is written, none is righteous.
No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good.
Not even one. You're like, no one does good. Maybe I do. Not even one. What he's saying is that, and this is a quote from the Old Testament, but that the standard of righteousness is not met by anybody. That you're supposed to add high quality good into the world.
You're supposed to have positive righteousness and you're supposed to not sin. And what we have done is we have not done this, not done what we were supposed to. And we have done what we weren't supposed to. We have sinned. That's us. If it's your first time hearing that, I'll let that sink in for a second.
You're a sinner before God. You have lied. You have stolen. You have been covetous. You've messed up relationships. One of the best examples of this is that to show how wicked we are is that most of the time, the worst things we do are the people that we would say we love the most, the people we're closest to, that we consistently harm people that we're around, that you have not, you're not one of the good ones.
So we fall short. This is what he says in verse 22 and 23 later on. He says, for there is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So that none of us make it. Secondly, so we've all sinned. Secondly, we need to understand this is verse 19.
That we are all accountable to God. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. That not only are we in our sin, but we are accountable to God. That he, as God, as creator, as ruler of the world, holds us to account. And we don't have anything. We don't have anything to say.
He says every mouth may be stopped. This is what Job says when he talks about standing before God. He says that who could stand before God? He would accuse you on a thousand fronts and you would have no response for any of them. That if you actually went in front of God, he'd have a thousand things that he could say. You've lusted.
You've lied. You've tried to make yourself seem better than you were. Every time you did something good, every time you did something that would be counted as good, you walked around with pride in your heart, strutting as if you were better than everyone around you. You couldn't even do something good without bringing your sin along. And we would have nothing to say. It'd be like he had it on tape.
He had it on record. He showed it to us. We'd have no argument to make. That's what he says. The law just shuts us up because it holds us accountable and there's nothing we can do about it. The third thing you need to understand is that no amount of work can fix this.
So when we're called to be righteous, there's no amount of penance that you can pay, no amount of debt that you can work off, no amount of goodness that you can add back into the world, no amount of, okay, I've been bad, I've messed up, I've hurt people, but now I'm going to get it together. Now I'm going to do it right. That doesn't work. He says, for by works of the law, this is verse 20, no human being will be justified in his sight. Since through the law comes knowledge of sin. So if you say, well, what do you want me to do?
Just give me the list and I'll do it. He says, that will never make you justified. You'll never be able to stand before him by works of the law and have done practical righteousness and not sin. No human being. If you happen to be a part of the Illuminati and you're like a lizard person, you might can sneak in, but everybody else, all the human beings, will not be justified in his sight. This is what Galatians 3.10 says, for all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.
For it is written, cursed be everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law and do them. So I want to talk to two people real quick that I think often are trying to rely on works of the law. I want to talk to a good old boy, Southern Christianity. What does God want from me? He wants me to be an upstanding citizen. He wants me to do what's right.
Okay? True, he does want those things for you. That will not save you. Because if you don't uphold every part of the law, you're cursed. There is no, just be in the middle of the pack. Don't make things worse.
And we'll be all right. That's not how it works. It says, all who rely on works of the law. For you to say, well, I'm just going to be good enough. I'm just going to kind of do what I'm supposed to. I'm going to be a part of a church.
I'm going to read my Bible. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to pay my taxes and pay my tithe. And that's what you're relying on. This is what you're going to present to him. This is your resume you're building. You are under a curse.
It will not work. And some of you are shooting for middle of the pack. And some of you go, that's ridiculous. Got to be in the top 10%. So let's talk to church ladies.
If we're going to give a hard time to good old boys, let's talk to church ladies. If you think that, no, it's not, it's not just be kind of good. It's be really good. It's get a perfect attendance pin to Sunday school. It's know your Bible backward and forward and be able to quote it at people. It's be disgusted with sinners.
My wife works at a bank and periodically they'd have situations where things were going wrong. And I don't know if y'all know this about people, but they get upset during customer service incidences. And they seem to crank that up if it involves their money. But there was a time she was telling me there was a lady they work with who's hard to work with. And every time something happened, she was super frustrated. And when she was arguing with them, she would cite that she was a Sunday school teacher.
And how dare they? And my wife would be like, what? First of all, this is a bank. We don't care about your Sunday school teaching. Second of all, what the heck even is that? It's like this.
But that idea of I'm one of the good ones. You're cursed. If you're trying to rely on the works of the law. If you have a resume that you're going to present to God, it will not work. It's what Galatians 2, 21 says. He says, I do not nullify the grace of God.
For if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. If you could do it on your own. If there was one person. It says, no, not one. But if there was one person who was righteous on their own.
Then all God would have to say is, see? You could do it. But this person, the rest of y'all, if we could do it, if there was a way to attain it from the law, why did Christ come? Why did he die? We don't have an answer for that. Paul says it's for no purpose.
Christ doesn't have to die. He would just have to teach us things. He would just come back in. He would reform it a little bit. He'd tweak it. He'd say, y'all aren't doing this part right.
But if you try really hard, you can. You can. You can. So Jesus comes, verse 21 in Romans. But now, the righteousness of God, that's that word again, has been manifested, means showed up, apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.
So he says the law and the prophets were pointing us in this direction, but it's not the law that brought God's righteousness to us. It says it's the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified. That's that word. That's that theological word, that thing that we need to be in front of God, justified.
By his grace, as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. All right. That's beautiful. That we're justified. That thing that we need, we're made right before God by his grace as a gift. A gift meaning we didn't do it.
He gives it to us. It's to be received. You look at the bottom. Received by faith. That's what we do. We receive a gift by faith, by trusting Jesus.
He's the one who does redemption and propitiation. Let me tell you what those words mean. Redemption is the idea that he buys us out of slavery. That he pays the price for us. So, to stand before God, you need no sin and positive righteousness. Unfortunately, what you have is sin and no positive righteousness.
Okay? You're in the wrong line with the wrong ticket. At the wrong show. At the wrong time. You got nothing. Jesus has no sin and positive righteousness.
So, Jesus redeems and propitiates. Meaning that he comes in and he swaps places with us. He pays the debt. He says, I'll take your sin. I'll give you my righteousness. It's redemption.
Propitiation. Then he goes to God and he says, I will, here's their sin. I'll pay for it. That's propitiation. That he absorbs the wrath of God on our behalf. If he had sinned, he wouldn't be able to do anything for us.
If he hadn't fulfilled the law on our behalf, he wouldn't be able to do anything for us. He never sinned and he fulfilled the law. We never fulfilled the law, but we have sinned and he swaps places with us. Jesus Christ died for a purpose. And it was to redeem sinners and to propitiate our sin before God. There's this idea of a champion.
I always found it really intriguing. And it's just an interesting thing that would happen in history. When people would go to fight, whole armies would line up. But then at times they would say, rather than us just our army fighting your army, just send forth your champion. Send out the biggest, baddest dude you got. And we'll send out the biggest, baddest dude we have.
And they'll fight on our behalf. This actually happens in the book of 1 Samuel. That's what Goliath was. He was the champion of the Philistines. He comes out and says, I'm going to fight on behalf of us. He actually says, if I win, y'all will serve us.
But if you win, if your champion wins, we'll serve you. The whole nations, the whole armies, everything was hanging in the balance on one-on-one fight. That's what faith in Jesus is. He's not our commander that coaches us up on how to fight well. He's our champion. We stand back.
It's all in his hands. If he wins, we win. If he secures the victory, we have the victory. If he rescues, if he redeems, if he accomplishes it, if he rises, we rise. If he doesn't, we don't. But it's all been pushed onto him.
That we trust Jesus to be the one who accomplishes this. Jesus to be the one who's righteous for us. Jesus to be the one who pays off our sin debt. That it's not, I have to feel bad enough. I have to pay penance to pay off my debt. Or that I have to be good enough.
It's none of that that we trust Jesus. We have faith in Jesus and we are saved by faith. Fifth thing we need to see is that faith is not a work. It's actually the opposite of work. It's anti-work. It's not the one work that we do.
It's the quitting of our work. Effective immediately. Resignation, effective immediately. Here's what he says, verse 27. And I love that he poses this as a question. Then what becomes of our boasting?
Like what the question is, okay, cool. Jesus saves me by grace through faith. It's a gift. What do I get to brag about? What happens with me telling everyone I'm awesome? And he says, it is excluded.
Which means you don't get to. There is no boasting in this system. You aren't awesome. Did you read the first part of my letter? It's excluded. You did not do this.
That's what he's saying. There is no boasting. And this helps us understand that this isn't a work. He says, by what kind of a law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.
For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Meaning if you did it, then you can strut. But if you watch David and Goliath go forward. And we were here for 40 days, super scared. Nobody wanted to fight Goliath. And then we're like, here's a child with a rock.
Let's see what he can do. We send him forward. All our hopes in him. We're trusting in this. Because he's the only one brave enough to go do it. He's going to go handle it.
Seems meek. Seems like it's not going to work. But it does. That ultimately he's a beautiful picture of what Jesus is. But we're the ones all scared and sitting back.
And as soon as he killed Goliath, if I jumped in the back and yelled, I'm awesome! Chad Phillips! He'd be like, what is wrong with you? He'd be like, we won. It's like, yeah, but David, what? That's what he's saying.
Like there's no boasting here because we didn't do any work. It's excluded. This is what Calvin says in his institutes. He was a French performer in Geneva. It says, because of the majority of people, because the majority of people, imagine a righteousness of faith mixed with works. Meaning you need both.
You've got to bring your good works to the table. You need to have faith in Jesus. Let us also show the righteousness of faith is so different from that of works that if one is established, the other is overturned. One's excluding the other. You can have one or the other. You can stand before God on your own merit or you can stand before God on Christ's merit.
It's up to you. But you don't get both. You either show up with Christ's record of righteousness, which I would heavily suggest to you, or you show up with your record of righteousness. But you don't get both. That's what he says. What becomes of our boasting, it is excluded by law of faith.
And this is good news. I want to jump to Romans 4, 4. Because I love this passage. Now, to the one who works, he's still carrying this idea out, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. If you work for 40 hours, you went to pick up your paycheck, and as they went to hand it to you, you reach that and they pull back and say, ah, say thank you. Like, fool.
You tell me thank you. You owe me this. That's his point. It's like if it's a wage that you earned, it's your due. We can't hold it back from you. You deserve it.
Then he says this, but to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. That's us. We don't work. We didn't show up with something to present. And we're ungodly. But Jesus justifies the ungodly.
If you're here and you're going, I'm so messed up. I've got to get back in church. I've got to get it together. I've got to start reading my Bible. I've messed everything up in my life. I've messed up all my relationships.
I've just got to clean this up. I've got to get this straightened out. You won't. But Jesus can. He justifies the ungodly because he's good. That's why it's a gracious gift.
This is beautiful, wonderful news. That faith is counted as righteousness. And faith is us just saying, I trust that Jesus has accomplished this for me. And that makes us genuinely, truly, eternally righteous because we stand in Christ, not ourselves. We're saved by grace alone through faith alone. Now, as we do that, Christians are supposed to work.
We have good works. But good works do not secure salvation for us. They do not earn anything for us. It's just the appropriate response to what Jesus has done for us. That's what Martin Luther, I'm going to end with two quotes from him. He says, God does not need our good works.
They don't present to him. They don't save us. He says, but your neighbor does. And that's God, we're saved by grace through faith for good works that he works in us, that he planned beforehand. We're told that in Ephesians, but they don't redeem us. So that if you look at a Christian, Christians are supposed to have works.
They're supposed to look like believers. John tells us that. James tells us that. Paul tells us that. Christ tells us that. But we look like believers because we are.
We look like Christ because we've been made like Christ through the work of Christ. So you don't bring good works to him for your redemption. You come to Jesus. The only thing that you can bring is your sin that makes your salvation necessary. That's all you have. I need a clean.
I need clean hands and I need a pure heart. But I have dirty hands and a wicked heart. And I get Christ. Christ. So this is what Luther says.
He says, it is God's nature to make something out of nothing. Hence, one who is not yet nothing, out of him God cannot make anything. So if you think you're something, if you have good works that you're going to present to God, you'll stand in that. But God will not make you new. Because you still think you're presenting something to him that has earned you something. He says, therefore, God accepts only the forsaken.
Cures only the sick. Gives sight only to the blind. Restores life only to the dead. Sanctifies only the sinners. Gives wisdom only to the unwise. In short, he has mercy only on those who are wretched.
But he does have mercy on those who are wretched. He does justify the ungodly. And so we get together and we praise his name because he saves us through his goodness and his glory on our behalf. The band's going to come back up. If you have not placed your faith in Jesus. If you do not have a good answer to the question of what does God want from me?
Or if you answered the question with he wants me to be good. You are under a curse. You are not righteous. You are accountable to God. And you will pay the due penalty of your sin. And it would be unloving to tell you anything else.
It would be unloving to stand up here and say, you'll be okay. It'll be fine. It will not. If you walk towards Christ with your resume that screams the glory of your own name. You will not be welcomed into heaven. You will not be welcomed into his presence.
You will not be given glory before his face. You will pay the penalty of your sin. But Jesus Christ redeems the ungodly. He justifies us before God. He pays the penalty of our sin. And all you need to do is bring your sin to him and say, this is all the stuff that should disqualify me.
All I can bring to you is all the things that would keep me out. And I can hand him over to Christ and I can let him take him to the cross for me. And when he rises, I can rise with him. Because he gives me his righteousness. And then when you stand before God. And he brings to you a thousand accusations.
You can say they were all paid by Christ. And I am clothed in the righteousness of your son. And we are made righteous in his son. And we are justified by God. And if someone says, well, you're ungodly. It's like, yes and amen.
That's who Jesus justifies. I'm wretched. And so I get a glorious, gracious Savior. And if you've placed your faith in Jesus. And you're somehow trying to smuggle works back in. Because we have little legalist hearts.
That you're somehow falling short. And you haven't done enough. And you aren't good enough. And you're overwhelmed by the weight of your sin. Would you stop and take a deep breath. And praise Jesus for justifying the ungodly.
If you can look at yourself right now and say, I've been following Jesus for so long. And I feel so ungodly. Praise Christ that he justifies the ungodly. That he redeems. That he propitiates. You say, I deserve so much wrath for my wickedness.
He said, yes. And Christ paid it out on the cross. And he disarmed the rulers and the authorities. And we rise with him because he rises. Not because we're good. Not because after he saved us we got together.
And we became good people. But because he redeems. And he makes new. And he gets the glory and the praise forever. If you haven't placed your faith in Jesus. Trust him.
Come to him now and say, I need you to save me. And he will. And if you have placed your faith in Jesus. Let's celebrate that he saves sinners like us. And let's sing praises to his name.
Sola Gratia
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
O worship the King, all glorious above, and gratefully sing His wonderful love. Our children defender the Ancient of Days, a billion in slender and burdened with praise. Good morning. My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here. I have a super fun announcement to make.
It seems that our restrooms in the lobby have been going a little crazy this morning. So if you need to use the restroom, you can go check it out. Maybe this situation has resolved itself in the last ten minutes. If it has not, there will be somebody to direct you to a different part of the building. You're welcome. Okay.
So we are in our five solas series, taking a break from walking through books of the Bible to look at the five anthems of the Protestant Reformation. The five main teachings, the five main doctrines that come out of the Protestant Reformation that formed the tradition that we are in now, that shape what we believe and how we practice what we believe. Last week we were in Sola Scriptura, which is Latin for Scripture Alone. And this week we're looking at Sola Gratia, which is Latin for Grace Alone. So when I was in, I became a Christian when I was 17.
That's when I came to faith. And when I came to faith, there were a few things that I understood. I understood that Jesus died for my sins. I understood that He was raised in order that I might have a new life in Christ, that I needed to be born again, that the old was gone, the new has come, is what 2 Corinthians 5 teaches. I understood some of the basics of the gospel, that faith was not the kind of the southern Christian in name only. I'm a Christian, but I don't actually practice this, that it was a full surrender to Christ.
I understood that, but I was real raw and green on everything else. I didn't really know the Bible hardly at all. And then I got to college my freshman year, and I was in a Bible study. And we were reading Ephesians 2 together. And I just went, what? Like this is in the Bible?
Like we were reading Ephesians 2, and it says that you are dead in sin outside of Christ. And then we keep reading, and then we get to verses 8 and 9. And it says, for it's by grace that you, this is what we read earlier together in our liturgy. For it's by grace that you've been saved through faith. That it's not of your own doing. It's not of works.
So that... Oh my God. Look at that. No? No? Let's go one more time.
My back. Head, hand, hand, hand. All right, you guys. I'm going to grip this like it's the rat battle. Here we go. Come on.
Oh, we're back. Here we go, you guys. Yes, technical difficulties all around this morning, but we're good. So, when I read that it was by grace alone, it blew my mind. I was like, you mean to tell me that I didn't bring anything to the table? That I brought my sin and my rebellion, but I have to do anything to earn the favor of God?
It absolutely, it wrecked me. I was like, this is amazing. And guess what? I was not the first person this happened to. I wasn't. 500 years before, the reformers who had not had the scriptures.
This is what we talked about last week. They did not have the scriptures that the Catholic Church had. The translation of the Bible that was in Latin. The common people weren't able to read it. But once the common people got the Bible in their language, they were able to read passages like Ephesians 2.
They went, what? This is in here. This changes the game. And that's what grace does. So, we're going to look at grace alone today and how beautiful and good this is for us. We're going to look at this in three different ways.
The first is the recovery of true grace. The second is the rediscovery of planned grace. And the third is the implications of endless grace. So, let me pray for us and then we will begin. Father, I thank you that we have your word, that it is sharper than a two-edged sword, that it pierces the division of soul and spirit of bone and marrow, that it sinks into our hearts to show us the goodness of the gospel and where we need to grow. And grace is beautiful and it is good.
But we need to have open hearts to hear what you have to say. So, God, I pray that you'd open our hearts this morning, that we would be present, and we would respond. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, first, we're going to look at the recovery of true grace. So, grace can be used, that word, broadly, to mean a few different things in the New Testament. It comes from the Greek word, charis.
So, if you're wondering why we named our third child charis, there you go. It means grace in Greek. It can mean a few different things. It's like people will often say, can somebody, before we eat, say grace? And what do they mean? I mean, can you say the blessing?
Because in the New Testament, you see over and over again, grace is used as a blessing. Grace to you. You hear about spiritual gifts and charismatic, right? Well, the base word for charismatic is charis. It comes from grace. Like, grace has a few different uses throughout the New Testament.
But when we are talking about sola gratia, sola grace, grace alone, what we're talking about is salvific grace, salvation grace. We're talking about how we are saved. And sola gratia and sola fide, grace alone and faith alone, are separated. They came to the realization of Martin Luther at the same time, the Reformers at the same time. But they're separated for a reason.
Because faith alone shows the mechanism, shows how we are saved. But grace explores why. Why we were saved. Now, Catholics and Protestants will both say that you're saved by grace. But how we define grace there is different.
And some of you might be saying, oh my goodness, we're going to argue about semantics and how a word is defined and how it's used. Yes. Absolutely so. Like, our faith is built on the Word of God. It's built on semantics. Like, if someone in the press pool for the President asked him this week and said, hey, are we going to be in a nuclear war with Russia?
And he said, possibly. Yeah. How he defines possibly is really important. The implications of that are huge. If he means, well, actually, yeah, possibly. And at this point, it's a real possibility.
We are buying potassium iodine pills. Like, we're building bunkers. We are getting ready for nuclear fallout. The implications of that are huge. But if you meant, well, actually, possibly.
I mean, there's an endless amount of possibilities. Right? So, I'm sure it's certainly possible. That's a way different definition of the word possible. The implications of that are way different. That's how it works with grace.
It's important how we define our terms. For Catholics, grace is a gift in cooperation. Okay? Grace is a gift in cooperation. They have a few different descriptors of grace, but one of them is justifying grace. So, for the Catholic Church, justifying grace, it starts with baptism.
Because in the Catholic Church, they believe that you are saved by baptism from a Catholic priest. And we as Protestants say, no. No, we don't believe that at all. But for the Catholic Church, yes, you are saved by grace at baptism. And that work continues in penance and in confession and in other sacraments. And grace, therefore, is a cooperative work.
And that is the teaching of the Catholic Church. Now, as we saw last week, as we saw last week in Sola Scriptura, that for the Catholic Church, Catholic doctrine is greater than the Scriptures. Right? So the Scriptures are supporting evidence for what the Church teaches. And we as Protestants say, no. The Bible says something different.
It says in 2.8 and 9 of Ephesians, what I mentioned earlier, For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. Not a result of work, so that no one may boast. First, we look at this very differently. We say, did you not see?
It says, this is not of your own doing in the slightest, that grace is a one-way work of God. And the context of Ephesians 2 leading up to that shows that. It says that we were dead in trespasses and sins. Verse 1, you are dead in trespasses and sins. You are spiritually dead. Unable to make your way to God.
In verse 4, he says, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us. That's the great love that He loved us. Not the love that we bring to the table. Verse 5 and 6, he says, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. That God is the one that makes us alive. He says, by grace you have been saved and raised up with Him and seated with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
That God is the one that raises us up in faith. One of the more popular definitions I've heard over the years that I appreciate for grace is an acronym for grace. God's riches at Christ's expense. That we get the riches of God, the infinite beautiful riches of God at the expense of Christ on the cross crucified. That is a gift to us. We cannot earn that in the slightest.
It would be like if I gave you a brand new custom Rolls Royce. Okay? Like the most expensive Rolls Royce in the world is a custom made Rolls Royce. It's about 10 to 12 million dollars. So let's say I give you that Rolls Royce.
You know what? I'm going to up the ante. It's got a full tank of gas. Which pretty much just doubled the value at this point. Right? So I give you this Rolls Royce and you go, man, that is so good.
And then you pull out your wallet and you got five fresh hundred dollar bills. And you say, here you go. One, two, three, four, five. Thank you. Thank you so much for this gift. I would be like, listen, I don't think you understand the exchange that just happened.
I just gave you a 12 million dollar car. I'm not looking for your money. Especially not that. That's us. When we misunderstand that the gift of Christ and what He has done for us, that His crucified flesh, His perfect record that was nailed to the cross on our behalf. That's a gift that we cannot earn in the slightest.
And it doesn't just affect how we define the mechanism, which is faith. Because Protestants, as we'll get into next week, we believe it's faith alone. In the Catholic Church, it's faith and works. It's not just that. It affects how we view ourselves. It affects how we view God in salvation.
Because in grace alone faith, there is no room for boasting. Like we don't have a righteous leg to stand on above anyone else. In grace alone faith, there's no separation between the priesthood and the laity. Meaning the pastors and priests and the lay people. In the Catholic Church, there is. There's a holy separation there.
All the way down to how they are dressed. There's a distinction there between the priesthood and the laity. But we as Protestants, because of grace alone, we look at that and say, no, we believe in the priesthood of all believers. We believe that all of us have received the same amount of grace. There is not this distinct holy separation between us as four elders of this church and you. Now, the Bible does call for respecting the pastors and elders of the church.
So we probably go too far in the other direction because we disrespect each other quite a bit. If you've sat in our sermons long enough, you know that I will make jokes about Chet who preaches the other half of the time. And then Chet will make funnier jokes about me when he comes up and preaches. Right? So we do this.
Probably go a little bit hard in the other directions because it does talk about respecting elders. But the point we're trying to make is that there's nothing great and glorious and super awesome about us. It is grace alone that we are who we are. In a grace alone faith, as we'll get in next week, there's no need for indulgences, which was a practice at the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation of purchasing, buying indulgences to get people out of purgatory, which we looked at last week. Purgatory isn't scriptural anyways. But the idea that you could give money to get someone into heaven is evil.
We don't believe this in the slightest. The scriptures do not teach it. It is by grace and grace alone. There are no rituals, baptism, praying to saints, Hail Marys, anything that, any of those extras, also that we would add to it, none of it. It is by grace and grace alone. We, as Protestants, look at this and say, grace isn't really an act to begin with.
That grace is God's nature towards His people. It's His nature towards God's people. That grace is, like, grace is like a giant lake. Okay? It's like a big lake of God's grace. And what flows out of that is the river of faith.
Alright? So, faith flows from this lake of grace. And as our faith flows from this, there are no outside external tributaries. Right? There are no creeks or small rivers that flow into it outside of the lake of grace. Your good works, your being at community group on a regular basis, baptism, none of that is an outside work.
It all flows completely and solely from the lake of grace. From grace alone from our God. Even as we completed that in the liturgy earlier in Ephesians 2.10 when it says, for we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Those display the faith that God has gifted us but all of that, everything flows from the lake of grace. It all comes from the grace of God. And this had been missing for a very long time in the church.
And then when the reformers like Luther and Zwingli and Calvin, when these reformers and the people of that time read the Bible and saw this, they went, man, we've got to get back to this. This is really, really good news. And that began to be recovered. And as they were recovering this aspect of grace, one of the things that they rediscovered was planned grace. We're going to look at the rediscovery of planned grace. So, as they're rediscovering the Scriptures, they rediscovered this aspect of planned grace that had been lost for centuries.
This aspect of grace reawakened the church, the Western church, to the sovereignty of God in salvation. As they're reading the Scriptures, they began to see this, that a teaching that had been largely lost since about 400 A.D. Augustine was one of the last major church figures to write about this. They saw the Scriptures and said this idea of planned grace needs to be further explored. And in one of Luther's most famous works, he wrote something called The Bondage of the Will. And The Bondage of the Will, which is probably Luther's best work, in The Bondage of the Will was a response to a brilliant Catholic scholar named Erasmus.
Erasmus was brilliant. I mean, everyone in Europe knew Erasmus was one of the top scholars at the time. Now, Erasmus stayed Catholic because he sat on the fence during the Reformation. He agreed with the Reformers and their critiques of the corruption of the Catholic Church. Some of that led to the much-needed Counter-Reformation that cleaned up a lot of the really grotesque things that were happening in the Catholic Church and led it on a better path. But Erasmus was on the fence and he agreed with some of those critiques, but he disagreed with some of the theology of the Reformers.
And as the Reformers were being kicked out and excommunicated from the Catholic Church, he stayed put. He did not go with them. So Luther wrote a very respectful disagreement in the bondage of the will with Erasmus' view of salvation, which for Luther was a lot because if you read his writings, he wasn't very respectful of any of his opponents. But he was very respectful of Erasmus and he wrote this disagreement because Erasmus believed that sinners of their own free will and volition could cooperate with God in salvation. This is a doctrine of, it's called synergism, the idea that you can, your will and God's will combine for faith.
Whereas the Protestant tradition taught monergism, which is one, the will of God. And honestly, Erasmus' position in his theology went on to influence a lot of Protestant denominations, the Methodist Church, a lot of Pentecostal churches, even a lot of Baptist churches. But Luther disagreed with this and he wrote The Bondage of the Will. And in one of the sections of that text, he said this, First, God has promised certainly His grace to the humble. That is, to the self-deploring and despairing. But a man cannot be thoroughly humbled until he comes to know that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, counsel, endeavors, will, and works.
And absolutely depending on the will, counsel, pleasure, and work of another that is God only. That he argues that it's utterly beyond our own will, our own good endeavors, our own counsel, that our hope firmly rests on the will, counsel, and pleasure of God alone. Some of you may be familiar with this teaching. This is the teaching of election or the teaching of predestination, the idea that God chooses those whom he will save. And we see this throughout the New Testament over and over again. I'll just give you a few passages.
In Ephesians 1, 4-6, it says, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. That God chose us before the foundation of the world, before time. He says, in love, he predestined us for adoption. That is being, as Ephesians 2 says, we're once children of disobedience. He brings us and adopts us into the family of God. He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he blessed us in the beloved.
You see that in Ephesians 1. You see it in Revelation. The book of Revelation, there are two references to this book of life. There are those that before time, their names are written in the book of life and in those who are not. And in 13, it's talking about those who are going to worship and follow the beast. That is the Antichrist type figure.
He says, all who dwell on the earth will worship it. That's the beast. Everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. You get to 2 Timothy when Paul is writing to Timothy to give him encouragement. He says in verse 9, he says, who saved us and called us to a holy calling. Not because of our works, but because of his purpose and grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.
You see this teaching over and over and over and over again in the New Testament. you see the sovereignty of God in salvation. And as the Protestant Reformation was getting going and they were reading the scriptures for the first time, this was being rediscovered. Now, many Christians have wrestled with this, have wrestled with these passages. Myself included. I became a Christian in a Methodist church, which is a Wesleyan, Armenian tradition. And for years, I wrestled with this.
I wrestled with the idea of fairness in this. Well, how is it fair that God would choose some and not others? That's really what it boils down to. Like, I wrestled with this. How is that fair? I got people that I love, that I know, that don't know Christ.
How is that fair? I wrestled with this. And I had some reform-leaning brothers who would sit down with me and some of them not as, some of them very bluntly would say, listen, you know what's fair? Everyone goes to hell. They would say that we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We've rebelled against His good nature and His good works and His good design.
Fair is we all receive punishment. And I was like, I don't like how bluntly you're telling me this, but I don't know how to argue with you on that either. And I wrestled with this. And I would do this, it's a bit of a textual dance. I would say, well, no, what's actually happening is that God, outside of time, looks inside of time and He looks at us and He foreknows who's going to choose Him and He knows that who's going to choose Him and place faith in Him and that's who He elects and then outside. And in the past, and I would do this dance, which you can do philosophically, but the text just doesn't say that.
Over and over again, it makes it clear that it's God's sovereign choice. And I wrestled with this. I wrestled with the book of Romans over and over and over again. But I kept reading the Bible. And if you're struggling with any of these aspects of faith, which are very difficult, mysterious, that's my encouragement is to read the Bible and come back to the Bible. Don't deal in outside philosophy.
Come back to the Scriptures. And after years of wrestling with this, there was one summer I had a job at a resort cleaning public bathrooms. Had a lot of time to myself. Cleaning bathroom after bathroom after bathroom. I'm an extrovert, so I love talking to people, but that's a job where you don't talk to people because it's real awkward and weird. So I had a lot of time to think and I was wrestling with this idea, wrestling with this theology, and then it finally dawned on me, I don't have to know why God does what He does.
I don't have to know why God chooses whom He chooses. I don't have to know why God doesn't justifiably give the wrath of God towards all of us for our rebellion. I don't have to know why any of this is the way that it is because I am not God and His ways are higher than my ways. I will never understand the mind of God. These things are too wonderful for me. You know what's funny?
Paul, I think, felt the same way. Romans 1-11, those 11 chapters are some of the most beautiful, some of the most beautiful literature that's ever been written. It's incredible. And he's wrestling with this. Alright? He's saying very tough.
You get to Romans 9, you're just like, oh man, this is really difficult. He's under the inspiration that God is inspiring him. He's writing this beautiful, wonderful text. And then he gets to chapter 11, the end of his long argument because the first 11 chapters are theology and the last 5 are the application of that theology. And he's wrestling with this. And he finally just throws up his hands because it's just too wonderful for him.
And he just starts to praise God in verses 33-36. He says, oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. It's just too deep for me. He says, how unsearchable are His judgments. How inscrutable are His ways. Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Who has been His counselor? Who has given a gift to Him that He might be repaid for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever and ever. He's like, I don't get it. I don't understand it. He's too glorious.
And I will rest in the mystery of God. And Luther came to the same conclusion in the bondage of the will. He says, the dreadful hidden will of God who according to His own counsel ordains such a person as He wills to receive and partake of the mercy preached and offered. This will, hear this, this will is not to be inquired into but to be reverently adored as by far the most awesome secret of divine majesty. The doctrine of God's plan's grace is not meant to vex and bother us into this existential crisis where we're like, I don't know. It's not what it's meant to do at all.
Our ways are not as ways. Our thoughts are not as thoughts. It is meant to drive you to a humble, deep worship where you just say, thank you Jesus that you saved me. I don't know why you saved me. I don't deserve it. I haven't earned it.
I've sped upon your goodwill. I've rebelled against you but praise you Jesus that you redeemed me. That is what it's meant to lead us to. That it's not of our own will and it's not of our own good works but praise God and if you can get to that place, brothers and sisters, you will find peace. You will find peace knowing that He's higher than us but He's good to us and as a finite human being that's good enough for me. So, when you get to that place, you can just worship.
That's why an amazing grace, you don't see, He didn't go in there and just write a whole bunch of things about all the theology. He just praises God. He says, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, a broken wretch dead in sin like me. I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see. you can just praise God and rest in the planned grace that He's been given to us and when you get to that place, when you start to understand the depths and the mystery and the beauty of grace, then you can really appreciate and understand the implications of His endless grace. That's the third thing I want us to see today.
The implications of His endless grace. There are lots of them. I only have time for three. First, grace removes the pressure. Grace removes the pressure. In doing a lot of preparation for this series, I spent a lot of time reading different Catholic doctrine and scouring different Catholic teachings and I stumbled upon this Catholic blog from a monastery in Kansas and this monk was writing about one of the most famous stories of Saint Benedict.
So, Benedict of Nercia was basically like the Billy Graham of monks. Okay? Really big deal. And he was writing about this famous story about Benedict who one day was walking down a path and he became tempted to lust over the thought of a woman. Now, this is how he responded. I'm going to read word for word how this monk retells this story because I think how he retells it actually is very helpful to understand the difference here.
He says, just then he noticed a thick patch of nettles and briars next to him. Throwing his garment aside, he flung himself naked into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. You catch that? He stripped off his clothes naked and he jumped into a briar patch. Then he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood.
Yet once he conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain off the poison of temptation from his body. I want to read that again and absorb what he said. His torn and bleeding skin served to drain off the poison of temptation from his body. Before long the pain was burning. His whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained victory over sin.
Now, part of me wants to admire that approach to sin because Jesus teaches to give a really serious response to sin. In the Sermon on the Mount he says, cut off your hand if you're tempted by lust. That is strong, intense, metaphorical language. You don't read the book of Acts and read about a bunch of one-handed apostles, a bunch of one-handed Christians. You're not going to read the book of Acts and read about how Paul and Barnabas were walking down a path that got tempted and they threw themselves into a barpratch and cut themselves up into the blood, the poison drained from their body. You're not going to read that because they believed in grace alone.
You cannot earn the favor of God and achieve perfection. Jesus did that on our behalf. So, you may look at that story. And look at that story. I think that's kind of silly. But I would argue that we do this in a different way.
That when we approach the sinful fallen parts of our nature, we do this. How many of us will work ourselves into deep anxiety or depression because we're trying to do it all. We're trying to achieve perfection. We're trying to prove ourselves over and over again to God, to others, for the approval of God, for the approval of others. We try to control everything we can because we've got to conquer sin. We've got to do it right.
And we work ourselves into this deep sadness and anxiety because we don't understand the grace of God. How many of us hurt ourselves because we don't like the sin and fallenness in our lives? how many of you have been tempted with suicidal thoughts because you look at your life and you just, you hate it. You hate the sin in your life and you wish it was over. How many of you engage in a negative cycle of cruel talk and you talk down to yourself all the time? You talk to yourself in ways that you would never let anybody else talk to you. We do this.
When we face our sin and our brokenness, we beat ourselves up. We're our own worst enemies. And it's no more effective or pious or holy than what Benedict did. And it never, hear this, it never fuels effective repentance. Christian, the pressure is off. If you're in Christ, there is no pressure that you're not having to fulfill the law and all the commandments of God because that's been fulfilled in Christ.
And that was nailed to the cross on our behalf. The pressure is off. Any attempt to gain righteousness on your own is pulling out $500 bills for a Rolls Royce that's trying to purchase a gift that has been given to us. You need to see the lake of His grace that is upstream and say, praise Jesus that I don't have to earn this. Though I deserve punishment, you paid for me. You need to rest in His grace.
The pressure is off. God, hear this, God the Father, He saw you and He said, you're mine. Before you were ever thought of, He said, you are mine. You are my child. That Christ, before you ever thought of, His death, His brutal death on the cross was for you. His blood shed was for you. that you are gifted the Holy Spirit who sealed your faith and who will carry you all the way to the finish line until He calls us home.
The pressure is off. We need to see the beauty of His grace from the moment of belief until we go home. Listen, the enemy, he can point at the worst parts of your sin and say, how gross is this? How bad are you? How disgusting is this? And you know what you can say?
Yeah, you don't know the half of it. But you also don't know my Savior. You'll never know Him. And He died for all of that and did something. And that's how good my God is. We rest in the grace of God and it takes the pressure off and the next thing it does is it removes our boasting.
Grace removes boasting. I personally have never understood the self-righteous Christian. It's been very hard for me to understand the thought process of anyone that positions themselves above anyone else. I just don't get it. I think maybe God has been gracious to me because He shows me my sin on a regular basis. And I see it and I'm like, man, that crap is gross.
No. Thank you, Jesus, that you died for this. I don't have a category for anyone that can position themselves over somebody else. I just don't. Because I'm like, have you not read when it says, not a result of works that none may boast? Do you not see that?
I don't understand that. But I do understand that you need to get past your own pride and inflated self-worth. Those are heinous in the eyes of God. And that maybe, may be the only reason that you've not gone down the rabbit hole of depravity. Right? For the self-proclaiming Christian that says horrible things about sexuality or drugs or work ethic or fill in the blank, maybe the reason that you've not gone down the rabbit hole of depravity is because God has not let you.
The reason that you are not a drug addict, the reason you did not fall headlong into the opioid epidemic is because God did not let you. The reason that you are not a jihadist Muslim is because you were born in this country. That was God's choosing. You were not born in the darkest parts of Afghanistan. The reason you are who you are is because the sovereign God made it so. So you have to get off your high horse.
You have to realize that you are who you are because God has been gracious to you. And approach him in humble repentance and worship. To look at our souls in the mirror and realize that every decent quality that is of God comes from him. Listen, this is an aside for a few of us. This also applies to those who boast about their theology. This also applies to those, and listen, I am as reformed as the next guy.
You can go to my office, you can go to my bookshelf, and I got Piper, and Keller, and Dever, and Grudem. I got them all. I got the Institutes that's right behind me. Listen, the person who is boastful about their theology has not been humbled by the doctrines of grace. It should not lead you to a position of arrogance. It should lead you to a deep position of humility.
Grace removes boasting, and lastly, grace gives glory. Grace gives glory. Paul, Luther, Calvin, each of them understood good. That grace alone means that it is from Him, and through Him, and to Him. It is to His glory. Calvin once said, he said, the glory of God shines indeed in all creatures on high and below, but never more brightly than the cross.
And that is sure, and that is true. Which means, listen, which means that the darkest parts of your flesh, the parts you are most ashamed of, the parts that plague you the most, that is where His grace shines the brightest. And that is where God gets unbelievable, uncomparable glory. That every time God bends a center to faith and belief, God gets glory. That every time you have victory over sin, God gets glory. glory that God willing as you are on your deathbed and there are saints around you singing hymns and you are murmuring them in your final breaths of life praising God, God gets the glory because all of that is by grace alone.
And that is what we have to remember. Matt and Kelly are going to come up and they're going to finish us out.
Here We Stand: The Five Solas
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
He call glorious above, and gratefully sing His wonderful love. Our children defender, the ancient of days. Alleluia, in slender, and burden with grace. Well, good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here.
In the summer of 1520, during the height of the Holy Roman Empire, a papal bull was sent out, which sounds way cooler than it is. It just means aggressive pope letter. So the pope sent out this letter, this papal bull, and in it there's this quote. It says, Arise, O Lord, and judge your cause. A wild boar has invaded your vineyard. This letter was sent out, and it was saying that this wild boar was Martin Luther.
This monk who was in the Catholic Church had, as he was in the Catholic Church and been studying as a monk and had begun to teach, he had begun to realize that he didn't think the Bible matched up with a lot of what Catholicism was doing. And as he was reading it and studying it, he thought, oh, wow, I bet the Catholics would like to know this. I bet the pope would like to know that, like, we're not lining up with scriptures. And he started writing. His intent was to change some of the way that the church was operating. He was trying to say, hey, I don't think we're right about this.
He wasn't trying to do what he ultimately ended up doing. He was just trying to reform. And so he had begun to disseminate information that the Catholic Church didn't want to be disseminated at this time. And so Pope Leo X sent this papal bull out, and it basically said, Martin Luther, you've got 60 days. Turn yourself in. Recant.
And we can move on. Martin Luther, around day 60, with some of his students, burned the papal bull. He said, they burn my books. I'll burn their letter. And he was excommunicated from the church. And then the pope basically asked Charles, told Charles V, who was king, to go get Martin Luther.
The separation of church and state is something that comes out of the Protestant Reformation, but it did not exist before that. And in the Holy Roman Empire, the pope and the state were one and together, and the pope had a lot of authority. And so he told this king to get Martin Luther. They bring Martin Luther to the Diet of Worms, which when you read it, looks like a way worse version of the paleo diet. But diet just means council, and Worms is just a city.
So they call him to like a city council meeting, but like an aggressive one. So it was kind of like a city council meeting. And they bring him in front of it, and this council works for the church, works for the Catholic church. And so basically they're bringing him in, and it's kind of a trial to see if he's a heretic. And at this time, he's already been excommunicated from the church. But if you're deemed a heretic, someone who's actually teaching false doctrine, they most likely will execute you.
Heretics were burned. And so he stands in front of this council, and they basically slide across to him some of the things that he had been teaching. And they say, these are the teachings, and we want you to recant. We want you to take it back. And so he says, can I have a day? Can you give me a day to look over this, to think about it?
They say, yes. You have it 24 hours, and he would show back up the next afternoon. So he goes to think about it. Now, Martin Luther, if we're looking at the Protestant Reformation in a real simplistic form, Martin Luther is like the spark that set off a powder keg, where God had already been working and doing things, but when Martin Luther begins to proclaim what he proclaims, it sets all of this in motion. And the reason it's called the Reformation, or the Protestant Reformation, is that they were intending to reform the Catholic church. They were reformers.
But the Catholic church didn't want to be reformed, so they became protesters. So it's the Protestant Reformation. And out of this, we have Lutheranism and Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists come out of this. We're going to study this for ourselves. We're going to look at this and decide what we ought to do based off of the Scriptures. We have Scriptures in our own languages, in the common language.
That was not a thing that was practiced at this time. So Martin Luther comes back the next day, and he says two things, and I appreciate both of them. And I think we can learn from both of them. The first thing he says is, okay, I admit that some of my language was not helpful. Some of the way I went about this was coarse. And if you ever read much of Martin Luther, yes, he did not speak kindly.
He was very coarse in his language, very aggressive. And so he says, I didn't word this right. And some of us need to learn that, that you can come back and you don't have to hold to all your guns. You can come back and say, hey, so I still agree with myself, but I did not handle that well. I should not have said that the way I said it. I shouldn't have acted the way I acted.
I need to repent of that part. And then we need to have a discussion about the actual issue. That's what he says. I shouldn't have said it this way. And then he says, but I can't recant. And this is how he ends him telling them he can't recant.
He says, my conscience is captive to the word of God. I will not recant anything. For to go against conscience is neither honest nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.
Amen. So he tells them, understanding that those who have gone before him and have stood against the Catholic Church have many of them been executed. He says, here I stand. I can do no other. I stand on the word of God. I'm held captive to it.
He ultimately is not killed by the Catholic Church. He does have to escape. He hides for a while. But this monk who started reading the scriptures and became captive to the scriptures sets in motion this movement in the church that we stand down river from. That we stand in line with. And so for the next five weeks, well six weeks counting today, we're going to look at the five solas of the Reformation.
These five major pieces of articulated doctrine that come out of the Reformation, we're going to spend some time studying them and looking at where they come from in the scriptures. I want you to turn to Titus chapter one. So I can help you understand why we find this valuable and helpful for us to do. And then what we'll do today is we'll walk through all five of them, give a brief introduction to them, and then we'll spend a week on each one over the next five weeks. Titus chapter one, verse nine. This is Paul writing a letter to a pastor.
We're going to read what he says, but we're going to pray first and then we'll move into Titus one. God, we ask for your blessing and your help. We ask for the work of your spirit that we might see these truths, these doctrines as beautiful and good. And that we might grow to know what we believe and why we believe it as we hold fast to you. In Jesus name. Amen.
Titus one, verse nine. Paul's writing to a pastor and he's this is a pastoral epistle. He's writing to a pastor and Creek and he's basically telling him what to do, how to install more elders, more overseers in this area. And he says this in verse nine. He meaning any new overseer, any new elder, any new pastor must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction and sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. We are a people of the word that's been handed to us.
We have a message. We have doctrine. We have truth that we hold on to and that we teach and instruct one another in and keep each other in. We have boundaries. We have a foundation that we can't go outside of. This is good for us, but we don't get to come together and make up new doctrines.
It's one of the things we've said periodically. If you're reading the Bible and you come across something brand new, it's possible that you're reading it wrong. But we also and we'll get to this later, we believe that we are under the authority of the scripture and that it does reform the church. So that there are times where we've gotten off and the scriptures bring us back. But we have to hold firmly to this.
And so it helps us to know what we believe and why we believe it. Because we are a doctrine people. This puts us at odds with the world. That we actually have truths that we hold to regardless of what others say. That we don't change with the times. In so many ways, we're bound to this.
He says this in chapter 2, verse 1, as he keeps going. And he says, but as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. And so that's what we're setting out to do for the next five weeks is to study together good doctrine. And good doctrine is life-giving. It's foundational. It's helpful.
One of the things that happens in this room periodically is someone will come and they're coming to visit or they're coming to see something or they're coming to help fix something. And they'll walk in this room and they'll stop and go, oh, wow. We've had multiple people just walking with eyes to come fix something or look at something that will just stop and stare at the ceiling in this room. They're like, oh, my goodness. Because that's a beautiful ceiling. I mean, that's a good-looking ceiling.
Now, if you're under the balcony, not as much. But if you're out here. And what happens in places like this where something is well built, there are times where you can just kind of be captivated by it. And then there are other times where you cease to notice it. And foundational doctrine in the church works much like that. It can't be removed.
But at times we can get to where we've stopped noticing it. We've stopped appreciating it. And for the next five weeks we want to know what we believe, why we believe it. And we want to take a moment to just look and go, isn't that good? Isn't that beautiful that that's true for us? And just appreciate this sound doctrine.
So let's talk about what the five solas are. We will look at them first in Latin. One of the things that the reformers fought tooth and nail for, often being executed for, was to get the Bible in the common language of the people. And to honor that sacrifice, we refer to these in Latin. It's possible that the reason we do this is so that we can still be clear with the Catholics where we disagree. And they like Latin.
So it's like these are the ones that we want to talk to you all about. But here they are in English. Scripture alone. That's what the sola, sola, sola. Scripture alone. Faith alone.
Grace alone. Christ alone. To the glory of God. Alone. I was talking to someone recently. I said we're going to talk about the five solas.
And they were like, hmm. I don't know about that. And then I said them in English. And they were like, hmm. That's good. I like that.
That's what we believe. A way to say this is that we believe that we're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. As revealed by the scriptures alone or under the authority of the scriptures alone. To the glory of God alone. That's foundational for us as Christians, as Protestants. And that was not the case when this began in the Reformation.
And these were points of clarification where Luther and Calvin and Zwingli had to say, no, no, no, no. Look at this. It doesn't say what y'all are saying. So. Sola Scriptura. We'll look at it first.
Martin Luther was a monk. And he had become like a priest, pastor, kind of in a role where he was teaching. And they had him teaching through the book of Romans. And so he was reading Romans. And he was reading Romans in Latin and in Greek. And you had to be well educated to do this.
They did not have the scriptures in the common language. And so as he had been educated, he was beginning to read this. And as he was reading the scriptures over and over again and studying the scriptures over and over again. He came to the conclusion that the Catholic Church at that time was not in line with the scriptures. There were a lot of things that they were doing that didn't make any sense. So he at one point says.
A council may sometimes err. And be wrong. Neither the church nor the pope can establish articles of faith. These must come from scripture. And if you read scripture, you'll see this. Jesus says this when he's talking about the Pharisees in Matthew 15, 9.
He says, It's in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. They've begun to teach foundational truths, but they're just made up. They don't come from the text. They were things that men came up with. They aren't what we build life and faith around. Or in 2 Timothy.
As we look at this idea of scripture alone is our authority. Scripture alone is what guides and directs the church. In 2 Timothy 3, 15 through 17. Paul writes to Timothy. He says that he. How from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings.
That's the scriptures. We believe that the scripture is from God. It's breathed out by him. It has authority. It's true and valid. And so we rest on scriptures.
When we come to the Bible, we don't approach this. We talk about interpreting. Like we want to interpret this well. And we do. We want to understand how it was written. Who it was written to.
What time it came in. We want to understand what this passage means like that other passage. But what we don't get to do is decide what we like and don't like. What we'll keep and not keep. We don't believe that the Bible sits under us. We believe that the Bible sits over us.
That it has authority over us. We actually believe that it makes logical sense that this will say things that you don't like. If you read the scriptures and they only ever agree with your political views. If they only ever agree with what you wanted to do anyway. There's a good chance you're not reading it right. Because the scriptures correct us.
They challenge us. That God is holy. We are not. And so that he has to in his holiness correct our sinfulness. This affects how we operate as a church. This type of series that we're doing right now is very out of the ordinary for us.
We'll spend most of this year as we've spent most of every year. Walking through books of the Bible. Because we think they're profitable. For teaching. For reproof. For rebuke.
For correction. For training in righteousness. That we would be equipped. We think that they're able to make us wise unto salvation in Christ. So we study the Bible together.
We just finished 1 John. We're going to hopefully, by the Lord willing, we'll look at Ruth this year. We'll get into Exodus. It's going to be a pile of fun. And we think it's going to be helpful. And it will point us towards Jesus.
That even the Old Testament will ultimately drive us towards faith in Christ. We live in a culture right now that tells you that this is a crazy idea. And that what you need to do is be true to yourself. Figure out what you really love and follow that. And as Christians, the Bible stands antithetical to that idea. You know, people sit in horror movies and they're like, don't go in the room.
You know, they yell at the person or whatever. We need to do that in Disney movies. It's like, follow your heart. Don't do it. Your heart's going to murder you. It's a liar.
We don't think we need to follow our heart. We think we have scripture that corrects us and addresses our heart and changes us. And that puts us at opposition with the world. And also, some of you right now are believers. And you're stressed. And you're tired.
And you're exhausted. And you're frustrated. And you're confused. And you're telling this to your community group. But you're not reading your Bible.
And we need this to correct us, to train us, to help us, and to point us towards Christ. So we're going to spend some time looking at that over the next few weeks. Sola fide. So we're going to keep talking about Martin Luther as we go through some of this because he's a very interesting person. But he was training to be a lawyer.
His dad was helping pay for that. I was excited about him being a lawyer. He got stuck in a thunderstorm and was terrified. Lightning struck really near him. And he shouted out, St. Anne, protect me.
I'll become a monk. He's Catholic. So he's shouting, St. Anne, protect me. I'll become a monk. He did not die in that thunderstorm.
And he did become a monk. And his dad was very mad about it. Much like my mom when she found out I was going to be a pastor. She was disappointed in me. She thought it was good. But she wanted me to do other stuff.
She told me she had to pray about it. She thought I was throwing away my potential, which I think she overshot potential. But whatever. She's my mom. She's real proud of me, guys. So he becomes a monk.
And the knowledge of his sinfulness was ever present with Martin Luther. He felt it. His wickedness. His evil. He drove his confessor crazy. You know, you have to go confess your sins to a priest.
And he would go all the time. Because there were a couple of teachings that affected this. First of all, he had become a monk to try to save his soul. So he was trying to work. He was holding vigils and doing prayers and doing effort. He was trying to make himself okay in God's eyes.
And one of the things that you have to do is you have to confess sin. And if you confess sin and then you have unconfessed sin when you die that you haven't confessed yet, you can still go to hell or purgatory. And so there's multiple cases where he would confess sin, be walking out of the confessional, and turn immediately back around and be like, I forgot something. And he would just go through. I did this and this. And he would drive in his...
The priest is like, that's enough. Like, wrap it up. Like, he was confessing too much stuff. He was driving him crazy. At one point... The other thing is they teach venial sins and mortal sins.
And venial sins are like sins that aren't that bad. And mortal sins are sins that are real bad. And one of the rules is that if you do it on purpose, like with a high hand, like aggressively sin, that can make it a mortal sin. And so Martin Luther would go in and confess sin. And his priest would say, well, that's, you know, a venial sin. And Martin Luther would be like, no, I did it on purpose.
And the priest would ask him questions. And it was... His argument was, if I know what's right and I do what's wrong, then I've intentionally done it. My heart is angry towards God. My heart is not towards Him. I'm doing all of these.
And so Martin Luther would go in, confess every sin he could think of, and argue that all of them were mortal sins. To the point that his priest said, hey, let's stop this. You need to just become a mystic. Which was the thing that was growing in Catholicism at that point. He said, you need to learn just how to love the Lord. And so he tried that.
And he came back. And the priest was like, how's that going? Do you love God? And he was like, nope. Martin Luther actually said, no, I've actually learned the more I've tried to love Him that I actually hate God. And the reason was that God was angry, waiting to strike him down, holding him to a standard that he couldn't meet, dangling him over the pit of hell.
And he would never be able to get himself out of this. He was working and working and working and working and working and working and working to try to make himself okay. And he could never escape. He said, I hate God. And his priest said, you know what? I'm going to put you in charge of being a pastor over some students.
That was his response to finding out that he said he hated God. But his theory was he was taking it very seriously. And maybe he needed something to take his mind off of how sinful he was. And just hanging out by himself, being a monk, wasn't working. So he put him in charge.
And he started teaching through the book of Romans. He's reading it in Latin. He's reading it in Greek. And he gets stuck on Romans 1, verse 17, which is this. For in it, talking about the gospel, because Romans 1, 16 is not ashamed of the gospel for in its power of salvation. He says in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.
As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. And he gets stuck because he doesn't understand what on earth that means. And he keeps reading it over and over again. And in the Latin, the word righteousness is this word that means justification, to be right. Right. But in the Greek, the original language it was written in, it has this nuance to it that means to be named right.
To be considered right. So he started thinking, hold on a second, this isn't God's righteousness, wherein he's righteous on his own. But it's righteousness that he gives, that we're considered righteous. And he stares at this over and over again until he says, hold on a second. Righteousness from God is revealed from faith and it's for faith. That it's not revealed from work.
So we don't get to his righteousness from effort. We get to his righteousness from faith. And then it's not from faith to something else, but it's from faith and it's for faith. And so the righteous shall live by faith. And in this moment, it says it clicked. That he would be saved by faith alone in the work of Christ.
That the gospel was the power of salvation. And it was from faith and it was for faith and the righteous live by faith. And he has this quote. He says, when I discovered that, I was born again by the Holy Spirit. The doors of paradise swung open and I walked through. Now, it's amazing.
He jumps. This is the hinge. This salvation by faith alone is the hinge which all the rest of this turns on. It's where our faith is that we are saved by faith alone. But I feel like if he had just kept reading in Romans, he'd have figured it out more clearly because it gets clearer.
I think if he'd have been in charge of teaching Galatians, that's pretty much all Galatians is saying. I want to show you this in Galatians chapter 2, verse 16. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. That the way we're made right is not by our effort, but through faith. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law.
Because by the works of the law, no one will be justified. The law being God's righteous moral standard. That you being good enough will not justify you. If you've come in here and you think that the primary thing that the Bible teaches you is how to be a good person, this flies in the face of that, that is not what it is telling you to do. It is telling you about a good person and his name is Christ. And that we are justified through faith in him.
Philippians 3, 8 and 9 says, Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish. In order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. We are not saved by our work. You're not saved by your morality.
You're not saved by your good works. You're not saved by what you do. You're not defined by what you do. If you're in Christ, you get to be defined by what he has done. And that we are made righteous, acquitted, not guilty, perfectly clothed, beautiful, spotless, blameless, above reproach. We are made righteous in Christ through faith in what he has done.
That we trust in him. That we would have a righteousness that comes through faith, that depends on faith. And it is not the righteousness of our own that we've earned. Some of you need to soak in this idea. Because some of you, even those who say, I'm a Christian and I believe that I'm saved by faith, that you live out your life much like Martin Luther, constantly in the confession booth. All you can see is your sin.
All you can see is your brokenness. All you can see is your wickedness. And you're constantly going to God and saying, help me with this. Forgive me of that. I'm so, and that's all, you're stuck there. And some of you need this truth because you don't even think you need a confession booth.
You're strutting around in your good works. How wonderful you are. How well behaved you are. How you're one of the good ones. And the beautiful thing about salvation by faith alone is that he saves us from our sin and our good works. That he rescues us from our wickedness through his righteousness.
And he saves us from our self-righteousness through his righteousness. That we get to be free in faith alone in Christ. The next one that we'll spend some time looking at over the next couple of weeks is sola gratia, which is by grace alone. If faith alone is the mechanism by which we are saved, if it's the means, if it answers how, how are you saved? Well, you're saved by faith in Christ or through faith in Christ. Then grace answers the question, why?
If faith answers how, grace answers why? That God in his grace saves us. And this is so freeing when you see these two truths together. But I want to show you this. Ephesians 2.8, it says, For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing.
It is the gift of God. If you've ever gotten a gift and you brag on the gift. My wife's really good at gift giving. She's a thoughtful person. She remembers stuff. I'm getting better at it because I've learned to write things down.
Like a genius. But if I ever talk to you about a gift that she's given me, I'm bragging on the gift. I'm bragging on the giver. I'm never like, yeah, I don't mean to brag, but I crush going to Christmas. It doesn't make any sense. And that's what he's saying is that we're saved by grace.
It's a free gift from God. And it's not your own doing. And I want you to, if not your own doing, if you could wrap your arms around it, I want you to. I want you to hug and love this idea of grace. Because if it was just faith alone, then we might feel like, okay, I've got to keep my faith. I've got to have faith.
I've got to muscle up some faith. Because if there's anything that we're good at, it's smuggling some works in there somewhere. And so what you might be tempted to think is, well, I'm one of the smart ones. I'm one of the ones who did research. You know, other people just bounce along in life not even thinking about it. But I actually studied.
And so I was able to come to the conclusion that Jesus is who I need to place my faith in. And yes, he saves me, but I somehow got myself here. Not your own doing. It's the goodness and the mercy and the love of God. Which means that it's faith in what Christ has done that saves us. And it's his grace that got us there.
And it's his grace that keeps us there. So that I'm saved by his work and I'm kept there by his goodness. And that's good news. This is what Martin Luther said. He came to the conclusion that he hated God. And then he says this.
He says, if you have a true faith that Christ is your Savior, then at once you have a gracious God. For faith leads you in and opens up God's heart and will that you should see pure grace and overflowing love. This is what it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly, friendly heart in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees God is angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face. So that when he was trying to work, he hated God.
He was frustrated with God. He was fearful of God. But when it dawned on him that he was saved by grace through faith, God's glorious. He's good. So that some of you are tired and you're frustrated and you're mad at God because he's not doing what you want him to.
Or you feel like that you're always falling short and he's always disappointed with you. And you need to wrap your mind around and wrap your heart around that you're saved by grace through faith. This gives us ultimate humble confidence. It gives us ultimate humility. Because we did not earn this. This isn't the super morality club.
This isn't the most well-behaved people in Casey. If you join a community group, there's going to be a time where you're like, these, these, these, what? These people are the worst. Over the course of getting the pastor, people have found out that our pastors are sinners. Yeah. Uh-huh.
That's actually why I'm here. If I didn't believe it was by grace through faith, I'd be doing something else. Because I wouldn't be in the good behavior club. I would have never, would have never gotten in here. Would never, this is good news. We have humility.
We're sinners. If someone comes to you and say, I need to talk to you, I think you've sinned against me. Your response should be, probably. What was that? I need to know some specifics so I can repent and try to change my attitude. But you shouldn't be surprised.
Me? Sin? Never. People all the time will be like, hey, can I talk to you? Like, they'll text me or they'll call me and I'll ask. Hey, are you correcting me?
Because I just like a heads up. I want to get emotionally prepared. I want to remind myself I'm a sinner before I get in there and you just spring it on me. I don't want to know. Like, it's a thing. We have humility.
But guess what? We have off-the-chart confidence. I didn't earn this. I didn't earn this. It's not my doing. It's not found in me.
It's not found in my goodness. It's not found in my wisdom. It's not found in my strength. You know what that means? It's not kept by me. It's not kept in my goodness.
It's not kept in my wisdom. It's not kept in my strength. How are you going to take it away from me? Are you going to make God not merciful? Good luck. Are you going to snatch the righteousness of Christ out of Christ?
Not going to happen. That's why you can tell me I'm a sinner and I don't lose my way. I already knew that and I already knew my hope wasn't in me not being a sinner. My hope is in Christ. Oh, faith and grace are glorious. And don't take them for granted.
Let's take some time to just look at them and say thank you that you are so good and this is so beautiful. And that I'm kept and I'm saved and I'm free. The fourth one that we'll look at is solo Christo. In Christ alone. You see this faith alone, grace alone leads us to it's in Christ alone. Which is they go together that Christ is the one who has accomplished this.
That it's his grace and it's his work that we have faith in. But this also one of the things that they were having to combat was that the Catholic church believes in faith. But they would say it's faith plus and they would add things to it. And so what ended up happening was that the church stood in between you and Jesus in so many ways. That you needed the church for sacrament. You needed the church for to be absolved by a priest.
You needed to go on pilgrimages. You needed to have catechism. You needed all these things that were from the church. And this church administered grace. But we believe that it's in Christ alone.
That the church is good. That loving our brothers and sisters. We talked about this in 1 John. Is good. But that salvation and grace do not result from the goodness of the church.
The goodness of the church results from salvation and grace in Christ. And so that we get Christ and then we're ushered into these good things. But it's Christ alone. He's the one who does this. 1 Timothy 2.5 says, For there is one God and there is one mediator between God and men. The man Christ Jesus.
That you get to go directly to Christ. And by Christ's grace you get to be brought directly to the Father. That you get to have a relationship with the Father. That you get to be adopted into the family. That you get to belong. That you get to be brought to the Father.
Secure. Through the work of Jesus. And I think this may be a thing that we take for granted. That if you didn't grow up Catholic. You're not familiar with the Catholic Church. At this time it was thousands of years.
A thousand years where this had been taught. And they finally wrapped their mind around. Wait I just get to know the Lord. And he knows me and he loves me. Where Paul writes. That God.
That Jesus loves me and gave himself up for me. He's writing a letter to the church. And he says no he loves me. And gave himself up for me. And this beauty of our genuine personal relationship. That we get to have with the Lord.
This is not perfunctory. It's not something that we do some routine things. And we're in. But we know Christ. And he knows us. And we love Christ.
And he loves us. This is why we preach Christ. And celebrate Christ. And that we want to leave praising Christ. Because our hope is only in Christ. Christ.
The fifth one that we'll spend some time on. Is soli deo gloria. Which means to the glory of God alone. I have a relative that I used to follow on Twitter. When I was on Twitter. And he would post things.
He would post. It was like it was connected to his Instagram account. Which I'm not. I wasn't on Instagram. But he would post.
And he would say. Had a great night out with friends. Or he would be like. Wonderful day at the museum. Or whatever. And I would click on the picture that he had posted.
And he would be like. Great night out with friends. And I'd click on the picture. And it would just be a selfie of himself. Like in the corner of a booth. Or like.
Got to see the Grand Canyon. And it was just him. And like. He was like. What are you. What are you doing?
I also wanted to see the Grand Canyon. I guess I could just Google it. But I wanted to see which part you saw. Like I. I wanted to see if you actually had friends. Like why are you only taking pictures of yourself?
I think you've missed the point. Of what you were supposed to do. At least given the caption. You know. I guess he could just post. Handsome at a restaurant.
You know. Whatever. If we. With these doctrines. These. Truth.
Joyous. Glorious. Truth. Somehow turn around and go. Look at how great we are. We've missed the point.
That we don't earn something. We receive something. And then we celebrate. That if you believe that you're saved by faith alone. By grace alone. In Christ alone.
Then you'll celebrate the glory of God alone. That if we walk in here as those who have trusted in Jesus. And have been redeemed by his grace. And are kept by his grace. Through the work of Christ alone. Then we'll stand.
And we'll sing. And we'll praise. Because that's the appropriate. Right. Joyous. Response.
To a God who loves us so much. That he would come and redeem sinners like us. That we'll come in and say. Thank you. That you would purchase. For yourself.
Me. With your blood. That you would welcome me. That you would make me righteous. That you would keep me. That you would do this by your grace.
And your mercy. Praise your name. You are glorious. And you are good. And you are holy. And that we would walk in this humble confidence.
That makes us free. To delight in the goodness of the Lord. We're not earning this. We're not achieving this. And we're not losing this. That it's in Christ.
And we trust in him alone. And so we celebrate the glory of God alone. This is kind of the centerpiece that holds this all together. In Isaiah 48, 11. God's talking about salvation that he's going to bring. And he says.
For my own sake. For my own sake I do it. For how should my name be profaned. My glory I will not give to another. That the right response to his salvation is to glorify him. To praise him.
Because he's the one who's done it. He doesn't share his glory with us. Jude 24, 25. And I think it's a good place for us to end. It's where Jude ends his letter. He says.
Now to him who is able. To keep you from stumbling. And to present you blameless. Before the presence of his glory. With great joy. Go back to that real quick.
That's salvation. By grace through faith. In Christ. That he's the one. Him. Him who's able.
To keep you from stumbling. By his grace. By the work of Christ. Some of you feel like. I think I'm going to stumble. Well he's able.
Well he's able. To keep you. He's able. To present you blameless. Before the presence of his glory. With great joy.
Can you wrap your mind around that for a second. That when we stand. Before. The king. We will not shrink. In fear.
Or sin. If we're in Christ. But we'll be. Blameless. Radiant. I have two little boys.
Every once in a while. Something will happen. I'll ask my older boy a question. And you can see this moment. And I know that moment well. When someone asks you a question.
You didn't want to answer. And so you have that little lightning strike of terror. So I ask him a question. He'll be doing something with his brother. And he'll be bopping along. His brother's crying.
And I'll ask him a real pointed question. And he'll go. Like oh. Did not expect to see my father in my own house. I did not know you cared for that little one. That lives here.
It's this moment of pure terror. And I don't even want to imagine. Because I know what that was like. A teacher would ask me a question. Or my dad would ask me a question. Or even my relationship.
Or my wife's asked me questions. I didn't have a good answer for. I didn't want to answer. I know that moment of terror. I don't even want to imagine. What that's like.
Before the face of God. Who can see directly through us. The deepest part of our wicked souls. Oh but he can keep us from stumbling. And he can present us blameless. And that when we stand in Christ.
There's none of that. Just joy. Just welcoming. And he says this in verse 25. To the only God. Our Savior.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Be glory. Majesty. Dominion. And authority. Before all time.
Now. And forever. Amen. That our God is good. He redeems. He saves.
By his grace. Through his work. To his glory. We sit under the authority of the scriptures. That has good news to proclaim to us. And we celebrate.
So for the next five weeks. We're going to look at doctrine. So that we know what we believe. And we know why we believe it. And so that we hold firmly. To some really good news.
And we don't drift from it. Into something that is worse. And something that is smaller. And something that robs us of joy and hope. Matt's going to come back up. We're going to sing.
But before we sing. We're going to take communion. Communion is a practiced rhythm. For the church. Where when we gather. We remember what Christ has done.
That on the night before he was betrayed. On the night he was betrayed. And the night before he died. He took his disciples. And he took bread. And he broke it.
And he said. This is my body. It's broken for you. And he took the cup. And he said. This is my blood.
It's a new covenant. It's poured out for you. That this is a meal. Remembering. The body and blood of Christ. The sacrifice that was needed.
For the redemption of our sins. And Paul says. That as often as we take it. We proclaim his death. Until he comes. That we stand.
That he's had glory. From eternity past. He has it now. And he'll reign forever. And we stand right now. In this moment in history.
Where we stand in between the cross. And his return. And so that we proclaim his death. Until he comes to get us. Until it's consummated in the kingdom. And we share the wedding supper of the lamb.
All those who have been redeemed. By God's grace. Through faith. In Christ. And there are three things that we need to do. As we come to this this morning.
If you're a Christian. If you're not a Christian. We ask you to not partake in this with us. This isn't for you. We'd love for you to place your faith in Christ. For you to receive what we have in him.
Which is by his grace to be saved. To be made righteous. To be made new. We'd love for you to do that. But if you're not a Christian.
We'd ask you to refrain from taking communion. But for Christian. There's three things we need to do. We need to see ourselves. See our sin. We need to repent.
We need to go before the Lord. And ask him to forgive us. And to make us whole. And to watch us. We need to know. That we need a savior.
And we need to see him clearly. We're to discern the body and the blood of Christ. To know that this was a sacrifice that was necessary for us to be made whole. And then we proclaim his death. Which is to proclaim the good news of the gospel. That you aren't saved by your own works.
And you aren't kept by your own works. That we get to come as sinners made new in the work of Christ. That he physically came. That he physically died. And that he made us whole. To take a moment.
Where you are. To pray. To repent. And to celebrate. As you're ready. That Jesus died.
To save a sinner like you. And that by his grace. And by faith in him. We are redeemed. And we are kept. And we are whole.
When the Rooster Crows (Matthew 26:46-27:10)
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
You Well, good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. I'm excited to be here with y'all this morning. Grab your Bibles. Go to Matthew chapter 26.
If you have one of the blue Bibles, it looks like this. It'll be page 486. And if you do not own a Bible, take this one home with you. That's our gift to you. We want you to have a Bible. We want you to read it often.
We are walking through the Gospel of Matthew, and we are coming into the end of Matthew. And so these next few weeks, we're going to spend looking at the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion of Christ. And in what we're going to look at today, we're going to cover a decent amount of ground this morning. We're going to work through this story, and we're just going to walk through the story and talk about it. We'll make some observations as we go. And then at the end, we're going to look at Peter and Judas and the religious leaders, and we're going to look at their response to sin, their response to shame, their response to their guilt.
The truth is, in life, there are times where we come face-to-face with ourselves. We come face-to-face with our own sin, that we cease to be able to hide who we really are. Often we're very good at deceiving ourselves, but there are times where we finally see it. And so we're going to ask the question as we walk through this text, what do we do in those moments? How do we respond to our own sin and guilt? So let's pray, and then we'll walk through this story together.
God, we ask for you to bless this time. We pray that you would help us to love your word, to trust your word, and to see clearly Christ in his glory, in his greatness towards us. And may we see our sin, so that we might run to a savior. In Jesus' name, amen. Matthew chapter 26, starting in verse 46. Jesus has just been in the garden.
He's been with his disciples. He had the last supper. He said, this is my body broken for you. This is my blood that's shed for you, and a new covenant in my blood. And he says, as often as you do this, you declare my death until I come. He tells his disciples that one of you is going to betray me.
They go through and they ask, is it me? Is it me? Eventually Judas leaves. He goes out with his disciples to the garden, and he tells them, wait and pray and keep an eye out. He takes Peter, James, and John with him a little further in. He falls on his face.
He begins to ask the Lord, if this cup can pass from me, let it. He's stressed. He's troubled. He tells them he's sorrowful to the point of death. He goes back. The disciples are sleeping.
He wakes them up and says, you couldn't stay awake for an hour. Keep an eye out. Pray for yourselves. Pray for me. He goes back. He does this three times, and eventually he says this.
Rise. Let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand. At some time in the middle of the night, Jesus hasn't slept. The disciples have slept some because they're exhausted. But he wakes them up and says, see, my betrayer is at hand.
And while he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a great crowd with swords and clubs from the chief priests and the elders of the people. So Judas has agreed to betray Jesus. He knows where he is. He comes to him in the garden. And he's got a great crowd with him with swords and clubs. Other gospels tell us they had torches and lanterns.
And that some of these are Roman soldiers. Some of these are soldiers that belong to the Sanhedrin that are actually part of the temple group of soldiers. But they've come to arrest Jesus to try to have a trial, to try to pin something on him so that they might kill him. So Jesus wakes up the disciples. He's been praying that this would pass, but now he's facing it. The disciples are waking up.
And you know, immediately, if you've ever jumped out of a kind of a groggy sleep, but maybe you heard a noise or something, their hearts are beating. They're looking. They're suddenly, adrenaline's pumping because there's this large crowd of armed men coming towards them in the darkness. Torches and lanterns, and they're surrounded. And Judas, it says one of the twelve. So one of the men that had been closest to Jesus, had spent the most time with Jesus, had professed that he believed and would follow Jesus, has come to betray him.
Verse 48. Now the betrayer had given them a sign saying, The one I will kiss is the man sees him. And he came up to Jesus at once and said, Greetings, Rabbi. And he kissed him. Now, for Americans, that's weird. And often Americans have read this and tried to read things into it and tried to understand what's going on here.
But this is a, for Middle Easterners, this is not an odd greeting. He's basically saying, The one I go greet, the one I go say hey to, this is the man. Ben Johnson, who's one of our group leaders, was a missionary in Lebanon for ten years. And they greet each other with kisses. They greet, they do three kisses. Just on the cheeks.
They get good at it. They know how to do it. He came traveling back. His home church was in Georgia. He was jet lagged. He was tired.
But he had to run by the, his church building before he could run to his house and try to get some rest. He showed up. He ran into the custodian there who he knew. The custodian said, Hey Ben. Ben said hey and grabbed him and went to kiss him. And it goes over different in Georgia than it does in the Middle East.
And so we read this and we're going, What's going on here? But really all that Judas has said is, It's going to be dark. These people would not have recognized Jesus. Maybe some of them have seen him. It's not like they had wanted posters up for him. It wasn't like us where we get to see famous people.
We get to see them on TV that you might could actually run into a famous person at Walmart and recognize them. They would have heard about Jesus. They might have seen him in the temple, but the ability to recognize him in the darkness is not much of a chance. But they wanted to go under cover of darkness and arrest him. And so that's how they worked out with Judas. Judas will identify him.
Judas has been with him for three years. I bet Judas in the dark, just seeing the disciples silhouetted, could probably tell you by the way they carried themselves who was who. And so he says, I'm going to identify him for you. The one I go greet, that's the one. So he walks over and he says, Greetings, Rabbi.
Would you know that had to sound weird? Too hard trying to sound normal, a little too loud for some reason, a little too quiet. There's no way this came out right because he shows up with this band of people with swords and clubs. Hey, Jesus. Greetings. But he grabs him.
He kisses him. Jesus said to him, this is verse 50, friend, do what you came to do. Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and seized him. So these military soldiers knew as soon as he, whoever he greets, that's Jesus. That's who we're arresting. They come in.
They grab him. They rough hands clamp down on him to hold him. Verse 51. And behold, one of those who were with Jesus, and that's Peter. We find out one of the other gospels. One of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand, drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear.
So Peter, as soon as they grabbed Jesus, it's go time. He pulls his sword out. He said, I'll go with you even to death. And he meant it. He pulls his sword out and he cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant. The reason he cut off his ear was because he missed.
He was aiming to kill him. You don't swing a sword at someone's head unless you think this is it. Let's go. He missed. I'm assuming he came something like this. The high priest's servant went something like that.
He caught his ear. Cut it off. It would have been a bloody mess. Peter would have. I don't know if you've ever fought multiple people at once. But if you do.
You attack one, you back up and keep your eye on the other one. So Peter doesn't follow that up with more strikes. He swings at that guy. I'm assuming he backs up and looks. And in that that moment, that brief pause when everything got much more intense because they've got swords, they've got clubs, they've got the disciples surrounded. We know at least there's 11 disciples.
There's potentially more here. And they've come armed because they want to show have a show of force to try to a keep there from being violence or be when if there is violence. I don't know if you fought multiple people at once. If you're actually going to get in a fight, it's better to be on the multiple people side. That's what they showed up with. We're going to make this go well for us.
But Jesus, I mean, Peter cuts the ear off and then this is what happens next. Then Jesus said to him, put your sword back into its place for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my father and he will at once send me more than 12 legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled that it must be so? So Peter attacks.
And in that breath in between when everything could have broken loose, Jesus says, put it up. That's not what this is about. How else would the scriptures be fulfilled? But Jesus says something very interesting here that I think we need to see. He says, do you not think that I could at once appeal to my father and he would not send me more than 12 legions of angels? A legion is a thousand.
He says, I have at my disposal at this moment over 12,000 angels. We see in the Old Testament where one angel kills 185,000 Assyrians in one night. So if Jesus calls on more than 12,000 angels, Jesus says, if I want to just let the angels do it, we can kill the entire population of the earth in less than 30 minutes. If I want them to do it rather than me do it. I want us to see something here. We just last week read where Jesus prays in the garden, Lord, if this cup can be moved from me.
If we can go another way, let's do that. But not my will. Your will be done. But even in that, Jesus says, Peter, if I want to stop this, I can. You see, it would show great bravery for Jesus to walk into this and to hand himself over and to then it be outside of his control and him have to face torture and death. But the reality is it was moment by moment inside of Jesus's control to stop this.
He could have moment by moment chosen. To not save us. He could have moment by moment chosen to let us receive the wrath we deserve. He could have moment by moment, lash by lash. Strike by strike. Hammer hit by hammer hit.
He could have moment by moment chosen to stop this. If he had just uttered the words he had at his disposal, more than 12,000 angels. He looks at Peter and he says, no, how else will it be fulfilled? How else will salvation come? How else will the rescue happen if I don't do this? And so Jesus isn't caught up in something that is beyond him.
And faces it bravely. Which we would honor a man if they did that. But Jesus isn't caught up in something beyond himself. He is caught up in something that is under his control at all times. But willingly, humbly, graciously submits himself to it for the sake of those whom he loves.
Don't miss that. Verse 55. At that hour, Jesus said to the crowds, Have you come out as against a robber with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching. And you did not seize me. But all this has taken place that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.
Then all the disciples left him and fled. So the disciples now facing, we're not going to fight. This isn't going to be done in hot-blooded anger. This isn't going to be done with adrenaline pumping. What's coming now is going to be dealt out in a cold manner. What's coming now is going to be calculated.
What's coming now is going to be us humbly submitting to arrest. They flee. And Jesus says all this has been done to fulfill the scriptures. That this was God's ultimate plan. That one day Christ would come. That he would die for sin.
That he would die for sinners. That he would save a people for himself. This is something that God had intended all along. Verse 57. Then those who had seized Jesus led him to Caiaphas, the high priest.
Where the scribes and the elders had gathered. And Peter was following him at a distance as far as the courtyard of the high priest. And going inside he sat with the guards to see the inn. Now that's a bold move. Peter just cuts somebody's ear off. Runs.
Catches his breath. Starts sneaking back. To see what happens. Joins the crowd. It had to be a pretty big crowd. For him to just start walking with them.
And kind of keep up with them. It had to be a large group of people that had come out. And he goes. And then he sits with the guards. The guards of the high priest's headquarters. His area.
He sits outside of where the trial is going to take place. But it does seem like he would have been able to see all this taking place. But he sits and he just wants to see what's going to happen. Probably trying not to make a lot of eye contact. But make enough eye contact to not be suspicious.
If you've ever been on the run. You know what I'm talking about. That's what Peter's doing. Verse 59. Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus.
That they might put him to death. Okay. This is a sham trial. This isn't a real trial. They've arrested him so that they can find somebody to give just enough on him that they can kill it. They're looking for false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death.
I want you all to see that Jesus submits to, in order to undo, in order to redeem, he submits to wicked justice. Perverted justice. Perverted justice. Perverted justice. That he's caught up in this moment being small and having those who should be handling this well and honestly and appropriately. Those in power using their power for their own gain.
And Jesus steps into that so that he might undo that. Verse 60. That's a testimony to the righteousness of Christ. That even with liars they couldn't get anything to stick to him. That Jesus is sinless. By a human court would have been acquitted.
And we're told that by a heavenly court would be acquitted. That he has no sin. That he's a perfect spotless lamb. But they're trying to lie about him and they can't find anything. And then it says, and though many witnesses came forward, at last two came forward and said, this man said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and to rebuild it in three days. Okay.
That's true. He did say that. We're told that he said that and that he was talking about the temple of his body. That he was saying that the temple was the place where God meets earth. And then he uses that term for himself saying that I am where God meets earth. I'm where humans are going to now be relating to God and connect to God and find sacrifice.
He refers to himself as the temple. And he says, this temple will be destroyed and I'll raise it in three days. But they, misunderstanding what he meant, are like, I'm pretty sure he's a terrorist. He said he's going to blow the temple up. He did say he would build it back in three days, which seems unlikely. But we know that he said he was going to destroy it.
That's the accusation. Verse 62. And the high priest stood up and said, have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you? See, one of the things that Jesus is doing here is he's not trying to defend himself. He knows how this is playing out.
He's not in the hands of the religious leaders. He's in the hands of God. The reality is Jesus is more in control of the situation than they are. So he's walking through this process. He's not there to defend himself. He's there to head to a cross.
The high priest stands up and yells at him. He says, if you know answer to make, what is it that these men testify against you? But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God. Tell us if you are the Christ, the son of God. And Jesus said to him, you have said so.
That phrase seems a little cryptic to us. You have said so. But we have phrases like it. We have phrases like, yep, you guessed it. You called it. Bet.
Bingo. We got phrases like it. That's what he's saying. Nailed it. That's the phrase there. You have said so.
Is that kind of a phrase? He's not trying to just defer. He's saying, yeah, like you finally said an appropriate. We're now in the place that we need to be talking. You've called it. You have said so.
But I tell you, from now on, you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. I tell you that from now on, you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. He doesn't just say. You called it. He doubles down on it. He makes it more.
He quotes Daniel to the religious leaders. They're going to freak out. They understood exactly what he meant. But let's look at Daniel so that we can see this. Daniel chapter seven. This is what he's talking about.
The son of man seated at the right hand of power. He says, I'm not just the son of God. I'm the son of man. The one that you've read about in Daniel. I'm the fulfillment of this prophecy. Daniel 7, 13 says, I saw in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man.
And he came to the ancient of days. That's God. And was presented before him. And to him, the son of man, was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples and nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. He says, are you the Christ, the son of God?
And he says, oh, I'm the one presented to the ancient of days. I'm the one who's given dominion and glory and a kingdom. I'm the one that all peoples, nations and languages should serve. I'm the one who has a dominion that's an everlasting dominion. I'm the one that will not. My dominion will not pass away and my kingdom shall not be destroyed.
Oh, you finally. You finally found it. I am the Christ, the son of God, who has an everlasting dominion. I will be presented to the ancient of days. The next time you see me, I'll be riding on the clouds of heaven. Verse 65.
Then the high priest tore his robes and said, he has uttered blasphemy. What further witness do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment? And they answered, he deserves death. The high priest tears his robes.
It's an aggressive response to this. The only place we see that is like WWE or something. This is not a muted response. Now, it's possible that this is a bit of a put on because they've heard Jesus say things like this before out in the open and they did not respond this way. But in this trial, this is what they've been waiting for.
This moment when Jesus says something, they can finally pin on him and he stands up and says, what else do you need? He's claimed to be the Christ. The problem with the high priest's question is that he allowed no room for Jesus to actually be the Christ. Jesus actually is the Christ. Caiaphas has since passed away and Caiaphas has since seen the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power. At this moment, they respond and they say he deserves death.
I want you to know that Jesus does go to his death and I want you to know that he is the Son of Man who is seated at the right hand of power. That the humility here, the grace here, the love here that is shown for sinners is beyond understanding. Then they spit in his face and struck him and some slapped him saying, prophesy to us, you Christ, who is it that struck you? They show him great dishonor. They slap him. Men slap other men, open hand slap other men when they feel that they are in complete power over them.
This is why I would be much more offended if you slapped me than if you punched me in the face. If you punched me, you're showing me some amount of respect. If you slap me, you don't think there's going to be any return fire from my side. It's very hurtful. They show him great disrespect. They spit on him.
They strike him. They slap him. We're told in the other gospels that they blindfold him. That's why they ask, prophesy to us. Who slapped you? They line him up.
They slap him. Jesus takes this. At any moment, he could stop this. But he submits to the will of the Father and he loves sinners. Verse 69. Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard.
And a servant girl came up to him and said, you also were with Jesus the Galilean. Well, that's a startling moment for Peter. He's sitting in the courtyard. He's paying attention to what's going on. He's heartbroken. He's probably trying to keep that together.
The servant girl walks by and says, hey, you're with Jesus. You're on his team. I don't know if you've ever been trying to hide something and someone pinpoints it. I don't know if you've been in class hoping the teacher wouldn't call on you because you had no clue what the answer was. And it's almost like they could see it in your eyes. So they called on you.
I don't know if you've been in the middle of a lie and someone asked the exact right question they needed to ask to make you have to lie perfectly in that moment. This would have felt like a lightning strike. But he denied it before them all saying, I don't know what you mean. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like I'm one of the arrestor guys. And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him.
I'm assuming he waited an appropriate amount of time. Maybe he just started like, well, I was heading this way anyway. But he tries to move away from those people in that situation. He goes out to the entrance. He moves a little bit further out. He thinks maybe if this is going to keep happening, I need to be close to the exit.
Another servant girl saw him and she said to the bystanders, this man was with Jesus of Nazareth. Doesn't even talk to him this time. Just starts telling other people. And again, he denied it with an oath. I do not know the man. This time he promises.
I swear on the temple, I don't know him. He starts doing things that Jesus expressly said not to do. For the record, he lied last time. He's also not supposed to do that. But now he's lying with an oath.
After a little while, the bystanders came up and said to Peter, certainly you too are one of them for your accent betrays you. He sounds like he's from Galilee. Not like he's from Jerusalem. He's from Hicktown. He's like, dadgum, I don't know him at all. They were like, I live here all my life.
No. Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear. I do not know the man. And immediately the rooster crowed. So this time he calls a curse.
He swears. Last time it was an oath. This time it's may God strike me if I know him. I've never seen him before. Peter remembered the saying of Jesus. Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.
And he went out and wept bitterly. Peter had told Jesus, I'll go with you to the bitter end. I'll go with you to imprisonment and death. Jesus says, you're going to deny me this very night. And he says, even if everybody else falls away, even if everybody does, I won't. And Jesus says, this night you're going to deny me three times.
Before the rooster crows, you'll deny that you know me three times. Peter says, no, I won't. And Peter does. The rooster crows. And what Jesus had said was true. And it breaks him.
And there are moments where who we want to be and who we think we are and who we tell ourselves we are is crushed by who we are. There are moments where the rooster crows and we wake up to who we are. Not who we think we are. Not who we say we are. Not who we are willing to pretend we are. But who we actually are.
The decisions that we've actually made. And Peter got here quickly. He was doing fairly well. But when it came down to it and he suddenly had this moment where he'd have to profess Christ and face the consequences, he decides not to. And the truth is that some of us have done pretty well until we got into some tight spots. And then we quickly made several decisions that put us in a place where we suddenly realized we were someone we did not think we were.
We made some decisions pretty quickly and in some tight spots that suddenly told us that we weren't exactly as good as we were, as honest as we thought we were, as good of a husband, as good of a businessman, as good of a mom, as good of a friend, as good of a student. That what we had been telling ourselves about ourselves wasn't actually true. Peter goes out and he wept bitterly. Chapter 27. When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to the death. And they bound him and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate the governor.
We'll see more of this later. But the Sanhedrin decides that Jesus deserves death. They're not allowed to perform capital punishment. The Romans gave them some soldiers, let them have some of their own soldiers, let them have some Roman soldiers that they oversaw. But they weren't allowed to do capital punishment.
Every once in a while, mobs would come together and stone people. But it wasn't the Sanhedrin wasn't allowed to oversee that kind of stuff. And so they decide they want to put Jesus to death and the charge against him is blasphemy. But they've got to come together and talk because the Romans don't care about blasphemy. They do it all the time. They're not going to that's not going to work.
So they're going to have to have a discussion about what they're going to accuse him of. We'll see later. They what they accuse him of is sedition. Treason against the Roman Empire. But that's why they take counsel and they decide to deliver him over to Pilate.
Because they're. Let's figure out how to put him to death. Verse three. Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and he brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. So Judas is going through a similar thing.
He's seeing the outcome of the decisions that he's made. When he sees that Jesus is condemned, he realizes this. I shouldn't have done this. He changes his mind. The phrase there in the Greek is short of repentance. But it does mean he changed his mind.
He decided this shouldn't have gone down this way. He shouldn't have done this. He changed his mind. He brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders saying, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. And they said, what is that to us? See to it yourself.
And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed. And he went and hanged himself. I want you all to see for just a second the absolute failure of the chief priests and the elders. We've been seeing that Jesus has said this, that the temple is done, that they have failed, that this has not worked, that they have not responded the way they ought to. Judas comes to them and says, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. But in the chief priests, priests, the ones who are supposed to stand between the people and God, the ones who are supposed to oversee the sacrificial system, say, what is that to us?
We have nothing to do with helping people get past sin. That's on you. What is that to us? See to it yourself. And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, it is not lawful to put them into the treasury since it is blood money.
So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers. Therefore, that field has been called the field of blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, and they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a piece, a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel. And they gave them for the potter's field as the Lord directed me. Some of that phrase also comes from Malachi. He just ascribes it to Jeremiah because he was the more well-known of the prophet.
They do that a couple of times where they're just saying this has been fulfilled and highlights the main prophet. But he's just showing that Jesus did come to fulfill scripture and that these events do fulfill scripture. So what do we do when we come face to face with our own son? What do we do when we fail to live up to who we think we are, who we want to be? If you're much past high school, you've already begun to do that. You've already begun to see that.
If you're in high school, in middle school, you're doing that, but you're not seeing it. Ask your parents. They might can help you out. But as you get older, you begin to realize that this isn't exactly working out how I thought it was. You begin to see your sin. You begin to see your failures.
You begin to have what you wanted to be and who you hoped you were and how you thought life was going to go. And that begins to fall short. And then we also begin to do things that we wish we could take back, that have consequences. And once you're past it, you're looking back going, how did I ever get there? How did I ever get here? How did I ever make these decisions?
How on earth could I have been a person who did that? What do we do? What do we do in our sin and shame when it clings to us? When it threatens to destroy us? Let's look first at the chief priests.
Verse 5, it says, In throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money. Y'all, this is insane. He says, I've betrayed innocent blood. He throws the coins back to them. They say, we don't have anything to do with that.
That's on you. He leaves. They go scoop the money up. And they go, we can't put this in the treasury because it's blood money. And we don't want to break the law. The religious law.
Y'all, they paid the blood money. Potentially out of that treasury. This is where Jesus told them, Y'all strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. You're worried about all these little fine points of the law, and you're just blind. They don't see their sin. They know it's blood money, but they don't see how that's on them.
Even though they're the ones who paid the blood money. And then they have the audacity to stand there and have a discussion about caring about applying the law. We've got to do this in a lawful way. Whenever you commit murder, you shouldn't murder on the Sabbath. And if someone pays you to murder, you need to tithe on the earnings. It's like, what?
What? This would be somebody who's saying, man, I know that divorce is wrong, so I'll kill my spouse. What? It's that level of insane. And for us to think that for one second, we're not capable of this. Like we haven't shown up to a community group and discussed minute little parts of the Scriptures and failed to acknowledge our sin.
Like we hadn't discussed what it would be like if I did actually, you know, maybe, you know, I think Christians need to repent. We need to understand that God... But we're not... Like we haven't highlighted the parts of our lives where we're obeying pretty well that I give money and I do this and I'm generous here and I'm generous with my time so I don't have to do that. Or I'm... I mean, yeah, okay, I may be falling into some sexual sin, but I'm showing up to my group more than I ever have.
We don't do this. One of the ways that we deal with our sin and our shame is absolute blind denial. God help us. This is one of the reasons why we want to be in community groups. This is one of the reasons why we show each other love by being in life with one another so that we can point out each other's blind spots. Not to make ourselves better, but to help us by God's grace see our sin so that we'll run from it.
But they don't see it. And they head to destruction. Let's look at Judas, verses 3, 4, and 5. It says, Then Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned and he changed his mind. And he brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. And he's saying, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.
And they said, What is that to us? Let's look at this part first. See to it yourself. He sees what he did was wrong. He brings the money back. His hope is that he can talk to the chief priests and he can somehow maybe undo this.
His hope is that maybe he can somehow atone for this. And they give them, give him the response that religion gives you. And I don't mean religion in the general sense that Christianity is a religion. I mean the process by which humans do good things to make God love them. How we do what's right and don't do what's bad so that we might be on good terms with God. They give him the same answer.
What does your sin have to do with me? See to it yourself. That's the answer that religion gives you. That's on you. If you're good enough you'll be fine. But it's on you to go be good, to go do what's right, to go be moral, to handle your affairs well.
And that works if A, you're too blind to your sin or B, you see your sin but you minimize it to the point that you feel like you're probably not that bad. But that falls completely apart when you see your sin clearly. Because the idea that I'll be moral enough or I'll be good enough and that'll fix it falls apart because we can't fix it. Our good works cannot atone for our sin. Our good works, our good behaviors, our self-made righteousness cannot atone for our sin. It cannot handle our shame.
It's about as good as a spider web is at catching a rock. It can't do it. It falls apart. And you know this. Some of you are in this process right now. You've done some things that were terrible that you're ashamed to mention, that you feel shame creep up on you when you think about it.
You've made some choices that make you, if you really look at it, make you into a person that you don't want to be. And if you admit that that's who you are, it's crippling. So some of you are in the process right now of doing good religious behavior. As if somehow good religious behavior on this side will offset your wickedness on that side, but that's not how judgment works. This is the example I use. I've used it to try to help explain this to people at different jobs I've had, try to help walk them out.
But if you had a doctor who is an excellent doctor, like a real world doctor house, but nicer, and he was the reason why people's lives got saved. They were going to die. Nobody could figure it out. And this person would figure it out. And let's say he saves two lives a month, sometimes more, 50 lives a year, and then three, four times a year, three or four times, sneaks into someone's house and murders them. When he gets to court, he doesn't get to have a chalkboard and go, I've saved 50 lives this year, killed four people that y'all know about.
I'm a plus 46. I rest my case. He didn't get to do that. Because that's not how justice works. And some of y'all are figuring that out. I've been trying.
I've been trying to show up. I've been trying to do good. I've been trying to... And it's not fixing this. It's not fixing what's wrong with me. It's not fixing what I did.
It's not restoring what was broken. He gave the money back, but it didn't fix it. Some of you are figuring that out, and the truth is you're way, way, way further off than a plus 46. So he moves on to the next thing that happens. What happens when religion begins to fail us? Verse 5.
Throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself. What happens when we have to carry the weight of our sin and our guilt and our shame and we have no religious ability to cover it up is we begin to hate ourselves. We begin to destroy ourselves. Some of you walk around daily, mentally, undercutting everything you do. You're wicked. You're terrible.
You're evil. You're broken. In your group, when someone says they love you, you go, not if you knew the real me. You don't say that out loud, but that's what you say in your head. You end up destroying all the relationships you have. This can move on down the line to where you're destroying your body because you care so little about yourself because you know that you deserve destruction.
Even if on most days you're not willing to fully admit it in those terms, that's what you're doing. So you're destroying yourself through guilt, through shame, through pain. Some of you eventually move into cutting. But it's this, this I deserve punishment and the truth is you do. You're not wrong. Some of you look back at what you've done, the way you've used people, the way you've treated people, the way you've treated your spouse.
Some of you, if you would just look at how you treated the people you love most dearly and you still hurt them. Those are the people you're giving your best effort to. And your best effort is at times pathetic. And if you stare at that, it's crushing. And you feel like I don't deserve anything. I just deserve pain and destruction.
And Judas jumps to the end of that line very quickly. He goes out and hangs himself. And some people work themselves to that eventually in life, trying to bear the weight of their sin and shame. And others do it daily, slowly. For years and years and years. Punishing themselves for their guilt.
Trying to atone for their sin. Chapter 26, verse 75. Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. And he went out and wept bitterly. Through the words of Jesus, Peter sees his sin. Through the words of Jesus, Peter sees his failure.
Peter weeps. He's broken over his sin. Y'all, the next time Peter shows up in the Gospel of Matthew, he's showing up to see Jesus, to listen to him and follow him after the resurrection. We see that Peter moves on into the church that he leads in the church. Peter saw his sin, saw his shame, saw his shame, and took it to Jesus. Peter saw his sin, saw his shame, was broken over it, and ran to the only one who could fix it.
You see, Judas and Peter saw the same thing, that they had failed, that they had shame. Judas knew of no way to fix it, and Peter knew Jesus. Judas proves that he doesn't know Jesus. As if Jesus wouldn't accept him, as Jesus wouldn't give him an opportunity, as Jesus wouldn't accept repentance. He just takes the weight of his sin and shame and is destroyed by it, and Peter runs to Jesus with it. And that's what 2 Corinthians 7.10 says.
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. We talk about repentance all the time, that we would see our sin, that we would repent, that we would turn from it. The truth is, we want to be grieved by our sin. I think so many people, though, who only understand the worldly approach to this, think that the church gathers so that we can feel bad about ourselves, and that by feeling bad about ourselves, we can go out into the world and be motivated by guilt so much that we'll be good people. No. And if that's what you're trying to do, welcome.
Let me explain this. It's so much better. The truth is, we do want to grieve. We do want to be called to repentance because we want salvation without regret. Somebody say, without regret. Now, the people who really need to say without regret, say without regret.
How on earth is that possible? Jesus Christ bears the sin of the world for all those who believe in Him. He takes your sin. He becomes your sin. He dies to your sin. We are buried with Him in baptism.
We are raised with Him in a new life. We are washed clean and we have no regrets. Why? Why can we have sin and no regret? Because we have a Savior that washed us clean and my sin only magnifies His glorious grace. my sin only works in me to produce praise. My sin only works in me to help me see, yes, how small and wicked I was.
Yes, how much of deserving of destruction I am. When the enemy comes along and he begins that, let me tell you, he's preaching the first half of a good sermon. When the enemy comes to you and says, you are wicked, you are a sinner, let me drag up behind what you have done in the past. Let me tell you what you've done. Let me tell you how you've hurt people. Let me tell you what you did in high school.
Let me remind you of your sin and your wickedness and your brokenness. Our response, if you belong to Jesus, is come on, get to the end. Get to the end. Tell me about Christ. Tell me about when He went to the cross. Tell me about how His blood was shed.
Tell me about how He died. Tell me about how He was in a tomb and everything seemed dark. Tell me about when life came back into Him. Tell me about how He saved me from my sin. Tell me about how I'm free. Tell me about how I have a salvation without regret.
That is what is for you in repentance. We want you to grieve. We want you to hate your sin so that you will repent so that you will find Christ. Worldly grief just feels bad and destroys you. Grief, when Jesus enters the picture, dies and rises again. We have a salvation without regret.
Thomas Watson says, till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet. For some of us the first step is to hate our sin, to grieve over it, to have the rooster crow to stare face to face with our wickedness so that we can see how glorious Jesus is that He dies for sinners. The band's going to come back up. My prayer for you is that you will respond like Peter. The truth is you are responding to your guilt. You are responding to your shame.
Some of you are trying to cover it up. Some of you are trying to deny it. Some of you are trying to hide it. Some of you are trying to just muscle through. Some of you are destroying yourself slowly over time and feeling terrible about it as if somehow tearing yourself up, tearing your body up, tearing your mental state up, will atone for your wickedness. And the reality is Jesus atones for sin and Jesus alone.
Only He sets us free. Only He provides salvation without regret. Some of you are Christians. You've placed your faith in Jesus and you are still in the middle of your sin, not getting to the part of salvation, just grieving, just trying to atone for it by feeling bad. Stop. Do not rob the Lord Jesus of His glorious grace.
Praise Him that He saves wicked sinners like you. When you see your sin, turn from it and run to the one who saves. Some of you right now are trying to deny this. You're trying to hide from your sin. You're trying to cover it up through religious good works and the reality is religion says to you, what has this got to do with me? See to it yourself.
And Jesus says, I'll see to it myself because your sin has everything to do with me because I'm going to cover it for you. May we hope in Christ, in Christ alone. We're about to sing a song called Nothing But the Blood and I want that truth to sink into your head. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Nothing else will fix it.
No amount of good work, no amount of shame, no amount of feeling bad will fix this. Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Let's pray. God, we thank you that you're good. Thank you that you save sinners and we pray that in the middle of our shame and our doubt that we would move from grief to repentance and from repentance to salvation without regret that we would walk in the freedom provided by the cross that we might proclaim the glorious grace of Jesus. Lord, may we repent of our religion that stands in the way of us loving you.
May we repent of all of our self-righteousness. May we repent of our wickedness in the places that we failed. Help us to see ourselves clearly so that we may love you fully. In Jesus' name, amen.
Discipline
Transcript
How are we doing this morning? My name's Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. My community group, the community group I'm part of, we, a couple weeks ago, were having a cookout. And so we were all hanging out, having a cookout. And we were grilling, and we had a fire pit, and we were just kind of celebrating that...
Oh, actually, we were celebrating a couple of people in our group got baptized. That's what we were celebrating. I was going to say we were celebrating that the weather was getting nicer, but that wasn't true at all. We were just enjoying the weather was getting nicer. We were celebrating that a couple of people in our group had gotten baptized, and so we were just cooking out and hanging out. And my wife came over to me.
I was standing at a table talking and just kind of eating and drinking. And she came over to me, and she goes, You're going to have to help me watch that boy. That boy is our son. He has a name, but I know who she was talking about. Because a lot of times when we go out places, I just walk off because I'm not great at this yet. And she tends to him, but he's about as big as she is now.
And he's a little over a year. But so she said that, and at that moment I was like, Okay, so I'm like, I've got to find him. And so she goes, You're going to have to help watch him. And I kind of look. And at this moment, I look behind her, and about 10 yards off, I think she just sat him down somewhere where he was safe, but then she walked away. And so he scanned the area and thought, What is the closest thing that could do me some serious physical harm?
Because that's how he goes through life. And he saw a fire pit and took off running as fast as he could towards it. And so I saw him. The fire pit was kind of down a hill, so he was going to get going as fast as he could go, and there was going to be no possible way he could stop. I saw him running towards the fire pit. It had a pretty good fire going in it.
And I took about two steps and realized there was absolutely no way I was going to make it there. And he was running about as quick as his little legs could take him towards a fire pit, and I was not going to make it. And Anna did not realize this was going on. So I took about two steps. It really felt like the ultimate dad challenge that she had just put me in. She was like, You watch him.
Best of luck. It's about to get serious. And so I see him running as fast as he can towards a fire pit. I can't get there in time. Maybe some other parents maybe know kind of that feeling. If you're maybe you don't have children or maybe you're a parent that kind of does that thing where you watch your children all the time, you know, one of those kind of parents.
Maybe you don't understand that feeling. Imagine someone swings a baseball bat at your face, and it takes four seconds to get there. But you just kind of have to watch it. Kind of like that's kind of this moment of just being like, This is going to be terrible, and I'm going to have to watch it. And we had a good run. I mean, he's a little over a year, so we did well so far.
But this is it. And it took about two steps, and I think some other people in our group noticed because they all help us watch Archer, which, thank you, Lord. And a lady named Edie, who also has a son who was born on the exact same day. Our group has three boys that were born. Two of them were born on the same day. One of them was born the day after.
And she has a son who was born on the exact same day. And she jumped up from where she was, and right as Archer was getting close to the fire pit, just scooped him up. And so he's looking back at the fire and crying and wondering why this lady is psychotic. And she hands him to me, and I was just like, Thank you very much. Like, it was just a moment of absolute relief. And I was so thankful for her and for her seeing that and jumping up and grabbing him before he ran headlong into absolute disaster.
Today, we are going to talk about church discipline. As we talk about what it looks like for us as Christians to be a healthy church, what it looks like for us together to follow Jesus together. We're talking about church discipline. And really what we're talking about, what church discipline is, is the process through which Christians address sin in each other. To pursue holiness and to avoid destruction. It's the process through which Christians address sin in each other.
To pursue holiness and avoid destruction. It is us as Christians, when one of us is running as fast as we possibly can, towards destruction. Towards pain and disaster. It's us as Christians being willing to do what Edie did, which was jump in and snatch each other up. Here's the reason why this is helpful for us to talk about. You're going to sin.
I'll let that sink in. No, that was heavy. You weren't ready for that. The question we have as a church is, how are we going to handle sin? How are we going to address sin? We're not going to not sin.
You are in a room full of messed up people and sinners. And the question for us is, how are we going to address it? How are we going to handle it? It feels a little bit like when I get to do premarital counseling with couples in our church. We talk about, basically, we're going to get together and talk about all the things y'all are going to fight about. And we're going to talk about how to fight.
So, honestly, in premarital counseling, I try to pick fights. I really do. Try to get a little bit annoyed with each other. Because here's the thing. You're going to fight. You get married your first year, you're going to think, why are we the only couple that yells at each other at 3 o'clock in the morning?
You're not. You are not the only couple that does that. You need to learn how to fight. And so, as Christians, for us, the question isn't, how are we going to be the perfect church? We're not going to be. How are we going to handle it when we aren't?
That's the question. What are we going to do when there's sin? What are we going to do when there's rebellion? What are we going to do when there's hurt feelings? What are we going to do when someone in your group has almost maliciously, aggressively begun to attack the group? What are you going to do when someone in your group just completely disappears?
What are you going to do when someone lies about you? What are you going to do when something turns up missing? Like, what are we going to do? How are we going to handle sin? That's massively important for us. It's vital for the health of a church.
And what we're going to talk about today I don't think is very popular. So I don't know. There may be a moment today where you think, this is so good. I don't think there's going to be one. I think mostly you're going to think, this all sounds terrible. I hope I never have to be involved in it.
And that is the hope. But surprise, you're going to be. So let's figure out how to do it well. Let's figure out how to love one another well, serve one another well, and be able to walk through this process well. Because we're a bunch of sinners who need grace and who need each other and who need Jesus at work on our behalf. So I'm going to pray.
And then we're going to hop in and try to figure out what it looks like for us to healthily, as we follow scripture, practice church discipline, which is how do we address sin in each other? God, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you save sinners. And we thank you that you then don't expect them to be perfect, but that we continue to have grace and we continue to have hope. We thank you that you give us to each other, that we belong to one another so that we might defend and protect one another. And we thank you, Lord, that in your word you give us wisdom and clarity on how we ought to approach one another in sin.
We love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's go to Luke. We're going to move around a bit today. We've been doing this throughout this series. We've kind of bounced around as we try to ask questions of scripture.
A lot of times scripture doesn't just answer stuff in one place. And so we've got to kind of move around so we can get the full picture. I'm looking forward to when we get to walk verse by verse through some books again because of my attention abilities. I like being able to just stay in one place. But we don't get to do that today.
We're going to have to move around a little bit. So Luke chapter 7, if you have a blue and white Bible like this on the row, you'll be on page 569. Am I saying this wrong? Luke chapter 17. My bad, guys. You're on page 569.
We'll be in Luke chapter 17. Believe the screen. Sometimes I say things incorrectly. So Luke 17, 569. If you don't own a Bible, this is our gift to you. Take it with you.
Okay. And he said to his disciples. This is Jesus talking. Jesus is the he here. Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come. So you're going to be tempted.
There's going to be temptations for sin, but you don't want to be the person tempting people. Temptations of sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck. That's a giant heavy rock. That's a giant heavy rock. That's a giant heavy rock.
Were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea. That he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Little ones there being Christians. Followers of Jesus. And then he says this. Pay attention to yourselves.
So that is pay attention to your own life. Pay attention to your attitude, your current discipleship, you following Jesus. Pay attention to yourselves. And then he says if your brother sins. So that's also, that's not just you personally, but that's pay attention to the family.
Pay attention to your community group. Pay attention to the Christians around you. If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day and turns to you seven times saying, I repent, you must forgive him. One of the first questions I think we need to ask is what is the heart behind church discipline?
Like why would we do it? Why would I address sin in you? Why would you address sin in me? Why would we have those uncomfortable conversations? Like why? What's our motivation when we go into that?
Are we supposed to be the sin police? Am I supposed to sit around and be like, let me see. Is everybody minding their manners? Out of line. Like should I get excited when I see a sinner? Does that make me feel better?
Jesus, look at how terrible that person is. Obviously you love me more now. Like is that our attitude? No. Not at all. What he says here, and I love this because it translates so well for me.
Verse 3. Pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. I love that he says brother. We talk about this all the time that when Jesus saved us, John 1 says that those who believed in him, he gave the right to be children of God. So we've been adopted into the family.
God is our father. We're brothers and sisters together. And they're your brother. They're your sister. And so you would address sin in them. And that worked so well for me because this is how I've worked my entire life.
I have two brothers. If I saw someone, let's say I saw you doing something. Maybe we went to school together. Maybe I just knew you. And you were doing something dumb. Here's what I did.
This was my approach to you being sinful, to you being dumb. I would think, that's dumb. And then I would say, not to you, but to the person next to me, look at how dumb they are. That was the extent of how I addressed that. If you continually did stupid things around me that I didn't like. And by stupid, I mean by my own categories of what I gauge as dumb.
I did a lot of dumb things, but they seemed smart to me. If you were stupid of a certain brand that I did not appreciate, I just would quit being your friend. Easy enough. I don't have to hang out with idiots. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying this is what I did.
So, you don't need to be taking notes on this part. Nobody's like, alright, no idiots. Like, don't do that. You know, you're sitting next to one, so you're hiding it. Sorry. The people who laugh the hardest.
Sorry. Okay. Anyway. It's your brother. Brother. So, this is the way I work with my brothers.
When they did something stupid, I went to them and I said, Hey, sit down. What you're doing is dumb. I disagree with you. You are wrong. You should not do this. I'm going to stay your brother, but you're wrong.
This should not be your approach to things. You should not have this attitude. You should not be chasing after this. This is a bad decision. And here's why. I felt some ownership over them.
I felt like if I had noticed them doing something that was bad for them, that was wrong, that I didn't think headed them in the correct direction, and then five years later, I hadn't said anything, but they had completely derailed. They had completely shipwrecked. I was going to own that because they belonged to me. I was going to own the fact that I saw this coming and did not tell them. And so when Jesus says, If you're brother, what he's saying is Christians belong to each other. You're going to own this.
You don't get to say, Oh, well, that was just that other person. I didn't want to get in their business. That's not an option for you because we've been made brothers and sisters in the same family. And that helps me tremendously because I really feel this. And it's culturally induced, but I feel this. Ah, that's not in my business.
I don't really want to. But when it was my brother, it was always my business. Because you're my brother. And so that's the beginning of our heart behind our approach to sin, is that we're family. So of course we would address sin.
Jump to Matthew chapter 18. So Jesus is saying something very similar in Matthew 18, but he's going to give it a much more full treatment. And so what we'll read will sound very similar to what we just read. He says, Pay attention to yourself. If your brother sins, rebuke him, which means address it. Talk to him.
Point it out. Matthew 18 should be on page 534. It's to the left of Luke. A little bit earlier. We're going to start in verse 7. And again, it's going to sound similar to what Jesus was just saying.
Woe to the world for temptations to sin. For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. And 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 crippled or lame than with two hands and two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.
Okay, so Jesus just said some things I think we've got to talk about. Feels like it. Jesus just said there's two directions. There's two tendencies. And this lines up with what the rest of Scripture says. So have you ever thought, man, this world we live in is just so beautiful.
Like you listen to Louis Armstrong sing, What a Wonderful World. Whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah. That song, you know what I'm talking about? Your little eyes tear up because these little kids are going to learn things that I'll never know. And you're like, that's true. My grandma didn't know about the internet.
Like whatever. You know what I'm saying? Like you have those moments where you just see a picture of something or you went and visited the Grand Canyon and you're just like, oh my goodness. You hold a baby and you just think, what on earth kind of place do we live in that this exists here? You have those moments. You listen to a song or something.
Like you're riding down the road, you just see something. Like for different people, it's different things. But there's these moments where you're like, this place is magical. It's the best way to describe it. Have those? Okay.
You ever have those moments where you think this is the absolute most shipwrecked, terrible place ever? Like earth is just wrong. This is just like, I don't know how it got this crooked. I don't know how it got this bent. I don't know how it got this bad. And there's a lot of philosophies and belief systems out there that are going to say, no, the world's good.
And there's going to be a bunch that say, no, the world's bad. Christianity says, yes. And yes. It's better than you could imagine. It's better than you could think. It was created by a holy God who designed it to be enjoyable and amazing and glorious and to point back to him.
And humanity completely shipwrecked this. And sin has completely wrought havoc on earth. And there are so many heinous, terrible things that happen that you are going to, that just going to obliterate your soul when you see them and when you partake in them and when they happen to you. Christianity says, yes and yes, more than you could imagine, more than you could imagine. Because we have a world created by a good and holy God that he put humanity on that has free will and humanity has rebelled and each one of us is off. Our hearts are wrong.
We're twisted and broken and this world is shipwrecked. And God is working to bring it back to what it was meant to be. And what Jesus says is, there's a place that you'll enter called life. Those who enter into life. What he originally meant this to be. And there's also a trajectory which is a hell of fire.
You see what it is, is it's the world as God meant it, completely maxed out, carried out into infinity, carried out into eternity. Or the world as we've turned it, the twisted broken sinfulness, carried out to maximum, carried out into eternity, into infinity. Those are the two trajectories. Those are the two destinations. And the Bible is very clear. Everyone on earth is on one of those trajectories.
And everyone on earth will extend into eternity, pursuing and being filled with life and joy and hope, what God originally designed, or extending into eternity where there's destruction and pain and death and suffering and hell because it's the ultimate expression of our brokenness. So what Jesus says, because he sees eternity. You see, there was a moment where Archer, it's my son, all he could see was the beauty of a glowing fire. He doesn't know what it is, he's just running towards it. Seems nice. The reason I panicked and he didn't was because I saw and knew where he was headed.
I knew how that ended up. I knew how that worked out. So Jesus steps out of eternity onto earth and he says, let me explain something to you. There's life and there is an eternal hell. And you would rather cut your feet off and make it into life. You would rather pluck your eyes out and make it into life than to be fully functional, active, healthy, so that you can sprint headlong into a flame.
That's Jesus' point here. Now, I've heard this read before and people say, well, it's hyperbole. He doesn't really want you to pluck your eyes out. He doesn't really want you to cut your feet off. He's just trying to show us the seriousness. I'm not sure that's true.
I'm going to give a caveat here in a second. Let's keep moving. We're not pulling out hacksaws yet. We're saving that to the end when the music's playing. Just kidding. Keep going.
Here's what he says. For if your eye causes you to sin, this is verse 9, tear it out, throw it away. It's better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. 10, see that you do not despise one of these little ones. Again, he's talking about Christians. He was given an example, so he brought a child there.
We read that at the beginning of chapter 18. But he's talking about Christians, followers of Jesus, the small ones that belong to him. And then he says something, we're about to read something that's confusing but does not have anything really to do with the point we're making today, so we don't have to spend a lot of time on it. But people don't really know what he meant here. There's a couple of different ones but we're not getting into it. So 10, see that you do not despise one of these little ones for I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.
If you're confused, that was confusing. 12, what do you think if a man has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, I truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the 99 that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. What Jesus just said is heart-poundingly glorious. Jesus said, there's a shepherd who has some sheep.
He's got 99 of them that are hanging around and acting like they got some sense. He's got one of them that gets lost. Doesn't he just leave the 99 and go get the one? Doesn't he just leave them there and go find the one? And the answer is yes, that's what shepherds do. They leave the 99 and they go get the one.
And he says, and once he gets the one, doesn't he celebrate? Isn't he more excited about the one he found than the one that just stayed? Yes. You see, Jesus says, there's a trajectory entering into life or entering into destruction. And Jesus says, if you're entering into destruction and your hand is causing you to sin or your foot is causing you to sin, cut it off. And we say, well, that's hyperbole.
Jesus went to a cross because of sin. Jesus was nailed to a cross because of sin. The Son of God left eternity to pay for our sin. Jesus does not believe that is hyperbole because when it came time for him to give up everything, he did. But the only reason why you don't have to cut your feet off is because Jesus' were nailed to a cross.
The only reason why I don't have to pluck my eyes out when they cause me to sin is that Jesus' eyes closed in death. The only reason you don't have to cut your hand off is because Jesus was pinned up and his heart exploded in his chest and he died of asphyxiation and he was laid in the tomb. The only reason why we don't have to crush sin in our bodies is because Jesus was crushed for our sin in his body because he believes this. If you're not sure whether or not Jesus believed in an eternal hell, look at him on the cross. He was chasing down the sheep that went astray when he went to the cross.
Here's the good news for you today. Everybody's on a trajectory either towards life or towards eternal destruction. But if you're headed towards eternal destruction, I want you to know that the shepherd has left the 99 and he's doing absolutely everything he can to chase you down. I want you to know that that shepherd left the 99 and swapped his life for the sheep. We need to know that so that we understand the heart, behind addressing sin in each other. You see, we've got to believe that we're family and we have to have a rock-solid belief in the gospel which says that we're all sinners bound, running headlong towards a real hell outside of the grace of Jesus on the cross that makes us into a family that loves one another, cares for one another, protects one another.
The heart behind church discipline is a rock-solid belief in the gospel that we're all sinners headed for a real hell outside of the grace of Jesus on the cross who makes us family that loves one another, cares for one another, and protects one another. That's the heart behind it. That's the reason why you address sin in someone else because you actually believe that what Jesus said is true, that there are two trajectories. that's why we risk conversations. That's why if someone in your group, let's say you've got a young lady in your group and she's following Jesus until she gets a boyfriend.
The reason why we're going to talk through this is because this happens. We have a lot of relationship idolatry in our culture where love conquers all and they're not talking about the verse from Corinthians but they're talking about if I love somebody everything works out and you can all shut up and if you stand in my way you're wrong and I get to do whatever I want. If you watch a romantic comedy or any kind of romantic movie the bad guy is the person who stands in the middle of this really jacked up relationship not the two people who are chasing after a really dumb relationship. Okay, I'll give you something to think about next time you watch one of those.
She gets a boyfriend, she's following Jesus, she gets a boyfriend and now she's following her boyfriend and her boyfriend is headed away from Jesus. Why would you have that conversation with her? Because you believe, you have a rock solid foundation that says she's your sister so you have some, she belongs to you, you have some ownership and she's on a trajectory either towards life or towards destruction and that's going to extend for eternity so you have an awkward conversation. Why when somebody offends you or hurts you or sins against you do you go talk to them rather than just writing them off because you believe that their soul matters more that they're on a trajectory?
Okay. If that's the heart behind it, if that's our motivation, what's the process? Like how do we actually do this? Does he lay that out for us? I'm glad you asked. Yes, he does.
Next verse, 15. If your brother sins against you, okay, so again, putting this inside the family relationship, this is Christian to Christian, this is those who belong to each other. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. Go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. Between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. That means the gathered belonging group of Christians following Jesus. We would say, tell them to your community group and then we'll take it to the whole everybody, all the groups got to know. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector, which man, really drives that home because we use those terms and know what that's talking about. Let's explain that in a second.
Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. That's taken out of context a lot. We're going to talk about that in a second too. Okay, so here's the outline.
Someone sins against you. You go talk to them by yourselves. They repent. They say, you're right. I did sin. I'm wrong.
I shouldn't have done that. You know what you say? Up top, we're good. I forgive you. We're good. Like that was the goal.
You wanted, like the repentance was, that's what you were aiming for, was them to acknowledge their sin. They don't repent. So let's take this scenario with the girlfriend thing. You, she's part of your community group. She's following Jesus. She gets a boyfriend.
She just starts kind of disappearing. So you call her up and say, hey, can we get coffee? Can we talk? She says, yeah. So you go sit down with her and you say, hey, this doesn't look good.
Like this isn't, this isn't a good trajectory for you. Like you were following Jesus and now you got a boyfriend and like, I'm, I'm pretty sure he's like leading you off. Like he's, he's taking you away from following Jesus. Doesn't seem like you're reading your Bible anymore. I think y'all are having sex. Like I think there's a lot of things going on here that aren't good for you as you try to follow Jesus.
Let's say she responds with, yeah, you're right. I didn't need to come back around. I'm sorry. I'm wrong. That's great. That was it.
That's all you had to do. That's, that's, if she, she repents, you want her back. But if she says, who are you to get in my business? We're not hurting anybody. You're just jealous. Okay.
Now you go talk to more people. This is why we say all the time. If you come tell me about a situation where this person did this against me, my immediate response should be, what did they say when you told them? Because I've got to assume we're on step two. I just got to assume, oh, you already told them and it went poorly. It's, it shouldn't be.
And maybe I'm wrong for this. It's my favorite when I say that to someone and they go, what was it? Oh, no, I hadn't, I didn't talk to them. It's like, oh, good. I especially like it if that person's there, I'll just go, hey. Hey.
Yo, Mike. Dave's mad at you. You got it, Dave. Take it from here. It's like, what the heck? I think this is the best.
Um, I tried to pick two random names so that there wouldn't be an actual Mike and an actual Dave that he walks up afterwards like, what the heck, Dave? So anyway, um, do you go tell somebody else? They come talk. If they won't listen to the two or three people, you go tell more people. It says, take it to the church. You go tell your whole group.
Hey, this is what's going on. We talked to them a couple of times. They're not listening. They're not repenting. They're not acknowledging this. Eventually you would bring it before the whole church and here's how this ends.
At some point they repent. That's option one. That's the one we're going for. Or at some point it says you treat them like a Gentile and a tax collector. Okay. First of all, that does not mean be mean to them.
Matthew, see that name at the top left corner of the Bible there? That guy was a tax collector. Okay. He wrote this down for us. What he means is you graciously pursue them as someone who doesn't know Jesus. You're going to assume that they are not a Christian.
You have to. And here's why. Christians repent. If you say you're a Christian and there's no pattern of repentance in your life, no you're not. Christians repent. Christians acknowledge sin.
That's how we got in. This is a group of people who said, I'm jacked up. You messed up? Yes. Ooh, this is me. Shh, shh.
He's talking to me. Yes. Jesus is not. That's how we get in. That's what, Jesus was not messed up so that we can be made righteous through him. But all of us are messed up.
So if you come tell me I've sinned, it's like, yes, probably. How? When? What did that do? We get to talk about it. Christians repent.
So if there's a pathway of non-repentance, at some point you have to go to your group and you say, I don't believe this person is a Christian and we have to start treating them like they're not a Christian. Which means, try to be around them. Try to love them. Try to point them to the gospel. Try to help them. But we're not holding them to the standards of Christians anymore because they're not a Christian.
They don't believe this. You would maybe need to tell them, hey, just wanted you to know I don't think you're a Christian. I love you. I'm going to keep loving you. But I don't want you thinking that you're following Jesus when you're not.
Because there's an actual trajectory towards life or towards destruction. And the worst thing we can do is in our community groups and in our church coddle and be really kind to a bunch of people headed to destruction and let them pretend that they're Christians and never have had a moment where we sat with them and said, hey, I don't think you get this. Okay. Okay. This ends in one of three ways. Oh, sorry.
Let me keep... He puts it on the church, not the leadership, on the gathered people of God. He says there's power in gathering. There's... Where two or more of y'all are gathered, I'm among you. So some of you think what the Holy Spirit tells me is more important than what He tells anybody else.
Jesus would say, nuh-uh. He speaks through the gathered church, through His people together. So if you're in your group and you're the only person who thinks what you think and your whole group that you've been with for a while and know loves Jesus and know they get together and study the Bible and have seen that they've had wisdom before and they're all looking at you and saying, hey, what you're doing is dumb and you think they just don't understand me? No. No, no. You should think, maybe I'm wrong.
I've had conversations with people before and they go, I don't want to talk to them. I know what they're going to say. It's like, good, don't talk to them. Go ahead and start doing it. I don't want to get with my group. I know what they're going to tell me.
Is it going to be something from the Bible? I love your group. I hope they show up at your house. Sorry. Anyway, that also does not mean we're two more gathered. There I am in the midst of them.
That doesn't mean when people say, so me and my buddy, we're a Christian. We can go get on a boat. That's our church. Okay, that has nothing to do with what he's talking about here. And I hope a few of your other buddies who are Christians come and talk to you alone. And if you listen, that'd be great.
But if they don't, I hope they bring more people. Okay. Let's go to 1 Corinthians because there's three ways this ends. Most of it ends with the first step, which was you go talk to them, they repent. You go talk to them, you point out their sin, they repent. Most of it does that.
Sometimes it ends with they will not repent and they are not a Christian and we just need to acknowledge that and keep loving them and keep wanting them around and keep chasing after them and keep inviting them to things and they're welcome to hang out with our group and they're welcome to be here on Sundays and they're welcome to do everything we do as a church. We just got to know they're not a Christian. That's option two. Option three is worse. It's the one we don't like as much. It's got the same goal and the same heart.
Okay. We in 1 Corinthians 5? We made it? This is Paul writing to a church. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and a kind that is not even tolerated among pagans. For a man has his father's wife and you are arrogant.
Ought you not rather to mourn? So what he says is, you've got people hanging out in your church that are actively pursuing this sin. Flagrantly, openly, actively pursuing this sin. And y'all's response was, look at how gracious we are. Look at how much we believe the gospel. Isn't this beautiful?
They're arrogant. And he says, no, you should be broken over this because Christians repent of sin. You should mourn if someone's actively, openly, flagrantly pursuing sin. You should mourn for them. You should hurt over this. Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
If that sounds harsh, it's because it is. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
He's writing to Jewish believers and here's what he's saying. When they celebrated the Passover, they celebrated with unleavened bread because leaven for them when they were doing this feast represented sin. So if you had leavened bread, you were representing that it was sin. And so they would have unleavened bread to represent it was sinlessness, that the Passover lamb was sinless. It's talking about Jesus. And he says, you've been made unleavened, meaning you've been covered by Jesus.
So when we celebrate the Passover, we're covered by Jesus. We're celebrating what he's accomplished for us. We don't have any sin. That's what he's saying. But don't you know, a little leaven leavens the whole lump.
So here's why he says, put them out from among you. There's a sin of a certain type that is only going to cause harm to everybody else around. There's a sin of a certain nature. The Bible doesn't give us a list of these. We have to base it off of wisdom and what's going on in the particular case and the people and what's happening. That the best response for Christians is to say, you can't hang out with our group anymore.
You can't hang out with our church anymore until you repent. Thankfully, we haven't had to do that here. I've been a part of churches where that has had to happen or where they told somebody he was actively, aggressively, kind of predatorily approaching females. And so they told him, look, you can come to this gathering and that's it. Like, you can be here and you can be in this group. If we see you anywhere else, that's not okay.
When you show up, you have to tell a pastor you're here. When you leave, you have to tell a pastor you're leaving. If we see you outside of that window, that's not okay. Because they were protecting everybody else. They were going to be aggressive with this guy. And they said, if you show up to another gathering, not the one we told you you could be at, you're not going to be allowed to be around at all until there's repentance, until there's change.
Now, I don't want this to ever happen. This isn't the goal. The goal is repentance. But I'll tell you one thing. If you look and say, hold on a second. So the response was, this guy's a sinner.
Kick him out. That was the response. Put him out. Don't let him be around. When Archer was running towards that fire pit, if Edie had drop kicked him, I would have high-fived her. Like, if that was as close as she could get, it was just to do that.
I'd have been like, that was the most beautiful kick. You've got to teach me your form. Thank you. Thank you. What Paul's saying is, get rough with them if you have to. Don't let them pretend.
If someone is actively, openly, aggressively pursuing sin and will not repent, then do what you have to so that they can't go home and go, oh, no, people accept me. This is okay. This must be all right. If I get to be around. If everybody in the church looked at you and said, you cannot be here because you are actively, aggressively pursuing sin and this is not okay and you're going to harm people and we don't believe you're a Christian, until you decide to repent and change from this, you're not allowed to be around. And if we find out you've headed over to another church because there's a bunch of close ones, we're going to call them.
Hopefully, by God's grace, you would go home and go, I may need to think about this. But if we all just go, hey, buddy, there's a good chance you'll think it must be okay. Verse 6, your boasting is not good. Do you not know that little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. Meaning Jesus has already taken away your sin.
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven and the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. He gives clarification. Not at all. Meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters since you would need to go out of the world.
So what he says is, when I said don't associate with sexually immoral, I didn't mean non-Christians. That's what he means by of this world. Because what he says is, you'd have to move. Off the planet. You would need to quit your job. Go to the top of Mount Everest and die.
That's how you could escape. But you'd be next to another little frozen sinner that got up there and died. Like that's, that's all, like that's his, so don't take this to mean, oh I can't have sinner friends. All your friends are sinners. Look to your left on the row. Look to your right on the row.
Next time you're hanging out with your community group, be like, hi sinner friends. That's who's there. But what he's saying is, people who are actively pursuing this and are a part of the church need to be addressed. It needs to be talked with, with them. It can't be okay for this to linger. But I am writing to you, not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother.
Christians, those who belong to Christ. If he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed or as an idolater or a reviler or a drunken or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one. So what he's saying is you address it with him, you talk to him about it, they repent. He's not negating what Jesus said. He's saying that if someone's actively pursuing this and won't repent, then at some point you have to say, hey, you can't be around. We're not going to keep acting like you're a Christian.
For what do I have to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God Judges the outside, purges the evil person from among you. Okay, meaning the Christian church should quit acting like the rest of the world should be Christians. Step one, quit judging the world outside. Point them to Jesus.
They're sinners. They need grace. Step one, quit acting like the rest of the world should be Christians. Step two, start acting like the Christians should be Christians. It's real easy to stand up and talk about all those bad people out there. Why don't you start talking to the bad people in your group?
Because I know them and that's uncomfortable. Yeah, it sure is. We got to start addressing sin in each other and start acting like, hey, if you're a Christian, this is what it looks like. Start calling each other towards holiness and away from destruction. When someone says, you can't judge me, 1 Corinthians 5, yes, I can. I am supposed to.
Paul says, aren't we supposed to judge the people inside the church? And by judge, it doesn't mean condescending, I'm better than you. What it means is, I'm a Christian, I see what you're doing and it's not lining up with what Jesus says. We need to talk about it. I can rightly see what you're doing and address it with them. So, the heart behind this is a rock solid belief in the gospel, a belief that we're all sinners bound for a real hell outside of the saving grace of Jesus through the cross that makes us into a family that loves, cares for, and protects one another.
That's the goal, the process we just talked through. That's the heart behind it, the process we just talked through. What's the goal? What's the aim? What's the point? Why are we doing this?
2 Corinthians. Go to the right, one book. Chapter 2. Why are we doing this? Verse 5. We're going to wait a second.
I want people to see this. Now, if anyone has caused pain, He has caused it not to me, but in some measure, not to put it too severely, to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough. So, that's the majority of the church. The people who belong to the church, the majority is enough. So, you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.
So, I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for the sake, for your sake, in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs. Most scholars believe this is referring to the same person from 1 Corinthians. He came back.
He came back. And Paul says, forgive him. Reaffirm your love for him. That's why you did that in the first place. Paul says, to put him out from among you. And then he says, when he comes back, he says, bring him back.
One of the reasons he said to put him out, and I don't know if we missed this, I don't remember reading this, but it said, turn him over to Satan so that he might, for the destruction of the flesh, so that he might be brought into life. That's the point. The goal is repentance. The goal is that they would return. The goal is that we would all remain a part of Jesus' family. The goal is that we would always stay in.
And this guy comes back. I hope that we never have to stand up at a family meeting and say, this person who was a part of our church family is no longer allowed around us. With tears in our eyes to say, we've talked to them, we've talked to them, we've talked to them, they haven't repented, and they're not going to be welcomed right now. Let's all pray for their soul. I hope to God we never have to do that. But if we do, I pray for the day we get to stand up and say they came back.
It worked. Jesus chased them down. They're here. They're repentant. Let's reaffirm our love for them.
Let's lay our hands on them. Pray for them. Let's all hug them. If they're not a hugger, they can get over it. They're back. We're going to have on screen Hebrews 3 as we wrap up.
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort. That means encourage a special gospel Bible encouragement. It means point each other to Jesus. Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
Just leave that back half of that verse up there. He says, take care, be watchful, keep an eye on yourselves that there's not a deceitful, unbelieving heart that sin lies to you and leads you astray. I get excited and have been all week as we talk through this and here's why. I need this. I want this. One of the things we're excited about is we go to membership where we're going to do official kind of membership where we say this is what we believe as a church and our community groups are going to say this is what we're going for as a group is to give all of us the opportunity to say I'm in and what I mean by I'm in is if I ever try to get out I want you to chase me down because I need this because sin lies to me and I want right now while I'm in my right mind that I'm following Jesus I want to look at the rest of the people in my community group and say if I start running I want you to run faster than me and chase me down.
I want you to love me enough to grab me as I run headlong into destruction. I want you to believe the gospel enough to sit me down and say you're wrong here. You need to repent here. One of the ways that we know we're loved as Christians one of the ways we know we have brothers and sisters is when was the last time someone sat you down and told you you were wrong? That's one of the most loving things people can do. I know because that's what my wife does most of the time.
You're wrong here. You need to repent here. One of the ways that we know we're loved as Christians one of the ways we know we have brothers and sisters is when was the last time someone sat you down and told you you were wrong? That's one of the most loving things people can do. I know because that's what my wife does most of the time. That's how you know you're loved. Someone cares enough about you to risk your relationship
By telling you something you don't want to hear? So your group cares enough about you to call you up and say hey we haven't seen you in a while what's going on? They call you up and say we've got to get together let's talk hey you're not following you're not doing this right you're on a path you're on a trajectory and it's not towards Jesus it's not towards holiness it is not headed in the right way and let me explain something to you
If it's this relationship Jesus said cut your feet off I know he means break up if it's school if it's whatever that's leading you away from Jesus it's not worth it and I need somebody to sit me down and say that and you need somebody to sit you down and say that because you're not strong enough on your own you're not smart enough on your own and your heart lies to you
And the author of Hebrews says take care be watchful that this doesn't happen as long as it's today point each other towards Jesus as long as it's today chase one another down because the goal is that we'll be there at the end the goal is that all of us are there at the end Matt's going to come back up here we're going to sing here you see those commercials for traffic fatalities in South Carolina they're interviewing people and they're like
What's an acceptable number for traffic fatalities in the state of South Carolina people pick a number I don't know a hundred okay what's an acceptable number for traffic fatalities in your county four five what's an acceptable number for traffic fatalities in your family and immediately everybody goes zero and they go okay why don't we make that our goal for the state zero because it's always going to be somebody's family what's the acceptable
Number of Christians that we can lose along the way what's the acceptable number of the people in your group that can get their trajectory off and run headlong into destruction what's the acceptable number that we want to stand before Jesus and say yeah I didn't really want to get in their business it didn't feel like my place if that number's me if you're talking about me the acceptable number is zero I expect everyone
In my group to be like to the point of physical aggression with me dude this isn't okay you're confused you're lost your heart's lying to you you're chasing after stuff that's not going to fill you up you're believing lies because the goal is that we would all hold our confidence firm to the end that the gospel that we believe in now we would believe in on the day that everything melts away and we stand
Before our king because there is life to enter into and there is hell to enter into and they're eternal and that's the only thing that matters if you're not a Christian I want you to know that Jesus left the 99 he left heaven to chase after you that he loves you enough to die for you so that you don't have to pay the penalty of yourself and you can be saved and you can be taken up by Jesus and you can be made his and you can be brought
Into the family and if you're a Christian I want you to care about your brothers and sisters enough to talk to them I want us to have lives marked by repentance and I want us to love one another enough to address sin in each other Christians part of our church family we're about to celebrate communion that's where we take bread and we take grape juice and we remember that Jesus' body
Was broken for us so that yours didn't have to be that his blood was shed so that yours doesn't have to be that you can be set free if you have someone who sinned against you and you haven't talked to them you need to talk to them before you take communion I fully expect that people will get up and move around the room and we'll have some conversations where we pray
With one another where we address sin in each other where we say hey I've been noticing this I haven't brought it up to you you need to confess you need to repent we have lives marked by repentance you need to repent before you take communion if you're not a Christian you can repent of your sin and you can place your faith in Jesus that he paid your penalty so you don't have to be led to destruction
And you can take communion for the first time which is a celebration that Jesus went to the cross for you let's pray God I pray that we would be a church that has a rock solid belief in the gospel that you would not for one moment let us forget that there is an eternal life and that there is an eternal destruction and God that we would love one another
Enough to address sin I pray that we would be a church Lord that doesn't talk about people but that talks to people and God I pray that you would bless this church so that this process always works God I pray that through your Holy Spirit this would always work
That there would always somewhere down the line somewhere along the way there would be repentance there would be an acknowledgement of sin that people would turn back and that we would continue to love and forgive always that we would always forgive and reaffirm our love
For one another God we praise you we thank you in Jesus name mass going to continue to play when you feel ready go take communion if you need to talk to somebody get up go talk to them we're going to move around the room we're going
To repent of sin we're going to believe the gospel
Hate-Filled Bigots and Hospitality
The Church has gained a reputation over the years as being intolerant, closed-minded, and bigoted. And to be honest, some of it is probably deserved. But what if there was a way to believe faithfully while still loving extravagantly? What if Christians were better known for the openness of their homes than the slogans of their picket signs?
This week's sermon comes with an added Q&A session with one of our Community Group Leaders, Jordan Surratt.
Transcript
Well, good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in our sixth week, sixth and final week of our Theology of Sex series. I know many of you are thinking, man, I'm about sick and tired of talking about sex. So this is the last week.
We'll be spending any significant amount of time on that. But what we're going to say today really is a culmination of all the things we've said throughout this whole series. So this is more, maybe more than any other series. This series has kind of built off of what we said the previous week. Even the series where we walk just straight through books. This series has been basically we've got to get this concept so we can.
I'm going the wrong way. We've got to get this concept so we can discuss this concept. So we can discuss this concept. And we've kind of just built off of everything we've been saying. And so we're going to tag back to a lot of those ideas today as we talk through this issue. We're going to be discussing homosexuality and how we ought to respond and interact with that from a biblical understanding.
And so before we hop in, we're going to pray and then we're going to get started this morning. God, I pray that you would give us grace as we study your word. That you would help us to be gracious and loving to one another. And that you'd help us to really approach this difficult topic that is highly polarized in our culture. In a manner honoring to you and loving to others. And so God, I just pray that you'd bless us this morning as we as we seek to understand your will for us and your will for for your creation.
So God, we praise you and we thank you in Jesus name. Amen. So just just go with me for a second. Imagine remember back to middle school. For some of you that that's going to take a little more work for others of you. That was a couple of years ago, so it should be pretty easy.
Remember back to middle school and kind of just imagine for a minute that just kind of as as puberty began to hit you, which it hit people in different stages. And some people it was like it attacked them overnight and other people it like dragged it out for years. But just kind of begin to imagine with me for a second where you begin to just your body starts going through changes. So if you're a guy, maybe like your voice starts cracking. So like you're trying to talk and it just does that for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Which makes it really hard to like talk to humans without being made fun of and maybe maybe for girls like there's just maybe your parents began to let you I don't know like shave your legs or wear makeup. I don't know what happens with girls going through through all that. It was hard enough for me on my own. I wasn't trying to learn what was happening with y'all. But like you just you just begin to like the world just starts kind of changing around you.
And so for guys, maybe you spent way too much time looking at your armpits in the mirror to try to see if you were growing any hair like I don't I don't know. But just this stuff begins to change in you and you start realizing it's like in the movie Bambi where everybody gets Twitter painted in the spring. It was like suddenly in middle school all the guys started like you just started noticing the opposite gender. Like there was just this moment where it was just like there are girls here. And like I never really thought about how much that's going to impact the rest of my world. Like there was just kind of these moments.
But just imagine for a minute that when when that began to happen, when you began to have desires, sexual thoughts, when you began to have attraction to people in a whole new way, that it that it was the same gender. But just as that began to happen, you just began to find that I'm not attracted to what it seems like everybody else. Like I'm not I'm not experiencing the world the same way that everyone else is. So when I'm in the locker room changing and they're talking about the opposite gender, like I just I don't connect with that. And and I'm beginning to realize that my whole experience is just a little bit different.
And the amount of questions and confusion that would come along with that to begin to ask him, am I gay? What does that mean? Will I always be like this? Is there a way to to change this? Do I tell people what will they say if I tell them? How will they respond?
What happens to me if I tell people this? What happens to me if this is true? If this continues this way and just the amount of inner turmoil and pain? And confusion that just applies to all of life as you begin to try to just understand your place in the world, because because middle school and high school begin to be that anyway. Like you're trying to figure out who am I? Who am I going to be?
And you're basing that so much off of how people respond to you. So it's really interesting if you're around middle schoolers or high schoolers. They're a different person every time you meet them, because sometimes they're trying to be like, I'm going to be quiet and brooding. See how this works. Or I'm going to try to be a clown. I'm going to try to make everybody laugh and see if that works.
Like there's just this constant, I'll try to be really smart. I'm going to act like I don't understand anything. And you're waiting on your body to try to tell you, like, am I going to get really tall? Am I going to be athletic? Is this, like, what's going to happen here? And then add on top of that, I don't even understand my own sexuality.
And I'm beginning to realize that this puts me in a very small minority among everybody else around me. And then looking into our culture and realizing that it's so absolutely polarized. That on the progressive side, people who would refer to themselves as progressive, they're going to say, you need to just embrace your desire. You just, that's who you are. You found out your identity. You need to pursue that.
That's going to define you. And then on the other side of that, it's like this, maybe people made fun of you. Maybe people talked about you behind your back just based off of your mannerisms or the way you act in certain situations. And you begin to realize that there's not really a middle ground for you when it comes to culture. There's no way to just approach this in a non-polarized way. No way to process it in a non-polarized way.
And so when we begin today to discuss homosexuality, which has become absolutely polarized in our culture, we're talking about real people made in the image of God and loved by God. So absolutely loved by God that he would go to the cross and absolutely in a situation where struggling through. What does it mean to be safe? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be loved? What does it mean to exist with this?
And so as we talk about it today, I just want us to realize that we are going to discuss the logical end of it. We are going to discuss what the Bible says about it. But we also have to realize that we're talking about real humans, valuable based off of the fact that they were created in the image of God and that they're loved by him. And so we just want to be able to enter into it, understanding that. Now, the church has existed for over 2,000 years. Some would argue it was when Jesus kind of in Matthew 16 begins to say, I'm going to build my church on this, this proclamation of the gospel and those that proclaim it.
Some would say it specifically happened at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit filled 3,000 people and made them into the church. But it's existed for over 2,000 years and there has been agreement across the board with what the Bible says about homosexuality. Even as the church went Catholic and Protestant and there was Eastern Orthodox and like the church split at different times there, up until the last 30 years, 50 and maybe some really progressive circles, has there ever been any question of what the Bible has said about homosexuality? Now, there have been people who have outright rejected what the Bible has said throughout history and that's one thing.
But we've only recently begun to approach the text and say it doesn't actually say what we've always said it says. And so as we get into this this morning, I want us to realize that what we're going to do, I just want to walk us through what our plan is for today. We're going to lay some groundwork to try to even be able to enter into the conversation. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about what the New Testament actually says about this and how we ought to understand that and some of the common kind of pushbacks on what the Bible says. And then we're going to spend a good bit of our time just talking to the church and how we ought to respond, how we ought to think and treat people.
But this issue has become massively polarized to the point that there's no way for me to say things in a way that everybody leaves happy. So welcome. It's not going to happen today. Do try to be a couple of caveats. I'm not trying to make any political statements. So if you hear some, that's just because it's become a very political conversation.
But I'm not making any political statements. I won't be endorsing any candidates or anything like that. Lord, help us with all of them. I'm not making any political statements. Anything I say will sound like I've said 12 other things. So just try to base it off of what I'm actually saying, not what it sounds like I could be saying.
And I've had to work really hard to just say what I've got here and not just things that pop into my head so that I can be as helpful as possible. Here's the other thing that we all have to realize. In our culture, on especially very polarized issues, what we're taught is if we disagree, you're against me. If we disagree, you hate me. Especially on this issue, this is dividing us. We're going to join teams.
And if we're not on the same team, then we're against one another. And can I just tell you, that's not helpful and it's not true. So we are absolutely able to disagree and still be friends. Absolutely able to disagree and still love one another. Still spend time with one another. Still hang out with one another.
And can absolutely disagree on very important issues. And still be gracious and loving to one another. And we even see in our culture where it's gotten to where if we disagree, I've got to call you a name. That we've just broken down what adult conversations should look like and how we ought to interact with one another. So, real quick, as we get started this morning, the Bible does teach that homosexuality is a sin. Now, we're going to go through and explain what the Bible teaches sin means so that we can better understand that.
But the Bible does teach that homosexuality is a sin. That homosexual Acts are a sin, more specifically. But before we hop in and start looking at some of this, I want us to see Romans 3. Because this is what we believe as a church. This is absolutely primary to us. So we're going to have it on the screen.
But you can jump to Romans 3, verse 23. It will be on page 611 if your Bible looks like this. Romans 3, verse 23. For all have sinned. Welcome. You're included.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No one measures up. And are justified, made to measure up, made to be okay. By his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Whom, that's Jesus, God put forward as a propitiation. Which means a blood sacrifice to turn away God's wrath by his blood.
To be received by faith. That is what we believe. That is the primary message of the church. Which is that all of us fall short. All of us sin. None of us bring anything to the table.
And all of us are only made okay and only made right by Jesus. Period. That's what we believe. That's what we're here confessing. That's why we started the church a couple years ago. That's why I'm here.
If this weren't true. If it weren't true that sinners could be saved by Jesus. I would be doing something else. Probably more lucrative. Just guessing. I went to business school and tried to make some money.
That's what I'd be going for. Just letting you know. I might not make money, but I'd try. That wasn't helpful. Anyway. That's what we believe.
That Jesus saves sinners and that's all of us. That what we bring to the table is essentially nothing. Just our sin that made us qualified for Jesus to save us and die for us. That's all of us. There's not one thing that the Bible doesn't say. These are good people and these are bad people.
Or these are the people that God likes more. And these are the people that God likes less. What the Bible says is all have sinned. All have fallen short. And all are made okay only through Jesus. And his work on the cross.
That's the primary belief that we have. And in order for us to even have a conversation about this. We have to understand that that's what we believe. That's ultimate for us. Okay. The Bible in that way is very progressive and inclusive.
Everyone is welcome. Because everyone has fallen short. And everyone is a sinner. And it's only Jesus that makes us okay. I now have seven quick points I'm going to try to make. And I mean quick.
Because I've got way more other points coming later. Our culture has a track record of being unloving. To those who struggle with same gender attraction. To the gay community. We have a track record of being unloving. Hateful.
Our culture just in general has not treated them well. And that is not okay. Especially for the church. Those who claim to know and follow Jesus. Those who claim to believe what we just read. Which is that all of us are only made okay by Jesus.
All of us have. The only thing that we've brought to the table. Is what should exclude us. There's nothing that brings us. Makes us included other than Jesus. The church should be the absolute safest place on earth.
Because there are no disqualifiers. Absolute safest place on earth. To struggle with anything. And so where the church has responded poorly here. We ought to repent. We ought to look different.
Because it's Jesus that makes us okay. Two. Our culture sees sexuality as identity. Just to be helpful. This is a bunch of stuff we need to say. It's not in any kind of particular order.
And it won't necessarily be like. How does one connect to two? It probably doesn't. Our culture sees sexuality as identity. Meaning that whatever kind of sexual desires you have. That's who you are.
So when someone says I'm gay. They mean that as a. This is who I am. This is my identity. The Bible doesn't treat your identity that way. Your identity actually transcends sexuality.
It's much bigger than your sexual desires. Three. The Bible does not really speak to sexual orientation. Does not really speak to having a desire for someone else. We'll see where it kind of. It talks about it.
But it's not addressing that as sinful. To have a desire for someone else. To have a desire for the same gender. The Bible is going to specifically say. That homosexual activity. Is sinful.
So the Bible is going to say that. Having a thought or a desire for the same gender. It doesn't ever really get into that. It does say that lust is sinful. Which is where we have a thought or a desire. Heterosexual or homosexual.
And then we actually take active work in our minds. With that. So Martin Luther put it this way. When he's talking about sexual temptation. That you can't stop birds from flying over your head. But you can keep them from making a nest in your hair.
And that's the difference between having a sexual thought or a sexual desire. And lusting. Where lusting is where we actually take kind of an active part in choosing to let those thoughts grow. And take action in them. But the Bible isn't going to address desire as much as it's going to address action.
So the Bible isn't specifically after someone who has same gender attraction. As much as someone who Acts on it. Four. Sin is not just the bad things that we do. So we are tempted to think that sin is just my bad actions.
Sin is actually searching for satisfaction in anything other than Jesus. That's why we read Romans when we first started. Where we said that ultimately our biggest problem is that we've put something above Jesus. And that's what leads us into sin. Most of the time it's something good. Something applaudable.
Something that we would see value and worth in. And then we've begun to pursue that over and against Jesus. Here's the other thing. Sin is actually born in biblically. Like we're born sinful. I have an 11 month old.
I'm not going to have to teach him how to sin. I didn't explain to him how to throw a fit when I take my iPhone from it. I didn't explain to him to love my iPhone like a psycho. Like he just sees it anywhere and he's like, he'll drop whatever he's doing. He picks it up. And if I take it from him, he's like, why do you hate me?
And he falls in a little pile on the floor. And I just step over him and walk away. Nobody had to teach him that. We're all born with certain sinful proclivities. We're all born that way. So when someone says, I was born this way, I've always only ever had sexual desire for the other gender.
Christians shouldn't respond with, no, that's actually perfectly a biblical idea where it's like, yeah, it just doesn't mean what our culture means by that, which is if this is my identity, if I'm born this way, then ultimately it's okay. So I'll give you another example. My family filled with loud, aggressive people. Willing to be violent. Anna's family filled with quiet, nice people. That won't, like Anna, if you call her the wrong name, if you're like, hey, Susan, come here.
She'll, she'll, she just comes. Like she doesn't, she's not going to go, my name's not Susan. Like I've been around her before where someone called the wrong name and I've had to be like, her name's Anna. And they're like, well, I've been calling her this for a long time. It's like, well, that's really on her, but I'm sorry. You're going to have to change.
So I've had to do a lot of work to make Anna want to like assault me. Like I've gotten her there. It just takes a lot of work. I've had to be really active in my pursuit of making her that angry. But other people don't have to do that with me.
Like just my natural proclivity, like you can get me to where I don't want to talk and I just want to punch you pretty quickly. And that's in, that's born into me. But what I don't say is, sorry, this is how I am. Like, I don't, I don't get to do that as much as I would like to. They're all, all of us have some natural proclivities, natural desires that are born into us that are not God's good design. And all of us have to fight against that.
So when someone says I was born this way, honestly, we ought to say, yeah, okay. That makes sense. But that doesn't change what the Bible says. Sin is a big deal because it is always harmful. And when God addresses sin in us, it is not because he does not love us. It is because he does love us.
The primary place where we see Jesus, we see God actively addressing sin is on the cross. That's the primary place where God proclaims actively sin is horrendous. Sin is destructive. And I love you enough to work on it. So we don't believe as Christians when we say something is sinful, that we're against someone or attacking someone.
We're being helpful. When my wife points out sin in me, as much as I sinfully want to argue with her, she's actually doing that because she loves me. She doesn't point out sin in people she doesn't care about. She points out sin in me because she cares about me. And that's the way the Bible treats sin. So when the Bible says something sinful, it's not mad at you.
It's helping. Secondly, Jesus' primary place that he addresses sin is on the cross, which is where he dies to save us. So we can't act like him addressing sin is somehow hateful. It's actually the most loving thing he does. There are people in our church family who have varying levels of same-gender attraction. They have helped lead groups, served on teams, led teams, been a part of groups, and have been actively following Jesus and repenting of sin.
Absolutely believe that you can struggle with same-gender attraction. And be a spirit-filled Jesus follower on his mission for his glory, 100%. I have no doubt in my mind. Culturally, you're going to kind of be forced to decide where you land on this issue. There's not really a middle ground. So if your response is, well, I just don't care, culturally, they're going to say, sweet, you've joined this team.
There's not really a place where you can just say, doesn't matter to me. Culturally, you're going to kind of be forced to be on a team. And so it's helpful for us as Christians to study the Bible and decide where we land and be, to be as helpful as possible. Okay. Now I want to kind of move to the current discussion we've got going on when it comes to this.
We're going to look at three specific passages in the New Testament. So people bring up Old Testament. When it comes to homosexuality, a lot of people use what they call clobber passages, which is they just kind of go to this one passage and they act like, see, there it is. And they call it a clobber passage because they use it to like assault someone. That's not helpful. It is helpful to know where passages are that point to things, but not to use them aggressively to like Bible bullets to shoot someone.
Old Testament does address homosexuality. It does address, it'll say not to lie with a man as you would lie with a woman. Give specific instructions. And so people a lot of times will say, well, yeah, but there's a lot of stuff in the Old Testament we don't believe anymore. A lot of stuff in the Old Testament we don't follow anymore. We cut the, we cut our hair, we can get tattoos, we can eat lobster.
So obviously the Old Testament is just kind of discredited. There's a very long, helpful answer to that, that we're not going to get into because the New Testament talks about it. So where the New Testament does release us of some things like the dietary laws, it specifically continues to address other things like homosexuality. So we're going to spend the majority of our time focusing on the New Testament passages. If you'd like to have a discussion about the Old Testament passages, I'm sure Raz would love to talk to you about it, but I'll also talk to you about it if you want to. One of the other arguments, before we even get into, this is the kind of a prohibiting argument before we even get into looking at the Bible.
People say things like, it's 2016, aren't we over this by now? Or haven't we just progressed? Like there's this idea that progression of time just makes us better. And that idea came from Christianity and then got kind of co-opted and changed. So one of the things that you'll hear is just like, come on, like that's last century.
We're moving on. And the reason that that idea came around, historically people thought that that history went in a cycle. Christianity showed up and was like, no, there's a God who created everything. He has a beginning point. He has an end point. And he's working it towards something.
There's a redemptive history playing out. And so it's a Christian idea. Then the Enlightenment took it and basically just moved God out of it and said, as long as we move forward in time, everything gets better. Which once World War II happened, we should have gotten over, but we kind of haven't. We should have, be able to look at World War II and just go, no, time doesn't just fix things. All we've successfully done is figure out how to kill each other more efficiently.
But people still make that argument, which is really just a disconnect from what a Christian idea that God is actually working to redeem history. Also, people say things like, well, of course, Paul would say, that's who wrote some of these New Testament letters. Of course, Paul would say homosexuality is a sin because he wrote that such a long time ago. Meaning that the further you move back in time, the more prudish people get. Like, it's like you just go back and at some point you just, everyone turns into like a Puritan or a nun. Now, anybody who studied history doesn't really make that argument because the Romans and the Greeks, the Greco-Roman world was way sexualized.
Like massively. The reason Paul addresses it is because it was actively a normal part of life for them. And so he's going to address it. He's not addressing it because of course everybody agreed this was sinful because they were all old. He's addressing it because it was an act of practice going on. Okay.
The Bible clearly, directly, and repeatedly states that homosexual activity is a sin. None of these address same gender attraction as sinful. But there's been throughout history no real question about these verses. Go to Romans 1. We're going to spend a little bit of time there and then we're going to look at the other two where the Bible specifically addresses this. And I just want us to study them for a second and try to learn a little bit.
So Romans 1. We read this when we started this series. We read this a lot because this actually encapsulates sin for all of us pretty clearly. So we'll be in Romans 1. It's on page 610. If your Bible looks like this.
We're going to start in verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them from his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and his divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise.
They became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So we're going to pause there for just a second to catch us all up. God made the world. We notice that there's a creator. He has designed the world to reflect him, to point back to him from the Grand Canyon to massive waves. It's to bring glory and honor to him.
And we reject him and worship other things. That's our primary issue for humanity is that we put other things above God. We'd rather have money. We'd rather have power. We'd rather have a relationship. We just raise up all these other things, pursue those as primary, pursue those as that is what fulfill me.
And that's the major issue. 24. Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them two dishonorable passions. So it's now talking about passions, desire for one another.
Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless Acts with men, receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error. One of the results of this, and we talked about this in week one, is that we become overly sexualized, overly led by our lusts when we've begun to place something else above God, because it's easiest for us to believe that another human will fill this void. Money's great, but relationships hold more promise because we were made in the image of God.
So that's one of the things we talked about in week one. Specifically out of that, Paul's going to address that they exchanged natural relations with one another with the opposite gender for relations with the same gender. One of the arguments made against this passage currently is, first of all, it was saying that they weren't being true to themselves, that they were, it was heterosexual people who denied their natural desires for one another and pursued against their own natural desires, relationships with one another. Meaning that the biggest problem is not being true to yourself. The problem with that argument is that Paul says they were inflamed with passion for one another.
They burned with passion for one another. So it wasn't just their activity changed, but their desires changed. The second thing that is argued here is that Paul doesn't understand the concept of soulmates. Not the concept of soulmates, concept of orientation. That really the biggest problem is he didn't understand that people could actually be oriented in such a way to only be a desire of the same gender. The problem with that is in Plato's symposium, he talks about the idea of soulmates.
And when he discusses the idea of soulmates, we talked about this the other day for those of you who are looking for your soulmate, that originally the gods made people with two heads and four arms and four legs and then cut them in half and then you spend the rest of your time looking for your soulmate. So the problem with you looking for your soulmate is that this is a myth and it doesn't exist and you'll never find them. You're as likely to find a unicorn or Nessie. But in that myth, some of the people were male-male, some of them were female-female, and some of them were male-female. They had the idea and understood that some men were going to spend their life looking for a man and some ladies were going to spend their life looking for a lady.
They already had the idea and understood the concept of some people are just going to be oriented this way, directed this way, whether or not they use the language. So it was a familiar concept to them, but Paul's still going to say that this was a problem. Here's the biggest issue with us because we elevate your desires. One of our only hero stories left is the, everybody told you you couldn't be what you wanted to be and then you went and beat it anyway. Like that's one of our hero stories. Have you all seen previews for Eddie the Eagle?
Anybody seen previews for that movie coming out? If you haven't, this is going to be really hard for me to explain. Anybody seen it? Okay. It's about a really goofy, uncoordinated kid in England who wants to be an athlete, wants to go to the Olympics. The problem with Eddie going to the Olympics is that he's a really goofy, uncoordinated kid.
So there's no like real way he's going to do that because most Olympians are good at what they do and Eddie apparently is not good at anything. See how that works? Like, well, I'm not like going to go do the high hurdles or whatever. It's just not going to happen. So that's his problem too.
He's just, he can't. Then he finds out about the downhill super long ski jump. That's what it's called. Look it up. And decides he's going to do that because all he really has to do is like, bend, I don't know. It's probably way more complex than this, but bend and then not be afraid of dying.
I think that's basically the two qualifications. And the whole movie is that nobody wants him to do it because he's goofy and uncoordinated, but he does and does it anyway. And you can watch basically the preview and know what the movie is. And I still want to see it because that's our hero story. People told him he couldn't and they told him he couldn't and they told him he couldn't and they told him he was ugly and that was why he couldn't and he was uncoordinated. But then he can go do it anyway.
He's going to, he's going to thumb his nose at all of them and go accomplish it. And that's why when it comes to things like this, when it comes to your own personal desires, our culture just rallies around you and says, follow your heart, whatever you want to do. And if anybody tells you to stop and anybody tells you that you're wrong, you found your enemy and you found the person you've got to overcome so that we can make a really amazing movie about you. That's our cultural story. That's what we celebrate. And so when it comes to personal desires, we just come along and say, if you desire it, then it's real.
Pursue it. And if anybody tries to stop you, they're wrong, they're evil, they're against you. And you now know who your enemy is. The problem with that is that the Bible says that our passions and our desires and our heart are part of the problem. That our heart is actually deceitful above all else, that you've lied to you more than anyone else ever has. You've tricked yourself more than anyone else ever has.
And the other problem is it's just a small view of what passions are, how we associate our desires. Like we're really just saying, find something that you like, but we don't realize that's culturally connected. So let's take two men. One of them is an Anglo-Saxon way back in the day when they were super aggressive and right around just killing people. And the other person lives in Manhattan today. So another man lives in Manhattan today.
Both of them have the same desires. One of the desires is when anybody mouths off to them or stands in their way, they just want to harm them physically. Overly aggressive, want to harm people. The other one is they have same gender attraction. Now, in Manhattan today, the man who has both of those desires is going to say, my desires to harm people and crush my enemies is not me. And I need to suppress that and maybe get counseling because that's going to stand in the way of who I'm designed to be.
But they're going to look at their same gender attraction and say, this is who I am. This is what needs to be welcomed. And this is what needs to flourish because of our culture. But the Anglo-Saxon man is going to do the exact opposite. He's going to look at his desire to crush his enemies and go, that's who I am. Because his culture celebrates that.
And he's going to look at his desires for same gender attraction and say, I need to suppress this. This isn't going to help me. And so when we say, whatever desire you have, that's ultimate, we actually are taking a really small view of what desires, how they actually work as if we don't have competing desires. We're not understanding that our culture affects that. And the Bible says at the end of the day, your desires are messed up anyway. So you don't have to think about the logical stuff.
Just know your desires aren't helpful. You need to trust Jesus. Was that helpful? Okay. 1 Corinthians. It's going to be 10 pages over if you're in one of these Bibles.
This is another place that Paul addresses this. This is actually, we're in 1 Corinthians 6. We picked up right after this last week where Paul's addressing sexuality. Verse 9. Okay. We'll keep going, but we're going to have to come back to this.
A lot of times these passages get read wrongly as if the only thing that was written there was men who practice homosexuality. That's a long list. And that's just kind of stuck in the middle. What Paul's saying is all of those pursuing active sin are disqualifying themselves from the kingdom of God. They're not trusting in Jesus. They're pursuing their own desires.
They're idolaters and adulterers and sexually immoral, which sexual morality, we talked about it last week, is everything outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage as the way the Bible is going to hold up as the standard. The problem with us is that we want to point out one thing and say, see, see how that's a big issue? But we're not repenting of our own sexual sin. I'm acting as if my own heterosexual sin is okay or somehow blessed by God or somehow more acceptable than someone else who struggles with something else, and that's nonsense. But the Bible is going to list it as a sin with other sins that people struggle with and that Jesus redeems us from.
That's how he ends. Such were some of you, but you've been washed and sanctified by Jesus. It doesn't disqualify you from his love. It actually is what qualifies you. For Jesus to redeem you is your sin. And it lines up in these categories.
Now, people will try to argue in this one and in, even though there's some different words used, and in 1 Timothy, where we're going to go in a second, that we don't really understand what that word means, that it actually is referring to maybe pedophilia, or it's referring to unwanted sexual contact, or it's referring to promiscuous homosexual activity. The problem is there's not really, you're having to do work to make the text say that when the writing's pretty clear. And there's other issues with that that we'll see in just a second. So go to 1 Timothy. It'll be on screen, but if you want to flip over there, it's to your right, and it'll be on page 642.
Starting in verse 8. Now, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down, for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane. For those who, okay, so basically Paul's going to say the law is good because we're messed up. That's what he's, that's the point he's making. The law is good for all of us who are rebellious, because it helps us change. It helps us see our sins that will be pushed to Jesus.
For those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. It accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Again here, it does specifically in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians, although Romans addresses it, it does say men. Romans does address female homosexuality. And the men who practice homosexuality was a much bigger cultural issue for them. That's why Paul's going to keep bringing it up.
Because women didn't get to do what they wanted to, but men could do whatever they want. So that's why Paul's going to keep bringing it up. But sexual immorality basically covers everything outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, which is the goal. And here's the thing. I have a friend of mine. His name is Thor.
And he is a PhD in linguistics. Thor. Which means that, first of all, he's one of these guys who's like so smart. He's kind of, kind of can be awkward at times. Because he's so smart and he approaches everything like from a really like mental place, he can say things that other people can't say. Because it's like, there's no way I could say that without like laughing or thinking about the inappropriateness of what was just said.
But Thor can. Like he can just talk about whatever because he's just so academic. He was a PhD in linguistics and he knows language. And they were doing a discussion at Midtown Fellowship, which is where I was training there. He was a pastor in training there. And one of the things he said is he can go into all these verses and he can dazzle you, his words, not mine, with the Greek.
And make it say basically whatever he wanted to say. He struggles with same gender attraction. He struggles with this on a very personal level and says he's studied all the arguments against why the Bible doesn't say this. But none of them hold up. As much as he would like for them to be true, none of them hold up. All of them are weak understandings of the text.
And he said it seems as if people look at these passages and say these are the pillars holding up this argument. And if we can just knock down those pillars, then we would have the ability to basically pursue long-term, loving, homosexual relationships. And the Bible could be on our team. So they basically attack these verses. And so here's what he had to say. And this is a transcript.
So it's a terrible run-on sentence. Don't get caught up in the grammar. It's a transcript. If it helps you to read it, read it. But if you're a grammar person, maybe just listen because this was said out loud.
And so I'm going to read what he says, though. Even if you were to somehow take out those verses by reinterpreting them. He's talking about these verses. Or even if the Bible had never contained any verses that mentioned it. The biblical position on this issue is not resting on those verses. It's not resting on a few specific prohibitions.
It's resting on this gigantic tree trunk of the whole beautiful picture of why God put gender in the universe. And what gender and complementarity do. And how that runs through everything and all of creation. And his desires for intimacy. And his desires for life. It's this much, much bigger picture of what the Bible upholds.
And what the Bible says is the center. And what we should be running to is so unambiguous and so clear. So what he's saying is even if you took these verses out. The Bible's picture of what sexuality was meant to be. What we talked about last week is so clear. One of the things he says is because people think this is the pillars that I've got to knock down.
He said it's actually way more. It's held up by this massive tree trunk of God's good design for complementarity. God's good design for gender. God's good design for marriage. And for life together. And for creation.
And for the multiplication of the human race. And so he says it's this tree trunk of what God's woven into creation. He said it's actually more like you're climbing out on a few limbs and trying to saw those off. But in order to actually have the Bible agree with homosexuality as a perfectly fine way to live. You'd actually pretty much have to cut down the whole tree. And then you'd be left with no gospel and no Jesus.
And no real understandable picture of what it was designed to be in the first place. So the Bible is clear. And it holds up for us a good design that we ought to pursue and understand. Here's one of the major problems. We immediately say okay but what about love? What about long term relationships?
What if it's a committed long term relationship? What if they're good to one another? What if they love each other more than... Like there's so much messed up heterosexual relationships. And there's so many beautiful, loving, gracious, caring gay relationships. That why can't this be good?
Why can't we just look at this and say this is okay? Here's one of the reasons we make that argument. And here's one of the reasons that's so hard for us to respond to. Our culture says we've all bought into the idea that happiness is primary. That the purpose of life is personal happiness. That's the goal.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We've enshrined it. And then we've all agreed that the best way towards happiness is a romantic relationship. So if we've agreed to that, that happiness is primary and the best way to get there is a romantic relationship. The most cruel, harmful, evil things we can commit in our culture is to stand in the way of that. To tell anybody what we just said.
You can't pursue this type of relationship. That's not okay. The problem with that is that the Bible doesn't agree with either of those first two statements. Doesn't agree that your happiness is the point. You're going to have a really hard time forcing that on the text. I know people do.
I know someone who's stood up before. I had a friend who was a part of a church where they used to stand up and chant, money come to me now. Because God wanted them to be rich. And that was one of the prayers they would say. Read the New Testament. The call to Christianity is take up your cross, deny yourself, come die.
You're going to lose your friends. You're going to lose your family. This is going to go terribly for you. And then at some point after you've been tortured enough, you'll probably die. And guess what? It'll all be absolutely worth it.
Come take everything that has ever been a part of who you are and how you define yourself and lay that down for the God who died for you so that you might have a better eternity. You might have a real hope in something that absolutely matters. Everything matters. Jesus is going to tell stories about a guy who finds a treasure in a field and sells everything just to get that treasure because of how much more immensely valuable it is than anything else. That's what the Bible is going to say, that your happiness here is not primary. God loves you.
He's for your joy and your ultimate happiness, but that doesn't happen here through finances or relationships or anything else. And the Bible is also not going to agree with us that romance is primary, that it's the primary way to get to happiness. The Bible is pro-relationships. It's for love. It's not against it. I don't think it's primary.
It never holds that up as this is the way to pursue life. So when Christianity says, no, you actually should deny yourself, you should not pursue these relationships, we're not disagreeing with anything else the Bible says because we don't believe that happiness and romance are primary. Okay. Church. Four things for us and then we're going to do some Q&A. Four things for us that we have to realize in order for us to love people well and to act in such a way that someone who's a part of our church family who struggles with this can actually be loved, actually be welcomed, and actually live long-term pursuing Jesus.
Here's some things that have to be true. Number one, we can't keep pretending that happiness and romance are primary. As a church, the church in general can't keep buying into that idea. We agree to that, that happiness and romance aren't primary when it comes to someone who's struggling with same-gender attraction, but then we act like that's primary in all the other things we say. So every time you come up to a single person and go, have you found anyone yet?
Just keep trying. They're out there. Maybe you should lower your standards. Oh, I saw you talking to that person. Every time we do that, what we're doing is coming alongside someone and going, just remember where happiness is found. Just remember what life is about.
And it's nonsense. The Bible doesn't back you up on that. Perfectly fine for someone to pursue a romantic relationship with someone of the opposite gender, but it's not held up as supreme. Every time we say stuff like, well, I just know God wants me to be happy. How do you know that? Where did you find that?
You mean here? I doubt it. You mean long-term? Sure, yeah. And we see that on Jesus dying on the cross and calling us into a mission that matters so much more than everything else. That's his pursuit of our joy.
But I just enjoy my relationship so I know that God wouldn't want me to break up because I'm like, every time we say this stuff, we're not helping anything. And honestly, one of the major issues that those who struggle with same-gender attraction in the church face is not the sexual desire. It's that they're staring loneliness in the face. It's the emotional side of, I just want to be connected to someone. I want to be known and loved and cared about. And the church says your options are be celibate or pursue a heterosexual relationship, which to a lot of people who struggle with same-gender attraction, that's not really an option.
And celibacy just sounds terrible, not because of the sexual nature of it, maybe for some, but for a lot of them it's just that I want to be lonely forever. And here's what we're saying. Look, we know that happiness is primary and that romance is the only way to get there. I'm sorry. God's got rules. And then we're like, well, people are just going to keep pursuing this stuff and they won't repent.
And it's like, well, we pointed them to something that wasn't true. We kept holding up something that wasn't real and then acted like we were exempt from this. This false belief, this romance idolatry. All of us need to repent of romance idolatry. Some of you have stayed in really bad relationships for a long time or relationships that are really good but are outside of God's good design. And you're not repenting.
You're not changing. And we're all called to. And we honestly need to regain the biblical understanding of friendship. So one of the things that the, if you go to GayChristianNetwork.com, I think it's GayChristian.net. So the first website I said wasn't true at all.
It's the Gay Christian Network. One of the things they point to is they say, see, in the Old Testament the friendship between Jonathan and David was actually a homosexual relationship. The reason they're saying that is because we fall really short of the biblical idea of what friendship is supposed to look like. We're also approaching that in a very Western way, which is non-emotional. So like when David and Jonathan like cry and kiss each other, we automatically make that really sexual.
Whereas for Middle Easterners, that's not weird. Not sexual. Like it can happen in a perfectly non-sexual context. Did y'all ever see the pictures of George Bush walking down the street holding that guy's hand in Iran or whatever? Because that's how they indicate friendship. So he was with another leader and he held his hand.
And I was like, I remember seeing that when I was in high school. I'm going, that's super weird. I think we just have to go to war. I'm not walking around holding your hand, buddy. Like this is weird because I'm approaching that from a very Western mentality. But the truth is that the scope of emotion found in the Bible and the ability to love someone in a completely non-sexual way we've lost.
And so what we say is, yeah, the only real way to have actual friends is to get married. Like that's the only way you can really know somebody and really have intimacy and really over the term of life. And it's like that's foreign from the Bible and we have to redeem our understanding of friendship. Number two, we are all called to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus. So when you're living with your girlfriend but you're having a fit about someone who's struggling with homosexuality, it's nonsense.
When you won't repent of your sin but the gay's better, nonsense. It makes sense. The way that we get to grow together as Christians is all of us are called to take everything that we hold dear, everything that we hold in our heart that makes us us, all of our uniqueness and say, Jesus, you're king. All of us. And so then when we look at those, our same gender attracted brothers and sisters and we say, yeah, it makes sense because they see it. They see that all of us are repenting of sin.
All of us are fighting our own proclivities. All of us are fighting against our own sinful natures and all of us are seeking to pursue Jesus and submit everything to him. But when we act like, no, no, no, no, I'm okay. My porn struggle is not an issue. I am kind of fighting or whatever. But the fact that I'm really greedy, the fact that I'm really selfish, this doesn't really matter.
But you, big deal. I'm going to skip all the other things in that list. Big deal for you. Big deal for you. We have to all surrender and all deny ourselves. I have to all submit our sexual desires to Jesus.
The third thing is that the church has to actually be family. We have to actually care about one another and spend time with one another, relate to one another. Because honestly, it's the emotional side. It's the loneliness. It's the lack of friendship that makes it so untenable. When we say, you just got to be alone forever.
But if the church is actually what the New Testament holds up, where it's going to hold up consistently the church as family over and above nuclear family, then we begin to open our homes and invite people in to those who struggle with same-gender attraction or just our single brothers and sisters to come celebrate Thanksgiving with us. Come celebrate, quote-unquote, family time. Because ultimately, biblically, we're all going to die and we're going to be a part of a family. And I'm not going to be married to Anna anymore, but she will be my sister for eternity. And we get to celebrate that now, that we've been made into a new true family where God, through Jesus, has adopted us to be brothers and sisters.
And so one of the ways that we get to help those who struggle with this is by opening our homes and treating them like brothers and sisters, inviting them out to coffee, getting a conversation going, talking to them, being their friend, playing laser tag. We have an actual eternal family. Here's honestly, the LGBTQ community has been beating the pants off of the church when it comes to community, to friendship. In a lot of ways, it's really beautiful. It's what God designed it to look like, for them to care about one another, to love one another, to accept one another, not accept their sin as the church.
We would accept them and help them fight their sin the same way we accept everybody else in spite of their sin because it's our sin that actually qualifies us for Jesus to save us. But here's the other thing going on in the LGBTQ community. In the U.S., the most likely thing to kill someone who's a youth, get grades 7 through 12, anybody, is suicide. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide than their heterosexual peers. This is according to the CDC. They did a study on 55 transgender youth and found that about 25% of them reported suicide attempts.
25%! The Trevorproject.com says that LGB youth are four times as likely as their peers and three times likely if they're questioning to attempt suicide. And we're the church saved by Jesus in spite of our sin. And they're not welcome here? Not loved here? We bring nothing to the table.
You aren't special. And then we're going to look and say, but my sin's different than yours. No. This has to be the safest place. The most welcoming group of people you have ever met. That's so wildly welcoming that it makes people uncomfortable.
That they don't know how to handle it. I know you disagree with me, but you've loved me more than anybody I've ever met. I know we're not on the same page here, but you won't stop calling me. You won't stop inviting me over for dinner. Stop being my friend. No.
That's what we're designed to be. The most absolutely overwhelmingly welcoming people because we know that nothing makes us special outside of the blood and savior. The blood of Jesus who saved us from our sin. So number four is we have to actually believe the gospel. You have to actually believe that it is Jesus who has saved you and has made you okay in spite of your sin. Not because of your specialness.
Not because of your good behavior. That your sinful desires aren't somehow different or better than someone else's. You have to actually believe that it's Jesus that saves us. And if we do that, if we actually believe the gospel, then we're free to love one another, to care for one another, to accept one another in spite of our sin. And then continue to confront one another in our sin because we care for one another. Free.
Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to do some Q&A now. And I'm going to invite my friend Jordan Surratt. He's one of our community group leaders. He's going to come up here.
Help do some Q&A. Jordan struggles with same-gender attraction. He's going to help us as we talk about this today. So if you don't mind giving Jordan a hand. So this is my good friend Jordan.
He helps lead one of our community groups, the Pine Ridge group. Yeah. Jordan, real quick before we get into doing some of the other Q&A, I want to ask you a few questions just to help. People out here and talk about this a little bit as a church family. Can you tell people who you are, catch them up a little bit on your story, maybe just like the two-minute version of from when you were born to the moment you just sat down on that stool? That'd be great.
All right. Got to move quickly. All right. So I grew up in southwestern Virginia. It's kind of very super traditional, heart of the Bible Belt kind of area. And so I noticed that I started having same-sex attractions around seventh grade, so puberty time.
And I found myself just like, this is going to sound weird, but like looking at my teacher. And it wasn't like in a sense of, ah, I'm super attracted to him. It was more of like an interest. I didn't quite understand what was going on inside of me. And I noticed that like my peers, they would all be like starting to date girls. And I'm just like, I don't get that.
That doesn't make sense. But you kind of do. And so it would just be a little weird or whatever just growing up. But all through my middle school years, high school years, and even partly into college, it was just because of fear and shame and things like that, I wouldn't talk about it. And so the very first person I ever told, I think I was 18 and a half. And so I went basically the majority of my life.
I guess it is the majority of my life. Still keeping up with the half years at that point? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the first person I ever told was my cousin. That was after I started going to church. So I was already involved in a local church for about five to six months or so.
And I was just broken. And I could just feel God being like, you have to tell someone. You have to tell someone. I'm like, okay, the next person who comes up. And lo and behold, my cousin pops down in front of me. She's like, I got to tell you something.
I'm like, I do too. And so she was the very first person I told. Went off to college in Lynchburg studying religion, pastoral leadership. And I started opening up a little bit more as the years would go by. And then I moved down here. And I've been open with my community group, open with my friends, with Chet, with Matt, with Raz, and everybody else here that I love.
So you may have said this. Became a Christian in college? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my second semester of community college, I started following Jesus. Okay. And that's, yeah, about that time.
And during all that, like, I never really pursued a relationship with someone. I struggled secretly, and so, like, I couldn't have imagined, like, someone else finding out by me flirting with them. But, you know, like, I just struggled with things like pornography and masturbation and whatnot. Okay. Well, help us out this morning. Or help.
If there's someone in the room struggles with same-gender attraction or identifies as homosexual, maybe is a part of our church family, what would you want to say to them? How would you want to address them? Cool. Cool. Well, part of this is going to depend on where you are at in your own walk and how open you have been already. I found one of the most encouraging and helpful things to me, even though it was super hard, was just beginning to talk about it.
And so it would take years for me to really build up that courage. And I've been lucky enough to have never really had any kind of, like, anybody lash out at me or whatever. I've had a lot of people just like, well, I don't understand, and I'm really confused, and I have a thousand questions. But through them asking those questions and through them talking about it, it actually even helped me. And so my encouragement to you would be, if you are struggling with that, to find someone here. I think there's a ton of people in this room who love you and care about you and genuinely welcome you as family, as brothers and sisters.
And I think you're safe and loved and cherished. Cool. Another thing on that that I just want to help everybody here, when it comes to hiding sin or hiding any kind of personal struggle, if we don't talk to people, any people whatsoever, we kind of disconnect our ability to actually receive love. Because we'll always, when someone tries to say they care about us or say good things about us, we'll always just kind of discount it as, yeah, well, if you only knew. If you only knew the real me. And so there is something, too, when we're in sin or when we have particular struggles or whatever, being able to be honest actually opens us up to have people really genuinely care about us and us to actually be able to receive that.
All right. Okay. So I'm in a community group or someone out here is in a community group and someone in my group talks about this now, confesses it, says this is going on or I struggle with this or whatever. Help me, heterosexual white guy, respond well. Like how do we love people well in church family if that happens, if they talk about it? Yeah.
Okay. I want to break that up into two parts. Okay. One is short term and one is long term. Okay. You have to do whatever you want to with the question asked.
Yep. We'll do. We'll do. So short term, don't skip over it because you're uncomfortable. Engage them. Ask them questions.
Talk with them. Be like, what was that like? Like engage emotion. That's one of the hardest things for me has been just the emotion behind it. And check kind of talked about that a little bit in his sermon was just like the thing that hurts me the most is not me not having some sexual outlet. It is me more than likely being alone.
It is me more than likely not having someone who genuinely knows me and cares for me and understands me for who I am, which sexual sin and homosexuality or whatever isn't my identity. I am much more than that. But there are still some amounts of me being unknown, even now at this moment, because I'm constantly changing. I'm a different person all the time. But so ask questions like genuinely engage them.
Talk with them. And if you do, this is kind of going back to the second question. If you if you do open up, be willing to give some grace to the people that you're telling. So whenever I told my dad, he was just quiet the entire time and it took him a day to process through that. And he called me back. He's like, OK, you know, I got a ton of questions and we had like an hour long conversation, you know, but we be willing to give them grace because they're having to process through this stuff as well.
So that's kind of the short term. Love them. Well, love them. Well, hug them. Don't be afraid of them because they're terrified. I'm terrified.
OK, so ask questions. Yeah. Bring it up later. Yeah, I think that would be very helpful. OK, which is kind of the long term. You know, it's just like how if someone is like, hey, I'm struggling with a drug addiction.
You're like, OK, you don't mention it. Don't mention it ever again. You know, see how that's going to go for you. You know, that doesn't make much sense. So long term.
Yeah. Don't make everything about that. You know, I'm much more than my same sex attraction, but I struggle with same sex. Sex attraction. OK. And so long term, that would be talking with them, talking with me, talking with us, I guess I should say.
Loving us well. Inviting them into a family. You know, that's that's we already you know, we are a family so long as our faith is in Jesus. And so you are my brothers and sisters. I think for the longest time, like I wrestle a lot with this just imagery, this this picture of I'm a sheep who's outside of the flock and I'm really struggling, feeling like I'm part of the flock. And so that just that just makes it so much more easier for wolves to come in and snack snatch me, you know.
But I think that is just very common in people who struggle with same sex attraction. I've seen it so many times in a lot of my friends who I've spoken with who struggle with the same thing. They're just like, I can't tell anyone. You know, they don't I don't know what to do. I'm afraid. You know, it's just a consistent, constant fear across the board.
Even people who are proud, you know, they call it pride for a reason because they're ashamed and they feel guilty. One of the things you talk about being family, one of the things Thor has talked about before is that Kent Bateman is one of the pastors. He actually spoke here recently about going to planting in Knoxville, went to Thor and basically was like, look, I know you're kind of kind of pursuing celibacy, but I know you also have some desires to to be a husband, to be a father. Like that's part of what goes along with this. It's not just the sexual nature of stuff. And he was like, man, if you ever just get lonely, just come live with us.
Like he was about to get married to his wife, Anna, at that point. He said, just come. You can come live with us. You can help me father my children. You can help be a part of this this family. And and so there is room for that as you begin to build genuine, real relationships to just invite people in, divide them to be around, to be a part of your family.
The other thing, I think one of the reasons we don't respond when someone confesses sin is we don't know what to say, which actually means that we probably when we do know what to say are saying unhelpful things. And here's what I mean. When someone confesses sin and I'm like, oh, I got this because I've experienced that before. Mostly what I'm blasting them with is good advice. And so when confesses something I don't understand and I'm quiet, it's because I don't have any good advice. Our goal as a church family is to point people towards Jesus, which means that you get to respond to any sin because Jesus is the answer to all sin.
So let me just help you out there. If you're like, I don't have anything. Jesus, just Sunday school it. It's Jesus. Jesus is the answer. Like, just write that on your hand.
And someone confesses something. Go, let me tell you about Jesus. Like that's realize that ultimately it's Jesus that saves us and Jesus makes us OK. And you get to do that. You get to point towards Jesus in all of it, even if you don't know how to to be the most helpful there. And then, yeah, you can always ask questions.
I think that's a very helpful thing to say. OK. Yeah, I think that's what we'll take some Q&A kind of here together. And then appreciate you. Thank you for sharing all that with us. And we'll look at what kind of what's been sent in.
When it comes to the theology of sex, are there topics that are simply off limits for Christians? No. Let me caveat that, though. The short answer is no. The long answer is what's the point of talking about it? If your goal is, so Paul at one point talks about people having itching ears.
And I just think that's a helpful. If your goal is it just feels good to talk about sex stuff, you probably should stop. Like you should confess that to your group. And we should work on that together. If your goal is like I genuinely have questions. I want to talk about this.
There are words that are used in dirty ways, but they're also used to describe things. So like Miss Libby came up to me last week and was like, it's just so refreshing to hear a pastor say orgasm. And I was like, that's so weird that we can talk about this. But we're just having a straight up normal conversation about an actual thing that exists. And we have to use words to describe it. And so there are things you can talk about.
What's the point of saying it? Are you going for a flashbang or this will be exciting or something like that? So it's really more of a what's the point? So they're okay topics. What's the point? What's the context?
Why are you talking about it? Is it okay to discuss your marriage bed with someone other than your spouse? Okay. Okay. Yes-ish. Again, big question.
What's the point? What are you talking about? Like, are you just wanting to tell stories? Are you wanting to gossip? Are they sharing? And so you feel like it's your turn?
Like, no. How does your spouse feel about that? Have you talked to them? Are you talking to your spouse about your marriage bed? You probably should be having some of those conversations. But it can be very helpful to have some conversations that are, I need to discuss this with you.
I need to, I wonder if my heart's right here. I need to have some of these conversations that aren't detail specific, aren't any kind of, let me tell you, like, it's just, I need to talk about this for my own sake, for my own sin, for me to grow. And I'm trying to get some clarity on this, and I think that's okay. Some of it is you need to talk to your spouse. You need to talk about what they're comfortable with. And you need to not, the goal can't be, let me share stories or let me do this because it's, I think it's entertaining or interesting or anything like that.
It's got to be way more of a, I'm wanting to grow and I'm wanting this to be healthy, and so this is worth us having a conversation. Kind of how I say that, so. Can someone be in a long-term, committed, same-gender relationship and still be a Christian? I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume you've maybe thought about this more. So do you want to give an answer to that, and then I'll kind of fill in if there's any.
The hard thing is, is I want that to be so true because of what we were talking about earlier. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to not have someone, you know, that I can talk to, that I can trust, that I can lean into. You know, it's just like, God, there's just this deep desire to just be with someone. And obviously with my heart, like, I have no desire to be with a woman, which means that my desire is to be with a man. But I can't just for biblical reasons, you know.
But in regards to this question specifically, yeah, there's the emotional side of it, and there's the, well, they love each other, and they're committed to each other. But in regards to any sin, you know, homosexual, heterosexual, it doesn't really matter. If you are a heterosexual couple who is living in a relationship outside of marriage, you're in sin. And so I think the real question behind this is, can, let me read it, can someone be in a long-term committed, unrepentant sin and still be a Christian? And I think the biblical answer is no. So I'll read things like when Jesus says, why do you say you love me, but don't do the things that I've commanded?
Or John in 1 John when he says, you know, if you're continuously living in sin, then you actually never knew Jesus. You never knew God. The love of the Father is not inside of you. It's not what we want to hear. It's not what I want to hear. But it's true and actually better.
Yeah, thank you. It's a massively difficult question. I agree with that. I think it's where we try to gauge it, where we try to look into a situation and say, well, is this person a Christian? How long have they been sinning? Do they know about the sin?
Because there's, like, ignorance. And I've had friends who became Christians and continued doing very sinful things until they got to that place in the Bible. And then they were like, oh, this is no bueno. And I didn't know. Like, and that's one thing. It's a, is it an active, unrepentant?
I know what the Bible says. I just don't care. I had another friend who said, well, I'll become a Christian. But if I become one, I'm not going to do that no sex thing. He wasn't married. And it was like, you don't understand what becoming a Christian is because you get a king.
That's not how you show up with a, all right, king, here are my terms. That's not how it works. And so I think, yeah, long, long enough term, unrepentant, unwilling to repent, non-wrestling with it, just I'm just going to do what I want to do here. The Bible is going to say, well, you probably never were. But can you be a Christian in sin?
Yeah. Can you be a Christian in struggle? Yeah. Can you be a Christian in fall on your face all the time? Yeah, that's why we're Christians. We're the first people who raised our hand and said, I'm really messed up and I need someone to help me.
So, yeah, that's helpful. One more thing. I think it's very telling because if someone has an idol in their heart, which is what they worship to be God, and then God confronts them on that sin, and they're saying, no, capital God, I'm not surrendering this idol. I'm not surrendering this lowercase g God. Then that's idolatry.
And it shows that they're not even surrendered to God to begin with. At least that's the way that I process through that. I think the Bible processes through it the same way. Yeah. Can someone who struggles with same-gender attraction be in Christian leadership? You're a group leader.
You want to answer that? Well, I'm a group leader. So I'm a group leader. Yes, the more the merrier. Can someone who struggles with any sin be a group leader? I hope so.
Yeah. Yeah, for real. For real. We are really – That would be a real short list of groups. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the question there.
So I think the key in that question would be the struggles with – so someone who's unrepentant, that becomes an issue. But someone who struggles with sin, that's every Christian in the room. Like that's everybody, every Christian should be fighting sin. And there would be no Christian leadership if you couldn't struggle with sin and lead. And so, yeah, I think the answer to that is are you fighting it, loving Jesus, hating sin, versus, no, just this is me. I've accepted it.
This is who I'm going to be, and I don't care what the Bible says. That becomes a problem. So, yeah. How should our beliefs on sexuality affect our politics? Okay, so just in general, whole theology of sex series and how should that affect politics? I said I wasn't going to say political statements.
I still don't intend to. I think you need to realize that your belief should affect your politics, should affect how you vote, should affect how you approach candidates, how you think about things. I think you need to also realize there is no political group that perfectly is backed up by Jesus. So when you read the Bible, you're going to see some things that are going to line up with our different political parties in different ways. And I think in America, especially during this time, we need to realize Jesus has an endless kingdom where he reigns supreme throughout all of eternity. And no political candidate is going to save us or fix us or make us whole or complete everything.
There was a Messiah. His name is Jesus. He will return and set up a kingdom that will last forever and you won't see a Messiah on any of the tickets. So, think about it. Have your beliefs affect your politics. If you're just like, no, I just don't even think about what I believe.
It's like that's a culturally given thing. That's foreign to the Bible. You should absolutely have what you believe affect how you vote. Christians are told, don't bring your Christianity into this room. And it's like, that's nonsense. Take it with you everywhere.
But realize that it's not ultimate regardless. But Christians should vote. And all the people you're going to vote for are going to have some things that are just completely messed up. Do you want to take this one? All right.
We're good. I'm going to pray. And Matt and Bianca are going to come back up and we're going to sing a little bit together. And so, I'll send it to you. Yeah, you can come on. No, we're good.
We'll move this and then I'll pray and we'll sing. Y'all thank Jordan again for hopping up here. Thank you. Father, we thank you that you're good. Lord, we thank you, Lord, that our sin qualifies us for you to be a very good and loving Savior. Pray, God, that you would help us to grow to be family.
To all of us repent of sin. For all of us to quit believing the lies about happiness and romance so that we actually, in our marriages, can just love our spouse well but without believing they're supposed to fill us up. That in our pursuit of relationships, we can love you more. And that in the midst of all of our life, we'll quit just believing the lie that you want us to be happy here in this moment right now. Rather than you want us to pursue you, which is an ultimate good. God, help us to believe the gospel.
And help us to love our city and our gay neighbors well. And all those in our church family who struggle with same-gender attraction. That they feel wildly loved and cared about and welcomed. Because you are our king. And we hold no other allegiances. In Jesus' name, amen.
Grace and Superiority
Transcript
My name is Chet Phillips. I'm one of the pastors here. I'm excited to be back. My wife gave birth to a baby boy on March 17th. So his name is Archer O'Daniel Phillips.
It was going to be Archer Daniel Phillips, but he was born on St. Patrick's Day. So what are you going to do? And it's been interesting. This is our first kid, so I'm learning a lot. It's a weird responsibility having, like, now we have a son, and I've got to help him grow up and be a full-grown adult male.
And so there's a lot of weight there. I'm already trying to work with him on some stuff. So he, I was talking to him the other day. He's a baby, so he cries a lot. And he cries every time, like screams and cries every time he's gassy. And so I've been trying to tell him that's going to be weird if he doesn't outgrow that.
Because that's, like, an odd thing to walk through adult life with. So he's just, you know, I'm trying to coach him up and make sure that he gets ready for adulthood. But that's what's been going on in my life. It is Jonah. We're in Jonah chapter 4. And so we've been, for the past three weeks as a church family, been walking through one chapter a week in Jonah.
The book of Jonah, it's an Old Testament book, an Old Testament prophet. It's in middle-ish to a little bit to the right of the middle in your Bible. It's on page 503 if you have a Bible that looks like this. What we're going to do today is we're going to be in Jonah chapter 4, and we're finishing up this series before Easter next week. And so what we've said so far in Jonah, though, and what the story has been so far in Jonah is that it says that Jonah was a prophet, which means he spoke on behalf of God. And that God comes to Jonah and says, go to Nineveh, because their evil has come up before me, and proclaim against them, like preach against them.
And so, first of all, this is a little weird because Nineveh is a non-Israel, non-Juda city. It's not the people of God, and most of the time when there's a prophecy about a group of people that aren't Israelites, it's just about them. It's not to them. So it would have been more normal for God to say, hey, go tell Israel I'm going to destroy Nineveh. But it was weird for God to say, go tell Nineveh I'm going to destroy Nineveh, because most of the time God's prophecies through his prophets were to the nation of Israel.
And so Jonah gets the word of the Lord, hears what God says, and runs. It says he went to flee to Tarshish. So he tries to flee from the presence of the Lord, which we would think is dumb, because, you know, you would think that God would be able to catch you. Like, I don't know if he thought maybe at night God can't see as well. Maybe God will be paying attention to something else. I don't know how he thought this was a good idea, but he tries to flee from the presence of the Lord.
He gets on a boat, and God sends a storm, because God's in charge of everything, and that's very apparent in the book of Jonah. Jonah sends a storm and stops his boat. They figure out that Jonah is the reason there's a big storm, and they say, what should we do to you so that we don't all drown? And Jonah says, drown me. And so the people on the boat eventually, they don't want to at first, but eventually say, okay, God, don't be mad at us. You're the one who sent the storm, and they throw him in the water.
The storm stops, which is equally terrifying. So it's very obvious that God did want Jonah. And so all of the crew members switched teams, so they had other gods they were praying to, and they realized, oh, okay, this one's in charge of everything. So they begin to worship the real God. And then Jonah is drowning, and a fish swallows him. And so Jonah chapter 2 is Jonah praying from a fish.
And what we saw in chapter 1 is that God's willing to go further to chase us in our sin than we thought. That he's willing to chase after us more, that he's more in control than we thought, and he's willing to chase us more. And then in chapter 2, we look at this prayer of Jonah's, and it seems like Jonah kind of relies on himself more than on God. Like his prayer is kind of a religious prayer. And just so you know, if you're just hanging out with us, this isn't a religious place. Religion is basically the idea that do these things, don't do these things, and God will love you.
Like it's about the work that you put in. And that's not what Christianity is about. It's not about earning things from God. It's not about punching your ticket, and eventually you get enough hole punches, and then you make it to heaven. That's not how it works. The idea of what I do accomplishes something puts me, as Raz said the past couple weeks, in God's good books isn't true.
That's not how it works. And so Jonah, though, kind of seems like that's what he thinks it's about. It's about what he does. He even kind of promises. And he prays kind of like us, God, if you take this away, I just won't do this anymore. Or I'll do this in the future.
I'll be good from now on. If you'll just let this situation not work out. I won't date guys like this anymore. That kind of a prayer. Like he's praying about, I'm going to do this in the future. I'm going to be better.
And eventually, the fish spits him out. Jonah obeys. He goes to Nineveh. And he proclaims against Nineveh. He preaches against Nineveh. And his sermon is, you're all going to die.
That's a heck of a sermon. We're actually thinking about doing a series later this fall. This coming summer called the You're All Going to Die series. It's one week. The sermon is, you're all going to die. All right, now bow your heads and close your eyes.
That's his sermon. He goes and proclaims it to a city about the size of Boston. And he says, you're all going to die. And they repent. He doesn't even tell them that they should repent. He doesn't even give them like an option.
He just says, God's going to kill you. And they are all like, they genuinely repent. They genuinely are broken over their sinfulness. And they repent from king to cattle. Like they put sackcloth on cows. That's how genuine their repentance was.
The king declares, no one eats, not even the cows. And so if you're watching a cow, you put sackcloth on the cow. And if the cow tried to eat, you grabbed his face and you were like, no, you don't. You're an evil cow. You've been making evil milk for evil people. And you will not eat.
And the cow was like, you're right. And a little single tear ran down his face. I do have evil milk. And they all repented. There was genuine repentance, heartfelt repentance from king to cattle. Okay.
If Jonah, if the story of Jonah was the way I had always heard it, the way I had always seen it in cartoons. Some of you maybe grew up in church and you've heard the story of Jonah before. Some of you maybe didn't grow up in church and you just hear that the Bible has a story about a guy getting swallowed by a fish. And you're like, the Bible's nonsense. Okay. But some of you who grew up in church, you've heard the story of Jonah before.
You've seen the cartoon before. And here's how the story goes. God comes to Jonah and says, go to Nineveh. But Jonah's scared. He's scared. The Ninevites are evil.
They're twisted. They kill people. So Jonah runs. He's afraid of God's call on his life. So he runs.
As he runs, God chases him down. He gets swallowed by a fish. And he prays and he repents. And he says, God, I was wrong. I trust you. I see that you're in control of everything.
But if you can control a fish and you can control a storm, you can keep Ninevites from gouging my eyes out. I trust you. He repents. And then the fish spits him out. Because in the cartoons, the fish always spits him out. There's even like, if it's a drawing, it says like patui or whatever.
In the Bible, it vomits. But like, it doesn't write as well. So the fish spits him out. Jonah's genuinely repentant. And he goes to Nineveh. And he preaches to Nineveh.
Repent. And all of Nineveh repents. And then that's the end. And God's faithful. And we see how it all works out. And everybody's happy.
And that's the first three chapters of Jonah. If that's the way the story was, we wouldn't be doing chapter four today. There would be no chapter four. Chapter four would be, and Jonah and God jumped into the air, all slow-mo and high-fived. And everything turned technicolor. And it was like, yeah.
And then credits rolled. That would be, Jonah would be credits. Or maybe like catching up with Jonah in later life. Just letting us know how he worked out. Like, this is a terrible story if there's like the whole buildup and then the climax. And then it just contends for 25% more.
Like, that's just, that's terrible. Movies don't do that. Like, you don't resolve the conflict. And then, like at the end of Avengers, they sat and ate a meal. But that was like five seconds, just kind of seeing them eating a meal.
It doesn't make you last. Like, it's not 45 minutes of them eating. And just like hanging out and like Iron Man at his house working on his computer. Like, they don't do that because the conflict is resolved. So if the conflict was that Nineveh needed to repent, the story would be over.
But Jonah apparently is kind of like a Peter Jackson movie where you think it's going to end and then it doesn't. And we'll even find out that it's very much like a Peter Jackson movie because then it just ends when you think it shouldn't. Like, God says something and it's over. So Peter Jackson movie is like, oh, it's done. Oh, no, it's going to keep going. Oh, now we're done.
No, it's going to keep going. It's going to keep going. Oh, they walked over a hill. It's done. It should have kept going. What just happened?
The dragon just got out. How do you just end the movie now? Like, what are you doing? That's what Jonah does. And we're about to find out in chapter four that the story is a little bit different than we thought. So I'm going to pray and we're going to jump into chapter four and see what this is really all about.
God, we thank you. We thank you for your grace. We thank you that we have the opportunity to gather as a church family and study your word. And we ask that your Holy Spirit would teach us and lead us. Speak to us. And show us what you intended.
When you had your servant pen the book of Jonah. And it's been kept so that we can read it. And so we praise you and we love you. In Jesus' name. Amen. Jonah chapter four is on page 503 if your Bible looks like this.
We're going to read all of chapter four today and we're going to kind of wrap up the whole story. So, again, the conflict kind of seems resolved. We're going to pick up actually in, I know it says Jonah four, but we're going to pick up in the end of three. So that we can kind of see what happens here. The chapters were added later, so it would have just been written as a one big story. Chapters were added just for a quick reference to be helpful.
So verse 10, also added later. So this is chapter three, verse 10. When God saw what they did, and what they did was repent from king to cattle. Genuine, heartfelt, we were wrong. And we need grace, we need mercy from God. When he saw what they did, how they turned from their evil, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them.
And he did not do it. We should be very excited, first of all, that that's God's attitude. Should be very excited that when evil people turn to God and say, I'm wrong, and genuinely mean it, God doesn't say, sorry, too late, crush. But he wants to relent from disaster. He wants to not destroy people. He's not vengeful.
Okay, so God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it. Chapter four, verse one. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. Okay. What? Like, if it was just that Jonah was scared, it should have been Jonah was stoked and skipped home.
Because everyone repented. Like, he's a terrible preacher, by the way. Like, this is a city about the size of Boston. If God came to a normal preacher and was like, hey, I want you to go preach against Boston. And the preacher showed up and said, like, one thing. And then from mare to dog park, they repent.
Like, mare to ferret. All of Boston per pence. Most preachers would have been like, man, that was a pretty good sermon. Like, the Lord showed up. This was great. Jonah's angry.
And what's a funny thing that happens in the Hebrew text here is that it says this. Verse 10. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil. So the word evil. God relented of the disaster. It's the same word.
Same root word. Almost exactly the same word. So evil and disaster, almost the same word. So they turned from their evil. God relented of his evil. His disaster that he was going to do.
That he said he would do to them. And he did not do it. And chapter 4 says, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly. That's the same word. So what it says is this was great evil to Jonah.
This was a disaster to Jonah. This could not have gone worse to Jonah. This was a train wreck. So we're learning something about Jonah. It couldn't have been fear because him not dying would have been like a win. What it says is they turn from their evil.
God turns from his evil, from his disaster. And this was evil to Jonah. It was a train wreck. And he's angry. Why? Why is Jonah angry that God's not going to destroy Nineveh?
Verse 2. And he prayed to the Lord. This is Jonah talking to God. Oh Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. All right.
So the author of this story did not tell us why Jonah ran earlier. We could only presume that he was scared, afraid of the call that God had placed on him, maybe afraid of the Ninevites. But the author intentionally held it till now. He in night shamalam'd us. Shamalam'd. He in nighted us.
Because there's a twist on the end here. The story's taking a turn on us. Jonah's been dead for 10 years. Like it's that kind of thing. Like the story's about to turn. He hadn't actually been dead.
But it's that kind of twist on the end here. So, okay. Is this not what I said? So we're about to find out why Jonah actually left. For I knew. So he says, okay, let's start over.
This whole prayer is crazy to me. And he prayed to the Lord and said, Oh, Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish. For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, relenting from disaster. What? His prayer is, oh, Lord.
I knew it. I told you this before I left. I knew it. We talked about this. This is why I ran. This is exactly why I ran.
This is what I told you. I told you you were good. Like his complaint about God is that he's good, that he's gracious. I told you you were gracious. I told you you were merciful. I told you you were abounding in steadfast love.
And I knew you'd do this. I knew you'd relent from disaster. I knew you were just getting my hopes up. You told me, Jonah, go tell him I'm going to kill all of them. And I knew I'd get here and you'd kill zero of them. I knew it.
I knew that as soon as I got here, they'd be all, oh, we're wrong. And you'd be like, you're right, and not kill them. Zero. Goose egg. That's how many Ninevites are going to die. You know how embarrassing and terrible this is.
His complaint to God is that he's gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love. Do you know what we just found out about Jonah? He's kind of a racist. He's overly nationalistic. Like, you should like your country and your people. But Jonah is so far ingrained in his nation and his people and his race that the Ninevites not dying is a disaster.
You see, Hosea and Amos at this time are proclaiming that Assyria is coming and Israel needs to repent. And the word of the Lord comes to Jonah and says, go to Assyria. That's where Nineveh is. One of their chief cities. And tell them to repent. Or I'm going to destroy them.
Tells them I'm going to destroy them. And Jonah doesn't want to go because he wants Assyrians to die. Jonah so cares about his nation, his people, and his race that he cannot, this cannot be good. Verse 3. Therefore, now, O Lord, please take my life from me. For it is better for me to die than to live.
Jonah says it's over. This could not have gone worse. Just kill me. This is such a train wreck. This is so terrible. Just kill me.
And the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? So God responds to Jonah and basically says, are you right? Here, is your response correct? And Jonah doesn't answer. So Jonah prays and says, God, I told you you were good.
I knew you would pull this. And then says, just kill me. Okay. That's kind of confusing. There's a little bit of me that says, okay, I want to understand a little bit more. This is part of the reason we've given Jonah such a hard time throughout.
Jonah 2 and 3, when it's like, well, he looks like he prayed and he repented. It's like, yeah, Jonah 4 kind of shows us where Jonah's heart is the whole time. So it's hard to be like, yeah, he genuinely repented. Oh, but also he's a racist. And he wanted God to kill them all. It seems more like what Rask talked about last week is that he religiously obeyed.
He did what he thought he had to do so that God would keep loving him. He could keep earning it. Okay, but this is a little bit confusing. Because you would think that Jonah said his message, that they repent, that Jonah should be excited. Or you're at least looking at this going, Jonah's just so off here. And let me try to help you see what he's doing.
And in order to do that, we're going to look at the one other place that Jonah shows up. But it's in 2 Kings, and we're going to show it on the screen so you don't need to flip there because it will be hard to flip there and then find it again and come back. But it's in 2 Kings. If I can find it in my notes, I'll read it from here. Yeah. Chapter 14, verse 25.
If you want to write that down so you can look it up later. It's talking about a king. So it starts with he. He refers to the king. He restored the border of Israel from Labo Hamath as far as the Sea of Ereba, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he, that's God, spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai. So it's the same Jonah, the prophet who was from Gath Heifer, which, by the way, Gath Heifer sounds like a lovely town.
Okay, so what we hear about Jonah here is that he's a servant and a prophet, and he speaks on behalf of God. This is a perfectly normal sentence structure, that this happened according to the word of the Lord, that he spoke by his servant and prophet Jonah. That's a normal thing. The Bible says that all the time. What did Jonah prophesy this time? That it seems like there's no conflict about.
What did he prophesy? Something good for Israel. I bet when this one came in, Jonah was ecstatic. God says, I'm going to restore this border. I'm just assuming that Jonah was like, yep, I can do that one. Sounds good.
Hey, everybody. We've got good news for you. And he gets to go tell the king. I'm assuming that if God had come to him and said, tell Israel, I'm going to destroy Nineveh, Jonah would have been very excited and run out to Israel and said, guess what God just told me? He's going to kill the Assyrians. It was when God came in and said, go to Nineveh and tell them that Jonah runs.
And here's why. And here's why we can see someone like Jonah who has it together in so many ways. Throughout the book of Jonah, he is spot on with his theology. His complaint about God is very, very true. It's a beautiful complaint. It's the best way to argue, by the way.
You get in an argument with your wife, be like, I knew it. I knew you were so pretty and nice. I knew that this would happen, that you would just be kind and thoughtful. Like, it's a great way to argue because then it's like, you're mad, but I, okay, like, good. I knew that you smelled good the whole time. So Jonah's complaint about God is spot on.
He's gracious and merciful. He's practically quoting what God shows up and says to Moses in Exodus when he describes who he is. And so Jonah says, I knew this about you. Jonah, when they confront him on the ship, he says, I worship the God, the creator of the land and the dry land and the sea. He knows things about him. When he prays, he has spot on theology.
Jonah knows stuff about God. He's willing to obey. We see that in chapter three. Here, he's a legit normal prophet. What's happened? See, Jonah's way more like us than we'd care to imagine.
Like, I actually, when I start seeing this in Jonah, I start seeing myself and I can kind of get on board with him. That's why he's such a confusing character because he's like you. He's like me. He's a person. All the characters in the Bible are pretty confusing except for Jesus. And he's terribly confusing because he's just good the whole time.
The rest of the characters kind of have it together, don't have it together because it's real stories about real people. There are certain things that you just crush. And there are other things you're terrible at and you run from God over. And that's what Jonah does. See, Jonah has this one area where if God messes with that, it's not okay for him to mess with. Because Jonah is doing what all of us do.
He's looking to something and saying, you make me have value. He has a system in his head that says these are good people. Those are bad people. This is how the world works. So there are certain parts of his interaction with God that perfectly line up with him.
There are certain things you should read in the Bible. There are times I'm reading the Bible and I'm just like, God, you are so smart. Like with your wisdom, you are crushing it right now with this stuff. This is brilliant. And there are other things I read in the Bible and I'm like, I kind of wish this wasn't in here. If I'm honest, if the Bible always agrees with you, by the way, you're probably reading it wrong.
For the record, you're making it fit you as opposed to it making you fit it. But here's what Jonah's doing. He has something in his head. He knows that he's a Hebrew. What do we know about Jonah? He's Hebrew.
He's from the northern kingdom of Israel and he's a prophet. And it seems like all of those are messed with by being sent to Nineveh. He has to leave his hometown. He has to go say good things possibly for people that aren't Israelites. And they're bad people. Israelites are good people.
Hebrews are good people. Everyone else is bad. They don't know the real God. They're bad. If being a Hebrew makes you good, being anybody else makes you bad. It has to.
It has to make them bad or Jonah can't be good. Does that make sense? That's why people who are racist, which by the way is one of the easiest ways to be superior to other people. What I mean by easiest is you don't have to do anything. Like if you think that white people are superior, like if my family thought white people were superior, that would be really nice for me because I was just born white. I didn't have to accomplish that.
That's why people like racism and nationalism. They didn't have to accomplish anything. They just had to be from their place and speak their language. Does that make sense? Like you don't have to do any work. That's what Jonah is doing.
He's Hebrew. And if Hebrews, what makes you good than being anything else has to make you bad or being a Hebrew doesn't make you good. That's why he has to put them down. He has to crush them. They have to be bad. They have to be wrong.
He has to leave and go talk to them. And something good has to happen for people that are bad. And it's messing with Jonah's brain. And what he declared was going to happen doesn't happen, which messes with his status as a prophet. Because the Old Testament says whatever a prophet says will come true. And if it doesn't come true, then he's not a prophet.
So everything that he's been basing his existence off of is taken from him. And now it makes a little bit of sense that he tells God, just kill me. You see, all of us have something that we're looking to and saying, you make me okay. You make me good. You're what makes me valuable in the world. One of the things I've consistently leaned into is hard work.
Because I'm good at that. I can do hard work. I started working when I was 13 for my dad's businesses. I've been working. And that's when I played football. I wasn't really fast or really strong.
When I went to college, our first football coach just wanted people who were mean and tried hard. So I fit in well. Then he left. And our next coach wanted guys who were good at football. And I was suddenly terrible. Because he wanted us to be like fast and accomplish things.
The other coach just wanted us to show up and try to hurt people. And I was like, I can do that. I may not hurt them. I can try. But I lean into hard work.
And so what that means is that people who are lazy, when I look at guys who don't want any responsibility, who don't want to work, who can't show up on time for things, who have no desire to take on any responsibility, I need them to be wrong. I need you to see that they're wrong so that you can see that I'm right. I need them to be bad so that you'll know that I'm good and so that I'll know that I'm good. And we do this with anything. You can do this with parenting. If what you use to give yourself worth and value is your children, then you have zero tolerance for bad parents.
Because you're looking at your kids and saying, if you work out, then I'm okay. If this works out, if you're good, if everything's happy, if I'm a good mom, then I know I have value. If I'm a good dad, if I've just been a good father, I know this will work out. And then when you see a parent that isn't living up to the standard, you need other people to see them fail. You need to see them fail. And they have to be wrong.
And they have to be bad so that you can be good. Grades. Athletic ability. Open-mindedness. Tolerance. That's my favorite one because it's sneaky.
So some of you are saying, I don't do that. I think everybody's welcomed in. I think everybody's okay. Yeah. Except for bigots and closed-minded people. Intolerant people have to be wrong for tolerance to be right.
So you have zero tolerance for intolerant people. And they don't deserve tolerance because they're intolerant. So they're not in the club. Does that make sense? Do you see how we do this with everything? And so Jonah's world is getting rocked because what he's using is his grading scale for what makes him good and valuable and worthwhile is taken from him.
God's messing with it. And that's where that shows up in us, too, because there are certain things that God is not allowed to mess with you about. There are certain things he just can't touch. You'll follow him fine. Jonah followed him fine when it was saying good things about Israel. When it was give Nineveh a chance, Jonah ran.
There's some things that you just crush. Maybe you just serve. Anytime there's anything that takes up your time, you're there. You'll sign up. You'll show up early. You'll leave late.
You serve. You're gifted there. You love that. And when God says, hey, I also want you to surrender your finances to me. No. No, no.
Can't do it. I have no obedience there. Some of us are the opposite. Man, you give. When you hear a need, your wallet magically appears in your hand. You ever met that kind of person?
Like, I thought I heard a need. Here's 20 bucks. Like, I just, I drop hints around those kind of people. Man, I sure could use 20 bucks. Like, those kind of people. But then when it comes time to give up time, ah, I'm just so busy.
I have no time for that. Some people crush both of those areas. And then it comes to relationships. You start looking at scripture where it says that your relationship doesn't honor God, isn't where it needs to be. And suddenly God can't mess with you there. We have something that gives us value.
And if it's our boyfriend, if it's our girlfriend, if it's knowing that we're loved, and God shows up and says, this doesn't honor me. You don't need to be sleeping together. You don't need to be living together. You need to stop this. And we say no. What we've realized is that something has taken the place of God and something is giving us our value that's not him.
And that can be finances. That can be work. That can be success. Some of you could care less about being a good dad. Some of you had dads who could care less about being a good dad. Because what they were using to give themselves worth and value was punching the clock and making a name for themselves and being successful.
And they looked down on dads who, you're going to take time off to spend with your kids? Do you not understand what makes us valuable in this world? And so God starts messing with what it is that Jonah has built around himself to know that he's a good person and it's a train wreck. And here's why. Jonah's religious. This is why Jesus butted heads with the Pharisees so much.
Because the Pharisees knew everything and obeyed really well. But that had to be what made them good. Knowing stuff and obeying. So whenever Jesus hung out with sinners, they couldn't have that. Because they can't be welcomed in because they're wrong and they're bad and if they're welcomed in, our position's gone. And so Jonah's looking at God and saying, you can't relent on Nineveh because if they're not wrong and they're not bad, my position's gone.
And so when that's taken from him, he says, just kill me. That's why people jump out of windows when the stock market crashes. Because what they've built their life on just disappeared. Their identity went with it. That's why some of you had a career-ending injury. And suddenly, if I'm not a soccer player, if I'm not a baseball player, if I'm not a football player, I don't know who I am anymore.
You had something that was good, but your identity left with it. Some of you had a relationship that fell apart and you didn't know who you were anymore. And not only were you sad, normal sad, you just didn't want to live. Because what you've been using to give yourself worth and value and fulfillment was taken from you. So Jonah says, just kill me.
Because we all have something that makes people good and something that makes people bad. That's all politics is. Democrats, conservatives have to be block-headed, close-minded, bigoted, backwards, gun-toting psychos. Have to be. They have to be wrong so that we can be okay, so that we can be right. So we can be what's right with the world.
Conservatives, liberals have to be fluffy-headed, open-minded, nonsense, family-hating, constitution destroyers. For us to be okay. They have to be. Obama has to be from another country. Has to be. For us to be okay.
Do you see how that works? One of the reasons we constantly, people are like, why can't we all get along? Self-righteousness. Why can't we all just tolerate each other? Self-righteousness. That's why intolerant people can't tolerate bigoted people.
Because we're all building something up to make ourselves good and okay and self-righteous and self-saved and self-sovereign. And that's Jonah's problem. So here's the thing. That's our problem. I fit with Jonah. I see this.
So how does God respond to Jonah? And what we're going to see is this really crazy, divine, God-ordained object lesson where God bends to teach Jonah something. So all of Nineveh repents. The story should have ended. But Jonah has a fit.
And then God bends. He says, do you do well to be angry? Verse 5. Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself. A booth is just like a three-sided tent that Israelites knew how to make ever since Moses' time. They actually had a feast of booths where they all made booths so Jonah knew it was up.
He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city. So he prays and thinks, okay, maybe God will stop being gracious, which is evil to me. Maybe God will relent from this disaster, go back to his original disaster, and destroy everybody. And I want to see the fireworks, so I'm going to go sit on this side of the hill and just hope, fingers crossed, everyone dies. I'm looking at you, cattle. Take the sackcloth off.
So that's what Jonah's doing. He's waiting to see what will happen. Now the Lord God, this is verse 6, appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. All right, so he's got a little bit of, he's manic and depressed, like he's going back and forth here.
He's super pumped about this plant. And it's really cool because God shows that he's in charge of a storm. He shows that he's in charge of a fish, and now he's appointing a plant. So like God just appoints things, does what he wants. So I walk out in my backyard, and I'm like, I wonder which trees were appointed and which of them just grew.
But like he just does, he just tells everything to do what he wants. And so he appoints this plant. And it seems like Jonah knows that God did this on purpose because he builds a booth, and then overnight a plant just grows up. And so Jonah's very happy about the plant, probably feels like, okay, God's comforting me. God's showing me some honor. Maybe I'm okay.
Maybe I'm in a decent spot. Maybe he still does just love Israelites. That's what it seems like. But he seems like he's more excited about the plant than God. Seven, but when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm, again, in control of everything, that attacked the plant so that it withered. I love that part of the story because the worm wasn't sent to eat the plant.
He was sent to attack it. So God appoints the worm, and it's not, hey, go eat the plant. It's go destroy the plant. That plant must die. And so there's this worm sent on a mission from God, which is just really cool to me that God would do this with a worm, that he's bending this much, that he's kneeled and stooped this much that he would tell a worm to go attack it. And so the worm waits till dawn because that's the best time to attack a plant.
And so the worm's waiting, and he's like, hold, hold now. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's just the way I see it, and he attacks the plant. This plant must die. Worm crushed it, did his job.
Worm attacked the plant so that it withered. That worm nailed it. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah. Which, if God's in control of the weather like this, I sometimes wonder what he's doing with South Carolina. Just 80, 40, whatever. It's better for me.
Sorry, okay. Some beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live. So this is the second time Jonah does this. So God sends a plant, and then he sends a worm to destroy the plant, which is just God teaching Jonah, bending over.
He's stooping to interact with Jonah personally. So we see that he cares about this whole city. We see that he's in charge of storms and weather, and then he just bends to deal with Jonah. And so he's giving him an object lesson. And so he has this plant grow up, and then he has a worm attack it, and then it dies. And then Jonah says, just kill me.
Because God's sending a scorching wind. It's dried out. He's cooking him. And now he feels like, okay, God's picking on me. He's messing with me. He's taking away my honor, my privilege.
He's teaching me that Jews aren't the best. It's kind of what Jonah, I think he's feeling here because we know that what he's based his life off of, what he thinks makes you okay, is to be an Israelite. He says, it's better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. Crushing it with logic, Jonah.
You ever do that, just shout something in an argument that you know no longer makes sense, but you're so entrenched in your point? That's what Jonah's doing here. Yes! I love the plant. You don't know anything about the plant. Just kill me.
And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left? Okay, most scholars believe that means children. Don't know their left and right yet. So it could mean a bunch of people who don't know anything.
So 120,000, they know nothing. They're completely backwards. But most scholars believe that he's referring to there's 120,000 children there. Don't even know they're left from their right yet. Which means that it's about 600,000 to a million point two in the city is what people guess, which would be about the size of Boston. 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle.
The end. Best ending line in the book in the Bible. It's my favorite. He ends with and also much cattle. Question Mark. It's over.
Okay. Jonah runs from God. God prays a kind of piousy prayer in a fish. Gets vomited up. Obeys. And then throws a fit.
And tells God three times, just kill me. And God's response to Jonah is to just teach him and talk to him. And that is so encouraging. Because if I was God and I had a guy consistently yelling at me and telling me, just kill me. I think at some point, God, I would just be like, fine. Like, yeah, I can do that pretty easily.
Do you really want a piece of me? And God's response to Jonah is, you're confused. You're off here. Do you not see that you're wrong? And he just tries to teach him. And what he shows Jonah is the stuff you care about is so fragile.
The stuff you're basing your life on, the stuff that you're using to give yourself comfort and worth and value, is so fragile and easily taken that it can show up in the night and it can be taken in the night and a worm can destroy it. And I just want us all to hear that. The stuff that we're looking to, and some of you know this, you painfully know this, because you've had it snatched from you. And some of us in this room haven't had it snatched yet, but it can be gone in the night. What we're looking to, to give ourselves worth and value and to know that we're good and other people are bad can be easily taken from us.
And it's not worth building your life on. You see, Jonah, when he looks at God and says, I knew you were gracious. I knew you were good. I knew you relented from disaster. I knew you were abounding in steadfast love. What he's doing is he's the kid who raises his hand and says, you forgot to take up the homework.
The only kid who raises his hand and does that is a kid who's done his homework. It's the only time you raise your hand and do that. You're never in the back of the class being like, didn't do my homework, didn't do my homework, bell ring, didn't do my homework, didn't do my homework. You know what, I need to be honest. You didn't take up the homework. You don't do that.
It's the kid who's back there going, I spent 30 minutes on this. I have nice handwriting. I assume most kids who do homework have a nice handwriting. I checked the back of the book. I knew I was right. But I didn't check the back of the book until I had done all of them.
Looking at you, Carl. Like, that's the kid who raises his hand and says, take up the homework. That's the kid who does that. And so when Jonah looks at God and says, I knew you were gracious. I knew you were merciful. I knew you abounded in steadfast love.
What he is saying, even if he doesn't realize it, is I don't need those things. That's a character flaw in you. See, if Jonah knew he needed grace and mercy and steadfast love, he would not be mad about it. What Jonah is yelling at God is, I'm one of the good ones. Take up the homework. You'll see I did just fine.
Jonah wants God to take everybody to task because Jonah thinks he's arrived. And Jonah wants God to take everybody to task because he needs God to see that he's arrived and other people haven't. But when we realize that we need grace, then we want it for everybody. When we realize that we need mercy, then we want it for everybody. When I didn't do my homework, I want everybody to not have to turn their homework in. I want the teacher to say, you know what?
I'm not taking up homework today. Best teacher ever. I want the kid who did his homework. You don't have to turn it in. It's fine. You did it.
Whatever. Everybody got points. That's okay. I think she gave points to everybody. You got your points. But that kid doesn't want everybody to get points.
He wants himself to get points and you not to get points. Does that make sense? So when Jonah says, you're gracious, that's a problem, he's saying, I'm good, you should know. And he's missed the point. As we see this bigger story unfold of how God interacts with humanity, and it's such a baffling picture that the God of the universe would send a little plant and a little worm to teach a little man. Does that make sense?
Like this just seems so small. What we see is that he's actually willing to stoop further. That God would actually come to earth. That he wouldn't just send a begrudging prophet to say a message. That he would actually send his son to pay a debt. That Jesus came because God was willing to stoop way further and be way more gracious than we see in the book of Jonah.
That he actually died for our debt. The Bible is very clear. There are not good people and bad people. There are bad people and Jesus. It is not us and them. It is us and him.
That's it. And all of the things that we've put on our resume mean nothing. We all need grace and we all need mercy. Now here's the thing. We don't know how Jonah responds. It just ends.
The end of the book of Jonah is and much cattle. God's saying, Jonah, the cows repented, man. I just can't kill a cattle with sackcloth on. I'm just not going to do it. But the end of the book of Jonah is and much cattle.
And do you want to know why? We are all given the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would. Every person in this room, you're given the opportunity because God has actually stooped further. In the book of Psalms, it's a prophecy about Jesus and it says, I'm a worm and not a man. And it's talking about him dying on the cross. It's a prophecy about the death on the cross.
And he says, I'm a worm and not a man. I have my life taken from me. And you see, God sends a worm to teach Jonah a lesson and he became a worm to rescue us. He took on sin and death and paid our penalty so that we can have life and joy and hope. That we can be set free and all of us have the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would. Turn in your resume.
Tear up your homework. Put your hand down. And be thankful for grace. That Jesus was good on our behalf. And he took all of our bad stuff, put it on himself and died for it. So that we can be free.
We wish Jonah would see his sin and realize that he needed grace too. That's what he's missed. That his thing that he's looking to say, this makes me a good person. The stuff that you're looking at and saying, this makes me a good person. And God is asking you to throw that away. To realize that it doesn't.
To realize that you're all bad. All in need. All in need of grace. And run to him. And trust in Jesus to be a good person on your behalf. That's the invitation.
And that's the response we get to have. And when that happens, we want grace for everybody. When that happens, something changes in us. To where we want everybody to be invited in. And we realize that all the stuff we fall short. All the stuff that we mess up.
Just points to how good and gracious God is. So David, Matt, and Raz are going to come back up. We're going to sing and praise Jesus. Jesus, you get the opportunity. Let me be very clear. The story of Jonah ended very abruptly.
Don't let yours end like that. Don't let the story today end for you with God asking you a question. Are you going to hang this stuff up? Are you going to quit trusting in yourself and you not respond? Some of you will let it be that. And you'll just leave and there will be no response.
But we have the opportunity to respond the way we wish Jonah would have. To see our sin. To see all of the stuff we've piled up. To say, God, take up the homework. This is what makes me good. And to realize that all of us fall short.
All of us need grace. All of us miss the point. And all of us get invited in by Jesus. Who stooped way, way lower for us than God did for Jonah. And to be radically changed by that. To have that sink into our hearts so much that we can't.
Not love him. Can't not lean into grace. And can't not want it for everybody else. God, we pray. That your Holy Spirit would lead us. That you would help us clearly see what it is that we're leaning into.
To give ourselves worth. And to give ourselves value. What we're using to say, God, you can take up the homework. Because I'll be okay. God, you can weigh everybody out now. You can check everybody out now.
Because you'll see that I've accomplished something. God, I pray that you'd help us to see. What it is that we're using to give ourselves value. That can be so easily taken from us. That can in a night be gone. God, help us see the things that we wouldn't feel like we deserved life.
Or needed life. Or had life. Or an identity or self anymore. If it was taken from us. And God, help us to see so clearly the cross. That sets us free from all of that.
Jesus who came to die on our behalf. Lord, help us to repent as Jonah should have repented. Help us to see our sin as Jonah should have seen his sin. Should have seen how his religion. And his obedience. And his knowledge was getting in his way.
From knowing you. And being close to your heart. So that he could celebrate when you celebrate it. And God, help us to be so in love with grace. That we want it for everybody. We ask all this in Jesus' name.
Amen.