How to Save Your Life

If you want to save your life you will need to die to yourself and live only for Jesus.

[00:00:00] Well, now that it’s June, we have reached the unofficial start of summer. So I want to give you a little overview of where we’re going for the next three weeks. We’ll be continuing in our series here in Luke, and then we’ll stick a bookmark there in Luke and pause for a bit. Our preaching team has been writing and preparing to take us through Second Timothy this summer, in a series entitled The Next Generation. Our team’s been studying this book in depth and workshopping our sermons. We’ve been preaching our sermons to each other, which has been pretty fun. And we’re focusing on this book because in this book, Paul hands Timothy the responsibility of leading the next generation of the church. And as Calvary grows, we are keenly aware of our responsibility to raise up, to train up and to empower the future church. So I’ll be away a bit this summer. Uh, preaching at a camp in northern Michigan. Uh, that I love camp Baraqiel. I’ll be there. Uh, I’ll be working on a couple of writing projects, and if you can believe it, uh, I will be hiking the Alps with a group of pastors from our district. Now, that sounds crazy, right? I’ll be touring John Calvin’s Geneva in Switzerland and then hiking the tour du Mont Blanc, which is a 110 mile alpine journey through three countries over 11 days. So if you think to pray for me, then I am not broke down somewhere on some mountain yodeling for help.

[00:01:36] Also also, Pastor John will be going on sabbatical this summer from June 10th to August 4th. Uh, he’ll be doing some studying and some working on licensing, but the one thing he won’t be is available. He will not be available. So it is your job to leave him alone, okay? Leave that boy alone. Okay. When we begin our three service structure on September 8th this fall, I’m going to be kicking off a brief six part series on marriage. Uh, as I’ve been thinking about the needs of our church, the Lord has laid it on my heart to to focus on healthy, biblically designed marriages. Uh, marriage is the most foundational human relationship. We learn that in Genesis 1 to 3. And so we’re going to take some time to look at marriages renewed by the gospel. Uh, it’ll be a great time to invite friends and neighbors and coworkers and family members this morning and next week. Our focus is on failure. You might be intrigued by the title I’ve given to our sermon this morning, A Catalog of Failure. It’s not a clever title that I came up with. It is a literal description of our passage, which is a list of very short stories about failure. It’s a catalog of failure, eight stories of failure, to be exact. Each story gets progressively shorter. The first one is a paragraph long. Uh, the last three are two sentences each. By the end, Jesus is calling out failures left and right.

[00:03:18] Failures are popping like 4th of July fireworks. By the end of this, it’s a it’s a grand finale of failure. Uh, now, why include this? Why would Luke include in his book and his account of Jesus a list of failures? And why would we spend a lovely Sunday morning discussing that list? Uh, I’m actually pretty glad this list is here, and I think you will be too. I’m very glad that that that Luke’s account of Jesus ministry and the people around him includes a list of failures. Because if you were to write out a narrative of my own walk with the Lord, you would see that it also forms a catalogue of failure. Last 26 years of my life has in some sense been a catalogue of failure. Now, not entirely. There are peaks and there are valleys, but there are so many valleys. Uh, like the time that I declare to my then girlfriend, now wife. While we were talking about the importance of spiritual leadership, I declared to her that I am not a spiritual leader. Yeah, I said that and I somehow I’m still married. I we got married, so, uh, it was okay in the end. But I said that while studying to be a pastor, I declared that. Or how about the time in seminary when I discovered our new apartment was still getting cable TV from the previous resident and I wasn’t paying for it, and so I just decided to keep silent and keep using it anyway, just studying the Bible and steel and cable.

[00:04:58] That’s what I did. Yeah. One more. Sure. Why not? Why not? After seminary, Rachel and I went to assess a church planting opportunity over a weekend visit, and on the trip home, she turned to me and she said she did not feel good about this at all, and I responded, oh, it’ll be fine. That was my response. But it wasn’t fine. It was not fine. That led to three years of the worst ministry experience of our lives, and I almost quit pastoring because of that. And that’s just a sample of a host of deeply personal and very embarrassing failures, some of which had a big impact on my family. And I’m sure that as you think about your life, you could start to put the list together, too. What’s the point of reliving failure? What is the point of that? Why record it in the Bible? What? Why does it come to mind when you’re standing in the shower? All those failures from before. Is there anything good that comes from thinking on failure? Well, as we look at this catalogue of failure today, I want you to notice what the failures all have in common. What they all have in common is that they all take Jesus and His kingdom too lightly. Some don’t take his power to heal very seriously. Some get distracted with wanting to be great.

[00:06:25] Some want to to quickly judge other people. And the last three in the list all have Jesus somewhere down in their list of priorities. And the reason it’s good to reflect on all of these different failures and different types of failure, and on your own failures, is not only so that we can learn and grow from them, but so that we can understand God’s grace in light of them. Here’s why. It’s so great to to think about failure. Jesus came to save failures like you and me. So he came, for he came to same failures like you and me. And so by reflecting on our failures, we see both the beauty of Jesus grace to us, and we see the parts of our lives where we need to become more like Jesus. Failure is embarrassing, but seen through the lens of the gospel, failure is both a celebration of God’s grace, and it’s a reminder to us to follow Jesus more closely. So here’s what we’re going to do. Uh, there’s eight individual stories of failure, and that’s a lot to cover in one morning. You all know my pace, right? So this week we’re going to cover the first five, which all have to do with Jesus disciples. And so we’ll be talking about failure as Christians today. And then the last three all come from people who are considering following Jesus. And so we’ll be talking about failure of non-Christians next week.

[00:07:54] Uh, you’ve already heard the passage read, so I would encourage you to have it open in front of you. Uh, I’m going to describe each one of these briefly and then draw a few summary conclusions at the end. The first story is the longest of the list, and that’s because it sets up the others. A man from the crowd comes to Jesus and begs him to have a look at his son, just like the widow whose son died. This this man’s, uh, son is his only son. So it’s his whole future is in this, this boy. And the boy has some sort of a demonic presence that causes him to seize up and to convulse. And so he foams at the mouth. He cries out, it’s it’s a bad situation. But the point of this story is not Jesus ability to heal. It’s the disciples inability to heal. The man took his Son to Jesus because he first took him to the disciples, and the disciples couldn’t do what they needed to do to to save him. And your first thought might be, well, maybe this was just an especially tough case. Maybe this case was too much for the disciples to be able to handle. But here’s the thing it wasn’t. That’s why Jesus reacts the way that he does. His disciples should have been able to handle this situation. Jesus gave them the power and the authority to get this done, but they failed because instead of doing what Jesus told them to do, they acted in accordance with the faithless, faithless, and twisted generation around them.

[00:09:30] Now, what exactly they did instead of being faithful, is not explicitly said here in Luke’s account of this. We know from the other gospel accounts that what they failed to do is pray. They didn’t pray in their in their work to heal this boy. And in a second, we’re going to see a few other failures from the disciples that will give us some insight into how they saw themselves and what they may have been doing instead of praying. But failure. Number one is this Jesus disciples aren’t supposed to be part of the faithless and twisted generation around them. They’re supposed to be the remedy for that generation. Church. That’s us too. That’s what we are to be to the. The greatest indictment against those of us who follow Jesus today would be that we would look and act just like the faithless and twisted world around us, that that that we would have the same values and the same practices that we would use what God has given us in the same way that the world uses those things. The other failures in this catalogue of failure flesh out this first one with some examples like this. Next one. All all the people are marveling right there. They saw Jesus heal this boy. They’re all marveling at the majesty of God. It says. And so Jesus takes this opportunity to once again bring his disciples to the side and give them the proper context, because he doesn’t want to be so focused on the majesty, so focused on the power that they lose the context of what is happening here.

[00:11:20] Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men. In other words, don’t get caught up in the display of power and forget the cross. Don’t. Don’t forget how hard it’ll be to be faithful to God’s plan to save the world. He wants him to remember how hard this is about to get, how hard it will be. That’s the problem today, actually with with flashy and exciting ministry, a daily walk with Christ where you deny yourself and you pick up your cross. Daily promises neither flash nor excitement. But there are entire ministry movements today, entire ministry movements today that are constantly seeking signs and blessings and experiences and sightings of God’s power and miracles for today. Now there’s nothing wrong. Certainly with, with with seeing the Lord work in power. It’s fun when we get to see the Lord work in power, when the Holy Spirit brings conviction and transformation to someone’s heart, that’s that’s very exciting to see that transformation in somebody’s life. When people are healed, when people when prayers are answered, big moments are are great. But there’s a lot of folks today who who will chase the big moments.

[00:12:41] They’ll chase the mountaintop experiences, but they’ll lose hold of the gospel root, the the loose hold of the cross in that. And these disciples were in danger of that. It says that they they didn’t understand what Jesus was saying. At this point, God is concealing that from them. So they’re hearing Jesus. But in God’s timing, they’re not yet understanding the full plan. They understand just enough about this plan that Jesus is talking about here, to not ask him any more questions about it because they don’t want the cross part of Jesus ministry. They like what’s happening around them. They like the power. They like the authority. They don’t want the cross. They want the healing and power, but not the cross. They don’t want to hear about suffering. And a lot of Christians like that. And I want to hear about suffering. What they want to talk about is their third failure. They want to argue about who is the greatest among the 12 disciples. That’s the discussion they want to have. Can you imagine them sitting there listening to Jesus talk about how he is on his way to Jerusalem, where he is going to be arrested, humiliated, and he’s going to die on the cross. Can you imagine them sitting around listening to Jesus do that, and then turning to one another and saying, I think actually I am the greatest of the 12 disciples. I think I’m the most authoritative. I think I’m the most powerful of the 12.

[00:14:21] And talk about tone deaf. This, by the way, is the opposite. In every way of declaring that you’re not a spiritual leader. This is declaring you are the greatest spiritual leader and that’s what they’re doing here. The ministry Jesus gave them has gone to their heads. They think they’re wonderful. They didn’t even pray to cast out a demon and heal that boy. Why would they? Why would they pray to. They think they have the power. They think they’ve been given the authority. And so what does Jesus do here? Look where it says in the passage. It says, knowing the reasoning of their hearts. Do you see that? He says, knowing the reasoning of their hearts. See, that’s where the problem lies. The problem is in their hearts. If you want to find the root of your failure, any failure in your life, if you want to find the root of it. Trace it back to the reasoning that’s happening in your heart. What’s going on in your heart when you chose to do that thing that was a failure against God? What arguments based on lies are you telling yourself that led you to make the twisted, unfaithful, sinful choice that you made? Because that’s where the problem actually is. That’s where it started. It came out of your actions. It came out of your choices. That’s the failure was out here, but it started right in here. Why did I ignore my wife’s insight 20 years ago? Try to plant a church in a bad situation? Why did I do that? It’s because I was telling myself that I was a great church planter, and how could I not be a success? Why did you have that fight with your spouse last week? Why did the.

[00:15:59] Why did the two of you go at it? Why? Why did you fight with your spouse last week? Isn’t it because in your heart you reasoned that you were right and you deserve to get what you wanted instead of being a faithful servant to your spouse the way God has designed it? Isn’t that the truth? See, all of our failure starts right here. It starts right here in our prideful hearts. That’s why Jesus selected a child to illustrate what greatness really is. See, it says he put a child next to him, and he said to receive the child was to receive Jesus himself. They’re arguing about how to attain greatness that they want so that they can sit in the place of prominence next to Jesus. That’s what James and John will eventually come and say. Can we sit on either side of you in the kingdom of God? That’s what they want. And Jesus takes a child and he puts him in that spot right next to him. Now, this illustration doesn’t work as well in our culture because we idolize children. We think children are great. Parents are adjusting their whole lives around their children.

[00:17:08] Believe me, I know, right? It’s hard. And so we love kids and sort of put them in a place of prominence that that seems right to us. But in the first century, that wasn’t the case. They loved their children in the first century, but kids lives rotated around the adults, not the other way around. So to spend time with a child, to receive a child and put put one in a in a prominent place, that would not be the way to greatness. That would not be how you would achieve greatness in life by giving your time to children. Jesus is saying that the way to greatness in the Kingdom of God is to be a humble servant of the lowliest and most needy people. When you won’t attain anything worldly for doing it, for giving your time to people who are desperately in need. And that’s not what. That’s not what prideful people want to hear. See prideful people. They want to to climb to greatness. And in a sense, Jesus says that true greatness is something you have to sink to in the kingdom of God. You have to sink to greatness. You have to stoop down to greatness. You got to serve and sacrifice your way to greatness in the Kingdom of God. In the next two failures further illustrate the wrong mindedness of the disciples. John’s response is something John’s response to Jesus illustration with the child shows us that everything that Jesus just said went completely over his head.

[00:18:45] The disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, and Jesus says to receive a lowly child would be to receive Jesus himself. And by the way, to receive Jesus would also be to be to receive God the Father. This is the this is the pathway to God that you would serve the least and the lowly. And John’s response is, we saw someone else doing ministry in your name, Jesus, and we stopped him because he’s not part of our group. What? How was that a response to what Jesus said? I can only think that that this is this is John’s attempt to shift the focus to the name of Jesus, and not to their own names, and to the group as a whole and not to the individuals. But it’s another swing and a miss, because John still has his mind in the superiority of his own position. See that he just shifted the focus of his own superiority. Jesus says, do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you. So the ministry happening in Jesus name, even if it’s outside of Jesus inner circle of disciples, is still legitimate ministry. God’s project of spreading the gospel of Christ is larger than any one team of people, and this is a very good reminder to churches and to entire denominations. Sometimes leaders can be so focused on their goals, so committed to their agenda, that they miss the good work that God is doing in the other churches and other denominations.

[00:20:27] When we planted that church, the bad idea church that I mentioned earlier, right when we planted that church, we started out as the only church plant in a downtown area of a small town, and three years later, we were one of five church plants within two blocks of each other in this small town. Everyone was doing good work. Nobody was talking to each other. Nobody. There’s need for good church plants everywhere, but it should have been a coordinated effort. Let me quickly qualify this, okay? Let me qualify what Jesus is saying here when he says that there are other teams, other groups, other people doing legitimate ministry. Okay, let me qualify it because Jesus himself qualifies what he says here. Just a few chapters later in Luke chapter 11, when he describes how the kingdom of God spreads. He says that the spread of the kingdom is like a strong man going who’s who’s guarding his house, and a stronger man than him breaks into the house and he comes in to steal the guy’s stuff, and the stronger guy has to tie up the owner before he can take his stuff. And in this metaphor, Satan is the strong guy and Jesus is the stronger guy coming in to plunder Satan’s house. It’s an awesome metaphor. I can’t wait till we get there. Uh, I’m looking forward to that one. But right at the end of that story, Jesus says this phrase whoever is not with me is against me.

[00:21:59] And whoever is, whoever does not gather with me scatters. He also says in the sermon on the Mount that there are going to be people who are going to do ministry using his name, and he will not know them. He doesn’t actually have a relationship with the people doing ministry in his name. So what that means, if you bring those together with what we’re seeing here in what Jesus is saying here in our passage this morning, is that there’s a lot of need for discernment when it comes to thinking about which ministries to encourage and which ones to avoid. Is the gospel preached? Is the Bible handled well? Are the leaders humble servants? Is is the theology orthodox, or is it twisting scripture to create strange doctrines? There are many warnings in Scripture to be very discerning about ministry and what is truly Christ centered, gospel proclaiming work of the Holy Spirit. We need to be discerning in these things. But Jesus, here in our passage this morning, is warning John that we can fail the other way too. We can fail the other way too. We can. We can become so focused on our team that we think we’re the only team. Now, you’d think that John at this point would be done failing, but he’s got another one in him, and this time he teams up with his his brother James for a team fail.

[00:23:26] Jesus is heading for Jerusalem because the time for him to be taken up, it says, is near. He sends his messengers into a Samaritan town to make some lodging arrangements for his journey. But the Samaritans won’t receive him because it says Jesus doesn’t plan to stay with them. He’s just passing through that town to go on to Jerusalem, and the people in the town don’t like that plan. They’re probably offended that he’s not staying there to do all the healing that they’ve been hearing that Jesus does. Getting a room back then was not as easy as booking a motel room off the highway. Uh, if the town didn’t want you in their town, then you didn’t go to that town. Jews from Jerusalem were generally racist against Samaritans. And so there’s already this, this bad blood. So they’re probably thinking, hey, if we’re not good enough for Jesus to stay here and do some ministry and heal some people in our town, then he could find another place to stay. Now in this situation, the disciples hear the messengers, they come back and they they they’ve been hearing Jesus all along say things like, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. He’s been saying things like, blessed are the peacemakers. They also heard instructions just back at the beginning of this chapter that if a town does not receive you, what you do is you shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them, and then you move on to the next town.

[00:24:58] And so they’ve been hearing from Jesus that there is a balance between loving people, making peace, sharing the gospel, bringing warnings against people who reject the gospel. Right. So they take all of that, James and John. They take they take all of that. They put that whole thing together and they ask, Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them? They went full Sodom and Gomorrah on these folks. That escalated quickly, wouldn’t you say that was fast? You don’t want us to stay overnight. Instant death. And they had the audacity to think that the power to call down God’s judgment, God’s penalty, was in them. Jesus, do you want us to tell fire they’re going to speak to fire the way Jesus spoke to the wind and the waves. They’re going to speak fire into existence. This is probably why James and John are nicknamed the Sons of Thunder. It truly is. I know it’s funny, but it truly is. This is probably reflective of of their attitude generally. This is sort of how they are that they would get this nickname. Jesus rebukes them and it says they they just went to another town, said, guys, we’re not just go to another town. We’re not going to blow the place up. So we got to ask, where do they go wrong? Where did the Sons of Thunder go wrong? See, they didn’t go wrong thinking that God will judge people.

[00:26:34] The Bible is very clear that God will ultimately judge those who reject Jesus. But they thought in their heart that they could dictate the timing and the method of God’s judgment. So here’s Jesus walking to Jerusalem to die for sinners who have rejected him. He will say, from the cross to God the Father. Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. James and John entirely missed the plan of compassion and grace. They jumped over compassion and grace right to judgment because they were personally offended. And now we can see that the parallels to our own common failure is obvious, isn’t it? It’s pretty obvious. How often have we stood in judgment of people around us, skipping over the gospel of grace to move straight to judgment? And it’s easy to do. It’s very easy to do this if you are personally offended. If we if we are hurt by people, it is very hard to hurt for those same people. And yet, this is exactly what Jesus modeled for us and what he commands of us. Remember when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of their evil? It was the Lord’s timing, method, and action. It was entirely God’s plan. What did Abraham do, though? Abraham’s role was to intercede. Abraham’s role was to intercede. Abraham advocated for everyone in those cities on behalf of the few righteous people that lived in those cities and and church.

[00:28:12] That’s our job to. That’s our job. We’re called to intercede on behalf of our city, on behalf of Rochester, on behalf of our society. Our job is to love people and to point them to Christ because of the coming righteous judgment of the Lord. We don’t. We don’t say there isn’t a coming righteous judgment of the Lord. We’re not saying that God doesn’t punish sin. He absolutely does. But our job is to intercede for folks to be gracious, not to bring God’s judgment. That’s five failures, five failures from Jesus disciples, and we put them together. They create a portrait of how discipleship can go very wrong. See, discipleship failure is rooted in our heart. That’s where it starts. When we when we set our hearts on things that are evil, that are part of this twisted generation, what happens is we become unfaithful. We join the culture around us. We set our minds on our own importance. We strive for greatness instead of service and humility. We become judgmental of of other sinful people instead of compassionate mediators of God’s grace. So we want God to bless us, but we don’t want the cross. We want the comfort and joy of being in Christ without the difficult sacrifice that Christ both modeled and commanded and told us we would endure. And the reason for this barrage of failure in Scripture is to call out the sinful reasoning of our hearts. That’s been a problem for followers of Jesus, right from the very first followers of Jesus.

[00:29:52] Isn’t that comforting to know it’s been there from the very start these struggles have been? If you’re looking for a religion that serves your purposes, that meets your needs, that tells you you’re fine just the way you are and gives you permission to be judgmental of everyone who isn’t as good as you. You won’t find it in Jesus. You won’t find that what you get with Jesus is a God who will consistently challenge the lingering sinfulness, the idols that lie in your heart. He will challenge your unfaithfulness at every turn. That’s what Scripture does. It’s constantly challenging us because of our unfaithfulness at every turn. He will not allow you to remain worldly. There is no path of following Jesus where he says, well, good enough. You made it. You’re fine now. No. It’s a lifelong transformation. And yet at the very same time that he will not allow you to be the way you are right now, he will also not let you go. He will not let you go. The encouraging part of this list is that despite all this failure, his disciples are still his disciples. They’re still there. James and John got to go on to the next town with Jesus. Why would that be? Shouldn’t their terrible choices and their terrible attitude get them kicked off the team? Absolutely. If that’s the way it worked. But remember how they got on the team in the first place? And that’s what we got to remember.

[00:31:29] How did they get on the team in the first place? They didn’t make it through tryouts. It wasn’t a performance based earning of their role. It was grace. It was grace from the very beginning, all the way to the very end. God’s unmerited favor and love for these disciples is what brought them to Jesus. As much as their failure needs to be corrected and it will be corrected when they follow Jesus closely. It serves to remind them just how much they depend on the gracious, loving mercy of God. And that’s the way it is with us too. That’s what your failure should do for you. When you remember your failure, when you remember all the ways that you have been disobedient to the Lord, when you have, when you have failed to serve him properly, when you have broken the, the, the arrangement, the commandment that he has given to us, you remember that that Jesus is calling you on. He is not letting you go, and he’s not leaving where you where you’re at. But he’s reminding you that you need him and his grace. As you strive to be more like him, to walk closely in step with Jesus, you’re going to have times of failure. We all do. Let that failure, though, drive you to repentance and to rejoicing in a God who came to succeed for us. So his success is now our success. Let’s pray.