July 22, 2000
-
The Ultimate Religious Decision Luke 6:46-49
The Ultimate Religious Decision
Luke 6:46-49
"Why do you call Me 'Lord, Lord' and do not do what I say? Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts upon them, I'll show you whom he is like. He is like a man building a house who dug deep and laid a foundation upon the rock and when a flood rose, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it because it had been well built. But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly is like the man who built a house upon the ground without any foundation and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed and the ruin of that house was great." Jesus ends His sermon with an analogy, with an illustration, with a very vivid picture of two kinds of lives, one that survives judgment and one that does not. It is then a decision that has to be made at the end of His sermon...which of the two lives do you desire to live? Do you want to survive judgment or do you not?
The most important decision you ever make is the one that has the most impact, the one that has the most enduring effect. The most important decision you will ever make is a religious one, it is a spiritual one. The most important decision you'll ever make is that decision which determines your eternal destiny. Or to put it in the language of Jesus here, the most important decision you will ever make is the one that determines whether you survive judgment. It is a decision about heaven or hell, essentially.
Religion thrives in the world because people want to go to heaven by whatever definition, whether it's the nothingness nirvana of the Buddhist who contemplates himself into oblivion, or whether it's the happy hunting ground, or whether it's across the silver river of the mystic Greek pantheon or whatever it might be, or whether it's going in to the calm, cool light at the end of the tunnel to the New Agers, whatever it is, religion thrives on the idea of heaven. It thrives on the idea that there's something for you in the next life that's better, painless hopefully, fulfilling, without all of the difficulties and trials and tribulations, disappointments and sufferings of this life. All religions promise some kind of heaven. That's what they sell, they sell heaven. That's what it's about. They sell some kind of bliss, some kind of happiness, some kind of fulfillment, some kind of rewarding life on another plain. It may take you a while to get there.
All religions promise heaven. That's what the attraction is. And today there are many within the framework, the broad framework of evangelical Christianity who think that just about anybody's sincerity in religion will guarantee them heaven. It's a little evangelical inclusivism. There's a new inclusivism that proclaims that anybody who is sincerely religious will be in heaven. I was at a mission conference not long ago, just in the last couple of months. All about reaching the whole world with the gospel and there were a number of people there who worked in that organization. And I was asked, I can't remember if it was three, four or five times, I think it was four times, the same question...are the people who never hear the gospel really lost? This is a strange question to be asking when you're a part of a missionary organization. This is a very strange question. You would think that somewhere along the line you would have answered that, right? They're skilled at the methodology but have no idea what the theology is. And when I said, "If a person doesn't know the Lord Jesus Christ, they're going to hell," that was really more than they could handle.
There is this new inclusivism that says anybody in any religion who is sincere is going to go to heaven. How close is Judaism? We believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we have that in common. It's true. We believe in God's holy nature as holy. We believe in His omniscience, His omnipresence, His immutability, the very attributes of God, the incommunicable attributes of God. We believe God is Creator, sustainer, sovereign judge. I can get with the rabbi and we can sit and we can agree on all of that. We believe that the God of the Old Testament is the creator, the sustainer. He is the care-giver, if you will, the comforter of His people. He is the consummator of history, etc., etc., etc. We believe that. We believe the God of the Old Testament. We believe in sin. We believe in righteousness. We believe in obedience to God's law. We believe there is only one God and that idolatry is a blasphemous violation of the first and great commandment, to worship only that one God. We agree on that. We agree that God is to be worshiped and God alone is to be worshiped. And anybody wants to worship God has to lift up holy hands and a pure heart. We believe that. We believe in virtues like love and humility and honesty and kindness and forgiveness.
We have all the same heroes because the heroes of the faith are listed in Hebrews 11. So when they quote Jeremiah, or they quote Isaiah as a couple of the rabbis who were speaking did, or when they talk about David, or they talk about Moses, or Abraham, those are my heroes, too. We also have the same father of faith in the sense that Abraham is the father of Israel and Abraham is the father of faith to those who believe, Paul says in Galatians. So...so it goes. There are a lot that does unite us but what separates us is infiinite. And the illustration of this is right here in our text.
Jesus is preaching to Jewish people. Get it now, preaching to fastidious, orthodox, devout, pious, zealous, passionate Jewish people who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who believe in the law of the prophets and the Hagiographa, the holy writings which are the three sections of the Old Testament. They believe in the Word of God as revealed in the Old Testament. They believe in the promises of God. They believe in the one true God, the Lord is one, the Lord is one, right? The Shema, that's what they believe, they're monotheistic.
They're serious about the law of God. They're serious about the details of the law of God. They desire to keep the law of God. They desire to worship God, to honor God. They have the temple where they go and they worship God and they follow the prescriptions of the ceremonies and the sacrifices and all of the festivals and feasts and new moons and Sabbaths and all of that. They're...they're in to that completely. We would say they are the orthodox of the orthodox. That's how...that's the kind of Judaism that existed in the time of Jesus. There were some..some offshoots, some liberals among those Jews who were not what we would say classic, fundamentalists or orthodox. That would be the Sadducees, they were the religious liberals. There were some who were politically oriented called the Zealots who were more into the political issues. There were the Essenes who were monastic, who were the antiestablishment, antisocial ones who lived out in the caves down by the Dead Sea. But for the most part, the vast, dominant viewpoint of Judaism was that which was articulated by the scribes and the Pharisees. It was a clear commitment to Old Testament scripture. So you could see that this was as close as you're going to get to the truth.
You can take it a step further. They were fascinated by Jesus. The group to whom He speaks here are called "disciples" in verse 20, if you go back to the beginning of Luke's recording of the sermon. They have devoted themselves to becoming Jesus' students. This is how it was in ancient times. You didn't necessarily go sit in a classroom. If you wanted to be taught, you picked your teacher and you followed your teacher around and teachers moved in a kind of life-mentor environment with the followers, their students, their learners, mathetes.
These people, thousands of them, had identified with Jesus and, of course, He was the most popular teacher ever because no one ever was able to do what He did in terms of physical miracles, or spiritual miracles, casting out demons. No one ever taught the way He taught. That is the group to whom He speaks...very religious people. They are as close to the truth as they can possibly get because they bought the entire Old Testament, they're worshiping the God of the Old Testament and they're looking for the fulfillment of the promises of the God of the Old Testament in the coming of Messiah and the salvation that's going to come with Him. So it's as close as you can get. Jesus never says to them, "You guys are okay, you're close enough. Close is good." He never said that. This is not horseshoes. Close is not enough. How close were they? Verse 36, "Why do you call Me Lord, Lord." This is good. Isn't it appropriate to call Jesus Lord? It is. It is appropriate to call Jesus Lord. "Why do you call Me Lord, Lord?" Well you could say because we respect You so much...You have divine power...You speak divine truth...You are definitely from God so we call you Lord, Lord.
What does kurios mean? Well it means teacher, master. It is also used in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, to translate the word Jehovah. The sum of which is calling Him "Lord, Lord" repeatedly means not just teacher but the teacher of teachers, the master of all masters, the master teacher. Not only that but one who speaks for Jehovah. This is getting close. If you're in Judaism, not in Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam or whatever else, you're in Judaism, that's close. Not only that, you are following and learning from the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ and you are affirming that He is the teacher of teachers who speaks for God. This is good...this is very good. But Jesus says, "With all of that, it's not enough." Jesus says, "The problem is you call me Lord but you don't do what I say." That's the problem. I'm not looking for your curiosity, your fascination, your admiration. I'm telling you what it is to be a true follower.
"True followers are repenters, they have looked into their lives deeply and they have assessed their true spiritual bankruptcy, they are poor, poverty-stricken spiritually. They are hungry, they are weeping and they are alienated." He turned the corner and He said, "Also, those true disciples of Mine not only hate their own sin but they love their enemies." And that was the second section from verse 27 to 38 in which we looked at the unique evidence of a transformed life by virtue of loving enemies. So Jesus said, "My true disciples hate sin in themselves and they love even those who persecute them." There is a hatred in a true disciple that is inexplicable humanly because man by his own fallen nature over-estimates his own goodness, right? It's only the work of God in the heart, the work of conviction that can bring a person to a right assessment of his spiritual bankruptcy. So true disciples have had that work of God wrought in their hearts. They are the broken and contrite whom the Lord does not despise but receives.
Secondly, it is not normal to love your enemies. It is not normal to be kind to those who hate you and persecute you and harm you. That's another evidence of the work of God. On the negative side, God does the work of helping you to see how bad you are. And then on the positive side, He does the work of giving you such goodness that you literally exude forgiveness toward those who hurt you. That's the work of God in the heart of a true disciple.
A true disciple has had the work of God in his heart so that he hates sin, the work of God in his heart so that he loves his enemies, and the work of God in his heart so that he follows Christ alone. He doesn't follow blind guides, earthly teachers or hypocrites who can't get something out of his eye because they have something bigger in their own eye. They can't take you any further than they themselves can go so their limitations become your limitations. If you're going to go into the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven, if you're going to have salvation, if you're going to go to heaven, then God must be doing that work of repentance, that work of producing an unnatural love and isolating you to following the true teacher who is Jesus Christ. And then He comes to the conclusion of the sermon and He says, "You keep calling Me 'Lord, Lord' but the problem is, you don't do what I say." Patronizing Me is not what I'm after. "Why do you call Me 'Lord, Lord' and not do what I tell you?" It's good to call Me Lord, if you don't call Him Lord you can't be saved, Romans 8:9-10, "If yo confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you'll be saved." That's good. First Corinthians 12:3, "No man can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit." The Holy Spirit works a work in your heart, brings you to the place where you call Jesus as Lord and you confess Him as Lord and you are saved. That's very good. But don't do that, confess Him as Lord with your mouth, and not obey Him. That's not acceptable.
How close do you have to be to get saved? Well there are people today who say, "Ah, if you're sincere in any religion, you're going to be in heaven." But this whole kind of thinking Jesus devastates because right here He says, in effect, "You can believe the whole Old Testament, you can call Me Lord and go to hell." In Matthew's account of this, Matthew 7:21, Matthew records that Jesus said, "Many will say to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' and I will say to them, 'Depart from Me, I never knew you, you workers of iniquity.'" Not only are people who don't know Christ not saved, people who confess Christ aren't saved in many cases. Close doesn't count. And Jesus is saying, "Look, if it's just a matter of calling Me Lord, Lord, and not doing what I say, that doesn't matter. That's not enough." In fact, it's a kind of profanity. It's not the profanity of the street, it's the profanity of the sanctuary. You're profaning the name of the Lord. You're using His name in vain. Nothing is more blasphemous than to say, "Lord, Lord," with your mouth and not do what He says.
That's what Jesus is saying here. "You have to leave Judaism and come to Me." In John 1:12, "As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name," that is His name meaning all that He is, and all that He's done. If you want to be a child of God, you've got to believe in Jesus Christ. You've got to receive Jesus Christ. Jesus says in John 6:40, "This is the will of My Father that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him may have eternal life." You have to see the Son, know who He is, believe in Him to have eternal life...no Christ, no salvation.
In Acts 4:12 it talks about Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead and there is salvation in no one else, there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved. There isn't any other way to be saved. "Well, how they going to hear the gospel?" And my answer is a very simple one. If God wants them to be saved, He'll get the gospel to them, right? Is that a difficult problem for Him? Romans 10, "Confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead and you'll be saved." That's it, believe in the Christ who was Lord who rose from the dead for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness. First Corinthians 16:22 says, "If anybody doesn't believe in the Lord Jesus, let him be cursed...anathema." In 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 it says that God is going to come in fiery judgment against those who obey not the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a command. People are commanded, sinners are commanded, all of us are commanded to believe, to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Here's the Lord speaking to the most religious people possible, the people in the right religion, Judaism. This is as close as you can get. People consumed by it, absorbed by their religion. And even fascinated by Jesus, admiring Jesus, saying...really saying as magnanimous things as they could possibly say about Jesus...Teacher, Teacher, Master, Teacher, Spokesman for God. I mean that is as much as they...that is as polite and kind and as admiring as they could possibly get.
But He says it doesn't mean anything if you don't do what I say. And what I say is, you have to recognize your sin, see that you're poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed, that you are the poor, that you are the hungry, the starving really spiritually, that you are the sad over whose lives there should be endless mourning because of your alienation from God. I'm tell you, you've got to look at yourself and see yourself as a sinner, then you've got to look at Me and see Me as your Lord and cry out to God for mercy. Even before the cross they needed to affirm their sin, cry out for the grace and mercy of God on their sinful lives and not depend on their self-righteousness, which is, of course, what the system did as it does today even now.
Some of these people later at the last day, Jesus says, in the day of judgment are going to say, "Lord, we prophesied in Your name, we cast out demons in Your name, we did many miracles in Your name," Matthew 7:22 talks about that: we did it in Your name. We not only called You Lord Teacher, we became devoted to You, we thought we were ministering in Your name. And Jesus says, "Depart from Me, you workers of iniquity, I never knew you."
How close is close enough? Close doesn't count at all. Judaism doesn't count. Judaism that acknowledged Jesus as a spokesman for God didn't count. Judaism that went so far as to actually try to function in Jesus' name and there were some people among the Jews who were trying to cast out demons in Jesus' name. Remember, the disciples reported that to Him. Close doesn't count. You have to do what He said, what He said, of course, was to recognize your sin, cry out to God for grace and mercy and forgiveness.
Jesus came preaching repentance. The system said you're righteous, you're good enough if you do these rules, God will accept you. Jesus' message was, "You're not good enough, you're damned, you're doomed, you're hopeless, you're sinful, recognize that, cry out to God for mercy, a mercy which God will grant you for My sake, confess Me as your Lord." That's what He was commanding them to do.
It was really necessary to abandone Judaism. That's what He was asking. It doesn't do you any good to admire Me, it doesn't do you any good to call Me Lord. It doesn't do you any good to say you're ministering in My name if you don't do what I said. It's the pattern of obedience that starts with believing, obeying the gospel. The gospel is a command to believe and be saved and then a continual pattern of obedience. John 8:31, "Whoever continues in My Word is My real disciple," mathetes alethos, real one. If you continue to obey what I say, you're My real disciple. And that's been reiterated all throughout the New Testament. The new child of God is the one who obeys Him, read that in John 15. Read it in 1 John, "If you say you abide in Christ you ought to walk the way He walked." Don't tell Me you're a believer, but you don't obey the Word of God. If you're a believer, the Word of God, the Spirit of God abides in you, you don't continue in a pattern of sin that's unbroken.
He was saying you call Me Lord but you don't do the will of My Father. What is the will of My Father? "This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, listen to Him." Or in the words of John the Baptist, the prophet of God, "This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." You have to see Me as your sin-bearing Savior, as your Lord and God.
People have God on their lips but not on their hearts. That is a kind of profanity. James put it this way, "Be not hearers of the Word only, deceiving your own selves." On the other hand, he said, "Be ye doers of the Word." It's always that way. Look at verse 47 and as Jesus expands, "Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts upon them." You come to Christ, you hear the gospel and you act. What does that mean? You obey, you do what the gospel commands, you believe, you receive, you repent, you confess. All the commands of the gospel, repent of sin, confess your sin, believe in the Lord Jesus, receive the Lord Jesus. That's what's required. That alone will save. Nobody short of that is going to heaven, I don't care what religion they're in even if it's Judaism, even if it's Christianity, even if it's somebody right here at this church.
He gives an illustration that is unforgettable. "The one who comes to Me hears My words and acts upon them," that's obedience, "I'll show you whom he's like. He's like a man building a house who dug deep," that's kind of the idea of repentance, getting really down to the realities of my own life and down also deep into the truth of God, "and laid a foundation upon the rock." Rock is an Old Testament term for God, isn't it? And foundation is a New Testament term for Christ used a number of times, most notably in 1 Corinthians 3:11.
You go all the way down, you dig down into spiritual realities, you dig down deep and you lay the foundation on a rock bed. "And when a flood rose," as they did frequently in Israel, because you have a very dry climate and when you have torrential rains, dry river beds begin to swell and floods just begin to wash away houses. They would be very familiar with this kind of picture, a guy builds his house, puts a foundation down, the flood rises as the rains come, the water goes over the banks of the dry bed, the torrents burst against the house, the language is very graphic and vivid, smashes the house and couldn't shake it because it had been well built. And well built simply is a summary of all that had been done...dug deep, laid a foundation on a rock. It's all about foundation.
The house is your religious life, your church life, your Judaism, your religious activity, ceremony, etc. The storm is divine judgment. It's the fury of God. But it can't shake this house because it's on an immovable foundation. The foundation in the Old Testament is the rock who is God. The foundation in the New Testament is Christ. But we could extend that. In Matthew 7 Jesus says, "Whoever hears My Word and does it, whoever hears My Word and does it..." It refers to these words of Mine, and here you have the same thing back in verse 47, "Hears My words." So what you have here is the message of Christ which is about God as the rock, about Christ as the foundation, and the gospel. So whoever builds his life on the gospel, on the great cornerstone of the gospel from Matthew 16, "Thou art the Christ the Son of the living God." That's the rock bed, cornerstone foundation. When you go down and you build your life on God in Christ and the gospel, storms of judgment can never move your house. That's somebody who just doesn't admire Jesus, but who embraces Him as Lord and Savior.
Verse 49 says you have an alternative. "The one who has heard, not acted, he's like the man who built his house on the ground without any foundation." In Matthew's account, sand. "The torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed and the ruin of that house was great." These are religious houses built apparently the same way, at least superficially, built in the same area because the same storm affected both. So one is the truth and one is Judaism. They're in proximity. Jesus is coming, He's bringing the truth. New Covenant truth, it's in proximity to Judaism. He's not talking about some religion on the other end of the planet, He's talking about Judaism, the religion of the time and the people. And He is picturing it as a house without a foundation.
When the storm of judgment comes, these two side by side, they might look on the outside from somebody who is just a bystander like everything is fine, wonderful, religious edifice has been built, but when the judgment comes, the one without the foundation gets swept away. We can't always tell that. We look at somebody's life even in the church and we don't know whether Christ is really there or not. We don't know whether the foundation is there or not. We don't know whether they dug deep with repentance, whether they went down to an understanding of their true condition before God, cried out for mercy, embraced the Savior. We don't know whether that's happened or not, or whether they're just going through the motions.
The key thing here is not to admire Christ, it's to obey Christ. And if you get all the way up, you're an orthodox Jew, you get all the way up, you even admire Jesus, you might think He's a prophet, you might think He speaks for God, you might think He's a great teacher. You get that close you might even decide to identify with Him somehow, maybe become a liberal professor in some liberal seminary and you talk about Jesus all the time. Maybe you become a liberal pastor in a liberal church. Maybe you become a part of a cult that talks about Jesus. Maybe you become a part of an evangelical movement that talks about Jesus and superficially identifies with Him. But the foundation isn't there. You can get that close to even identifying with Jesus to even ministering in His name and your whole life is going to be a great ruin. What He's talking about there is, of course, eternal punishment.
It's so important to dig deep. It's so important to have an honest, deep understanding of your condition and a deep understanding of the gospel. Christianity has become so superficial, so surface, no foundation, no deep plowing, no spade work, no brokenness of heart, no mourning, no really coming to grips with waywardness, lack of depth. The shallowness produces a superficial convert. But this is a person who goes for the truth of the gospel, who embraces the teaching of Christ and goes deep. Not in a hurry, no quickie conversion, no light off the top confession, real counting the cost, digging deep with an attitude of penitence, this is the person who knows the foundation is everything.
You have a choice. The most important choice you'll every make and the choice is between damning religion, and Christ. Anything but Christ is damning religion. It catapults people into hell, no matter what it promises or what it claims about heaven. And truly, everybody talking about heaven ain't going there...unless by true obedience to the gospel you have repented, confessed, believed, received Christ as the foundation, you will not survive divine judgment. Jesus talked more about hell than He did about heaven in order to warn men of its reality. And that's exactly what He means when He says, "The ruin of that house was great." May God by His grace help you to make the right choice. It's one thing to choose to go to hell, it's something else to choose to go to heaven but end up in hell because you chose a deception. There is no salvation in any other than Christ.