Word of Salvation – Vol.39 No.12 – March 1994

 

On The Way To The Cross Jesus Denies The World

 

Sermon by Revd. J. Rogers on Matthew 19:16-30

Reading: 1 John 2:9-17

 

Beloved congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,

‘Good master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’

That was a very good question.  He was obviously a serious young man.

I wish some of you young people were more serious at times.  Actually, this applies to all of us.  Far too often, we seem to live life on the surface.  Mind you, life has a way of forcing us to face hard realities.  Or, perhaps we should say, God does!

We are very concerned with possessions.  We are even more concerned with appearances – to have and to hold, not a person, but things.  Even though the bank holds the title deed.  And the car and the Lazy-boy and the video and the CD-player are all mortgaged as well!

And it is not much better in the Church either.  We must be seen as a growing church, a church that is going places; a church that’s with it and up with the times; a church that communicates in a relevant way – they are the words we must use today.

There are two things going on here.  First of all, there is the desire for possessions, for wealth and the things of this world.  The other is, that we must at least be seen to be successful, whether we really are or not.  We are captivated by the outward show of things.

John calls it ‘the lust of the eyes and the boasting of what one has and does.’  Eve saw that the fruit ‘was a delight to the eyes.’  But Jesus asked, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, yet lose his own soul?’

As the Lord Jesus went to the cross as a true man, He did exactly what He asks of us – in principle at least.  He denied Himself the world (possessions), the flesh (pleasure), and the devil (power).

Today we see that Jesus, on the way to the cross, denied Himself the world for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.  To make us rich, He became a pauper.  Let us see, first of all, that…

1.  In His Self-Denial, Jesus was a Man Like Us

‘From heaven above to earth I come,’ says Christ in Luther’s hymn.  That in itself is a great reduction to poverty.  But Paul writes in 2 Corinthians (8:9), ‘You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor.’  But congregation, that becoming poor was not just in the step from heaven to earth.  It was also in His whole life here on earth.

Jesus was a carpenter.  Could He not have done His kingdom work on the side?  You know, like Paul.  He could have had a tent-making ministry – or a cabinetmaking ministry.  Furthermore, Jesus was a very good carpenter.  It is our duty to offer to God our very best and to do everything, even eating and drinking, to the glory of God.  And you can be sure that the Lord never did otherwise.  He could have carved Himself a niche in the Quality Homes market.  He could have been the sort of tradesman someone with a fine eye would wait six months for.  And, of course, top-notch tradesmen can always command a premium price.

Yes, He could have made quite a name for Himself as a builder of repute, ‘having a good report with outsiders’ – as all elders in the kingdom of God are supposed to have.  He could have been President of the Master Builders Federation.  Now that, surely, would have given Him influence for the kingdom, wouldn’t it?

And yet, we read, ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay His head’.  For your sakes He became a pauper, so that you, through His poverty, might become rich.

So one day a serious-minded young man who ‘had great wealth’ came to Jesus and said, ‘Good master, what must I do to get eternal life?’  Now there is nothing unusual about that question.  Every disciple asked his rabbi that question.

After a bit of discussion, Jesus accepts his answer that he had kept all the commandments since he was a boy and, as Jesus said, if he really kept the commandments as God requires, he would have had eternal life.  So, to get to the heart of the matter, which is, that we keep the commandments as God requires, Jesus says, ‘If you want to be perfect’ – the word means being fully equipped – ‘If you want to be fully equipped, if you want to be fully qualified to receive eternal life,’ Jesus says, ‘go, sell all your possessions, give the money to the poor and you shall have treasures in heaven.’

The young man had addressed Jesus as ‘Good Master’ – so the King James Version has it correctly.  The question he asked was quite ordinary.  But he recognised that he was speaking to no ordinary rabbi.  Alfred Edersheim tells us that there is no recorded instance where a disciple called a rabbi ‘good’, for, of course, only God is good.  Well, he sure had an exceptional rabbi and he was beginning to wish he hadn’t noticed him.  This guy’s tougher than strict old Shammai.  ‘Sell all I have?!’

The rabbis had never asked this, and if they asked for alms-giving at all, it was done in the way we see in the story of the poor widow in the Temple.  She put in only two mites while, and it could be seen, ‘many rich people threw in large amounts.’  Large amounts they might have been, but they were never a very big proportion of one’s total wealth.  It was unlawful to give away more than 1/5th of one’s possessions, let alone all of them!  It was a crime to make oneself poor.  More than that, it was sheer folly, for the rabbis regarded ‘the miseries of poverty as worse than all the plagues of Egypt put together’ (Edersheim).

Well, quite apart from the argument between Jesus and the rabbis, the fact was that the young man hadn’t kept all these commandments since he was a boy at all – and he couldn’t keep them now either.  The sum of all these commandments is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself.  But he loved his possessions more than God.  He did not love God enough to give them all away to obey Him as Abraham who, out of love for God, had given up his only begotten son.  And he didn’t love his neighbour as himself either.  He couldn’t bear to see his neighbours enjoying his wealth while he could not!

But that is what Jesus asks of us, brothers and sisters.  And it’s only what He Himself gave for us.  He became a pauper that we might become rich.

The second thing I want you to notice in this text is this:

2.  In His Self-Denial Jesus had His Reward

Yes, for His time on earth, He gave it all up.  Why?  ‘For the joy set before Him.’  For the great reward of the heavenly kingdom.  So that He could take up that ‘glory which He had with the Father before the world began.’  So He could receive from His Father ‘all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.’

And that’s just what Jesus promised this young man.  ‘Give you possessions to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven and come, follow me.’  But he couldn’t do it.  So Jesus said, ‘How hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’

‘Yes Lord,’ said the disciples, ‘and that gives us a problem.  If a rich man can hardly be saved, who can be?’  ‘Is not wealth the blessing of the Lord upon the works of our hands?’  Indeed; many Jews had come to regard a rich man as a righteous man.  They thought that God would only make a righteous man rich.  As the blind man reminded the Pharisees; ‘We know that God does not listen to sinners.’

Now hang on a minute, thinks Peter.  We disciples have done what that young man could not do; the very thing that, according to our master, rich men find hard to do.  We have left all to follow Jesus.  Surely, an act so difficult and so rare must be very meritorious.  ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘we have left everything to follow you!  What then will there be for us?’

But, of course, it was not nearly so hard for them.  Or was it?  Surely, their family livelihood was at stake.  Jesus didn’t say, ‘You have left all, have you?  Pray, what was your all worth?’  No.  Poor men’s single ewe lambs and widow’s mites count a great deal with Christ.  Little or great, all is all and Christ is pleased.

And what about our reward?  Jesus tells us in w 29:

“….everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

Well, even before the stock-market crash in 1987, you couldn’t make this sort of return.  And certainly not now.  At best you might get 7.5% at the National Bank.  You can’t even get 10%, let alone 100%.  But God does not promise even 100%!  He is not so miserly as only to match dollar for dollar.  It’s a hundred times as much as we give Him.

Give a paddock to Him; He’ll give you a hundred in return.  Give a son or daughter to Him for the mission-field; you’ll get a hundred back.  And that’s just in this life.  In the next, it’s eternal life.

But hang on a minute, you think.  There’s something as fishy about the throne He promises as the fishing boat the disciples gave Him, because all the disciples died martyrs, and paupers!

So how are we to understand these rewards?

First of all, it is true if we take what Jesus said as a Law, a general rule; and if we look at it with a long-term view.  Given a few generations, ‘the meek do inherit the earth and delight themselves in abundance of peace.’  So Abraham only ever owned one field in Canaan; but his descendants had the whole land.  And so eventually Rome became a Christian state – and Great Britain and the United States and Holland.  And so we too enjoy great blessings of religious peace and prosperity because of our heritage of the Protestant Reformation.

But secondly, while Jesus’ promise doesn’t hold in every instance in the way we just talked about, it can be fulfilled in other ways.

Paul tells us that when you sow, you don’t plant the body that will be, but just a seed – but that seeds produces a plant.  The plant is not the seed.  But in essence, it’s exactly the same.  It just has a different form.  Everything that is in the plant was in the seed and, in fact, is produced by something already in the seed.

So we can understand Jesus to be saying that He will repay us one hundred times.  Not necessarily one hundred paddocks or mothers or brothers or fishing boats or what have you; but one hundred times as much pleasure and joy you would have got out of those things you gave up.  He prayed that our joy would be full.

There’s a bit of an example of that in the life of the early Church.  Peter and John went to the temple to pray and they met the lame man who held out his hands for money.  Peter says, ‘Sorry mate, wallet’s empty.  But I’ll tell you what, I can do you a hundred times better; C’mon, up you get!’

Now, what do you think that fellow would sooner have had?  Even if Peter had waved a million dollars under his nose, he would have taken the legs.  And later, when he realised he got Christ as well, why, he would have given up the Temple, gold plate and all!

And Paul too.  He said ‘we apostles go round every day sorrowful, yet rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing everything.’  He wouldn’t have swapped preaching the Gospel from Damascus to Rome for Robert Jones’ House and his Rolls Royce!  Being an apostle of Jesus Christ in prison was worth a hundred times as much!

And brothers and sisters, the promise of a hundred times more joy than all earth’s riches applies to us today just as much as for the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles.  ‘Everyone who has left anything for my sake will receive a hundred times as much in this life (adds Mark) and in the next, eternal life.’

But we must ask ourselves the question, thirdly,

3.  Will We Deny Ourselves the World for Jesus?

The Lord gave the young man his answer.  But he just couldn’t do it.  And the disciples were greatly astonished at how hard Jesus said it was.  So they asked, ‘If this is how it is with the rich, and they are blessed with riches because they are righteous, who then can be saved?’

But you ask me, ‘Surely all we have to do is nothing?  Simply believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’

That’s all true enough, brothers and sisters, but we must believe in Jesus Christ empty-handed.  As we sing, ‘Nothing in my hands I bring; only to Thy cross I cling.’ The reason many can’t cling to the cross is because their hands are still filled with the world!  And the more of the world we have in our grasp, the harder it is to loosen our grip.  So hard, in fact, as to be impossible.

The Jews had a proverb: ‘not even a man in his dreams thinks that gold grows on palm trees and elephants can pass through the eye of a needle.’  Jesus gives the proverb a turn and opens up a whole new meaning.  Now I will be quite frank with you and tell you that there is no agreement among the scholars about the meaning of this saying of Jesus.  But this explanation seems reasonable to me:

I am sure that you have all seen those large workshop doors, or warehouse doors, that have within them another little door just big enough for a man to get through.  Eastern cities of Jesus’ day had much the same thing – either in the large city gates that were shut at night or in the wall just alongside.  These little doors were called the eye of a needle.

If a traveller arrived after the gates were closed, he could enter the city through the eye of the needle.  But if he had a camel, he had a problem.  But it was just possible to get the camel through the eye of the needle – with a lot of push-me, pull-you.  It was absolutely impossible without taking the load and saddles off the camel first.

And that of course, is exactly Jesus’ point: ‘sell everything you have.’  Your love for me must be such that you will give up absolutely everything I ask.  ‘Nothing in my hand I bring’; Pilgrim’s pack, whatever it contains, must be shed.

But the young man couldn’t do it – at least at that point.  So he went to his rich home, poor.  He went away sad.  The idea really is that a great dark cloud came over him.  He was genuinely serious with Jesus.  He came in his rich clothes and bowed in the dust before this poor rabbi.  He was in earnest.  He desperately wants an answer to this most important of all of life’s questions.  And yet, when he gets it, it’s as if He on whom he had pinned all his hopes had thrown a great wet blanket over all his expectations.  The whole dark sky fell in.

Some of you are asking the same question.  But when you are given the answer, you are so shallow you can’t even be sad!  This young man thought about it.  Some of you don’t even give it serious thought because you can’t even be sad at the idea of giving it up!

Some of you young people – and older one’s too – are just cruising – that’s the very word you use, isn’t it?  And you seem to be quite content with this life – especially when it’s cruisey.  And most certainly you are not willing to give up your comfortable, pleasant, pleasure-filled, life-style.  You say, ‘But if I come to Church seriously, then I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do the other.’  Exactly!  You are not prepared to loosen your fingers on that first love and that means you do not love God first, let alone with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  But if you don’t do it, you cannot have eternal life.

Jesus gave up the world.  He became poor in this world so that we might become rich.  Indeed, He even gave up the true riches in heaven for a time.  But we, on the other hand, love the world, and its unreal riches because we did not realise they were not real, not the ultimate that God wants to give us.  The real world is the world to come and not this one.

So brothers and sisters, as good and healthy as that sport or hobby, or as useful as that possession or study course or whatever might be, it is a sin if you love it more than Christ.

Are we really so shallow, so trivial, so silly, so unthinking, so scatty that we would sooner have the pleasures of sin, the pleasure of dreams, for a season and miss out on real pleasures at God’s right hand forevermore?

Do we really have such a false sense of values that the things of this sinful world which will be burned up in a moment, that we are not willing to give them up to inherit the new heavens and the new earth with God for all eternity!

Oh, may God strip us of our petty baggage and cleanse our minds that are so enchanted with this present world.  And may He drag us through the needle’s eye to Jesus Christ who, on His way to the cross, for our sakes became poor, so that we, through His poverty, may become rich.

AMEN