Christ’s Full-time Followers [B]

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Part of our discussion had been over the phrase Indian giver and where it came from. Now, I know people who genuinely get upset when the phrase Indian giver is thrown around. I don’t genuinely get upset, but just as we play back and forth, I kind of feign irritation when my wife uses the term Indian giver.

And in return, she uses the term to irritate me because of me being chock-tall. We end up teasing each other, and she makes Indian jokes, and I make Irish jokes back at her. Sorry if any of y’all are Irish.

I don’t have anything against the Irish. But we tease each other back and forth. But we were debating in the van, as we have many times before, the origin of the phrase Indian giver.

And she said, as I’ve heard many people say, she just always assumed that it was because the Indians would give people things and then take it back. I said, oh, no, no, that’s not where it came from. It came from them giving things to the Indians.

They’d give them land and then say, 50 or 60 years later, we need that back, y’all go on further west. Oh, no, we need that back. I said, and so the people that gave things to the Indians, they were Indian givers, and they took it back. But we talked about this phrase, and she didn’t believe me.

Never mind the fact that I was right, but she didn’t believe me. We debated back and forth about this phrase and acted like we were irritated at each other and just had a wonderful time. The phrase did come, whether you look at it from Indians, gave things and took it back, or whether you look at it from things being given to the Indians and then were taken back.

The fact is, the phrase came because somebody gave somebody else something and then took it back. And so many times we try to, oh, this goes against everything I believe in, but we try to be Indian givers when it comes to giving our lives to Jesus Christ, don’t we? That goes along with what we talked about this morning.

Mark chapter 8, starting in verse 34, we’re going to read through here again. Jesus is correcting, maybe correcting ahead of time, some misconceptions that the disciples and other people had about what it really meant to follow Christ. We talked about those things this morning, that we’re given a new owner. We no longer own ourselves.

We’re told to deny ourselves, and that really means to disown ourselves. We’re told to take up our cross, which is an invitation to die. We suffer with Christ. We endure with Him through the suffering.

And so we’re given a new commitment. And finally, we’re given a new pattern, a new person to follow. That’s Christ when he says, follow me.

It says in verse 34, and when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he came unto them, he said unto them, whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospels, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. There’s an exchange that’s being discussed here about turning one’s life over to Christ. In order to be a disciple, we completely, as we talked about this morning, we completely give up the right to call the shots in our own lives.

I heard Brother Gene talking about this last Sunday morning. It sounds bad to say I’m glad he’s not here. I’m only glad he’s not here because if I called him by name, he’d be mad at me.

So I’m glad he’s not here to hear me say this, but he’s right, and it’s important to point that out. He was talking about this last Sunday morning to somebody that the word doulos in the Greek that’s translated a lot of times as servant really means a slave. You realize that?

We are slaves to Christ when we become his disciples. Now, that carries in our world, the connotation of somebody being mistreated, somebody being beaten, somebody being roughed up and oppressed, that’s not the meaning at all when we say we’re slaves of Christ. A righteous master would not oppress his slaves. And we voluntarily become his slaves.

We deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow after him. We give up the right to call the shots in our own lives. But as I said this morning, there’s this bizarre phenomenon, at least as far as the Bible’s concerned, within Western Christianity, where we feel like we have the option of flirting with discipleship.

You know what I mean by flirting with discipleship? We’ll say, well, I’ll be a disciple for a little while, and we come over here, and then we decide it’s a little tough, and so we say we’re going to come back over here, and we just kind of go back and forth, and we treat it as though we can take it or leave it. It’s like sometimes you’ll see people out in the world, and they’re not really interested in being committed to one another, but they’ll flirt and enjoy each other’s company.

And that’s the way we treat discipleship a lot of times. I’ll be Jesus’ disciple. I’ll follow him until it gets a little bit difficult.

And folks, that’s not only a fairly recent innovation. In other words, it was never intended to be that way. And it was only recently possible to even try that.

But it’s fairly peculiar to our portion of the world. I don’t just mean America. I mean North America, Europe, places where it’s a little easier than some other places to be a Christian.

Throughout most of history and throughout most of the world, it’s been a difficult thing to be a Christian. It’s something that you commit yourself to completely or not at all because it costs you something in order to do it. And yet we’ve come along with this idea that we can flirt with discipleship.

We can like it today and not like it tomorrow and just go back and forth. And this was written, Jesus spoke this to really correct his disciples ahead of time, before it even became an issue, to let them know right from the beginning that this was going to cost them something. There was an exchange that was going on here, and that to be a disciple, we can’t give our lives to Christ and then take it back and then give it back and then take it back and give it back.

No, we’ve got to make a decision and a commitment once and for all which side we’re on and whether we’re all in or all out. There’s an exchange that takes place, and God forbid we should be, for lack of a better word, Indian givers and say, Jesus, I’d really like my life back now because I’d like to do what I want to do. And so he tells them, whoever will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

We belong to Jesus at that point. He tells us in verse 35, for whosoever will save his life shall lose it. What’s he talking about saving his life?

They lived, as I said this morning, in an era where being a Christian very likely could cost you your life. I won’t read the list again tonight. If you want to see it, you’re more than welcome to.

But of the 11 faithful disciples, 10 of them were killed for their faith and one died in exile. So many of the early Christians were killed for their faith. So many were sent into exile.

So many were tortured for their faith. It quite literally was a life and death proposition to say, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. And in many places in our world today, the same thing is still true. And there were times when people were brought before the Jewish leaders, when they were brought before the Roman leaders.

Today they’re brought before the Muslim leaders or the communist leaders or whoever else that is out there opposing the things of God. and they are told, we hate Christ, and if you’ll just simply renounce him, we’ll let you live. We’ll let you live.

Now, if you’ll remember a few, several weeks ago, about a month ago, I think, when we talked about the evidence for the resurrection, and I quoted some of the early Roman writers, they spell out that they realized early on this was a good tactic for rooting out who the real Christians were, because they said, if we ask them to renounce Christ and they do it, then not only do we forgive them, we know that really they were just hanging around with the Christians to begin with. because they said it’s not part of their custom, it’s not part of their faith to be able to renounce Christ. They can’t do it. Real Christians can’t do it.

The Romans picked up on that fairly easily, fairly quickly. So for 2,000 years, people have been given the option, your faith or your life. You have to give up one of them, your faith or your life.

In that day, they were about to be faced with this, and Christ said, for whosoever will save his life shall lose it. In other words, whoever is willing to renounce Christ for the sake of saving their own life, they’re going to lose it in the end anyway. And what we’re told there is not that we lose our salvation if we deny Christ, but ladies and gentlemen, a disciple will not be able to betray his master.

I watch a lot of documentaries, mainly because they help me sleep, but if I can stay awake for them, they’re also interesting. I watch a lot of documentaries about the Islamic world, about communist countries, both past and present, And folks, I’m terrified of some of the things that these people have put their citizens through, that they have put their own people through, that they have put believers in Christ through. To hear how Saddam Hussein hooked people up to car batteries, not personally, but had people hooked up to car batteries and beaten, it’s terrifying.

And I could imagine just about anything, doing just about anything, not to be tortured in that way. But as I think about it, I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying, I really don’t think we can do this. I cannot imagine renouncing Christ. I cannot imagine that any of us, if we truly believe in Him, if we truly are His disciples, that we would be able to bring ourselves to say, no, I never knew Him.

Now, there’s the case of Peter. He said, I never knew Him. But folks, his encounter with the resurrected Christ somehow changed all of that.

And from then on, you see Peter as a completely different person throughout the book of Acts. And what this tells me here is not that we’re going to be so strong that we’ll be able to withstand anything. Folks, when it comes to some of the stuff they talk about doing in other countries, it scares me to death.

I’m not going to stand here and say I’m too spiritual to be afraid of that kind of stuff. If it ever came down to that in this country, I would be scared to death, but I would like to think that I would say, no, you can kill me, you can do whatever. I would hope we would all say, as His disciples, you can kill me, whatever you want to do, I will not deny Him.

And they’re told here that whoever would save their own lives would lose them. But whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospels, the same shall save it. Folks, there’s an exchange that goes on here.

The Bible even uses the word exchange in verse 37. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? If out of expediency, out of a desire for success, for wealth, for happiness, for privilege, for popularity, if out of a desire for any of these things a man were to give up his own soul, he were to renounce Christ, he were to show himself not to be Christ’s disciple in order to gain all of these things, at the end of it, what would it profit him?

What would he gain if he gave up his soul, if he gave up eternal life for a little bit of temporary happiness? Folks, everybody in the world is at work exchanging our allegiance for something. And we give up our, as Christians, as disciples of Christ, We give up our allegiance to ourselves out of love for him and also because we know that there’s something so much better coming.

But the world, by the same token, is exchanging their allegiance to the evil one in order for some temporary pleasure. And they will think that they are on top of the world. They will think they’re happy, they can do whatever they want.

They’ve got everything that money could buy, even if they’re not rich. They can do whatever they want, they can be happy, they can live however they want. But the Bible is clear, what does it profit them if a man gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Folks, in this exchange of our allegiance that goes on here, where because of what Christ has done for us, we give up our lives to follow Him, there are some things that we can learn from this passage. The first of these is in verse 35. As we’ve already talked about, he says that whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospels, the same shall save it.

He talks about those who would save their own lives and end up losing them in the end because they gave up Christ, they gave up the gospel for the sake of a little safety, for the sake of a little happiness. And from this we can learn that those who draw back from Christ were never His and do not share in the gift of eternal life. Now, folks, I’m not talking about if we mess up and we sin a little bit.

That’s not at all what I’m talking about. I quote this passage all the time, but, well, there may be several passages. in the book of 1 John that talk about if we say we have no sin, we’re liars, and the truth is not in us.

It would be a lie for us as Christians to say we never sin. There are days, believe it or not, there are times that I do not act like a saved person ought to act. Anybody else in here guilty of that?

Is it just me? Okay, glad to see I’m not the only one. There are times that I do not act like a saved person should act.

Does that mean I was never his? No. It means that as it says, I believe in 1 John 2, that if we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, who’s Jesus Christ. I heard a preacher on the radio a week or two ago talking about this very concept and talking about people who go off and live worldly for a little while.

And I’ve been concerned about this topic for a while. I’ve debated it back and forth in my own mind. I know a lot of Christians wrestle with this topic.

If somebody’s made a profession of faith, and yet they’ve gone off the deep end and they completely. . .

What is the word I’m looking for? It starts with an I. They completely immerse themselves in the world and in fleshly pursuits.

And there’s no evidence within them that they’ve been born again. Because let’s be honest about it. We’re not expected to be perfect overnight, but we are a new creation.

Sanctification takes place then. It takes place over the rest of our lives. As I’ve said before, I can’t completely explain that.

But there should be some evidence of change. But I’ve known people and you’ve known people who’ve made a profession of faith and then they act worse than they did before. And the question has always bothered me.

Are they really saved? And I heard a preacher on the radio a couple weeks ago talking about this, and he said that when they left from among us, they showed that they never were part of us, because if they’d been part of us, they would have stayed with us. Some words to that effect, and I thought, okay, come on now.

Come on now. Because I knew who the guy was preaching, and I knew his particular theological bent, and I thought, okay, yeah, you would say that. And then he went on, and I thought, that sounds familiar, what he’s saying.

I flipped in my Bible when I got home later. that night to 1 John chapter 2. If you want to look with me real quick.

And notice something I had glossed over in the many times I’ve read through and preached on the book of 1 John. 1 John 2, 18. He says, little children, it is the last time, and as you have heard that antichrists shall come, even now there are many antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last time.

Verse 19, they went out from us, but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would have no doubt continued with us, but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us. And I thought, okay, here I thought the man was just spouting his opinion and he was quoting the book of 1 John.

That one’s on me. The book of 1 John was written to tell them, you know, there were people in that day, it’s not just talking about false teachers, it’s talking about the people who follow them. And these false teachers in their day weren’t just leading them into false doctrine, they were also leading them into sinful lifestyles.

And John writes to the churches and says that all these people that have left have simply proved that they never were with us because if they were with us ever, they would stay with us. Folks, I’m going to be honest with you. That verse doesn’t give me a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings because there are some people that I love very deeply who have made professions of faith at some point in their life.

I was there for some of them when it happened, when they made professions of faith and then turned out and immediately went and lived like the world. And I thought, well, maybe they’ve just never been taught. They’ve never grown.

They’ve never, you know, maybe they really did trust Christ. And folks, I’m not saying that we don’t sometimes sin and get off course. But if we sin and get off course and it does not bother us, there’s no conviction, there’s no being bothered over our sin, and all we’re trusting in is the fact that I said some words repeated after the preacher or walked down the aisle and we go out and live like the world and we act like we have nothing to do with Christ. Odds are that we never had any part with Him to begin with. As I said, that doesn’t offer me a lot of comfort because there are people that I love very deeply that are trusting in the fact that they said some words.

And according to that passage, they were never with us. And that eats away at me. And folks, we all know people like that.

Because the options here are when it says that somebody, talking to his disciples, when somebody tries to reject Christ, tries to renounce Christ in order to save his life, ends up losing it. The options here are that we can lose our salvation, which I believe without, I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than this, the Bible does not teach you can lose your salvation if you ever really had it. I’ve read through the passages.

I understand where people get that from, but they’re wrong. Just because I understand their point and see where they’re coming from doesn’t mean I agree with it. The Bible places us squarely secure in Jesus Christ if we are really His.

But Jesus said there would be some who would relent. John talks about them and said they were never really with us if they had been with us, they would have stayed with us. And those who, again, I’m not talking about people who mess up for a season and come back and make things right with God.

I’m talking about those who go out and act like they never were Christ’s. There’s a reason for that. But those who draw back from Christ, who are willing to renounce Christ, folks, they were never His, and they do not share in the gift of eternal life.

That’s not to say that they can’t be His. It’s not to say they can’t be His. That somebody who makes a false profession and then goes out and lives like the world, that doesn’t say that they can’t be convicted of their sin and they can’t repent and trust Christ for forgiveness at some time in the future.

That doesn’t mean we write them off, nor does it mean that we continue to affirm their behavior and say, it’s all right, you prayed the prayer, so you’re in. We need to know that those who draw back from Christ were never his. Secondly, it tells us in Mark 8, 38, he says, whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when He cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.

There would be people at that time who would be ashamed of Christ and of His words. They would be ashamed to be associated with Him. They would be ashamed to follow His teachings.

They would be ashamed to live His teachings and to share His teachings with other people. Folks, we still live in an adulterous and sinful generation. And there are still people who claim to be His but are ashamed of Him and are ashamed of His words.

This goes along with those who draw back from Him. Folks, if we can claim to be His and yet we’re ashamed of Him, if we’re ashamed of Christ, we’re ashamed of what He teaches, something’s wrong with us. We can’t claim to be His disciples and yet claim to be ashamed of Him.

But He tells them that in this adulterous and sinful generation, now I may be going out on a limb here, but I don’t know that that necessarily means just their 30 years or 40 years, however they categorize a generation. As I’ve been reading some in different commentaries, Sometimes the word generation means age, and we are still living in a sinful and adulterous age. And what we can take from this verse is that there will always be the temptation to be ashamed of Christ. The world will always push believers to relent and turn away from Him.

As long as we are here on this earth in its current form, there will always be pressure. There will always be temptation where the world tries to undermine true believers and tries to push us to relent and to renounce Christ. and to be ashamed of him. And he says, Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me in my words in this adulterous and sinful generation of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

The world will always continue to push us to back off from Christ and to back off from what he teaches. We see it in churches all over this country. We see it in churches all over this country where the world has so influenced the churches that they are embarrassed, they are ashamed to believe the things that they once believed, that their fathers, that their grandfathers once believed.

There are churches in this country today that do not believe the virgin birth because, oh, nobody believes in that anymore. Well, they believe it’s silly in such an educated and enlightened time to believe in the resurrection. It’s ridiculous to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.

It’s ridiculous to believe. There are even churches that call themselves evangelical that believe it is ridiculous to believe in the blood atonement. Folks, if the blood atonement is not biblical, then what in the world was Jesus Christ doing on the cross?

I cannot figure that out. I said on the eternal security thing, I can see the other side of the argument. That argument over the blood atonement, the argument is stupid in my opinion.

I can’t see where that comes from. There are churches that are choosing to surrender little by little to the things that the world wants to see in the churches. Well, if the church would just be a little more accommodating to what we believe, if they would just de-emphasize some of the more offensive doctrines.

Folks, the cross is offensive. The blood is offensive. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

And as long as we live in a fallen sinful world, there will always be pressure for us to relent from Christ and to relent from what He teaches. But folks, if we are His, we cannot back off of those things. We cannot.

And third of all, any earthly suffering that we may receive here is far outweighed by the heavenly reward for the true believer. any of it. And I don’t say that in a flippant way.

Oh, I’m sorry, people in the former Soviet bloc or the Muslim world, I’m sorry you got killed, that you got tortured. But it’s okay, everything’s going to be better. It’ll be worth it in the end.

I don’t mean it to sound flippant like that at all. But the joy of being with our Savior for eternity, the joy of instead of escaping the fires of eternal hell and being for eternity with the one who loved us enough to die for us when we were not worthy of Him to die for us. The joy of that is greater than any suffering, as terrible as it is, and it is terrible.

The joy far outweighs the suffering. Our heavenly reward far outweighs the suffering. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

If a man turns his back on Christ, or if a man outright rejects Christ in order to gain all the trappings of this world, what does it profit him? What’s it worth? Nothing.

And yet there’s this exchange that takes place where we give up our lives to follow Christ because we know that even though it’s going to be hard, even though there are going to be difficulties, even though there are going to be tears, there may even be blood, and there’s going to be sweat. All of these things that we expend for Him, folks, the joy and the reward far outweighs the suffering. Now, we don’t do it for the reward.

We do it because we love Him. When I say there’s this exchange where we give up our lives to follow Him, I am not telling you that somehow we purchase our own salvation by giving up our lives. that we purchase our own salvation by somehow following Him and being good enough.

Folks, if we try to follow Him without first being saved, without first being born again, without first trusting Him, it’s not going to work anyway. Even after we’re saved, it’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we’re able to do it. So when I say there’s an exchange, I don’t mean that we’re buying our salvation.

Because what we give Him in exchange, what we give Him is worthless anyway. Like today, Benjamin was, I was trying to study a little bit, and he was eating a pickle. And I told somebody yesterday that whatever he eats, I end up with on me.

Y’all don’t know it, but half the time I get up here to preach, I look down and say, my goodness, there’s a fruit roll-up. Just occupational hazard of being a dad, I guess. He was eating a pickle, and he was sharing it with Sophie, a little dog.

And she was gnawing on it, and he was gnawing on it. It was just making me sick. Just could not look at it anymore.

And he came over to me, and I had these little strawberry apple puffs that he loves. And I said, you know, why don’t you give Daddy that pickle, and I’ll give you this in exchange. You can eat this.

And he brought me the pickle. As a matter of fact, it’s still sitting on the table. The dogs may have gotten it by now.

It was right before we left. But he gave me this pickle that he’d been chewing on and he’d been sharing with the dog and that they’d both dragged all over the floor. It wasn’t worth anything to me.

He didn’t buy that puff from me, that strawberry thing. I gave it to him out of the goodness of my heart and because I loved him. And I asked for that pickle in exchange, but not because he was somehow buying it.

That pickle was nasty and worthless to me. At the same time, when we give up our lives to follow Christ, and at the end of it, there’s a heavenly reward, it would be ludicrous to infer from that that we somehow buy our heavenly reward, that we somehow buy our standing with God. When we hand God something ratty and worthless as our sinful fallen selves, and say, I trust you, I trust what your Son did for me on the cross, and because I love you and what you’ve done for me, I want to follow you.

And we take that corrupt thing that we have, our lives, and we turn it over to Him, and He gives us something different in exchange, we did not buy that. We did not earn that. It was not a quid pro quo trade, as they like to say.

It was simply God offering us something better, and we needed both hands to have it, so we gave up what we were holding. When this talks about exchanging our soul, when the passage here talks about what shall a man give in exchange for his soul, and ladies and gentlemen, we trust Christ, and we give up everything to follow Him, we are not earning our forgiveness, We’re not earning our standing with God. But we know that by giving this up and following Him and being His, that the heavenly reward that comes on the other side of it far outweighs anything that we give up, far outweighs anything that we endure here.

And if we really understand that, if we really understand what He did for us and we really understand what’s at stake here, it would be far easier for us to make the sacrifice, if we can call it that, to endure with Him when things get difficult. But as His disciples, we talked about what it takes this morning to be a disciple. As His disciples, the pressure will always be there to relent, to turn back.

But if we are His, we will not. Because we love Him and we know that there’s something better that He offers us than anything the world can ever offer in exchange for our soul. There’s nothing on this earth that’s worth an eternity in hell.