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When You Think It's Too Late to Turn Back to God · Faith at Work

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Last week,
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: we talked about a man who was already found and working on Jesus' agenda
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: before anyone in Jesus' circle had noticed him.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: This week, the circle around Jesus is down to almost nothing.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two men hanging on either side of him, both convicted and Both dying.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Both only hours from the end of any future they'd ever have a chance to enjoy.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: If there is a place where already found gets tested, it's here.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not a crowd scene, not a dinner table, a cross.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 23,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: 32 tells us that two others who were criminals were led away to be put to death
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: with him.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Luke never names them.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Later, church tradition gave them names.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Dismas for the one who turned towards Jesus and Gestus for the one who didn't.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Gestus Luke doesn't bother with names.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: What he does bother to tell us is what each man said with his last breath.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: One of the criminals who were next to Jesus moaned at him,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: guestus, saying, Are you not the Christ?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Save yourself and us.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 23, verse 39.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Notice what's at the core of that sentence.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: He already knows the title.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's heard Christ, Messiah, King used about this man hanging on.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe from the sign nailed over Jesus' head.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe from the crowd talking on the hill.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: He is not meeting Jesus for the first time up there.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: He already has a piece of the story.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: But everything that he does with that piece points in one direction.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Get me out of this.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Save yourself and us.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: His whole frame for who Jesus might be for him is just temporal rescue from
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: the cross he is hanging on at that moment.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing past it.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a sideways, crowd-informed insult toward Jesus at the same time.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The other...
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Dismas rebuked him,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: saying, Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we, indeed, justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But this man, he has done nothing wrong.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then he turned to Jesus,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: and he said, Jesus, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 23, 40-42.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: This man also knows something of Jesus, but he doesn't ask to be rescued from the cross.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: He asks to be remembered inside a kingdom that by Jesus,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Every visible measure does not exist yet and is not yet available to him.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a request for rescue.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's allegiance.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Offered to a king with a future kingdom and rule in sight.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew Bates in chapter 4 of his book, Gospel Allegiance, talks about this very story.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And from that book last week I talked about the Greek word pistis.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The word our Bibles translate as faith or belief.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And how Bates notes in the ancient world that this word actually means closer
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: to allegiance than faith.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or belief, loyalty to a king, and then willingness to carry that kingdom forward.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: This story, perfectly I think, illustrates that understanding.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: At this point in the story, there has been no resurrection yet.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: No empty tomb.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: No empty tomb.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's no church, nothing but a dying man next to him and a claim about a kingdom.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he pledges his loyalty to Jesus anyways with his last breath.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And with it,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: he becomes the first Christian to To literally do what Jesus asks
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: of all his disciples.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: To carry his own cross.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Both men already knew something about Jesus before this moment.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Neither is meeting him for the first time on that hill.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that matters because...
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It means the difference between them was never
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: about how much more information one had than the other or whether that information
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: about him was correct.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, one man's knowledge of Jesus had been bent entirely towards the temporal.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: What Jesus might still do for him right now in this crisis on this cross.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: The other man's knowledge had been bent somewhere else.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Toward a kingdom.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Toward an after this life.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Toward a direction that didn't end when his body did.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Towards a lifelong, albeit short, loyalty.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've come to believe something, and you heard the puppets mention it this morning.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I regularly say it to anybody who's willing to listen to me.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: God cares less about our present perfection than God does about our defining direction.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: God is more interested in your life direction than your current imperfection.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of these men is clean.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Neither has done anything to earn paradise by any measure of his deeds.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Dismas says so himself.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: We are receiving the due reward for our deeds.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: What separates them isn't virtue.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's which way their trust and loyalty is actually bent.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Even now, even this late, even with only enough time for just one more sentence.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Pope Francis once described Dismas,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: he was a thief and Francis said who had been stealing his whole life.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: But in the end, he stole the only thing worth stealing.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Heaven.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I like that line.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because it doesn't pretend that the man became someone different in his last hour.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: He used the very same thing he'd used his whole life.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Reaching for something that wasn't his to take and aimed it at
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: the one thing actually worth taking in life.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Francis even calls him the first saint of the church,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is a strange kind of sainthood,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: not earned,
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: not close to earned,
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: just a man whose loyalties were finally pointed in the right direction.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Today, I want each one of us here to take one more step towards allegiance to Jesus Christ.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, unlike us, the second criminal doesn't get years to take that step.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't get a slow walk towards maturity,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: a season of discipleship, time to prove anything further.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: He gets one sentence.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus, Jesus doesn't ask for more than that one sentence pointed in the right direction.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And once spoken,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus says to him,
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: truly, truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 23, 43.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not someday once he's shown more.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not even after the resurrection or after Pentecost.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Today.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Today.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: The whole distance gets covered the moment the direction turns.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not the moment the life is finished being cleaned up.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the same for us today.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Today I hope every one of you leaves saying,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to stop living for the temporal and I want to start living for the eternal.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know something about that.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: At 21, in college,
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was smoking about two packs of cigarettes a day, including some other things.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Drinking about a case of beer every Friday and Saturday night.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Living in a way that wasn't heading anywhere good or healthy.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I did not have the power to change any of it by myself.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I had tried.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't really blame my family or my friends or my culture for it.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then one night...
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I said all of that to God with a friend of mine in prayer.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a clean life to offer God that night.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had one sentence
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: pointed in a different direction than the direction I had been living in.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is closer to what happened on the hill with this man alongside of Jesus
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: in Jerusalem than I used to think.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that very night for me, I found myself with Jesus in paradise.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: This story of the two criminals illustrates the basic posture that most
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: of humanity hold towards relating to Jesus.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: One criminal spends his very last words on the temporal.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Save me, save us, get me off this cross, Jesus, you stupid, stupid man.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: We must notice that Luke wants us to see that he is joining in with the crowd
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: who is mocking Jesus and proclaiming that unless Jesus saves himself,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: he is no king at all.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly not a king worth anyone's allegiance.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was in fact the Roman agenda in the crucifixion.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus, Jesus doesn't respond to any of them.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the other criminal spends his very last words on the eternal
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: and proclaims allegiance even unto death, even death on a cross.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: He says, remember me in your kingdom, Jesus, my king.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus answers the one who reached past the temporal and the crowd's view
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: and Jesus answers him immediately.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: This whole series has circled around just one metaphor.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: An empty chair and who gets to sit in it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: No one expected to find an empty chair of eternity on a cross.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: But here it is in its rawest form.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: No church roll, no completed baptism, no good works to point to.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before or after.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing but a dying man and one sentence.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus still makes room on the cross that very day.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So here is what I want you to think about more deeply this week.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: This story is not about which man had sinned less.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is about which direction each one turned with what little time he He had left.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder how many we know,
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: how many people we know who is spending every moment they have left on
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: the temporal right now.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Scrambling for rescue.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Certain there is nothing past this crisis, this habit, this cross that they are hanging on.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether one honest sentence from them turned
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: the right direction might be closer to them than they think.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was for the man on Jesus' right.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was for me that night.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Would that all of us believed that it could be near to us too.