Lance Sawyer First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma Sermon Transcription June 10, 2012 The Slow Judgment of God Romans 2:2-10 I ve been thinking a little bit this week about some of my earliest memories because I just had a birthday myself -- just turned 42 years old, and I m getting where I can remember things that some people cannot remember. I m going to actually tell you about a person today that people under 40 may not even have heard about, and that is so sad, because if you don t know Evel Knievel, if you had the misfortune of growing up not knowing about Evel Knievel, your life has been a bore. It really has. The two most exciting things I ever remember hearing about when I was a little bitty kid were that Jesus Christ was coming again, and Evel Knievel was going to jump the Grand Canyon. In my mind, both of those were extremely important. I was very excited about both, and I was very disappointed when Evel Knievel did not get to jump the Grand Canyon because the Grand Canyon National Park would not permit it. He appealed to the Congress of the United States trying to get permission to jump the Grand Canyon. They denied him and he had to settle for the Snake River Canyon. But let me tell you a little something about Evel Knievel, and by the way, teenagers go on YouTube this afternoon, watch some of Evel Knievel s jumps. The jump over the fountain at Caesar s Palace I would recommend, as well as the Snake River Canyon. Let me tell you how Evel Knievel got started. His first job as a young man was working for the Anaconda Mining Company. He drove an earth mover, but he got fired from that job. It was most unfair. He got fired by a boss who obviously didn t appreciate who he had working for him, because he was popping wheelies with his earth mover and he ran into a power line that was a source for the whole town of Butte, Montana. Got fired from the first job, and he decided he needed to be working for himself. So Evel Knievel became a hunting guide and he developed this company called Sure-Kill, and he guaranteed that if you went hunting with him you were going to at least get a shot. If you missed, it was going to be your fault. Very successful as a hunting guide until the game wardens found out he was taking people into Yellowstone National Park for these sure-kills. He had to get out of the hunting-guide business. He tried motocross for a while. Actually didn t do very well in
motocross, and he knew that he needed to maximize his God-given talents which were not so much motorcycle riding. It was more his ability to sell himself and get people excited. So on one visit to Las Vegas, he saw the fountains at Caesar s Palace, and Evel Knievel s motor starting revving up in his mind just thinking about it and he decided he wanted to do a high-profile jump over the fountains at Caesar s Palace casino in Las Vegas. But how was he going to get permission to do that? He decided to go at it this way. The first thing he did was start a company. Actually it wasn t a real company, but he called it Evel Knievel s Enterprises. Then he got three of his friends to pretend to be lawyers and call the CEO of the Caesar s Palace casino representing Evel Knievel Enterprises. The next thing Evel Knievel did was call that CEO himself pretending to be from ABC s Wide World of Sports and he said, We ve heard about this Evel Knievel dude and we ve heard he s going to jump the fountains, and we want to be there. We want to film. We want to promote this thing. It turned out they let Evel Knievel jump the fountains at Caesar s Palace. He landed wrong. He was in a coma for 29 days, but when he came out of the coma he was a famous man. He was the most famous daredevil in the world. The next thing he did was try to jump the Grand Canyon. They wouldn t let him. So he went over the Snake River Canyon in a rocket ship. Not really a rocket ship, but a rocket that basically shot out of a cannon and went over the place, and it was just one thing after another. He made a whole lot of money. Later in his life Evel Knievel said, I made 60 million dollars and I spent 62 million dollars. He had a really awesome first half of life. The second half of life was not quite so good because all those bumps and bruises and concussions and comas, that has a way of catching up with a man, especially when you get to be 42 years old. It does! So Evel Knievel spent the second half of his life hooked up to oxygen because he had been smoking and drinking heavy for years. He had a liver transplant, oxygen tubes. He had an IV that constantly shot synthetic heroin into his spine because his back had been broken seven times. By the time he was 40 years old, he had broken over 40 bones. His life was basically a misery. It was a miserable existence during the last days of his life, and I guess what it goes to show is if you re going to be a daredevil and you re going to make 60 million dollars, you re going to pay for it eventually. Being a daredevil has its price, but living for the devil has a price too, but living for the devil over a period of time is sort of like being a daredevil, Evel Knievelstyle, in that you can do really well for a long time, but eventually it starts catching up with you. Eventually you begin finding yourself with problems that won t go away. You re a broken person. 2
That s what the Bible warns us about in so many different ways and in so many different places. Romans 2 is all about that, and here s what Romans 2 tells us. There s going to be judgment for everything we do that s wrong, but the judgment of God is slow in coming. There are times -- I would say there are a few times -- just a few -- where I can do something wrong and get punished for it right away. But the vast majority of times the consequences don t come until much later, and by the time the consequences come, it s way too late to go back and undo what I ve already done. The fact that God s judgment is usually delayed -- that it s slow in coming -- that causes a lot of people to get the idea that they re getting by with things that they re really not getting by with, and that s what this verse is about. It points out the fact that, that God s judgment is very slow in coming and it tells us the reason that God postpones the punishment for our sins. This is Romans 2:4, Don t you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant and patient God is with you? Does this mean nothing to you? Can t you see that His kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? Do you hear that? He s saying that the reason God gives us so much time is that He s giving us time to recognize what we re doing before it s too late. God will put off His judgment in a person s life for as long as possible so that you and I have as many opportunities to turn around as possible, because do you know what the Scripture says? God does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked. God doesn t enjoy punishing people. He hates to have to do it. His nature is love, and it goes against His nature to have to punish people He loves, and yet there are consequences. There s a price to be paid, but I describe it this way. Sin is more of a buy now, pay later deal. Have you seen those car lots up and down the road, even here in Muskogee, and it s buy here, pay here? You buy now, but you pay later. Don t go to those places because you re not only going to pay for it later, you re going to pay dearly with high interest rates, and that s the way sin works. That s the way the consequences of a sinful lifestyle eventually begin pouring down on us in a pitiful sad way, a way that must make God mad, sad. When we think of God s judgment, we often think of an angry God. He s just so mad He can t wait until He s finally given you enough chances so He can lower the boom! It s not so much that. The judgment of God doesn t make Him happy. It s not something He enjoys. It makes Him sad. In fact, the judgment of God is sort of like the way Paul described his feelings towards people in II Corinthians 12:15. I want to read that verse to you. I think it ll be on the screen too. I will gladly spend myself and all that I have for you even though it seems that the more I love you, the less you love me. You see, that s God s attitude. I ll gladly spend all I have to give you more and more opportunities even though 3
it seems the more I love you, the less you seem to love Me. That s something that some parents can relate to. If you ve ever had a child that rebelled against you and the more you try to reach out to them, the more they close you off. I came across a storybook recently that is a great picture of that. It s called The Giving Tree. Has anyone ever heard of The Giving Tree? Ever read The Giving Tree? Let me get a couple of kids to come up here. I want to share this story with you [speaking directly to a few children who had come forward]. Remember how a couple of weeks ago I said that any image that we create of what God is like is going to be insufficient, and so I want to say up front that this image I m going to give you of God is not complete. It doesn t tell you everything. Let s just have a seat. Let s just relax and enjoy this story about The Giving Tree. The rest of y all [speaking to the congregation], y all just listen in. Any other kids that want to come, are welcome to come too. I m not going to read this to you, but I remind you some of the most interesting things in the world are overheard -- overhearing a phone conversation in another room. Overhear this, and as you listen to this, think about what we ve said so far about the slow judgment of God, how He gives us everything He possibly can and we take it and we take it and we take it. Listen to these words. Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy. The tree loved the little boy, and every day the little boy would come and he would gather her leaves. He d gather her leaves and he would make them into crowns, and he would play king of the forest -- happy little boy -- happy tree. Great relationship. The little boy would climb up the trunk of that tree and he would swing from her branches, and he would eat her apples. He d climb up into the leaves and eat apples, throwing the cores down. Then the boy and the tree would play hide-and-goseek, and when he was tired, the little boy would sleep in the shade of that tree. You see, the tree and the boy, they had this great relationship. Boy, it was beautiful. The boy loved the tree and the tree was happy. But time went by. Think back to your relationship with God, the kind of connection you had with God when you were little. Time has a way of going by and things have a way of changing as it does. The boy grew older and the tree was often alone, and one day the boy came to the tree. He was a teenager by now. The tree said, Come boy! Climb up my trunk and swing from my branches. Eat my apples and play in my shade and be happy. Do you know what the boy said? He said, I m too big to climb and play. Too big for that. I m beyond that. I want to buy things. That s what I want. I want to buy a car. I want a four-wheeler. I want a new X-Box. I want to buy things and have fun. Can you give me some money? And the tree said, Well, money doesn t grow on trees. I don t have any money. All I ve got is leaves and apples, but I ll tell you what, boy, I ll tell you what. You can have my apples. Take my apples. Take every one of them, pick them, take them into the city and sell them. Then 4
you ll have money and then you ll be happy. And the boy said, Yeah, yeah, that s what I need. I ll take those apples. I ll get what I want, then I ll be happy. So he climbed up in the tree, pulled all the apples left, not a single one left, went away and sold them, and he stayed away a long, long time. Long, long time, no sign of the little boy, and the tree was sad wondering, Where s my boy? Where s my boy? Where s my boy? Finally the boy came back. By now he was a man, and the tree said, Oh, I m so glad to see you. Come climb up my trunk, swing from my branches like you used to do. Be happy! The boy said what most people in their 20s and 30s would say. I m too busy to climb trees like I used to do. What I need now is a new house. I need a house to keep me warm. I want a wife and children. Can you give me a house? But the tree said, I m sorry. I don t have a house. The forest is my house. But I ll tell you what you can do. Boy, you can cut my branches off and you can use those to build you a house. Then maybe you ll be happy. So the boy did. He cut all the limbs off the tree to where there was nothing left but a trunk, and he built his house and he stayed away a long, long, long time. When he came back, he was an old man. The tree was still happy to see him. The tree was so happy she could hardly speak, and she whispered, Come and play, boy! Come and play like you used to do. The boy said, I m too old and sad to play. Life is not fun. What I need is a boat that ll take me far away from here. Can you get me a boat? The tree said, Well, I don t have a boat, but here s what you can do. You can cut down my trunk and make a boat from my trunk. So the boy did. He cut down his old friend, the tree, made a boat and sailed away, and the tree was happy, but not really, because the tree was nothing but a stump now. The boy never came back. Then finally, after a long, long, long time the boy came back again and the first thing the tree said was, I m sorry, boy, but I ve got nothing else to give you. I ve already given you everything I had. I can t give you apples. I can t give you my branches. You can t swing in them anymore. You can t climb my trunk. But the boy said, Well, my teeth are too weak for apples now. I can t eat them anymore. And I m too old to swing on the branches. I m too old to climb a tree, and the tree said, I wish I could give you something. The boy said as a very, very old man close to death, he said, I don t need very much now. By the way, have you noticed when people come to the very end of life how little they need? So many of the things they thought they needed early, they don t need anymore. The old man who had been a boy said, I don t need much anymore. I m just so tired. I m tired of living, and the tree said, Well, I do have a stump left. Come boy, sit on my stump. Sit down and rest. So the boy did, and the tree was happy. 5
But the story makes me sad. It makes me sad because I realize that story about the tree and the boy is a lot like the story of the relationship that God has with us. There are a lot of us in this building today who used to be like these little children. See how quickly they came up to join me for the story. These little kids are open, excited about God. They love Him! And we hope and we pray that they re going to continue that relationship for life, but a whole lot of people don t. A whole lot of people get too concerned about the things they re going to buy with money, the house they ve got to build, the wife and the kids they ve got to get. There s a lot of people who forget the God that was there in the beginning until we get to the very end and all we ve got left is a stump. Little children, right now you have an opportunity to know God. You get to know Him now and you keep that relationship with God going from now all the way through your adulthood, all the way into old age and all the way out into forever, because if you don t, you ll wind up like some people I ve seen. I ve seen so many people who are old and miserable -- old and empty, and all the opportunities that they had earlier in life have been cut down and hauled away and wasted in their stunts, in order to do the things they thought would make them happy. Do you know what? Satan has no happy old people. Satan has no happy old people. Thank you, kids. You can go back to your seat. Satan s got no happy old people because in the end, when our health is gone and our spouse has died and our kids are far from us, the only thing we ve got left is our relationship with God, and if you don t have that, if you ve not been building that your whole life, oh, what poverty. It s so sad how many people come to the end of life and they ve got nothing to look forward to, no hope beyond the grave. They just sit on a stump until they die, waiting to die. Oh, God doesn t want that to happen, and yet sometimes God has to do what the tree did. We insist, God I ve got to do this. I ve got to have that, and the things of God that used to be so important aren t important anymore and we go out after other things. Do you know what God does, the Bible says? He lets us have our way. He turns us loose. The Bible calls it abandoning us. It s not when God abandons a person, it s not that He cuts you off. It s just that you ve got all this stuff you re after, He lets you go. A whole lot of people never come back. Listen to how the Scripture describes the lifestyle of a whole lot of folks. Romans 2:5, Because you re stubborn and refuse to turn from your sin, you re storing up punishment, you re storing up punishment for yourself. That means you re doing things now that are setting you up for trouble later on. A day of anger is coming when God s righteous judgment will be revealed. He ll judge everyone according to what they have done. He ll give eternal life to those who 6
keep on doing good seeking after the glory and honor and immortality that God offers, but He ll pour out His anger and wrath on those who live for themselves. Do you hear that? Who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness. We re talking here about people who do what the little boy did with the tree. He left that tree out of his life. People leave God out of their lives, and God made you and He made me in such a way that He made us to have Him as part of our lives, and when God s not there, there s this big empty place inside that we fill with all sorts of other things and we become people that God never intended us to be. We get involved in things that God never intended us to get involved with, things that destroy us. Now if you want an example of what I m talking about, what are some of the things that we get involved with that God never intended? Read Romans 1. That s a whole different sermon I m not even going to go into, but I m going to highlight some of them. When we leave God, we open ourselves up to things He never intended, and here are some of the examples you ll read in Romans 1. Straight people get caught up in a homosexual lifestyle. Honest people with good hearts get involved in a crooked, deceitful lifestyle doing whatever is necessary to get what they want. Loving people who once loved God and they loved their families, they loved their husband or their wife, they become hard and they fall out of love and they get to where they don t care about the people that God put in their lives. Soft-hearted people become very unforgiving people, hard-hearted. People who had a wonderful future in store with God forsake Him and then go the wrong way, and they crash and they hurt themselves, and they hurt other people, but again I want to say this. The judgment for sin is slow in coming, and where some of us are right now are basically where Evel Knievel was just before he jumped Caesar s Palace fountains. You re excited about what you re doing, you re getting a lot of attention, you re making money, people think you re cool, but there s a crash coming. There s a crash coming! Don t wait until after the crash. Do you know that the vast majority of people who ever come and talk to me about their spiritual life come after the crash? And it s better to come after the crash than not to come at all, but every now and then I think how much better would it be if people understood what was happening and they came saying, I want to get my life right with God before the crash, before I ruin my marriage permanently, before I lose my kids, before I ruin my health because of the things I m doing, before my heart gets so hard that I can t even hear God speaking anymore. I don t know where you are in all of this but I want to say first of all, those of you that are just starting to jump into sin and maybe had a crash or two but 7
you re still going. Come to God -- come back to Him before you create all this judgment for yourself. But I know there are others here who ve already done it. I mean you ve already blown it. You ve already created a whole lot of problems for yourself that really weren t necessary. I want you to know that, even for you there s still hope. Evel Knievel found hope at the end of his life. He placed his faith in Christ. He was baptized by Robert Schuller at the Crystal Cathedral, and most likely Evel Knievel died with his relationship with God intact, but everything else about his life was broken. I m saying, don t wait until it s all broken. Come to God now, while you can still hear His voice, while your heart is still tender, while your heart is still like that of a little child. I read something a while back that I ve been looking forward to telling you about. True story about a little boy named David. David was four years old. He went to the pediatrician and the pediatric nurse had this custom. She always put the stethoscope in the ears of the little children and she would let them listen to their heartbeat, and it was the coolest thing to watch a kid hear his heart beat for the very first time. But when little David came in and he heard his heartbeat, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, this weird look came on his face, astonished look, and amazed look, processing, What is this? What is this? And then a smile big as Texas came over his face and he said to the nurse, Is that Jesus knocking? Do you know that every time God gives you another heartbeat, in a sense, Jesus is knocking? He s knocking and He wants to come in right now. He doesn t want you to wait until you ve already produced a lot of unnecessary judgment. He wants to come in right now. But also right now I m sure that you re thinking of all sorts of reasons why you don t need to come to Him right now, why you don t need to open your heart to Him right now. You re thinking of all the things you re going to give up if you do. Jesus is thinking of all the misery He s going to spare you from if you open up to Him now, and I invite you to open up -- I invite you to come and talk. 8