Missing the Point of the Gospel

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Transcript:

As he said already, it is Father’s Day, and I want to wish a happy Father’s Day to each of the men here. I hope you have a good day. We’re going to be in Mark chapter 10 this morning.

Mark chapter 10. And in tying into the whole, we’re not going to be talking about Father’s Day this morning, but in tying into what’s already been said about Father’s Day, knowing that Sundays are such a busy day all the time, I mean, we just practically can’t squeeze in anything extra. I had planned that we were just going to celebrate Father’s Day yesterday, which we did, and loaded up the kids in the car, and Mom and Dad went with me against their better judgment, and I said, we’re just going to take a road trip, because I love just getting out and driving.

And Dad and I have this, I don’t know what you call it, an obsession with Route 66, and we’ve done East, and so we went out and just drove West yesterday just to kind of see what we could see, And did several things. And when we got home last night, I was asking Benjamin, did you have a good day? Yeah, I had a good day.

Well, what was your favorite part? I like the bridges. Really?

Because, you see, we started out at Route 66 Park on the far west side of Oklahoma City and let them play and let them chase geese and whatever else they wanted to do. And then we went and ate Mexican food and they had some things they’d never had. and we stopped and saw all kinds of things.

But his favorite thing apparently from the whole day was driving over the old style trust bridges. And I thought, you really missed the point of the trip, I think. But I guess not.

If that was his favorite thing, then that’s fine. And even on the way down here this morning, every time we came to a bridge, we have to put our hands and feet up and yell we as we’re going across the bridge. When we leave church, we’re going to head out south of town to the bridge over to Washington and let him have a real good time.

Anyway, I kept thinking to myself, you’ve missed the point of the trip. You’re focused on the bridges, and you missed the point, because there was so much more that there was to see. We stopped and saw some of the old historical landmarks, places that were there since the 20s and things, and he wasn’t impressed with those at all.

He liked the bridges. And, you know, it’s easy for us to miss the point, even in important things in life. It’s easy for us to miss the point.

And as we started last week talking about really the cost of following Jesus, and I told you we’d look at this for a few weeks, it’s easy for us to come to Jesus and miss the whole point of what he did. One of the people that was asked in the Bible to count the cost, if you’ll recall, we talked last week about counting the cost and how Jesus said, you know, if somebody’s going to build a tower, of course they’re going to sit down and count the cost first and make sure they’ve got enough money or what have you to finish the tower. or if a king is going to go to war, he’s going to look at his troops and make sure he has the troops necessary to accomplish the job.

Jesus talked to his disciples about counting the cost and a willingness to pay the price when it comes to following Jesus Christ. One of those people who was asked in scripture to count the cost was a man who we don’t know his name. We just call him the rich young ruler. And we’re going to look at his story today in Mark chapter 10, because when we look at his story, he was asked to count the cost of following Jesus, but he missed the whole point of what Jesus came to do.

You know what? That happened a lot, the whole missing the point thing. I’ve said before, I look at the 12 disciples and some of their responses when Jesus was speaking and think, how do you people not get this?

But number one, I had the benefit of looking at it from the past, not when it was actually happening. It was all new to them. I know how the story ends.

But even at that, I miss the point sometimes too. I find myself in the same situations they were, but it’s easy to miss the point. In verse 17 of Mark chapter 10, it says, when he was gone forth in the way, there came one running and kneeled to him and asked him, good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

And Jesus said unto him, why callest thou me good? There is none good, but one that is God. Thou knowest the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, defraud not, honor thy father and mother.

And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth. Missing the point of the law there, as we’ll see in just a minute. Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest, go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.

And come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved, for he had great possessions. And then explaining what had just happened there, Jesus tells them in verse 23, it says, And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God?

And the disciples were astonished at his words, but Jesus answered again, And saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?

And Jesus looking upon them, saith, With men it is impossible, but with God, but not with God, for with God all things are possible. And so what’s happened here? We’ve read the passage now, just to give you a little background information about what’s going on.

Jesus has been teaching. He’s been teaching to the multitudes, as he so often was. And after he had left from his speaking engagement, for lack of a better term, a man comes, this rich young ruler, comes running after him.

It wasn’t just that he happened upon Jesus and said, oh, by the way, I was thinking the other day, next time I saw you, what does a man have to do to have eternal life? Now, this man made a concerted effort. He was going to chase Jesus down and get his question answered and he said to him, good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

The word master here and the word teacher a lot of times in the New Testament are used interchangeably. And that doesn’t mean that as a teacher of the Bible that I’m your master, that you serve me or anything like that. But in their day and age, when you were to go learn the scriptures in the Jewish culture, you were to study under a rabbi, and you were to live where the rabbi lived, you were to sleep where the rabbi slept, you were to eat what he ate, and so on and so forth.

You were to follow him. And so when he calls Jesus good master, he’s looking at Jesus as his rabbi saying, teach me what is it that I need to do to have eternal life. And he’s made this concerted effort to chase Jesus down and find out the answer to that question.

And Jesus sort of sidesteps the question. He’s not being evasive because he will go on to answer the question, but he’s saying there’s something else we need to deal with here first. He says, why callest thou me good? Why are you calling me good?

Because he called him good master. Why are you calling me good when there’s only one who is good and that’s God? And now skeptics have made light of this verse and said, well, clearly Jesus didn’t claim to be God.

I mean, look at Mark 10, 18. And there’s an entire school of thought even among Christians, get this, even among some churches that say, well, Jesus never claimed to be God. Okay.

I’ve not found a satisfactory answer to this question, but I just want to know if Jesus never claimed to be God, then what on earth are we doing here? I don’t mean here on earth, but what are we doing in church? Why are we bothering to at least try to devote our lives to what he taught if he’s not really God?

Makes no sense to me. And you read through the Gospels, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record instances where Jesus claimed to be God. You have to read through and dig for them a little bit.

But what they hint at, John shouts about. I mean, throughout the book of John, you cannot read the book of John and not conclude that Jesus claimed to be God. But what he says here is, why callest thou me good?

There’s none good but one that is God. He’s saying here, why are you calling me good when there’s only one good and that’s God? He’s not saying here, I’m not God.

What he’s saying here is, do you really understand what you’re saying to me? Do you really understand the magnitude of the words that you’re applying to me? In other words, you’re applying to me an attribute that only belongs to God.

And while I am God, I mean, while Jesus was saying, I am God, you don’t seem to recognize that because he just held him to be a good teacher, good master. And so what Jesus says here is not a claim that he’s not God. It’s a question for the man.

Do you really understand? Do you really understand who you’re talking to? Do you really understand the words that are coming out of your own mouth at this point?

Then he turns back and answers the question that he was asked. He says, you know the commandments, And he lists a few of them here. He says, do not commit adultery.

Okay, that’s the seventh commandment. Do not kill. That’s number six.

Do not steal. That’s number eight. Do not bear false witness. Defraud not.

Honor thy father and thy mother. Okay, he goes through and lists some of them. And I find it very telling in verse 20 when he says, I’ve done all of these from my youth.

Tells me he has missed the point of the law. Okay, there is nobody, there is nobody under the definition they understood of the law who had kept all the Ten Commandments. I mean, if there’s anybody in here who’s never told a lie, I’d say raise your hands, but you’d be lying.

Because we’ve all done it. Have we taken something that doesn’t belong to us? You know what?

I grabbed a pen from the bank on Tuesday and took it with me. I figured it was out there for people to, here’s my dad’s bank. I figured it was out there for us to take the way they had them sitting out, but I didn’t ask him if that’s what they were there for until he got home later that evening.

As far as I know, I could have stolen it because I didn’t ask first. Now, it turns out they were there for everybody to take, but I didn’t know that. Say it’s a pen. Yeah, even something little, I took something that didn’t belong to me.

Guys, we’ve all taken something that didn’t belong to us. We’ve all said something knowingly that wasn’t true. We’ve all dishonored our fathers and mothers at some point or another.

So we go through this list, and even the best among us, there’s no way that we’ve kept the law. There’s no way we’ve kept even the Ten Commandments. And when you get outside of the Ten Commandments, to the other, I’m told, 603 laws in the Old Testament, because evidently there are 613, according to what one rabbi counted, precepts, separate laws that are taught in the Old Testament.

You get outside the Ten, I have no hope of being righteous according to the law. You cannot tell me that this man really had kept the Ten Commandments to the letter. But on top of that, Jesus in other places points out that really there’s another meaning to the law.

And I don’t mean some kind of secret, hidden meaning. But I mean the law was never meant just to control our external behavior. It was meant to address the problem of the heart.

You see, Galatians teaches us that the law is a schoolmaster to point us to Jesus Christ. If we don’t have God’s standard there saying, this is what you should be, then we can very reasonably walk through life thinking, I’m doing a good job. Until that law is there and says, this is what God says, and we realize, I am so far below that standard. It’s kind of like the things you see out in front of the rides at carnivals or in play areas at restaurants.

to say, you must be this tall to go inside, or you must be this tall to ride that ride. Well, before he comes up against that standard, a little kid thinks he’s big, doesn’t he? But he sees how far short he falls when the standard is there in black and white.

Well, the law is that standard in black and white just to show us how far we’d fallen short of the glory of God and how much we were in need of a Savior. But in addition to that, the law is even more difficult because it’s meant to address the condition of the heart. When Jesus talked about adultery, he said, yeah, yeah, you can very easily say I’ve never committed adultery.

I mean, that’s one of the easier commandments to keep. Until you get to Jesus’ definition, talking about the condition of the heart, where he says, I’m telling you, if you’ve even looked on another woman with lust, you’ve committed adultery in your heart. Oh, suddenly the goalposts have changed and we’re all guilty.

He says, do not kill anybody. And I can stand here and attest to you that I have never killed anyone. Aren’t you glad to know that?

but Jesus said if you’ve been angry with your brother without reason then you’ve committed murder in your heart does that apply to sisters too by the way good I’m Janet shaking her head no then I’m in the clear because I don’t have a brother but I have been angry with my sister without cause I don’t think it means just your siblings either we’ve all at some point been that kind of angry where it’s like we’ve murdered them in our hearts and suddenly again the goalposts are different than where we thought they were and we’re guilty. And so according to Jesus’ interpretation of the law, which is the correct one because he was the one who wrote the law, but according to Jesus’ interpretation of the law, there is no possible way that any of us are innocent.

There’s no possible way that this man is truthful in his observation that he says in verse 20, Master, all these have I observed from my youth. I’ve kept all the commandments since I was a little boy. No, you haven’t.

So you’re either ignorant or you’re just lying there too. I don’t know. My guess is he just didn’t understand.

He missed the point. The Bible says in verse 21, Jesus, beholding him, loved him. And I read some different commentators this week who said, well, of course, in his divine nature, Jesus was always loved, but this is talking about something different in his human nature where he felt that, you know what, I think that’s making things too difficult.

I think that’s split in too many hairs. We know that God is love. We know from his example that Jesus loved people, but what I take from this is that he was moved with compassion for this man.

You know, I’ve given the example before. I love my children all the time. As Brother Worthy sang a minute ago, it’s a love without end, amen.

I love my children all the time, but sometimes I’ll look at them and they’ll say something, they’ll do something, and that love just wells up inside. If you’re a parent, you know the feeling. And I really honestly think that’s what it’s talking about here.

He was moved with compassion for the man. He looked on him, beholding him, and loved him, and said unto him, there’s one thing you lack. There’s one area where you’re not perfect and complete.

And by the way, I don’t think he says one thing you lack as in only one thing you lack. It’s kind of like the old argument. Wife used to ask me, did you have a cookie?

No. Did you have two cookies? Yes.

It’s all in how you use the word sometimes. He says there is one thing he lacks. That doesn’t mean there’s not a second, but there is one thing he lacks because Jesus never agrees with him that you’ve not broken the commandments because that would go against what God’s word says elsewhere that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

But in his mind, he thinks he’s doing good. And so Jesus, rather than arguing that fact, says there is one thing you lack here still. Go your way, sell whatsoever you have, and give to the poor.

and you’ll have treasure in heaven. And come, take up your cross, take up the cross and follow me. Now, he’s not here providing an alternative plan of salvation for the rich young ruler.

That some of us get into heaven because of what Jesus Christ did for us on our behalf on the cross, and some get into heaven because they have enough money to just give it away and suddenly God’s happy with them. It’s not how it works. What he’s doing here when he says the one thing you lack is you need to go take all your possessions, sell them and give them away to the poor.

is pointing out the fact that there was an idol in this man’s heart. There was something he loved more than Jesus. There was something he loved more than eternal life with the Father.

There was something he loved more, ultimately, when you get right down to it, something he loved more than God, and it was his riches. And you know what? That’s a clear violation of the first commandments.

Have no other God except me. Take all your money. Take whatever you have.

Sell it. Give it to the poor. You’ll have treasure in heaven.

Come take up the cross and follow me. It says, and he was sad at that saying. And went away grieved for he had great possessions.

He had lots of things. You mean I’m going to have to give up everything? Yeah, that’s what Jesus is calling you to do.

Not to earn salvation, by the way. We cannot buy our way into heaven. I am not telling you, and this passage is not telling you, that if you’ll just go take whatever you have, whether we have great possessions or little, take whatever we have and sell it and give it away to the poor and go follow Jesus, that suddenly we’ll get into heaven because of selling and giving away.

No, this was told to him to point out the idol that he has in his heart. Can you get into heaven without selling all your possessions? I believe you can.

Otherwise, I drove here in a car this morning. I’m in trouble. Can we get into heaven without selling all of our possessions?

Yes, yes, I believe we can. Because there are other people in the Bible who are spoken of as believers who did have possessions. But the question is, are there idols in our heart that we’ve not dealt with?

Is Jesus calling you this morning to give away everything you own? Maybe. I mean, I’m not your Holy Spirit.

If you feel the Holy Spirit telling you to take everything you have and sell it and give the money away to the poor, then you better do it. But is this what that passage is teaching? No.

We might have other things that we have to give up, though. If we were speaking to Jesus, I don’t know about you all, but I’ve never been a rich man. Even when I’ve had money, I’ve never been a rich man.

If I were speaking to Jesus, I doubt he would say, Take everything you have, sell it and give it away, and then you’ll have, and then you can follow me. If it were me, I could see him easily. And this is just speculation, guys.

This is not doctrine. But with me, I could very easily see him looking and saying, what are the things that you obsess about and worry about and don’t want to give up? I could see him telling me the same thing he told Abraham.

All right, you think you’ve kept all the commandments? I want you to go take your kids up to the top of the mountain, and there you’ll sacrifice them. And you know what?

Just like, I hate to say this, but just like him in verse 22, I would be sad at that saying and go away grieved because of what I love more than God. And by the way, I don’t think he would ask me that. But I’m saying if I were in this same situation.

When we get right down to it, the point of this is that there are things that we love more than God, and that is idolatry. That is a violation of the first commandment. That is an evidence, that is a proof right there that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

That is a proof right there that we need salvation. And this guy was talking about salvation, but he was missing the point of it. He was missing the point of the gospel.

So what is the point of the gospel? To make it as simple as possible, because you can go through and read all sorts of things, and people have spent books and books and books discussing what the gospel is. And it is important that we know for sure what it is, but the Bible also makes it very simple.

In spelling out the gospel, as I’ve told you before, Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, I believe it is, that Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the scriptures. That’s the essence of the gospel. That we had sinned against the holy God.

That those sins needed to be paid for, and so Jesus Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, and he rose again, proving that he was God in the flesh and had the power to forgive those sins. The Bible teaches elsewhere that salvation is available as a free gift from God because of his grace and mercy, not anything that we deserve, and that it’s available to us by faith or through faith. So what is the gospel?

The gospel is the fact that we’ve sinned against God, we need a Savior, cannot save ourselves. Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins when we couldn’t do it for ourselves, rose again to prove that he could do it, and now offers us eternal life and forgiveness from God because and only because of what he did. That is the gospel, that we can be saved this morning, that we can have eternal life, that we can have forgiveness and a clean slate and a relationship with God because of what Jesus Christ did.

But you know, the gospel doesn’t stop there. The gospel doesn’t stop there. Nowhere in the Bible does it teach us that we’re to be saved and then just stop our spiritual growth there.

I’ve heard the phrase so much that for a while it really irritated me, but I think I’m okay with it again because it’s right that God loves us just the way we are but has no intention of believing us that way. I have a friend or had a friend years ago, not that we’re not friends anymore, but he’s passed on. Had a friend years ago who was a preacher who would just rant and rave about people saying that Christ had saved us to serve.

He didn’t save us to serve because that implies that we’re making some kind of payments on our salvation by our service. He saved us regardless of what we could do. And I understand that and I agree with that.

Jesus did not save us because of any good that we can do. Jesus didn’t save us because we were good enough in the first place. Jesus didn’t save us because he looked at us and said, well, 20 years afterwards, they’re going to be good for something.

So I’m going to save them for that. No, Jesus saved us when he saved us. He saved us because he was good and we were not.

So I understand what he was getting at. His reason for our salvation had nothing to do with us and what we could eventually do. And yet as a result of it, he did save us to serve.

He did save us to then go follow him. Because we needed to in order to be saved? No, because it’s the right thing to do now.

And so I really think that, you know, because of the gospel, our lives continue to be changed until we go on to be with him. He continues to work in our hearts and shape us and refine us by the power of his Holy Spirit as we walk with him for the rest of our natural lives. That’s what’s supposed to take place.

And this man missed this rich young ruler. Because he was not willing to count the cost and get rid of his idols, he missed the whole point of the gospel from the salvation to the sanctification that comes afterwards. And just like him, in just a few closing points here, just like him, we miss the point of the gospel too, first of all, when we’re more concerned about the fringe benefits than being reconciled to God.

We miss the point of the gospel when we’re more concerned with the fringe benefits than being reconciled to God. Now, I’ll be honest with you. When I was five years old, I started asking questions about salvation because I was scared to death of hell.

People say today, well, you shouldn’t scare the kids about hell and scare them into getting saved. Why not? That’s what happened to me.

They preached on hell in children’s church, and I remember being scared to death for four days until my little five-year-old heart just couldn’t take it anymore, and I went one day and asked my mom on a Thursday, how do you get saved? Because I knew I needed to be saved. See, I was worried about the, I was concerned about the fringe benefit of heaven, of eternal life, but in the explanation that was given to me of the gospel, I also understood that I had sinned against God and needed forgiveness.

That was the whole reason for hell. So I’m not too, I don’t have too much of an objection if we quote unquote try to scare people with hell because it is scary as long as they understand the reason for hell and the reason salvation is needed, that we need to be reconciled to God. What creates a problem is that because of watered-down preaching and watered-down testimonies that have gone on for far too long in churches, there are people who look at salvation as fire insurance.

They don’t realize I’ve sinned against God and need to be reconciled to Him. They’re just concerned about the eternal life. Yeah, I want to go to heaven.

Who doesn’t? There’s a country song that really grates on my nerves when I get in my sister’s vehicle and hears it. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go now.

If you like that song, I apologize. I’m not trying to, not trying to criticize you, just say, you know, it’s not my taste. Of course, everybody wants to go to heaven.

I mean, if you ask people, would you rather go to heaven or hell? And people, who in their right minds is going to say, yeah, I want to suffer in hell for all of eternity. But if the idea behind salvation is just, yeah, I want to go to heaven, what do I need to do for that?

Oh, I need to pray a prayer? Great. They’ve missed the point of the gospel.

The point of the gospel is we’re bound for hell because we’ve sinned against God. And in order to go to heaven, we need to be reconciled to God. And we can’t do that because of our sins.

See, he came to Jesus and he chased him down and said, what do I need to do to have what? What was he after? Eternal life.

That’s a good pursuit. There’s nothing wrong with wanting eternal life. But when it came down to a question of, all right, well, what do you love more?

The idols in your heart or the God you need to be reconciled to? He went away sad because he had much possessions. He had great possessions.

We miss the point of the gospel when we are more concerned about the fringe benefits than being reconciled to God. By all means, let’s talk to people about heaven. Let’s talk to people about hell.

Let’s talk to people about the great benefits to us of salvation both in this life and the next. But we cannot, hear me on this, we cannot leave out the part about sinners needing to be reconciled to God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. If we leave that out, they’ve missed the whole point of the gospel.

Second of all, we miss the point of the gospel when we’re more interested in our own self-righteousness than the righteousness of Christ. You know what? This can be a roadblock to salvation before salvation. It can also be a stumbling block to us afterwards.

I don’t mean in the sense that we lose our salvation, but it can get in the way of us doing things that we need to do and believing things we need to believe. You see, Jesus told him, you know the commandments. He listed several of them.

And the man said, Master, I have observed all of these from my youth. Well, again, no, you hadn’t. But in his mind, what else could I possibly need to do?

What could I possibly lack? Because I’ve been a good boy and done everything I’ve been supposed to. And the prevailing religion, I don’t care if you want to call it Catholic, if you want to call it Mormon, if you want to call it non-practicing.

There are even a lot of Baptists, call themselves Baptists today, who believe that they’re getting into heaven as long as they’re good outweighs their bad and they’ve been good enough. that God’s going to look on their self-righteousness and say, well, that’s good enough, come on in. It doesn’t work that way.

And I submit to you that is the prevailing religion in this country. Probably most countries is the religion of, if I could just do enough. You talk to people, you could probably walk up and down the street, the main street here in Lindsay.

And I noticed on Tuesday, it’s a lot busier on Main Street during the week than it is on Sunday. I’ve not seen that before. You could go find people and say, do you believe you’re going to heaven?

Well, sure. Why? Some of them are going to tell you, well, if I’m good enough, it’ll all even out in the end.

And one of the biggest impediments to talking to people, one of the biggest hindrances in talking to people about the gospel and getting them to understand their need for Christ, they don’t see the need for Christ because they’re already good people. You know what? I was a good person at five years old.

I mean, how much bad can you really do? I was a good person when I got saved, but you know what? I still was destined for hell because I’d sinned against God.

There are a lot of good people, and I hate to say it, but there are a lot of good people who are going to end up in hell because they were more concerned about their goodness than the righteousness of Christ. He held up the law and said, here are the things that, have you done all these things? And he said, yes, I have. No, you haven’t.

That’s the point. We don’t get there by being good according to the law. The law shows us that we haven’t been good enough, that we are by nature not good enough.

And until somebody can get past the idea, until a person can get past the idea, Well, if I’m good enough, and realize I need the righteousness of Christ, they missed the point of the gospel. The point of the gospel is not come to church and be a good person and God will love you more. The point of the gospel is Jesus Christ had to die for us because we couldn’t be good enough for God.

And as I said, th

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