Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 6, 2020 | UNCOMFORTABLE - Grace

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September 6, 2020 | UNCOMFORTABLE - Grace · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning and welcome to a new sermon series called Uncomfortable.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let me uh repeat, grab one of these Connect.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's our second edition of the Connect Journal.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And give Teresa big props for this.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty classy.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm proud of it.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uncomfortable is exactly what we are, right?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're uncomfortable with these things because they make my glasses fog up and and you have to talk twice as loud to hear yourself, and it makes the made the dentist sweat all over me this last week.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they're just uncomfortable.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole really it's physical distancing.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The physical distancing thing is that's weird too, right?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Always being a mile away.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then we've got all these other things that make us uncomfortable this year, like the whole defunding the police idea or the damn the breaking apart of law and order and um and an upcoming election.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything that makes us feel less comfortable than an election with all of the advertising and the fears and the oh my goodness.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a great sermon series.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh Eric, if you think about it, grab that, or somebody's coming up.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they can grab that door, close that door, because I see the donuts out there and and I've you know.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but instead of talking about masking or the election, sorry if you wanted me to, uh, in this five-week series, uh I and um and Alex and Connor are going to talk to you about five things that are part of the church, that are part of our lives, that are part of uh Christianity that make us feel uncomfortable.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the one that uh I've chosen for today is the perfect one for today.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's the perfect one to start off with.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole uncomfortableness that we feel about uh the gospel and about grace and about salvation, about the question, how do I get to heaven?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna take you to three verses today, three passages, and I I'm gonna I'm gonna uh show you how they make us feel uncomfortable in different ways and try to solve them.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And two of them uh um are some of the hardest, most tricky passages in the New Testament are considered by scholars to be difficult, and I know they are because I know a number of people at TBC uh misunderstand them, a number of people I talk to.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I'll work my way through.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the first passage is oftentimes called the narrow and the wide gates.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It comes out of, if you have a cell phone or you have a Bible, it comes out of the seventh chapter of the first gospel, verses 13 and 14, in which Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount contrasts two different gates and ways that go to heaven, although a way is as narrow or as broad as the gate.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So enter through the narrow gate, he says, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And many enter through it.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Already I feel uncomfortable.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: If that doesn't make you feel uncomfortable, nothing does.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's this picture that the majority of people who have ever lived have gone on a broad highway, through a broad gate, broad highway, and are headed for destruction, and there are uh that's the majority, and the minority are those who go through the narrow gate.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's it makes us feel uncomfortable, but immediately what when the world sees that verse, or when people read that verse, they go, Oh, that means I need to live what?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: The straight and narrow.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: I need to follow the straight and narrow, I need to mind my Ps and Q's, I need to dot my I's and cross my T's.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I need to keep the Ten Commandments, I need to stay away from the nasty nine or the dirty dozen.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I need to do what's good, I need to obey God, I need to, I need to, I need to do what's right and avoid doing what's wrong.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I need to work my way into heaven.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Working your way into heaven.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and that there's a little bit of comfort in that.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: At least I know what I'm doing, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I have my assignment, but I'm a little scared I may not be able to achieve it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Second text, also in the Sermon on the Mount, also famous, oftentimes called the most critical passage to understand, maybe in the New Testament, but also one of the hardest.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus said, Don't think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's speaking about what we call the Old Testament, Mosaic Law.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things are accomplished.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: For I tell you, and he makes it, he doubles down now, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden we see this comparison.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: The scribes and Pharisees, let's see how righteous were they.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have to surpass their righteousness clearly.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: We have to mind our P's and Q's.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have to dot our I's and cross our T's.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have to obey the commands, we have to avoid the nasty nine and the dirty dozen.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have to obey God really, really well in order to get to heaven.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: We need to work our way into heaven.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And to some extent that makes us feel uncomfortable, makes the world feel uncomfortable because we're not sure we can make it, and we're oftentimes told, right, that we'll not know whether we made it until we die.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we hate that worry, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Go to heaven.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Did I make it?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Did I not make it?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: What will Peter say at the gates?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we're a little worried that we get to the pearly gates carrying our good deeds, and Peter will say, and then we'll say to Peter, what do you mean?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: How do you plan on paying for your sins?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So good works being one thing, but then how do we take care of the slip-ups that we had, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: That whole thing makes us feel uncomfortable, but that's the way, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the people that we know in the world live.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's a scary way to live, and some reject it.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll go to a third passage, which raises the same issues.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus addresses them in a way that gives us the key to unlock the first two texts.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: To some who are confident of their own righteousness, that sounds like our last verse, and look down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that just as soon as we get a line on this cast of characters, we've already made up our minds, for we discover that one of the two characters is a Pharisee and the other man is a tax collector.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we know what to think of the Pharisee because, uh, like Pavlov's dogs, we're conditioned from our earliest days in Sunday school to call Pharisees evil.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And while we realize that the tax collector was not the best of men, we suspect that deep down inside he was a he was a good guy, our kind of guy.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, I guarantee that if you'd have been there when Jesus first told the story, you would be horrified to think that 2,000 years from then you would have thought this, or that anyone would say this at all, because in the eyes of all decent citizens, the Pharisee was a good man, and he was religious too.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: He could stand in the temple and he could say, God.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Whoops.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go to what he says.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: He could stand in the temple and he, uh, well, we'll go, we'll go to that later, obviously.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: He could stand in the temple and the Pharisee could pray to God and he could say, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, of evildoers, adulterers.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that when he spoke that way, he was speaking the honest, unbarnished truth.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a crook, he's not a criminal, he's not a womanizer, he's not made his living by ripping off his neighbor.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's taken nothing that he hasn't honestly earned.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: He plays fair.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: When he makes a promise, you can count on it.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in a day that was as sexually loose as ours, he has stayed loyal to his wife and he's loyal to his friends.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he's not only a good man, he's a religious man.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's a pillar of the church.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's not hypocritically religious.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: His outward righteousness is matched by his inward discipline.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: For one thing, he fasts twice a week.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: God had only commanded in the law of Moses that you fast once a year on the day of atonement, but he fasts twice a week.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Good devotion's not going to hold him back every Monday and every Thursday.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Those were the days that righteous Jews fasted twice a week.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every Monday and Thursday, he denied himself food.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in addition, it says he put his money where his mouth was.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: 10% off the top to God.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you know where to find a few dozen people like that, I can show you 10,000 churches in America that will accept delivery, no questions asked.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a man who's deeply sincere about his religion, and uh and he gives God the glory.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, he has a great reputation in town.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in the community knows that he's a moral leader and that he's a pillar of the church.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: They look up to him, they respect him, even the tax collector, this publican who comes to church and is gonna pray.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even he stands so in awe of the Pharisee that he won't even pray near him, but stands afar off.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you may decide that the tax collector is a good guy, sort of a man who understands, like Clint Eastwood, his limitations.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if you'd been there in the first century, you would not have come to that conclusion at all.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Decent and honorable men despise tax collectors.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: They thought of them as robbers, they thought of them as traitors.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because when Rome decided to, when Roman wanted to tax a province, they sold the right to tax to the highest bidder.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And once a person purchased the right to tax, he could take as much as he could squeeze out of people, and he found he could squeeze quite a lot.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you couldn't avoid him.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody has written about the tax collector.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's the worst kind of crook.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's a legal one, a big operator, a mafia-style enforcer working for the Roman government on a nifty franchise that lets him collect from his fellow Jews, mind you, from the people whom the Romans might have trouble finding, but whose whereabouts he knows and whose language he speaks, all the money he can bleed out of them, provided only he pays the authorities an agreed flat fee.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: He's been living for years on the cream, he has skimmed off their milk money.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's a fat cat who drives a stretch limo, drinks scotch, and never shows up at a party with at least two call girls in tow.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the guy we're talking about.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And listen, if there was an election between these two characters, you would go out and you would campaign for the Pharisee.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if the tax collector happened to win this election, you would regard it as a sign that your country was falling apart and had become, you know, corrupt.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they both wanted to marry your sister.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: You would not be happy if the tax collector won out.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: You would be thrilled if the Pharisee helped your family out by marrying them.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that once you actually start listening to the Pharisee's prayer, you find out that while it's honest, there's just something about it that bugs you.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's standing and praying like this about himself.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And five times in these two sentences, he starts a sentence with I.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he's in the presence of God, right?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: God, I thank you, starts off really well.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we ought to start our prayers.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I thank you that I'm not like other people, greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: I fast twice a week.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I give a tenth of everything I get.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And while he's being honest about his life, there's just something about this we don't like, right?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that what we don't like about it is not what God doesn't like about it, because what we don't like about it is he sounds stuck up.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: He sounds conceited.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if we knew him, we'd probably take him aside and said, you need to sound more modest in your prayers.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: You need to correct those, you need to.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: You said it doesn't sound good.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: You need to sort of tweak it here and tweak it there.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: We don't like conceit because it's, you know, we don't like, I don't like going out to golf with somebody who says, you know, Congdon, you know, I don't like playing with you.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: My game suffers because you're so bad and we have to spend so much time looking for your ball.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's conceit.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I I'm here to tell you that on a list of a hundred heinous sins, conceit is really 101.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because oftentimes it's just uh, you know, a person sounds conceited or talks conceited because he's making up for feeling inferior, right?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just oftentimes people who are conceited are just talking big and they're wrong.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Conceit is like a pimple.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Pride, however, is like the bloodstream.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what the problem is here is that he's standing in the presence of God and thinking that the differences on earth are differences that matter to God, and that somehow the fact that he is better than other people, that he's obeying the law better, matters to God eternally.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: That somehow, if he is this righteous, then God owes him.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: God owes him entrance into heaven, God owes him a lot of things.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, what happens, C.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis put it this way, he said, pride is always the pride of comparison.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Proud people always put others down as they lift themselves up.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so he compares himself to the tax collector.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Pride always puts others down in the process of putting itself up on stilts.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so pride is the real problem because he's in the presence of God, you see, and God does not care about how well he obeys because God knows he does not obey as well as he simply must obey.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Must obey.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so that's why uh uh uh this book reminded me of a book I read in the last couple weeks called Unfollow.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a book by Megan Phelps Roper.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Megan was as granddaughter of Fred Phelps Sr.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in her young 20s, she became sort of the young leader of the uh Westboro Baptist Church.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's Westboro Baptist Church here, Fag Marriage Dooms Nations, GodhatesFags.com.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you're familiar with this.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: If not, go out after the service and you will see them standing on the corner outside.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: They now only come between first and second service.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is Megan here, happily holding a sign saying God is your enemy.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh her mother, who is basically the leader and organizer of the church, according to this book, surely you're going to hell.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh thank God.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, uh, very controversial, after 9-11, they started, they started going to soldiers' funerals.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: They've stopped that now, probably because Megan, after she left the church, has talked a lot about it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So they no longer go and protest uh at dead soldiers' funerals.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Megan um in 1991 uh the Westboro Baptist Church began holding signs.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is just actually probably not a coincidence, just about two months after uh Fred Phelps Sr.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: was disbarred.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe he had nothing to do, but he started taking his family to carry signs there at Gage Park, where there was homosexual activity.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And Megan was five years old.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: She carried signs that she could hardly read and did not understand.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as she grew up, she was a fervent follower of the Westboro Baptist Church, and she represented that church very clearly on television in front of some important people and so forth.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: But um but this was a religion she found out that uh uh that she struggled with.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: She the all the kids went to public schools, and sometimes even when she was an elementary child, they would they would carry signs at lunch outside their own elementary school, and then she would walk in, and she found that sometimes after school she'd be sitting around with other girls, and they would be chatting about mean teachers and about assignments and so forth, and she would find that they were very friendly, and she says, I began to wonder, were my classmates really as bad as I'd been taught?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: The question lingered in the back of my mind for a while, but I batted it away.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: There were only two kinds of people in the world, and my classmates were clearly in the Esau category race to believe that God had chosen the Jacobs, he had rejected the Esau's.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't seem to know or care about the Bible.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Notice her standard of evaluating all of her classmates over here in the elementary and junior high school.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Their parents were divorced and remarried, and some of them were as good as committing fornication already, what with all the hand holding and kissing they were doing in the hallways.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: They might be friendly to me, but these friends of mine were all enemies of God and therefore must be my enemies as well.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But as she grew up, there were more and more things that began to impress themselves on her.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Her oldest brother Josh left the church at age 19, and like the rest of the family, she said he was an Esau, our enemy, doomed to eternal destruction because he had left the church.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Pharisee, evaluating himself and everyone else based upon obedience to the commands of God.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let's continue.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but kept striking his chest and saying, God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the presence of God, the tax collector knows that he's not worthy, and you say, Well, well, of course.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that was really easy for him to be humble because he could see who he really was.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down just a minute.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of tax collectors.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of great sinners today whose prayer is, Lord, I thank you, that I'm not like that hypocritical Pharisee.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, how many movies have you seen?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Where does the sinner who brags about his sin and points at preachers or points at people like yourselves, people who go to church?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the movie, you know who's the bad person and who's the good person because the movie has flipped this story on its head.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: The movie has been very proud of living in sin and basically said, but at least I'm not a hypocrite for it.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we live in a world today where the story has been flipped, and we realize it's very easy for publicans, for tax collectors today, to say exactly the same prayer that the Pharisee prayed.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: To say, Lord, that guy over there, he is so stuck up, and he is such a hypocrite.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: He is so unkind and so uncompassionate.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you that I am not like him.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's almost like the Sunday school teacher who said to her children, after teaching this lesson now, boys and girls, let's all thank God that we are not like this nasty Pharisee.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this man could have prayed that way, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: He could have prayed, Oh God, I thank you that I'm not like that Pharisee, a religious humbug who prays long prayers in the temple, and I thank you that I am not that way.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm an extortioner, I'm unjust, I'm immoral, but at least I'm honest about it.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't pretend.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm no hypocrite.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't it amaze you sometimes how the folks out there think that hypocrisy is the worst of all sins, and that somehow by parading their sins in front of the world, they can turn those sins into virtues, that by unwrapping their bandages and displaying the running sores of their lives, that somehow gives them a measure of health.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: All I'm saying here is that there are Pharisees who can act like Pharisees, and there are also tax collectors who can act like Pharisees.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the real issue that Jesus is pointing out is that this tax collector realizes that he himself, standing in the presence of God in the temple, is unworthy and he needs God's mercy.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is the same word as atonement.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: He needs God's atonement, he needs something different because his works are not.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Measuring up.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that is therefore the point of the story.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I tell you, says Jesus, this one, the tax collector, went down to his house justified rather than the other, because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why was he justified?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why was he declared righteous by God?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: This what we would call a drug dealer level person, this this terrible, awful mafia person, why would he be justified rather than this good man that we would much rather elect to office?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is that the things that matter in the presence of God are just the opposite of the things that matter on earth.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is that what matters in the presence of God is not how well you perform or obey.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can never obey and perform good enough.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: What matters in the presence of God is that you recognize that you are unworthy, that you can never do what you need to do to achieve the kingdom of heaven, or to get right to God with God, or to enter heaven, or to get eternal life for the forgiveness of sins.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you say, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that helps us then turn around and go back to our first verses and understand them, doesn't it?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is that because the road is the living the straight and narrow, and there are very few people who live perfect lives?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you've read Pilgrim's Progress, and sadly not many have anymore, the story almost begins with Pilgrim with a huge burden of sins on his back going to what's called the wicked gate.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: John Bunyan was thinking, not Paul Bunyan, but John Bunyan was thinking of the gate that Jesus spoke of.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And at this gate stands an evangelist, and over the gate we read, knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the evangelist gives him the gospel and opens this little gate.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: What gate is it?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the gate that says, I will perform everything that God tells me to perform?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, the evangelist is the one that gives the gospel of grace.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you cannot perform, you cry out, Have mercy upon me, make atonement for me a sinner, and you look to Jesus Christ.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that road that leads to life is the road of Jesus Christ who died on the cross.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: When you find that road, you walk across that road.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is a very famous picture, but I'll show it to you because it's so perfect.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: For Jesus says, I am that road, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: No one comes to the Father except through me.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a narrow path because it's a narrow gate, because the gate is the person of Jesus alone.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or how about that other verse, even harder one?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never get into the kingdom of heaven.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that clear that we have to be righteous?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: We have to keep even more commands than they do?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: If that's even possible.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: For Jesus said, now the way to interpret that is, of course, to go back a couple of verses and see that Jesus puts himself front and center by saying, Don't think that I came to abolish or destroy the law or the prophets.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Notice he doesn't say I didn't come to abolish them, but to observe them or command you to observe them.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I came to fulfill them.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: For I truly say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law, until all is accomplished or fulfilled.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: What does he mean when he says he fulfilled the law but didn't abolish it?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that what he means is what you would mean when you say that going to high school fulfills all of the education you've had up to that point.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't abolish what you learned in elementary or junior high, but it but that's what everything up till now has pointed to.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: Everything up through high school points to college, and college fulfills everything that preceded it.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you have the Ten Commandments, you have the law, and that's all fulfilled in the perfect person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And by his death on the cross, he fulfills the law and the prophets perfectly.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And because he fulfills them perfectly, when you climb into the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, you fulfill them in a way that is even better than the scribes and the Pharisees.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: You fulfill them as perfectly as Jesus Christ.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that when Jesus said, I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law, he did it through the cross.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when you come to the cross today, when you look at Jesus Christ hanging on the cross and think of Good Friday and Easter, and when you take communion this morning, the bread and the cup, that's Jesus Christ, and that's how you become more righteous than the scribes and the Pharisees.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that verse first makes you feel uncomfortable because you think it's too hard to do.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: But now that you're told that you fulfill it by trusting in Jesus and by grace, it turns around and makes so many people feel uncomfortable in a different way.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because they say, well, then it doesn't matter how I live, it doesn't make any difference whether I'm good or bad.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: I can be a Pharisee or a tax collector.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, it was uh uh what happened with Megan Phelps Roberts, very interesting.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Once she got in her young twenties, she saw that uh Westboro Baptist Church was technically challenged, and she said, you know, to get our message out, why don't I start a whole Twitter thing, Westboro Baptist Church Twitter, and be in charge of it?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: And they were happy to do that, and so she started it immediately.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: She was getting hundreds of tweets every single day.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at first she responded the way Westboro always does, damning everybody and calling them names and so forth.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: But she said, I found out very quickly I couldn't, I couldn't say as much horrible stuff as I wanted to, with only 140 characters limited.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And also I found that then they would never write back.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So she says I started trying to dialogue with them theologically.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, uh she found there were a lot of nice people out there who, even though they thought Westboro Baptist Church was hateful, they talked to her as though she was a normal person and they were compassionate.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as she listened to them, she began to hear things that showed her the inconsistency in the legalism and judgmentalism and the law observance of her church.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, one of the first was that an Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem tweeted this Didn't your mom have your oldest brother out of wedlock?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's another sin that deserves the death penalty, isn't it?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And she had never thought about that, of course, but he was exactly right, and she thought, how come we're so inconsistent about that?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when she asked about that, she was told to be quiet.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: And those inconsistencies and the compassion of outsiders is what finally caused her to leave the church.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the point here is that if you try to keep the law and try to keep it consistently, you will fail and you will find that the law, as Paul said, kills.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make you alive, it doesn't get you to heaven, it doesn't earn you eternal life.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: No, what you need is the person who fulfills the law in himself.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: For God made him to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, 21.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I received my sin, I received his righteousness.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And at that moment I became more righteous than the Pharisees and the scribes.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: What did God demand at Mount Sinai?
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect obedience to the law.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: At Mount Calvary, what God provided was grace.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it is that grace that you share with people that makes them feel uncomfortable.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: They say, This means I can live any way that I want to.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: That can't be right.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: It must still be my good works that get me to heaven.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, no, Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: No man comes to the Father except through me.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we've worked our way through three verses.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And another book I'm just finishing this week, uh, uh uh very similar in some ways to the others, by a woman named Lynn Wilder.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lynn Wilder and her family converted to Mormonism in Indiana, and of normal, well-educated, excellent family.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um and then she was uh expert in special education in Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, was trying to get accredited and they needed more women as faculty, and so they recruited her to come to the Lord's University in Utah.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent faculty, smart students, funded and run by the Mormon Church.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Lynn and her husband and their four children, three boys and a girl, were involved in Utah every day, deeply in the Mormon church.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: She received honors as a professor, she got tenure.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: All three of her sons did two-year missions trips.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And here's a picture of uh Lynn and her husband and her youngest son.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the story of this book.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: The subtitle of Unveiling Grace is the true story of how we found our way out of the Mormon Church, and it turns out to be a perfect illustration of this morning's verses.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: She writes, Since I was keeping the rules and regs and progressing at BYU, I thought life couldn't be better.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly weren't on the lookout for grace then.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: We were finding our way to the celestial kingdom by ourselves, and we were doing just fine.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: In reality, we were headed in the wrong direction.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: That would be the broad gate and the broad road.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Her youngest son joined the older two in missions.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: He uh his health caused him to have to stay in the States.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: His older two brothers went overseas.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was in Florida.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: For most of his missions, she writes, Micah had read the New Testament, and there he'd found a completely different gospel than the gospel of Mormonism.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: He came to know a completely different Jesus than the Jesus of Mormonism.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then later, she writes, close to the end of his two years as a missionary, because of kindness shown to him by a fellow he's living with, he'd done the unthinkable.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: He'd gone apostate.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, by that time, Lynn and her husband had seen cracks in the facade of their chosen church.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: They'd seen, like Megan Phelps Roper, internal inconsistencies.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: They'd seen a legalism and a judgmentalism that were imposed very differently upon very different people.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: When their oldest son had committed adultery and came immediately to confess, he was excommunicated, put out of the church, told he was going to hell, that in a year or two he could apply again for baptism.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: But his buddy, who was in another church ward, who committed, they were, they were out getting drunk and and and uh messing around one week, and his brother his buddy who'd done exactly the same thing was given a slap on the wrist.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: And internal inconsistency and judgmentalism and racism and polygamy and things like that.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: So already, let's be honest, Lynn and her husband had seen things that had shaken their faith in their church.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: But then their youngest son Micah said, you know what?
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's about Jesus, not the Mormon Jesus, but the New Testament Jesus.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Lynn continues, my whole life I thought I had to work for salvation.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Tithe to the church, be faithful and active in the one true church, Latter-day Saints, get married in the temple, receive special saving ordinances, obey the leaders of the church, but I was beginning to realize that because of Christ, we no longer need to work for our salvation because Christ has secured that for us by his blood.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Salvation is so much simpler yet so much deeper than I ever believed.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was beginning to understand that I was saved through grace, period.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: What I was beginning to believe was it's not about what I do, my good works, but about what Jesus did for me on the cross.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about who I am, it's about who God is.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: I made my decision.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: My contented sacred Mormon cow had to be slaughtered.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was finally ready.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Gathering speed toward the point of no return, I lay face down on the carpet, arms extended, and cried out to God as Martin Luther had, I am yours, save me.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Instantly I was sucked over the event horizon, using uh words from her uh her social work uh background.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a story, uh this is a story of what is the most important discomfort of all in Christianity, and that is how do I get to heaven?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: Is it by works?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's uncomfortable because I can never be good enough.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is it by grace, as the New Testament teaches?
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uncomfortable because wow, then what about how good a person I am?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm better than all those other people.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: You mean I don't get credit for that?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the first message.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you come to the end of yourself and realize that you are that you are completely unworthy, when you say it's unbounded grace, when I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you take the Lord's table this morning, recognize that what you are taking is the gateway, the doorway into salvation.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: So grab hold right now, if you would.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you brought your uh if you brought your uh um bread and cup in here.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grab hold of these and let's bow our heads in prayer and thank the Lord for grace.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and friend, as you bow your head, if you're if you've been uh longing to be accepted by God on the basis of what you do, on the basis of obedience, would you drop that this morning?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Would you see yourself maybe not as bad as the tax collector, but would you see yourself as as needy as the tax collector and desperately needing the atonement and the mercy of God?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: For that's how you get accepted by Him.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ and for the fact that he fulfills the law, and as a result, we do not need to observe the law perfectly.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: We place ourselves this morning as we take the bread and drink the cup at the foot of the cross.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: We look at our Savior Jesus Christ.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: We think grace, we don't think works.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: We trust in Him.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus' name we pray.