August 24, 2008
1 John 4:7-20
I have been struggling lately with two things. The first struggle has to do with what was going on in King Saul’s heart that God would reject him because of what would seem to us to be a minor variation of obedience to God’s command to immediately kill everything and everybody associated with the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15). Saul herded up the best of the animals to sacrifice to the Lord and brought back their King Agag. Samuel condemned Saul with the words from Isaiah, “To obey is better than sacrifice and to listen than the fat of rams.”
The second thing with which I am struggling is to make the distinction between Godly prophets and false prophets. It had to do with the answer that Jesus would give the false prophets at the judgment (Matthew 7):
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?” Then I will say to them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers” (Matt 7:21-23).
Since this was Jesus’ closing statement to His Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, the test of our standing with Him is whether or not we are living or striving to live by the standards of the Sermon on the Mount. Because the standards of the Sermon on the Mount turn human nature on its head, to live by them requires the active presence of the Holy Spirit as the change-agent in our behavior.
The message that the Bible is trying to give us has little to do with Saul or false prophets. The message is about God, His love of us and our trust in that love. You will recall that Jesus continued in Matt 7 by saying:
Therefore, anyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.
Those words that we are to hear and put into practice are the words of the Sermon on the Mount – particularly the Beatitudes – and have to do with what and whom we love. Love your enemy; do good to those who persecute you; be meek, poor in spirit, mournful; hunger and thirst not after fame and fortune but after righteousness; be merciful; be pure in heart; be peacemakers. These are all those things of which we are totally unprepared and incapable of practicing outside of a transformation of the heart and life. If we put those principles to work it is because something miraculous and supernatural has happened to us.
That is the test of true discipleship. The instinct and ability to love one another and forgive one another – especially an enemy – are gifts from God to His children and confirming evidences of His presence in our lives. In fact, it may go something like this: “I must really be a child of God! I find myself caring for and praying for this person I don’t like and who clearly doesn’t like me!”
That was the difference between King Saul and David. That is the difference between the world and the Kingdom of God. The false prophet is one who stands before Heaven’s throne and pleads his case. He may not have lived according to the Sermon on the Mount, but he did all kinds of things for God – prophesied in Jesus’ name; drove out demons in Jesus’ name; did signs and wonders in Jesus’ name. “Depart from me; I never knew you.”
Jesus is telling us that you cannot bypass the Sermon on the Mount.
You will recall my conversation with Cong. Tom Allen about his evangelical pastor friend in Portland who told him that the Sermon on the Mount is for a later time – after Jesus returns. Would it be too far off the reservation to suggest that this pastor friend of his may well be one of the false prophets that Jesus will tell at the Judgment that He never knew him?
What is this rock on which wise men stand? We have always thought of it as being the physical and spiritual person of Jesus. But what if that rock instead is something that Jesus is or demonstrates to us through His life and work? What if that rock is love itself – that a wise man who hears Jesus words and puts them into practice is standing on God’s love, depending on God’s love, living on God’s love and trusting in God’s love?
What King Saul lacked was trusting-love, was it not? What David had, despite his sins, was trusting-love. You have only to read the Psalms to know that for certain. The difference between Saul and David was their trust levels of God’s love. Saul built an altar to himself in Gilgal on the way from the battle with the Amalekites. He decided it would be OK to share some of the glory with God; he decided that pleasing the people would be an admirable thing for both Israel and the God of Israel; he disobeyed God out of a failure of complete trust of God.
The Sermon on the Mount is about the degree of trust that we have in God’s love. Does God love me enough to hold me up when my enemies seek to destroy me, or must I depend partially on my own ability to defend myself? Does God love me enough to protect and shield me when I am meek, lowly, poor in spirit, mournful, pure in heart? Does God love me enough to keep me from being destroyed by my enemy if I choose to love that enemy and pray for him?
These are the distinguishing features of a Christian. The ability to live in the shadow of the Sermon on the Mount is directly proportional to the degree to which we trust God to love us unconditionally. The saints of God have a sense of that truth and stand, somewhat wobbly at times, on the rock of God’s love. The people of the world stand, most of the time, on their own wits and wisdom. That was the difference between Saul and David.
After the service last week, one of you said, “That was depressing! No matter how hard we try, it may not mean anything in the final analysis.” In a way, that is very right. Our standing with God is not dependent on how much we love Him. It is dependent on how much we trust that He loves us, His love being shown to us in sending His Son to be sacrificed for us. It is not about trying; it is about being loved and standing on that foundation of hope. If you read the 10th verse of 1 John 4, it is clear that God’s love toward His children is total and unconditional, while our love toward Him is a process, making our ability to live by the Sermon on the Mount also a process:
This is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. The bottom line, as I read it, is that anyone who says that the Sermon on the Mount is for a later time when Christ reigns on earth doesn’t have a very valid eschatology and outright refuses to trust God’s love. Anyone who advocates for that position may be, in my reading, one of those false prophets who will come into Judgment before the Great White Throne with an appeal to fairness and human rights rather than to salvation by grace alone.
Anyone who advocates for his own good works is like the foolish person who builds his career and his life on the shifting sands of public opinion and cultural drift. Do you understand what I am saying here? He builds the structure of his life on the shifting sands of public sentiment – good works.
You have only to listen to the presidential candidates to understand about the shifting sands of public sentiment. Every time we come into a new presidential election year, we have all kinds of remedies to the latest crises. Those change as the crises change. Shifting sands! When the rains and the winds come, down go plans for creating a New Jerusalem out of America. The reason 9/11 has paralyzed our nation for the past 7 years is that America has been built on public opinion and cultural drift. As the national crises change, the cultural drift changes. One time it’s the economy; another time it’s energy; another time its race and human rights; another time it may well be prisoner rights.
The sad part is that the one structure that was built on the solid rock – the church of Jesus – keeps moving and rebuilding itself into a popular thing that ebbs and flows with the cultural tide. It has forsaken its first love. It has turned away from grace and toward the law. It has turned away from faith and toward prosperity and success. It has tired of waiting for God to act and has taken matters into its own hands by becoming politically active and promoting war in the Middle East. The new Christian Church in America is an institution that no longer values putting those words of Jesus – the Sermon on the Mount – into practice. It has become the American Dream church that demonstrates how much it can accomplish without God.
When the wind and the rain come, guess what! The Church of Jesus Christ will have no other recourse than to tear down its phony buildings, its useless programs, its big money and its political PACS, repent in sackcloth and ashes and rebuild on the Rock.
Jesus makes it very clear that forsaking the principles of the Sermon on the Mount invoke the rantings of false prophets – people who promise things they can’t deliver because they fail to understand that love of God is the foundation upon which everything lasting is built. You can pass all the laws you want concerning morality and ethics. If you don’t have love that is divinely given to those who hear and put into practice the words of Jesus, your morality is as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal – shifting sands.
Romans 12:2 is right on point:
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.
The transformation of the whole person is the test of discipleship. Transformation by the renewal of your mind is about living in the shadow of the Sermon on the Mount. Remember that Jesus said in Matt 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of the Father who is in heaven.” Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul says, “and you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is.”
I believe that God’s will has far less to do with what we are doing, where we are going and how we are going to get there than it does about trusting in His love for us today so completely that we are relieved of our worldly need to get the best of our neighbor and the best for ourselves– our need to act and react to keep the upper hand.
Conforming to this world means to downgrade love into lust. Lust is self-centered and self-destructive. Lust is not just about sex; it is about what has out attention and our devotion. 1 John 4:18 tells us that there is no fear in love – the kind of life-giving love that builds on the solid rock. Fear has to do with punishment. Perfect love drives out fear because it drives out punishment. Our punishment has already been served by God’s Son as a perfect demonstration of His love for us. Let’s take a look at this business of perfect love for a few minutes in closing.
1 John 4:17 talks about what it takes to have confidence on the Day of Judgment. It has nothing to do building a resume of miraculous accomplishments for God in the name of Jesus Christ. The only way love can be made complete in us is for God to live in us. There is no way God can live in us if we fail to trust Him not only for our salvation but for His promise to uphold us Trust demands that we reject behavior standards of this world – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; hatred for a brother, a security guard, the prison administration, the chaplain; lust of the eye; divorce; swearing on the Bible, etc.
It is not our love of God that counts; it is our trust of God’s love for us that transforms us.
How great is that love of God for us?
When Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, as written in John 17, He had this to say about us as His future disciples: “I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even… as…. you… have… loved… me” (v. 23).
Do you get it? Jesus is equating the Father’s love of us at the same level as the Father’s love of Him. Equally loved means no more and no less. It means that we can truthfully say that there is not another being in the entire universe, including Jesus Christ, who has been more loved by God than you and me.
Jesus’ prayer demonstrates His own love. He has been with God forever. Yet, He feels no jealousy, no remorse and no animosity toward us in the same sense as did the older brother of the Prodigal Son. In His prayer, Jesus is not only acknowledging that He is not loved any more than are you and me. He is asking the Father to broadcast that all over the world – “let the world know that you have loved them even as (much as) you have loved me.” As the perfect parent, God does not love any one child more than the others.
Our very salvation depends on believing how special we are to God – how much He loves us. Lamentations 3:21-23 says this: “But this I call to mind, and therefore have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”
The damage to our nation, to the church, to our families and to our institutions is caused by our unbelief of how special we are to Him. Matt 24:12 says this, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.” How do we keep our love from growing cold so that we continue to seek to live in the shadow of the Sermon on the Mount? We go to the source of that love – not a domestic partner; not the American Dream of prosperity and success; not our pseudo codes of morality and ethics; not the President of the US; not even our spouses. 1 John 4:19: “We love him because he first loved us.”
In our time, the Church of Jesus Christ – that institution built on the Rock Christ Jesus – has raised up leaders who no longer believe how special we are and how much God loves those He has called. Like ancient Israel, they are not satisfied with God’s love. They want to be like their neighbors – want to become like other churches. Once we go down that road, we cut ourselves off from the only true source of love. Our love of Him and each other begins to grow cold.
We then begin walking by sight and human reason rather than by faith rooted in God’s love. We have not endured to the end. Instead, we have insisted that God bring the end Right Now before we get into further trouble with Him and with our neighbor or cell mate.
Every thought, every word, every act of God is an expression of His love. God is sovereign. He has the right to do whatever He wants. With any human being or even with Satan, this would result in tyranny except for one clear distinction. Everything God does is motivated by love. Even our trials, sickness, death, financial setbacks are motivated by love.
I would be willing to bet that Job was one of the hardest nuts to crack in redemptive history. Proud, self-righteous, self-satisfied, legalistic; yet God said of Job that there was none like him in all the earth. God was holding out on Job and needed to break him in order for him to finally see God:
Then Job replied to the Lord: “I know you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’ Surely, I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said, ‘Listen, now, and I will speak; I will question you , and you shall answer me.’ My ears have heard of you but now my eyes see you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.
Is that not the place where the Church of Jesus Christ needs to come in our day? They say there are worsening times ahead. Instead of trying to predict those times, is it not time to build up God’s people so that they will be standing on the Rock when the wind and waves come at us? I submit to you that the Church of Jesus Christ in America is not prepared to survive spiritually in time of wind and waves pounding against our lives.
Rather than insisting on having faith in this promise or that promise, how about insisting on having faith in God’s unfailing love? Such a faith has a very critical purpose. Its purpose is to give us the confidence, courage and hope that we need to live as Christians in the Kingdom of God – standards of behavior that are 180 deg out of phase with the way the world thinks and acts.
Too often we have interpreted 1 John 4:18 to mean that it is our love of God that casts our fear. Our love, however, is not “perfect.” John is writing about God’s love as the love that casts out fear because God’s love is perfect as demonstrated and revealed through the person and work of His Son. No one can snatch us from God or stand in His way (Isaiah 43:13) means that nothing outside ourselves can stand in the way of God’s purposes for us.
The Sermon on the Mount demands more of us than any of us is capable of delivering in and through the flesh. And yet, we know that this is the only way of following Christ through His death and into the transformed life. I urge you to stand with Job who discovers, much to both his sorrow and joy, that what he knew about God was not enough.
That love is there for every one of us and has less to do with phony smiles of joy on our faces and a bunch of memorized Scripture verses than with hearts turned to Him and attitudes changed from within because we fully believe we are special to God.
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