YOU ARE NOT A CHRISTIAN UNTIL YOU REPENT, CRY, AND HATE YOUR SINS!
MOREOVER, ONCE YOU BECOME A CHRISTIAN, THE REASON WHY YOU LIVE EVERY DAY IS NOT FOR YOU, YOURSELF, YOUR PLEASURES, YOUR HEALTH, YOUR WEALTH, YOUR PROSPERITY, OR YOUR BENEFIT, BUT FOR THE HONOR OF THE LORD, OBEDIENCE TO GOD'S LAWS, PROCLAMATION OF THE WORD, SANCTIFICATION, HOLINESS, FELLOWSHIP, WORSHIP, PRAYER, AND FRUITS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Unleashing God's Truth One Verse at a Time
The Gospel: Self-Love or Self-Hate?
Here then are conditions established for the most important message ever given on this planet and that is the message of following Jesus. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? What does it mean to come after Him? What does it mean to become a Christian? What does it mean to be saved? That's at the heart of the message. And what Jesus says here directly speaks to that issue. So you want to follow Christ, do you? You want to come after Christ? You want to be His disciple? You want to be a "little Christ" which is what Christian means? You want to follow Him into His Kingdom, the Kingdom of God. You want His forgiveness, the forgiveness that He gives. You want the eternal life that He promises.
Well if you want that, He says, "You must deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow Me." This statement by Jesus is repeated a number of times in the New Testament gospel record. I'm sure He stated this many, many times, hundreds of times in His preaching ministry because this is at the heart of the issue of discipleship and salvation.
Now we've already looked at the three elements: denying yourself, taking up your cross and following. But I want to go back and visit them not in part but as a whole and try to give you maybe a summary understanding of what He is really saying here. And it's important to do this because what Jesus is saying is fundamentally opposite what preachers are preaching today. In fact, the fundamental call to salvation, the words of our Lord are utterly opposite how people think in our culture. We live in a culture of self-love, to put it simply, a culture that is consumed with self-love, ego-building, self-esteem, feeling good about yourself, thinking you're important, thinking you're valuable, thinking you're a hero, thinking you've achieved something, thinking you're worthy of honor. We're drowning in awards for everything imaginable and unimaginable.
Parents are consumed with boosting the egos of their children with every imaginable means, as well as boosting their own sense of self-value. This is the generation of self-lovers.
And just by way of reminder, in 2 Timothy chapter 3 the apostle Paul classified "love of self" as a sin. In fact, a dominating sin. In one of his familiar lists of iniquities, there are numbers of them in his letters, he begins the list of iniquities in 2 Timothy chapter 3 with "lovers of self," and then "lovers of money," and then goes through the rest of his list. This describes deceivers, unbelievers, those outside the Kingdom of God, those who do not know the truth. Self-love is at the top of the list in terms of normal human attitude. Sinners are consumed with pride. They're consumed with themselves. We have made that into THE prominent, dominant virtue in our society.
So here we are with the gospel, going to a generation of people who are not only proud but they've turned pride into the virtue of all virtues, who are in love with themselves and who seek to fulfill every whim and every desire and every ambition and every dream and every hope, who seek to be everything that they can be, who seek to set value on all that they are and all that they say and all that they do. And we confront that culture with the gospel and at the heart of the gospel is this opening, "So you want to follow Jesus, do you? You want to enter the Kingdom of God? You want your sins forgiven. You want eternal heaven. Then deny yourself and take up your cross and fully submit to Him." You can't even get to the submitting part unless you can get pass the cross part, and you can't get there if you can't get pass the part about denying yourself.
To give you a term that you likely won't forget, I'll borrow from Martin Luther. Martin Luther, as you know, launched the Protestant Reformation. He was a Roman Catholic priest who came to understand the truth of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from works and ceremonies and all the rest, and so he determined that he would confront the Roman Catholic system, the great monolithic system of error and deception, and he selected ninety-five different statements...ninety-five different protests. That's why we're called Protestants. Ninety-five different assertions that ran contrary to Catholicism, he wrote them down and he nailed them on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
The fourth of his protests, the fourth of his ninety-five assertions was that a penitent heart, a heart that comes to God and receives salvation is characterized by...here's his term, "Self-hate, self-hate." Quoting from Luther's fourth statement, "And so penance remains while self-hate remains." He said that self-hate was the true interior penitence. "This," said Luther, "is essential to the gospel." Whereas the Roman system, like every system of self-righteousness and earning salvation by ceremonies and good deeds is a wash in self-love, Luther confronted it and said, "Until the sinner comes to hate himself, he does not enter the Kingdom of God." So you have in the very birth of Protestantism, the very birth of the gospel, as it were, out from under its rock where it was hidden for a thousand years in Catholicism, at its very launch the gospel is defined as being founded upon the sinner's self-hatred. Hating oneself because one comes to see that there is in the flesh no good thing, that there is nothing of value, nothing of worth. That we are, as Jeremiah said, deceitful above all things, desperately wicked, every part of us is sick...as Isaiah put it...from the head to the toe. There's no good thing anywhere. There's nothing about us that has value. There's nothing about us that has worth. There's nothing about us that is deserving of honor or accolade. It is to come to the Beatitude-attitude again, of understanding spiritual poverty, of understanding bankruptcy, of understanding your utter nothingness, of looking at everything that's done in your life, whether it's religious or whether it's educational, or whether it's moral, or whatever it is, and like the apostle Paul saying, "It's all dung, it's all manure." This just does not sell in the cult of self-love.
But frankly it's absolutely absurd to suggest that a person could encounter holy God, the righteous God and enter into His Kingdom without wanting to be delivered from sin and without wanting to be delivered from understanding sin as sin really has to be understood, that is that it is pervasive and dominant. Those who meet God on God's terms, those who come to God and enter in to His Kingdom, invariably have an overwhelming sense of their own sinfulness. Job who was the best of men, according to the first chapter, in the 42nd chapter said this, "I had heard of God with my ears, but now I've seen Him." And he said this, "I hate myself." In the Hebrew, "I loathe myself. I despise myself, everything that I am. All that I am apart from God, all that I am in my humanness. Anything and everything about me is so stained and tainted with fallenness and corruption and sin, I hate everything about myself."
The apostle Paul in writing to Timothy said in 1 Timothy chapter 1 verse 15, "It is a trustworthy statement and worthy of all acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost of all." There was nothing about Paul that commended Paul to Paul. There was nothing about Paul, therefore, that commended him to anybody else. People today brag unabashedly about how great they are, how good they are, how many things they've achieved, how desirable they are, how accomplished they are, how valuable they are. It was Isaiah who said when he saw God, "Woe is me for I am ruined, I'm literally disintegrating before my very eyes. My whole self-image is disintegrating, it's going to pieces." Because in the presence of God he saw himself only as a wretched sinner, pronounced damnation on himself because he said he was a man of unclean lips. That's what we're talking about. That's what self-denial is. It's not saying, "I'm going to sell my house and give all my money necessarily to the poor." It's not saying, "I'm going to live in poverty and rags." It's not saying that, it is not saying, "I'm going to deny myself what is mine in terms of physical property or what is mine in terms of a job or whatever." It is saying, "I deny that there is in me anything of value...anything of worth, anything good, anything that ought to be awarded anything, anything that ought to be paraded as exemplary, anything that ought to be exalted." It is this overwhelming sense of drowning in your own utter sinfulness.
Peter again in the presence of God in Christ said, "Depart from me for I am a sinful man." When he was aware of the fact that Jesus was God cause He was controlling the fish that day in Luke 5, he had nothing but loathing for himself. He said, "Go away, You shouldn't even be around me. You shouldn't even be near me." Same attitude in Luke 18 of the publican who drops his head and won't look up to heaven because he doesn't even think he has a right to look up, lest God should look into the face of such a wretch, says, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." And he beats on his breast but he won't even look up. He doesn't even want to get into eye contact, as it were, with God. He's that unworthy.
When you become a Christian it isn't that all of a sudden you wake up to what you could offer God. And there are many other examples in the scriptures of those men and women who when they really saw God were literally crushed under the weight of their own nothingness, their own sinfulness. And frankly, this is absolutely alien to the culture that we live in, it's alien to the culture based on self-love and having every whimsical desire legitimized. Anything and everything you want you should have. You can be whatever you can be. You can...you can dream your dream and live your dream. The whole goal of life is for you to desire whatever you want to desire and see it all fulfilled insisting on rights, insisting on privileges, insisting on respect, insisting on reward and honor, and affirmation. The people who enter God's Kingdom don't insist on any of that. They feel themselves unworthy of any of it. People who enter into God's Kingdom are literally overwhelmed with hatred for what they are. I hate what I am, I hate what I am, I hate what I...what I am because all that I am is sin.
Now this produces repentance. This produces a turning, a longing to be delivered and rescued from what you are and to be made into what you are not but what you long to be, something that is good and that is worthwhile and does have value and is righteous and useful. It's back in the fifth chapter of Luke and verse 32, Jesus said, "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." I can't do anything for people who think they're already righteous. I can't do anything with people who are impressed with themselves, or impressed with their religion, impressed with their morality, impressed with their money, impressed with their education, their achievement. I can't do anything for those people. I didn't come for them. They don't hear My message.
In Luke chapter 13 and verse 3 Jesus tells us how important this repentance is. Verse 3, "I tell you, no, unless you repent you will all likewise perish," and He's talking about death and hell. Verse 5 He repeats it. "I tell you, no, unless you repent you will all likewise perish." Twice He tells us you're going to die and go to hell if you don't repent. And the only people who repent are people who are sinners, who are self-aware of their wretchedness. That's why the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin.
(PART 1)
MOREOVER, ONCE YOU BECOME A CHRISTIAN, THE REASON WHY YOU LIVE EVERY DAY IS NOT FOR YOU, YOURSELF, YOUR PLEASURES, YOUR HEALTH, YOUR WEALTH, YOUR PROSPERITY, OR YOUR BENEFIT, BUT FOR THE HONOR OF THE LORD, OBEDIENCE TO GOD'S LAWS, PROCLAMATION OF THE WORD, SANCTIFICATION, HOLINESS, FELLOWSHIP, WORSHIP, PRAYER, AND FRUITS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Unleashing God's Truth One Verse at a Time
The Gospel: Self-Love or Self-Hate?
The Gospel: Self-Love or Self-Hate?
Luke 9:23-25
We are in our study of the Luke gospel in the ninth chapter and we are looking at verses 23 to 27. This is really at the heart of Jesus' teaching so we've not tried to hurry through what is a rather simple and straightforward passage. And the temptation for me would be to stay here for months and months and months, unfolding everything that is either explicit or implicit in this passage, and I'm resisting that and trying to move along. But when you ask about what Jesus taught and what of His teaching was most central and significant, you find it right here because in verse 23 Jesus says, "If anyone wishes to come after Me..." And then at that point we could stop and say that's essential to His mission. He came to seek and to save that which was lost. He came to call people to Himself. And He says, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, here's what he must do..." Here then are conditions established for the most important message ever given on this planet and that is the message of following Jesus. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? What does it mean to come after Him? What does it mean to become a Christian? What does it mean to be saved? That's at the heart of the message. And what Jesus says here directly speaks to that issue. So you want to follow Christ, do you? You want to come after Christ? You want to be His disciple? You want to be a "little Christ" which is what Christian means? You want to follow Him into His Kingdom, the Kingdom of God. You want His forgiveness, the forgiveness that He gives. You want the eternal life that He promises.
Well if you want that, He says, "You must deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow Me." This statement by Jesus is repeated a number of times in the New Testament gospel record. I'm sure He stated this many, many times, hundreds of times in His preaching ministry because this is at the heart of the issue of discipleship and salvation.
Now we've already looked at the three elements: denying yourself, taking up your cross and following. But I want to go back and visit them not in part but as a whole and try to give you maybe a summary understanding of what He is really saying here. And it's important to do this because what Jesus is saying is fundamentally opposite what preachers are preaching today. In fact, the fundamental call to salvation, the words of our Lord are utterly opposite how people think in our culture. We live in a culture of self-love, to put it simply, a culture that is consumed with self-love, ego-building, self-esteem, feeling good about yourself, thinking you're important, thinking you're valuable, thinking you're a hero, thinking you've achieved something, thinking you're worthy of honor. We're drowning in awards for everything imaginable and unimaginable.
Parents are consumed with boosting the egos of their children with every imaginable means, as well as boosting their own sense of self-value. This is the generation of self-lovers.
And just by way of reminder, in 2 Timothy chapter 3 the apostle Paul classified "love of self" as a sin. In fact, a dominating sin. In one of his familiar lists of iniquities, there are numbers of them in his letters, he begins the list of iniquities in 2 Timothy chapter 3 with "lovers of self," and then "lovers of money," and then goes through the rest of his list. This describes deceivers, unbelievers, those outside the Kingdom of God, those who do not know the truth. Self-love is at the top of the list in terms of normal human attitude. Sinners are consumed with pride. They're consumed with themselves. We have made that into THE prominent, dominant virtue in our society.
So here we are with the gospel, going to a generation of people who are not only proud but they've turned pride into the virtue of all virtues, who are in love with themselves and who seek to fulfill every whim and every desire and every ambition and every dream and every hope, who seek to be everything that they can be, who seek to set value on all that they are and all that they say and all that they do. And we confront that culture with the gospel and at the heart of the gospel is this opening, "So you want to follow Jesus, do you? You want to enter the Kingdom of God? You want your sins forgiven. You want eternal heaven. Then deny yourself and take up your cross and fully submit to Him." You can't even get to the submitting part unless you can get pass the cross part, and you can't get there if you can't get pass the part about denying yourself.
To give you a term that you likely won't forget, I'll borrow from Martin Luther. Martin Luther, as you know, launched the Protestant Reformation. He was a Roman Catholic priest who came to understand the truth of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from works and ceremonies and all the rest, and so he determined that he would confront the Roman Catholic system, the great monolithic system of error and deception, and he selected ninety-five different statements...ninety-five different protests. That's why we're called Protestants. Ninety-five different assertions that ran contrary to Catholicism, he wrote them down and he nailed them on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
The fourth of his protests, the fourth of his ninety-five assertions was that a penitent heart, a heart that comes to God and receives salvation is characterized by...here's his term, "Self-hate, self-hate." Quoting from Luther's fourth statement, "And so penance remains while self-hate remains." He said that self-hate was the true interior penitence. "This," said Luther, "is essential to the gospel." Whereas the Roman system, like every system of self-righteousness and earning salvation by ceremonies and good deeds is a wash in self-love, Luther confronted it and said, "Until the sinner comes to hate himself, he does not enter the Kingdom of God." So you have in the very birth of Protestantism, the very birth of the gospel, as it were, out from under its rock where it was hidden for a thousand years in Catholicism, at its very launch the gospel is defined as being founded upon the sinner's self-hatred. Hating oneself because one comes to see that there is in the flesh no good thing, that there is nothing of value, nothing of worth. That we are, as Jeremiah said, deceitful above all things, desperately wicked, every part of us is sick...as Isaiah put it...from the head to the toe. There's no good thing anywhere. There's nothing about us that has value. There's nothing about us that has worth. There's nothing about us that is deserving of honor or accolade. It is to come to the Beatitude-attitude again, of understanding spiritual poverty, of understanding bankruptcy, of understanding your utter nothingness, of looking at everything that's done in your life, whether it's religious or whether it's educational, or whether it's moral, or whatever it is, and like the apostle Paul saying, "It's all dung, it's all manure." This just does not sell in the cult of self-love.
But frankly it's absolutely absurd to suggest that a person could encounter holy God, the righteous God and enter into His Kingdom without wanting to be delivered from sin and without wanting to be delivered from understanding sin as sin really has to be understood, that is that it is pervasive and dominant. Those who meet God on God's terms, those who come to God and enter in to His Kingdom, invariably have an overwhelming sense of their own sinfulness. Job who was the best of men, according to the first chapter, in the 42nd chapter said this, "I had heard of God with my ears, but now I've seen Him." And he said this, "I hate myself." In the Hebrew, "I loathe myself. I despise myself, everything that I am. All that I am apart from God, all that I am in my humanness. Anything and everything about me is so stained and tainted with fallenness and corruption and sin, I hate everything about myself."
The apostle Paul in writing to Timothy said in 1 Timothy chapter 1 verse 15, "It is a trustworthy statement and worthy of all acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost of all." There was nothing about Paul that commended Paul to Paul. There was nothing about Paul, therefore, that commended him to anybody else. People today brag unabashedly about how great they are, how good they are, how many things they've achieved, how desirable they are, how accomplished they are, how valuable they are. It was Isaiah who said when he saw God, "Woe is me for I am ruined, I'm literally disintegrating before my very eyes. My whole self-image is disintegrating, it's going to pieces." Because in the presence of God he saw himself only as a wretched sinner, pronounced damnation on himself because he said he was a man of unclean lips. That's what we're talking about. That's what self-denial is. It's not saying, "I'm going to sell my house and give all my money necessarily to the poor." It's not saying, "I'm going to live in poverty and rags." It's not saying that, it is not saying, "I'm going to deny myself what is mine in terms of physical property or what is mine in terms of a job or whatever." It is saying, "I deny that there is in me anything of value...anything of worth, anything good, anything that ought to be awarded anything, anything that ought to be paraded as exemplary, anything that ought to be exalted." It is this overwhelming sense of drowning in your own utter sinfulness.
Peter again in the presence of God in Christ said, "Depart from me for I am a sinful man." When he was aware of the fact that Jesus was God cause He was controlling the fish that day in Luke 5, he had nothing but loathing for himself. He said, "Go away, You shouldn't even be around me. You shouldn't even be near me." Same attitude in Luke 18 of the publican who drops his head and won't look up to heaven because he doesn't even think he has a right to look up, lest God should look into the face of such a wretch, says, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." And he beats on his breast but he won't even look up. He doesn't even want to get into eye contact, as it were, with God. He's that unworthy.
When you become a Christian it isn't that all of a sudden you wake up to what you could offer God. And there are many other examples in the scriptures of those men and women who when they really saw God were literally crushed under the weight of their own nothingness, their own sinfulness. And frankly, this is absolutely alien to the culture that we live in, it's alien to the culture based on self-love and having every whimsical desire legitimized. Anything and everything you want you should have. You can be whatever you can be. You can...you can dream your dream and live your dream. The whole goal of life is for you to desire whatever you want to desire and see it all fulfilled insisting on rights, insisting on privileges, insisting on respect, insisting on reward and honor, and affirmation. The people who enter God's Kingdom don't insist on any of that. They feel themselves unworthy of any of it. People who enter into God's Kingdom are literally overwhelmed with hatred for what they are. I hate what I am, I hate what I am, I hate what I...what I am because all that I am is sin.
Now this produces repentance. This produces a turning, a longing to be delivered and rescued from what you are and to be made into what you are not but what you long to be, something that is good and that is worthwhile and does have value and is righteous and useful. It's back in the fifth chapter of Luke and verse 32, Jesus said, "I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." I can't do anything for people who think they're already righteous. I can't do anything with people who are impressed with themselves, or impressed with their religion, impressed with their morality, impressed with their money, impressed with their education, their achievement. I can't do anything for those people. I didn't come for them. They don't hear My message.
In Luke chapter 13 and verse 3 Jesus tells us how important this repentance is. Verse 3, "I tell you, no, unless you repent you will all likewise perish," and He's talking about death and hell. Verse 5 He repeats it. "I tell you, no, unless you repent you will all likewise perish." Twice He tells us you're going to die and go to hell if you don't repent. And the only people who repent are people who are sinners, who are self-aware of their wretchedness. That's why the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin.
(PART 1)