Annual Sermons: Vol. 4 Sermon 7 Bob Marcaurelle Matt. 11:20-24

Transcription

1 Annual Sermons: Vol. 4 Sermon 7 Bob Marcaurelle Matt. 11:20-24 SODOM HAD NO BIBLES Have you ever thought about the fact that being in church today might be held against you at the Judgment? That reading your Bible might be a vice in the eyes of God rather than a virtue? If you come to church and read your Bible and do not change your ways and serve the Christ you hear about and read about, you will be in far more trouble with God than people in pagan lands who never saw a church, had a Bible or heard the name of Christ. This is the truth of our text. Look first at... I. THE REJECTION JESUS SAW (11:20, 23) Jesus was rejected not only by the proud Pharisees but by the people at large. In the midst of His popularity in Galilee He pointed to three cities where He worked His mighty miracles - Capernaum (His chosen headquarters) and Bethsaida and Chorazin (location unknown). These three towns were blessed by the Lord. Capernaum was where Jesus settled after being run out of Nazareth. Bethsaida was the hometown of Peter, Andrew and Philip. Chorazin, like the other two, was the site of Jesus many mighty works and words. The life of Jesus had been lived out before their eyes. They watched Him as He walked their streets, healed the sick, cleansed the lepers, called the sinful, gave sight to the blind and even raised the dead. They knew every feature of that holy face and every tone of that blessed voice. But these blessed towns were also blasted by our Lord. His presence had made no difference in the way they lived. He healed their bodies but not their minds and spirits. They accepted His gifts but not His demands. His sermons bounced off them like Pebbles off a Sherman tank. And because of this Jesus pronounced the awful curse of their impending doom. They would all three be in serious trouble at the Judgment Day

2 and they would all three be torn down as a picture in history of what was waiting for them in eternity. Today these three ancient cities are gone. Capernaum, one of the major towns in Galilee, with a perfect location by the lake, is a pile of ruins. Chorazin and Bethsaida were so devastated that today we do not even know where they were. God said it and it happened. What He prophesied in time took place. And what He prophesied about eternity will take place. The people of those cities who heard the gospel but who did not heed the gospel will be judged more severely than the pagans of Sodom. But we miss the point altogether if we see Jesus waving His arms in anger and causing these cities to fall. The cause of Jesus reproach was not anger but sorrow, as when He later wept over unrepentant Jerusalem. The Prince of peace wanted to say, Peace be unto thee! but He could not say Peace when there was no peace. He knew then, as now, when we do not turn our lives over to Him we turn them over to Satan. And Satan will bring us hell on earth and hell in eternity. This was the rejection He saw. Then we have... II. THE REBUKE JESUS GAVE (11:24) This rejection led to the rebuke by Jesus. The Jews believed the worst sinners in the Old Testament were the men and women of Sodom. Close behind, for the people of northern Galilee, were the pagan Baal worshippers of nearby Tyre and Sidon. Oh, no! Said Jesus. The worst sinners are nice, respectable, religious people like you, who live in the light of God s love but do not accept it, who know God s laws but do not obey them. We look at people living in the sewers of drunkenness, cruelty and sexual vice and put them down on the bottom. Jesus doesn t. At the Judgment Day, He says, many of them will be better off than many of us who are in church every Sunday. How can this be? Because God judges us by the amount of light we have received. God said through Amos to Israel, You

3 only have I known of all the families of the earth, THEREFORE I will punish you for all your iniquities (Amos 3:2). Jesus said, That servant who knows his master s will and...does not do it will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded... (Lk. 12:47-48). This frightens me because we, in this country, in this Bible belt and in this evangelical church, have been blessed above all people. So many people are born half damned. They live in the awful darkness of paganism with its ignorance, superstition,, injustice and cruelty. They are like Tyre and Sidon. Others live, even here in America, in sewers of sin. They never know real love. They feel their father s fists but not his arms. They see their mother s lovers come and go. They never hear God s name except in a curse. All they hear of Christ or Christians or churches are insults. I thank God that when they stand before Him all these things will be taken into account by a wise and merciful God who will do what is right. Jesus rebuke is also mysterious in that it gives a little insight into the complex standards by which mankind is to be judged. God s principle of judgment is, To whom much is given, much is expected. To whom little is given, little is expected. The simple truth is that an omniscient God knows what every person living in the darkness of heathenism would have done, had he lived in Christian America. He said, If the miracles done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented (Mt. 11:21). Does this hold out any hope for them to be saved apart from hearing the gospel? No one knows. It is a philosophical question and God does not answer our philosophical curiosity. He confronts us with His demands upon us. When a man asked Him if many or few would be saved He said, Enter in through

4 the narrow gate (Lk. 13:24). When Peter asked Him about John s future, Jesus said, What is that to you? You follow me! (Jn. 21:22). In other words, you take care of you and leave all these mysteries to Me. God s answer to our philosophical inquiries is Deuteronomy 29:29, The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this Law. But the frightening thing is that we, who live now in Anderson, will also be at the Judgment Day. And the worst sinners in God s sight will not be the foul people of Sodom or the cruel pagans of Assyria, or even the indifferent populations of these three cities. It will be those of us, here in Anderson, here in this church, here this morning, who live in the Bible Belt but remain indifferent to the claims of Christ upon our lives. The worst sin according to the Bible, the parent of all sins, is unbelief or the refusal to turn from sin and let Jesus forgive and rule us. Any hopes that might be held out to those in the darkness of paganism offers no hope to us. We who have the example of Christian parents, the influence of Christian churches, the instruction of Christian communications, and the prayers of Christian friends have no excuse for our refusal to repent, except the fact that we love sin too much to give it up. We love running our lives too much to let Jesus run them. We love doing our thing too much to practice doing the things of God. And every tear of Christian parents, every ounce of Christian influence, every word of Christian instruction and every prayer of Christian friends will be held against us at the Judgment. III. THE RESPONSE WE OFFER What is our response to all this? What do we do about the love of Jesus seen at the cross and the warnings of Jesus seen in words like this. I m afraid it is the same as the cites of Galilee. We are not moved by His love or frightened by His warnings. We are indifferent to both. Notice that not a word is said about

5 hostility or persecution or attack. The reaction of people to Jesus, then and now, is not active hostility, but bland, passive, do-nothing apathy and indifference. 1. Indifference In the World. No matter what the Gallup Poll says, we live in a nation of godless people who are indifferent to the claims of God. Over 90 percent claim to believe in God and even percent claim to be born again. But a whopping 60 percent of these do not see the need of organized religion. Now I know that many churches, with their squabbles and boring services, are partly to blame, but the real problem is that these people who are not faithful to any church worship a god of their own making, and not the God of the Bible who makes demands upon His people. 2. Indifference In the Church. Not wanting to waste my time on absentee sinners, I remind you that there is much indifference to Jesus in the classrooms and sanctuaries of our churches. And the hardest judgments will fall not upon those who pass by our churches on the way to the lake every Sunday, but those who worship in them but don t change their lives and live for God. I think of three types guilty of this: 1) Religion Is a Dull Habit. For many of you, church attendance is a dull habit you acquired somewhere along the line, that you don t quite know how to give up. Like civic functions and trips to your relatives, you keep it up, but your heart is not in it. Roy Clark sang about a man who went home from work every day expressing what many feel who come to church, Right or left at Oak Street It s a choice I make every day And I don t know which takes the most courage The staying or the running away. 2) Religion Is An Exciting Interlude. I fear too that church attendance for many others may be an exciting interlude. It is a form of enjoyment to be with the men and women of your

6 Sunday School class and a form of entertainment to gather for worship. It is exciting for you to come in contact now and then with a good, wholesome, rousing Christian appeal. It is not that you intend to change your mind or your heart or your lifestyle, but that it is pleasant to see an earnest man preaching from the depths of his soul. We are like Sunday afternoon quarterbacks who get excited about and engrossed in football games but we never really get in the game ourselves. 3) Religion Is a Spare Tire. Many in our churches have a spare tire interest in God. This is a peacetime version of foxhole religion. They turn to God when things go wrong. The business is going bad, the child is sick, the marriage is breaking apart and you can t keep these people away from the church. They show upon Wednesday night. They talk about reading their Bibles, saying their prayers and turning things over to God. What happens when their problems pass and God gets them back on their feet? The same thing that happens after we fix a flat. We put the spare tire back in the trunk and do not give it another genuine thought until we blow another tire. That s where God is in many of your lives. He is stuck off in a corner where you can forget Him until the next time you get in trouble. All three of these worship experiences lead to the deadly sin of becoming Gospel hardened. The most religious area in the whole world, from the standpoint of Evangelical Christianity, is the Southern United States, the Bible Belt. The gospel bombards you like the sunshine. There are churches, Bible, bookstores, television and radio programs, tent meetings, and newspaper articles all around us, preaching Jesus day and night. And herein lies our danger. Ray Charles, when he was a little boy in Alabama, gazed at the sun and became totally blind. A person living next to a noisy highway gets to where he does not hear the noise of the trucks as they pass. When I was a forester, my first apartment was about 50 feet from a railroad track. At

7 5:10 that first morning, a southbound freight came through at 60 miles per hour and blew its whistle as it crossed the road. I came out of bed thinking the end of the world had come. Everything in my room was shaking, mostly me. I lived there for three years and I got to where that train could race by, blow its whistle and shake my room, and I never knew it. It is the same with God s call to salvation. Many of you have done exactly that with the gospel. You have gazed at its light so long that you are now blind to it. You have heard it so long that you don t hear it. Your routine worship and carnal enjoyment of church and spare tire God have infected you with a mild dose of Christianity but the mild dose has made you immune to the real thing. Why are you here? Is it a dull habit, an exciting interlude, or a problem you can t handle right now? If that s all there is to it then Jesus says, It will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the prostitute and pimps on Bourbon Street than for you.