Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 16:14-31, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 59
- Date: Sunday, September 6, 2026 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
When We Don’t Want Something to Be True
On Wednesday night, some of my kids and I were running people home after the service, and I got a call from my wife, who was in my truck at the time. She asked, “Can you stop by Dollar General? I stopped by Dollar General, and I got back in your truck to go home, and it’s making a weird noise.”
My first thought was, “No, it’s not.” Sometimes I just don’t want things to be true, so in my mind they’re not. She says, “The washer’s making that noise again.” No, it’s not. Not until after dinner. Then I’ll think about it. But it’s not right now.
So she says, “It’s making a weird noise,” and I thought, “Okay, I’ll be there.” But I also thought, “No, it’s not. I’m going to get in, and it’s going to start right up, and everything’s going to be normal.” Well, it was not normal. I got there and started it up, and it immediately started shaking really hard, making the most unfortunate noises, and revving.
In the back of my mind, I thought, “Okay, there is a serious engine problem here. The timing chain is busted or something.” But I convinced myself, “No, maybe it’s something as simple as the throttle needing to be replaced. It’s something simple. We’ll have it towed. The mechanic will tell me.” I convinced myself it was just the throttle until he called.
My dearly beloved truck—my dearly beloved twenty-five-year-old truck with 260,000 miles that we put on together—the mechanic said, “If it were mine, I would be done with it.” He said we’re looking at thousands and thousands of dollars just to get into where we might be able to diagnose the problem.
I should have prepared myself instead of lying to myself, trying to convince myself that what I wanted to be true was true and what I did not want to be true was not true. I have a habit of doing that. Like I said, with the washing machine: “No, it’s not making noise.”
Some of you who have been around here for a few years remember when they were talking about a second or third wave of COVID coming. I would say, “No, there’s not. I’m not participating in this. You had me on the first wave. We’re done.” I have a tendency to say, “I don’t want that to be true, so I’m going to think it’s not true, and we’re going to move on.”
That might be funny for a little bit when it has to do with truck repairs or washing-machine repairs. It can be downright dangerous when it comes to the truth about who Jesus is.
We have just finished our summer series on being sent for the sake of the gospel. We spent the summer looking at things that we as a church need to be aware of if we’re going to be gospel-focused and make disciples in our community. Having finished that, we’re coming back to our series that we interrupted back in May on the book of Luke. We’re going to be in Luke 16, where we left off.
I bring up the desire for something not to be true because that’s exactly what was going on with the Pharisees. Throughout this middle part of Luke, we see that they already understand who Jesus is. The evidence is right there in front of them. But the Pharisees continue to act like it’s not true—not because they don’t believe, but because they don’t want it to be true.
They don’t want Him to be the Messiah. They don’t want Him to be everything He claimed to be, even though Scripture indicates that they know. Jesus confronts them because they know, and they just act like it’s not true.
We need to be very careful that we don’t do the same thing with Jesus that we may sometimes do with minor inconveniences in life and act like it’s just not true. And if that’s something we’re currently doing, or something those around us are currently doing, we need to address it and acknowledge the truth while there’s still an opportunity.
Jesus Confronts the Pharisees
We’re going to look at Jesus’ dealings with the Pharisees and a story He tells in Luke 16. Starting in verse 14, Luke records:
“Now the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, were listening to all these things and were ridiculing Him. And He said to them, ‘You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of the people, but God knows your hearts; because that which is highly esteemed among people is detestable in the sight of God. The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John came; since that time the gospel of the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery.’
“Now there was a rich man, and he habitually dressed in purple and fine linen, enjoying himself in splendor every day. And a poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores, and longing to be fed from the scraps which fell from the rich man’s table; not only that, the dogs also were coming and licking his sores. Now it happened that the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s arms; and the rich man also died and was buried.
“And in Hades he raised his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his arms. And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus, so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set, so that those who want to go over from here to you will not be able, nor will any people cross over from there to us.’
“And he said, ‘Then I request of you, Father, that you send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not come to this place of torment as well.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ But he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!’ But he said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”
It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that these two sections go together, but when you read through verse 18, you realize that everything Jesus says after verse 19 is a story to illustrate what He’s talking about in verses 14 through 18.
What He begins by doing is addressing the fact that the Pharisees were living one way, viewing the world a certain way, operating a certain way, while their hearts were in a condition that was not consistent with what they were trying to appear to be on the outside. This is why Jesus so often refers to the Pharisees as hypocrites.
I discovered several years ago that the Greek word we get “hypocrite” from is the same word they would have used to describe actors on a stage. You’re probably familiar with the Greek comedy and tragedy masks. I don’t know whether they actually wore literal masks that looked like those on stage, but the image represents the idea: they would change their outward appearance while nothing behind the mask changed.
That ability to portray something to the world outside that is not consistent with what’s going on inside is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not that we believe something is true and sometimes fall short of it. Hypocrisy is when we know what’s true, purposely do the opposite, and try to appear differently on the outside from who we are on the inside.
God Sees What We Hide from Others
That’s the point Jesus makes to them. They’re there in verse 14 mocking Jesus, and He knows they’re driven by greed. Luke says they were lovers of money, and they were driven by their greed to reject everything God was doing.
That’s why they didn’t want Jesus to be the Messiah. His message of their need for the grace of God flew in the face of everything they were teaching about themselves as the determiners of right and wrong. They were teaching God’s Old Testament law, but they were adding things to it. They were burdening the people with extra rules they had added, and then using their rules as loopholes to go around the law of God.
They were putting themselves in the seat of deciding what was right and wrong, who was right with God and who wasn’t. Then Jesus comes along and says that none of us is righteous. He tells us that we all, like sheep, have gone astray. He talks about the need we all have for forgiveness and repentance.
They didn’t want to hear that because it affected their position, their power, and ultimately their pocketbook, because they were using their positions to prey on the people. Of course, they didn’t say this outwardly. Outwardly, they wanted to look like the guardians of tradition. They wanted to look oh so holy.
So Jesus, in verses 14 through 18, makes the point that God sees what we hide from others. God sees what we hide from others. He calls them out for trying to appear righteous in front of other people: “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the sight of the people, but God knows your hearts.”
God sees what’s in our hearts. That’s why God can say, and know exactly what He’s talking about, that there is none righteous, no, not one. He sees us, and in spite of the good we may do, in spite of the moral and upstanding lives we may live on the outside, He knows what goes on in our hearts. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know the same thing to be true.
I’ve told you before that I’ve lived a very boring life by the world’s standards. I went in one time to get a background check to purchase a firearm to go hunting with, and the man at the store said, “Okay, you’ve filled out the paperwork. Now, this background check could take as much as eight minutes.” Then he looked at it: “Oh, you’re done.”
I’ve lived a boring life. God still sees that my heart is not as good as the outside appears. There’s still sin. There’s still rebellion. There’s still the desire to do things my own way. God sees the disconnect.
Our job is to be honest about the disconnect and throw ourselves on the mercy of God, but that’s not what the Pharisees did. They portrayed themselves to the people one way, and the people saw them and thought, “They’re dignified. They’re religious. They’re wonderful.”
The Pharisees, believe it or not, were actually fairly popular with the people. That boggles our minds because we know the Pharisees are the villains in the story, but they were pretty popular. The people looked at them and saw how dignified they were. God looked at the heart, and God was disgusted by what He saw.
The Law Exposes the Heart
Jesus explained that they were rejecting the Word of God as it had been revealed. They were holding themselves up as the religious authorities while rejecting the Word of God.
In verse 16, He talks about the Law and the Prophets. He’s referring to the Old Testament. He says these things were proclaimed until John came. It’s not that they went away, but until John came, that was the message pointing to the holiness of God.
The point of the Old Testament is not, “Do all these things so that you’ll be right with God.” Ultimately, the point of the Old Testament is to show us that you can’t do these things perfectly—not even on the outside, but you certainly can’t do them with your heart right before God. It’s a sign showing us our need for His grace and forgiveness.
I’ve compared it to one of those signs at a theme park that says, “You must be this tall to ride this ride.” You must be this holy to get in, and the arm is so high up there we can’t even see it. The Law and the Prophets were there, revealing the holiness of God until John came.
Then we get to verse 17, and the Pharisees are acting as though the Law does not apply to them. Jesus talks about them trying to justify themselves in verse 15. You only have to justify yourself if you know you’re wrong.
So they were trying to justify themselves, and the comment He makes in verse 17 about it being easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail is Him saying that God’s Law did not just vanish. That’s an indictment of them because they were acting like it did.
They claimed to be the upholders of God’s Law, but they acted like God’s Law didn’t apply to them. Jesus goes into greater detail on this elsewhere, but here He gives one example. The whole question about divorce seems really out of place until you realize it’s one of the most glaring examples of what they were doing.
There are other places—Matthew 19 and Matthew 5—where Jesus says similar things and goes into more detail. People have looked at those passages and said, “Well, this is a contradiction, because He says one thing here and another thing there.” No. Jesus is not going into the exceptions and causes here because that’s not what He’s doing.
In one of those passages, He’s answering a question about how divorce works under the Law of Moses. In the other, He’s doing an extended teaching. He doesn’t get into all the details here because right now He’s confronting them. He’s confronting them about one of the biggest problems they had, something that showed how little concern they had for the will of God and the Word of God.
These Pharisees would get tired of their wives, cast them aside, and marry somebody else. They would do it over and over, and they came up with loopholes to explain how it was right in the eyes of God to do this.
He’s not teaching here on divorce. He’s teaching about the Pharisees’ hardness of heart when it came to God, His plan, and His principles. He’s saying, “Here’s an example for you.”
The famous example given in one of their ancient writings was that if your wife displeased you for any reason—say she burned dinner—you were well within your rights to get a new one. We all know that’s not how God designed things to be.
Jesus is talking about hardness of heart. He’s saying, “You hold yourselves up to be so godly, but you’re looking for excuses and ways to violate the Law of God and still call it okay. You’re willing even to hurt those closest to you in the process.” That’s one example.
Since the time of John, since John began preparing the way for Jesus, verse 16 says the gospel of the kingdom has been preached. This phrase about people trying to force their way into the kingdom means that there were sinners, people who were worse off in society in the sense that they were openly sinful—prostitutes and tax collectors, people the Pharisees would have looked down on and said, “They’re so sinful. They’re never going to be right with God.”
Those people are hearing the message of the kingdom, and they’re beating down the door to try to get in. They’re beating down the door to know, “How can I be right with God? How can I be saved?” Meanwhile, these men who are supposed to be so religious can’t be bothered so much as to repent.
What Jesus is telling them in verses 14 through 18 is that they look good on the outside. They look holy on the outside. But they’re far from God. Then He tells this story, which we’re going to focus on through the rest of the message, to illustrate the danger they were in and their need to reverse course while there was still time.
The Life We Choose Now Shapes Eternity
He comes to the beginning of this story that many of us have heard all our lives about the rich man and Lazarus. From the beginning of the story, part of what He’s telling them is that the life we choose now will shape our eternity. The life we choose now will shape our eternity. We see that in verses 19 through 25.
The problem with the rich man isn’t that he’s rich. The problem is that he worshiped his riches and ignored God because he was constantly focused on his own pleasure.
Just the description in verse 19 tells us how rich this man was. To borrow a phrase from our day, you had to be part of the one percent to afford purple robes. Somebody had to go out into the ocean and collect little mollusks by hand, which they would then crush to make the purple dye. It was hard, time-consuming, and expensive. Kings wore purple.
This man lived in purple every day. He wore purple every day, and he lived in splendor. He was constantly focused on his own pleasure while people around him were suffering.
Lazarus lay right outside his gate. He longed just to be fed with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs were out there licking his sores. He was right outside this man’s gate, and the rich man couldn’t be bothered to help.
To understand why that matters, we have to understand a little bit about the world they lived in. Again, this man’s sin was not being rich. The issue is that in their culture, if you were rich, it was assumed that you were favored by God. If you were rich, you must have done something right spiritually for God to bless you with those riches.
So here’s somebody the Pharisees would have looked at and said, “Here’s a godly man. He must be so godly if he can afford all this purple.” Yet this man, who in their culture would have looked like he was so close to God, had such a hard heart that Lazarus lay outside his gate day after day after day, longing for scraps.
The dogs came and cared for him. There was some belief in ancient times that dog saliva could have curative properties. I don’t know; people debate that today. I feel like you could lose a limb that way. Yet dogs were considered unclean. So you’ve got someone who, on the outside, looks so close to God and can’t be bothered to help, while the help is coming from these unclean dogs. You see the hardness of the man’s heart. He could not be bothered to help.
Mercy, Torment, and the Heart
When the rich man died, verse 23 says he was in torment and cried out for mercy. It says “Hades” in my translation. Some of yours may say “hell.” Hades refers to the realm of the dead, especially as it is described before the coming of Christ. Both men are in the realm of the dead, but their conditions are entirely different.
Lazarus is in Abraham’s arms. In the translation I’m reading, I grew up hearing “Abraham’s bosom.” That’s not a word we use so much anymore, but it carries this idea that he’s being comforted with his head on Abraham’s chest.
John frequently talks about resting on Jesus’ chest at the Last Supper. That can mean he literally laid his head on Jesus’ chest. The culture must have been different back then; I would feel really weird sitting at dinner with another guy and doing that. It can also mean being in a place of honor right next to Him.
Either way, whether Lazarus is literally resting against Abraham or sitting at his side, the point is that Lazarus has gone from lying outside the rich man’s gate to suddenly being in this place of honor. He’s with Abraham. It’s the realm of the dead, but it’s the holding place of the righteous until Jesus comes for them after He has purchased their salvation.
The rich man, meanwhile, is in torment. He cries out for mercy in verses 23 and 24. He sees Abraham far away. He sees Lazarus, and he cries out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in the water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.”
There’s an irony here. Lazarus was longing for the crumbs that fell from the man’s table in life, and in the world to come, the man is longing for the water that might drip off Lazarus’ finger.
We need to be careful about understanding what Jesus is not saying about salvation, because how we understand this needs to be consistent with the rest of Scripture. He is not saying that giving to Lazarus would have earned the rich man salvation.
This is not about saying what he should have done to be right with God. It’s about diagnosing the fact that he wasn’t. The fact that he was unwilling to help shows that he was not right with God. His actions show that his heart was hardened in sin. It was cold toward God. It was cold toward others around him whom God loved.
This is the kind of cold, hardened heart that will not seek God’s mercy, that lives only for itself in this life. A heart like that leads us to be separated from God in eternity.
So don’t think, “If I’m going to get to heaven, if I’m going to be in Lazarus’ bosom—Lazarus’ arms—I just need to give more.” We’re getting the cart before the horse. A heart that has been changed by God to be right with Him is the kind of heart that will reach out, do these things, and serve Him. But serving others doesn’t get our heart right with God. We have to get these things in the right order.
Lazarus, on the other hand, experienced the grace of God when he died. The rich man had spent his life hardened toward the things of God, serving only himself, really treating his own pleasure as an idol. But Lazarus was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s arms, and verse 25 says he was comforted.
Miss Janie talked about the need to be comforted. We need to be comforted by the Lord in this life. Even more, we hope and long for the comfort we’ll have when we are together with Him in person.
We have to remember that Jesus is telling this story in the context of people being separated from God—the Pharisees—because they lack humility and repentance. He’s not laying out an additional requirement for salvation: “You need Jesus, plus you need to be generous. You need Jesus, plus you have to be poor. You need Jesus, plus you need to suffer.” He’s not adding an additional requirement for salvation.
In context, He’s showing that this man’s lack of concern for the things of God in this life matters in eternity. Lazarus, who could only cry out to God in this life, was comforted by God in eternity.
That’s why I say the life we choose now will shape our eternity. The things we choose now will shape our eternity. Notice I didn’t say determine.
Scripture teaches that we’re to repent. It calls us to Christ. As long as there’s life, there’s still an opportunity to change. And when I say change, I mean change our minds toward the gospel, change our minds toward the things of God. While there’s life, there’s an opportunity. But the choices we make, the things we choose in life, and the direction we choose to go meaningfully shape our eternity.
Death Makes Our Choices Irreversible
Then we come to verse 26, and perhaps the most sobering part of this passage: death makes our choices irreversible. There does come a moment when it’s too late.
In the story, Abraham tells the rich man, “Besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set”—a canyon—“so that those who want to go over from here to you will not be able, nor will any people cross over from there to us.”
I remember years and years ago standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon and just being in awe at how far one side is from the other. The reality is that you can get from one side to the other if you want to drive hours and hours around it.
I do not recommend trying to jump. You heard that. I do not recommend trying to jump. You won’t make it.
But even with that enormous canyon, there is a way around it. What Jesus is describing through Abraham in the story is a canyon so wide and expansive that we can’t get across it, ever. There’s no driving miles and miles. There’s no going clear up into Utah or Canada, or however far you have to go to get around the Grand Canyon. There’s no going around it.
There is a chasm fixed that we cannot get across, and we are on one side or the other. There comes a time for each of us when those choices have been set, and it’s too late to change.
Scripture teaches that God gives us opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to repent. He’s merciful, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But even though He gives us those opportunities, we don’t want to say, “I’ll wait until I’ve had my fun. I’ll wait until I’m old. I’ll wait until I’m on my deathbed.”
We never know when that chasm opens up. We never know when death comes for us and those choices are suddenly irreversible. This is a warning to humble our hearts, seek the Lord’s mercy, and run to Him while there’s still time.
We don’t want to be like the Pharisees. They were heading toward a time when their choices were going to be irreversible. Really, at this point, they’ve come to a place where they’ve so hardened their hearts that, absent a miraculous work of God, they weren’t even going to change.
It’s a warning to deal with the Lord while there’s still time.
God Has Spoken Clearly Enough
The good news is what we see in verses 27 through 31: He’s already spoken clearly enough for us to believe if we will.
People will tell us today, “There’s no evidence for God. There’s no evidence for the gospel.” I would love to sit down and visit with those people one-on-one. I don’t argue on the internet. It doesn’t usually do any good. I’m not going to sit down and go back and forth with people in a comments section. Some of you do that and enjoy it. That stresses me out.
But I would love to sit down and talk with people one-on-one about it, because some of the very things Jesus addresses through Abraham in this story give us evidence of the truth of the gospel.
There’s the very fact that for somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 years before the coming of Christ, Jesus was being prophesied about. The gospel was being prophesied about by people who would not live on this earth long enough to see it fulfilled.
If you want to go back further than the prophets, from the very time of the Garden of Eden, God was promising to send a Messiah. God was promising that the seed of the woman would come and crush the head of the serpent and that His heel would be bruised.
Jesus is in every sense the seed of the woman. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, with an earthly mother but no earthly father. His conception was a supernatural work of God, just as surely as creation itself was the work of God.
Jesus talks about the Law and the Prophets. Those stand there as a witness for thousands of years: this is going to happen. God is going to bring this plan into place.
We even see Psalm 22 and a description of crucifixion some thousand years before Jesus was crucified, and hundreds of years before crucifixion was even a popular form of execution. These are not things people could have known and made up.
We see in Isaiah 53 a thorough, beautiful, and haunting description of Jesus’ death as the Messiah seven hundred years before the fact. So many prophecies throughout the Law and the Prophets, so many promises that God made.
The evidence is there if we’re willing to believe it. We can always find a reason not to believe if we don’t want to believe, but the evidence is there for Jesus as God’s Messiah and our Savior if we’re willing to believe it.
Then the rich man requests a sign so his brothers will believe and be spared the same fate. There’s a back-and-forth where Abraham responds, in effect, “They’re not going to listen to Moses and the Prophets, so why do you think they would listen to anything else?” They’re not going to believe, and no sign is going to change their minds.
What He’s telling us here is that some objections are volitional, not informational. That means some objections are because of the will, not because we simply don’t have the evidence and haven’t been convinced.
The story ends with the statement in verse 31 that not even a resurrection from the dead would convince them. This is a huge indictment of the Pharisees because this is actually what happens.
They are so determined in their minds that they don’t want Jesus to be the Messiah and don’t want Jesus to be the Savior that even when He comes back from the dead, they still won’t believe. And it’s not as though He just randomly came back from the dead. At least nine times throughout the Gospels, Jesus predicted His own death and resurrection. Then He did it, and they still wouldn’t believe.
At that point, what does it take to convince somebody? They just didn’t want Him to be the Messiah.
The testimony of Scripture throughout the Old Testament is clear that Jesus is the Messiah. He is the Savior. He is God’s plan A and God’s only plan for our salvation. The testimony of Scripture is there.
On top of that, He’s given us the most incredible sign possible: Jesus predicted and accomplished His own resurrection from the dead. The historical evidence is there pointing to that as well.
The Evidence Is There If We’re Willing to Believe
The evidence is there if we are willing to believe. But we have to come without the preconceived notion, “I just don’t think that’s for me. I’m just not feeling it. I don’t really want that option.”
If that’s our approach—if we just don’t want this to be true—there’s nothing that’s going to change our minds. I hear people say, “Well, I would believe if God would just put a neon sign in the sky.” No, you wouldn’t. You’d find reasons to explain it away.
If I don’t want something to be true, I’m really good at coming up with explanations for why it’s not. The skeptical mind works that way.
He’s given us everything we need to believe. Jesus has given you everything you need to believe. He has fulfilled these Old Testament prophecies. He fulfilled His own predictions about rising from the dead. He is the only option for salvation, if you’re willing to believe.
For many of you, I know you’re believers. You already believe this. I’m preaching to the choir. But I hope it’s an encouragement to you in your belief and in your determination to serve Him.
But if anybody within the sound of my voice is sitting on the fence and saying, “I really don’t know about this,” the evidence is there if you’re willing to believe it, if you’re willing to give it a fair hearing.
If you’re still not convinced and you say, “I want to hear more about this evidence,” I’d love to talk with you—not to shout you down or browbeat you. I am not a confrontational enough person to do that, but I love talking about these things. I will literally sit for hours and try to answer every question you have if that’s what you want.
But the evidence is there if we’re willing to believe. Jesus has made it abundantly clear who He is and that He is our only option.
If you understand who He is, but you’re letting something hold you back because you don’t want it to be true, like the Pharisees, I implore you—I beg you—to trust Him as your Savior and be reconciled to God while there’s still the opportunity, because there’s an appointment for each of us with the Lord where that opportunity is no longer given.
