New Rules for False Religions

Jesus came to release us from the bonds of sin and death so that we can live for the glory of God, not to put us under the bondage of a new set of rules.

[00:00:00] Well, our passage this morning is going to be a great relief to some and a great challenge to others. It has to do with the rules. What rules, you ask? All the rules of life. Every rule you can think of. Everything from how do we play this board game? To what has the Supreme Court decided? Some people like the rules very much. They’re very oriented to the rules. They like to know what the rules are so that they can follow them. And even more importantly, make sure other people are following them. Some people like rules so much that they make up their own rules to go along with the rules that are already in place. They like rules because they argue it makes life simpler to understand, to keep everybody in line. It prevents us from errors big and small. Other people hate the rules. They don’t like the rules at all. They see rules as barriers to freedom. They are oppressive obstacles made up by other people to control what we can do. Instead of making up additional rules, these folks try to bend the established rules and break them when they can get away with it. Oftentimes, they like to appear as if they’re keeping the rules for the sake of earning the respect of other people, but then secretly breaking the rules to gain an advantage, sometimes over those same people. So, these are two ends of a wide spectrum on the rules. You probably find yourself in between those descriptions somewhere. Although every married couple in this room is looking at each other going, yep, I know which one you are. Enjoy that car ride home. This gets complicated for Christians. It does because we are motivated by love for the Lord to do what he’s asked us to do. In Micah 6:8, the prophet Micah famously says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God?” The word require is right in there, okay? It’s part of it. God has some expectations for us, and they’re good expectations. They flow out of justice and kindness and humility. God has designed and revealed to us what a righteous life lived for his glory is supposed to look like. And within that righteous life, there are things that we’re called to embrace, and there are things that we’re told to avoid. In other words, there are rules in there, guidance. And yet, since man’s fall into sin, history has shown us that there’s a tendency within the broken human heart either to rebel against God’s good rules and shun his authority, and to go our own way, or to add to God’s rules, to to create our own graceless religion and hold other people to be accountable to that skewed religion and condemn people for breaking rules that God never set up in the first place.

[00:03:12] These are the twin errors of our approach to God. We fall in either one of them. They’re like gutters on each side of the road. Pastor Tim Keller called them religion and irreligion. The big theological words are legalism, where you try to earn your way with God by keeping the rules. You’re accepted because you keep the rules. That’s legalism. And then on the other side of that road is antinomianism. You don’t live under anybody’s authority. Nobody makes the rules except for you, including God. Well, Jesus is going to show us today that his gospel of grace is the solution to both of those errors. Jesus came to release us from the bonds of sin and death so that we can live for the glory of God. Not to put us under a bondage to a new set of rules. So, if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and open them to Luke chapter 13. We’re going to begin in verse ten today. This is the account of a woman who is healed by Jesus. But the healing is simply the occasion for Jesus to address the concerning religious state of the people. See these people in Jesus’ day, they didn’t understand grace. Many of them didn’t understand grace. They had taken God’s good covenant of grace and turned it into religious rules. So, we’ll look at this in three parts. First, the healing, and then the religious reaction,

[00:04:44] and then Jesus’ teaching that reorients us to God’s healing grace. Let’s start with the healing. Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And behold, there was a woman who had a disabling spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, woman, you are freed from your disability. And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight and she glorified God. So, here’s the setting. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath day. This is not in Jerusalem at the temple. This would have been in a synagogue, which is a place of worship for Jewish people that would be closer to home. They were sort of spread all over the land. They were closer to home, so they didn’t have to travel all the way to Jerusalem. And this would be a place of where the people would come and they would hear the instruction from the scriptures. And with Jesus being a rabbi who was gaining popularity, he would have been invited to teach. And it’s the Sabbath day so it’s Saturday. There’s most likely a crowd there to hear him teach. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the Sabbath a little bit later.

[00:05:56] There’s a woman there in the crowd who has a disabling spirit that causes her to bend over, and she can’t fully stand up. She’s had this condition for 18 years, and that’s mentioned here so that we would know that everyone around her would know that she had this for a long time. She’s not faking this in any way. Everybody who knew this woman or saw this woman in this probably small community would have known her condition to be incurable. And notice that she doesn’t put herself forward for healing. She may have heard about Jesus’ power to heal. That might be the reason that she came that day. Or she may have just come to hear Jesus teach. It wouldn’t have been wrong for her to put herself forward and step up and ask Jesus to heal her. We see this a lot in the book of Luke. Jesus heals those who reach out to him in faith, but this time Jesus sees the woman and calls her over. He spots her in the crowd. He calls her over and he simply says, woman, you are freed from your disability. And then he heals her. Now, this is a small observation. It’s not really the point of the whole passage, but I pointed out because there’s a rather large portion, segment of the church worldwide that says that God is only going to heal you based on the purity or the intensity of your faith in him.

[00:07:21] And while there are examples of Jesus using someone’s external show of faith as an opportunity to demonstrate his power and authority over sin and death, it’s God’s sovereign decision to heal that makes the difference. God’s power to physically heal isn’t restrained because we aren’t faithful enough, or because we don’t pray enough or whatever it is, it’s not on us. The Lord will choose when he wants to heal based on his divine purpose, both for healing and for suffering. He’s got purposes in both. There’s a lot more that can be said on that, but I’ll just leave it at that. Here Jesus sees this woman. He calls out to her. He lays hands on her. He relieves her of 18 years of suffering. And we learn very quickly two reasons why he did this. The first is to add to the collective glory of God on earth. Do you see that there? It says that she was immediately made straight and glorified God. I’ll bet she did. Can you imagine it? 18 years of suffering relieved in a moment. Jesus actively steps into her life and he says, you are free. And then she actively begins glorifying God. To glorify something is to reflect the greatness of that thing. So, being set free by Jesus means you immediately become a beacon or a reflector, a magnifier of the glory of God. That’s what happens when you’re truly transformed in heart.

[00:08:59] You become a worshipper. I’m often fond of referring to the church as God’s audio-visual department. That’s what we are. We’re the AV department for God. We declare the glory of God when we share and proclaim his Gospel, and we depict the glory of God in the way that we live out his values, the values of the Kingdom in the world. Worship can only truly come from those who have received the healing power of Christ’s salvation. That’s what makes you into a worshiper, which is the spiritual message of the physical healing, right? That’s what it’s picturing. That physical healing is picturing that spiritual healing that’s taking place. That’s what happened here. We don’t know the spiritual state of this woman before she came in. We don’t know if she was already faithful to the Lord, and this was just another example in her life or whether she didn’t know until that moment who the Lord was and wasn’t an active worshiper. But we know she definitely is now because she’s worshiping right in this passage, which is what you’re supposed to do in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. So, everything should be fine, right? Everything should be fine and cool with what’s happening here, right? Well, there’s one guy that’s not having it, “But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, there are six days in which work ought to be done.

[00:10:30] Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” This is a different kind of reaction than we’ve seen in the book of Luke so far. We haven’t really seen this before. I’d go so far as to say that among Jesus’ critics, this religious leader might be the most interesting of all of them. Notice, first of all, that he is not critical of the healing. Did you see that? He’s not critical of the healing. Remember the other Pharisees and scribes and everybody, lawyers, everybody that’s coming at Jesus, they’re all very critical of Jesus’ power to heal. They call it the work of Satan. They say he’s doing Satan’s work when he heals people. This ruler doesn’t say that. This ruler of the synagogue seems to have no problem at all with Jesus healing. As long as you come back any day of the week that is not the Sabbath day. It’s like Chick fil A, right? It’s happy to serve you. Not on Sundays. So that’s all he cares about. This ruler is encouraging people to get healed even. Yeah. Come back and get healed. Seemingly, he’s even fine with Jesus using his power to do the healing, but it can’t violate his view of the rules. The second thing to notice here is who this synagogue official speaks to.

[00:11:56] Did you see that? He talks to the crowd. He doesn’t talk to Jesus. The Pharisees have been critical of Jesus to his face, either directly at him or to the crowd in front of Jesus about him while he’s right there. Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners? That’s what was asked of Jesus back in chapter five. When he cast out demons by Beelzebul, the Prince of demons, chapter 11. He’s talking to the crowd. This guy has been sent by Satan to do this work. But here the synagogue ruler doesn’t speak to Jesus. He doesn’t even make a comment about Jesus. His criticism is to the crowd, and it’s more of an instruction than a criticism. And remember, the crowd didn’t do anything. They didn’t put themselves forward. This woman didn’t come up to Jesus. She didn’t request healing. Jesus just saw her and chose to heal her. So, what’s going on here? What’s this synagogue ruler doing? Well, this religious official has a different tactic for controlling Jesus. Instead of undermining Jesus himself, he controls access to Jesus by putting up a barrier for entry to Jesus. I don’t care if you come to Jesus, but you better come by the rules that we’ve created. There’s a way to get to him. No one has access to Jesus unless you do it the proper way through the path that we’ve made. I believe this is one of the earliest and faintest instances of what would later become a pretty big problem in the first century church and the first generation of the church. There was a group of early Christians known as Judaizers. They believe that in order to come to Christ, you first had to go through Judaism.

[00:13:50] The gospel was spreading in all the non-Jewish parts of the world and communities. Paul was planting churches in Asia and Greece. People who had no Jewish background or knowledge of the Mosaic Law were coming to faith in Jesus. And there were some in the church, especially back in Jerusalem, where there were mostly Jewish-background believers who said that non-Jewish people needed to first become Jewish before they could become Christian, that there was a step to accepting Jesus. And that included eating only clean foods and getting circumcised and keeping the holy days, including the Sabbath day. Now Jesus has not died, and he’s not risen at this point in the narrative. The people in the synagogue that day were still under the old covenant, and Jesus himself was still under the Old Covenant here. There is still a Sabbath to keep here, and we’ll get to that here in just a minute. But this ruler of the synagogue that day is already starting to say, if you want Jesus, that’s fine, but you better follow the rules in coming to be with him.

[00:15:05] And wouldn’t you think, wouldn’t you just love to think that this was only a problem of the past? Wouldn’t you love to think, oh, we don’t treat it like that anymore. We don’t put up any barriers to entry to Jesus anymore. Wouldn’t it be great if somehow there was no longer a human tendency to take the gospel and create unbiblical barriers of entry into it, preventing people from Jesus? Well, unfortunately, this still happens today. It happens in every generation of the church. It has happened for 2000 years. Every generation of the church has struggled with this. When we’re not careful here at Calvary, we could find ourselves doing this sort of thing. And the barriers that we put up are usually customs and traditions, morals, behaviors. Good Christians never do this. Good Christians always do that. That sort of thinking. About 20 years ago, I heard an older Christian woman exclaim very loudly to a group of people that a person would drink alcohol only if you’re an unbeliever. That was her phrase. Only if you’re an unbeliever. That’s what she belted out. She didn’t proclaim that alcohol was bad news and should be avoided. She said it was a sign that you do not believe the gospel if you drink alcohol. Now, why would she say that? Well, this woman grew up during a long period of time, over 100 years of a temperance movement when churches were preaching total abstinence, and it was the context in which she learned the gospel.

[00:16:43] She came to faith in Jesus in the context of this sort of historical moment. Now, can alcohol be terrible? Can it be a burden to bear? And are there good reasons people choose to abstain? Absolutely there are. Absolutely. Without question. Can alcohol prevent you from walking in righteousness if it’s abused? Absolutely it can. See Noah right after the ark. Check that story out later today. But does consumption of alcohol mean you don’t believe in Jesus? And so therefore, you must cease consuming any alcohol before you can be healed, saved, and set free by Jesus. Well, if that’s the case, Jesus himself was not a follower of Jesus. Biblically, it’s an absurd position. And yet, historically, a large portion of the church believed exactly that. Some still believe that sort of thing today. Let me give you another example and this one might hit just a little bit closer to home. It’s one you might not think about, and it’s one that’ll probably get me in just even a little more trouble. More trouble than the alcohol one? Yeah, probably more trouble than that one. We have a fantastic youth group here. Fantastic youth. If you haven’t had a chance to come on a Wednesday night to see our youth group, you really should at some point.

[00:18:08] It’s a worship service, so you could definitely come and participate in it. It’s great. We have over 200 students that come. That’s a large church in America that comes and fills this room on Wednesday nights. Why do we have such a large youth group? Well, it’s because everyone is invited. Everyone is invited to it. It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from spiritually, or what your home is like, or who your influences are. As long as you don’t pose a security concern, every student is allowed to come hear Jesus sung and preached and talked about in small groups. Ten of our students were recently baptized at a high school retreat. More are going to be baptized coming up here in just a couple of months. Pastor John and his team do an excellent job of creating an environment where students who love Jesus can have a big impact on students who are very far from Jesus, all in one group. There are some who may look at that mix of students and say, wouldn’t it be better to make disciples without the potentially negative ideas and behaviors of non-Christians among our Christian kids? And I understand that thinking. I do. I get it, I have a couple kids of my own. I care a lot about what they’re taking in and what they’re discerning, about what they’re hearing. Right? I care about that stuff. But historically, churches that only welcomed Christian people who acted right and had their lives together and already trusted in Jesus,

[00:19:42] historically, what they did was they created a bubble within the world. They sort of kept to themselves as sort of this bunker mentality. Instead of engaging the culture and being an influence on the world, they created their own subculture with very little influence on anybody but themselves. And the barrier for entry to Jesus was, accept our subculture. You got to accept our culture. You got to listen to only our music, watch only our movies, dress the right way, clean yourself up, and then you can have access to our community and then eventually our gospel. In other words, be sanctified according to the ways that we’ve decided that the church should be and then you’re ready to be where you can hear about Jesus. And if you combine that philosophy, take that philosophy of ministry, and you combine that with a retreat from interacting with non-Christians in other venues like schools, clubs, arts, other social groups, the barrier to the gospel gets even stronger. And people who need Jesus get barred from him by the very people called to take the gospel to the world. If that goes on long enough, if that continues long enough, eventually you can find yourself teaching and believing that entrance into Jesus’ Kingdom requires a combination of his grace and our rules for what Christianity ought to look like.

[00:21:11] Let’s look at Jesus’ response to guide us the right way forward. “Then the Lord answered him, you hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox and his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day. As he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him.” So, the barrier to entry here is the Sabbath. The Sabbath was the seventh day. So, it’s Saturday, and this is when the people are not supposed to work. It’s part of the mosaic covenant given to the people, both as a gift for resting, because God knows that we need rest. And it was given as a sign that they were under the mosaic covenant, sort of the sign that you are under this law was practicing this Sabbath. God took the pattern of the six days of creation, and then resting on the seventh day, when he created the universe. He built that into the pattern of life for those who were living under the Mosaic Law, under the covenant. And it was serious too. It was a very serious part of the covenant. In fact, doing work on the Sabbath meant death in some cases. You don’t cook, you don’t kindle a fire, you don’t tend your field.

[00:22:42] You rest because you obey the Lord. You trust that the Lord will provide even though you’re not working, that the Lord will provide for you. And of course, you rest because you need the rest. Now the question comes up every time we start talking about the Sabbath, the question always comes up. Are we supposed to celebrate the Sabbath? Is that still a rule for us? Is this Sabbath? Are we doing it right now? Is coming to church on Sunday, is that our Sabbath? And if so, and all of that applies, you’re probably thinking, I’m in a lot of trouble. Broken it quite a lot. An entire biblical theology of the Sabbath is impossible for us here in our time this morning. So this will have to do. Since we are no longer under the Mosaic Law, we’re no longer bound by the Mosaic Law because Jesus fulfilled the Mosaic Law. We are not called to celebrate the Sabbath. Okay? Jesus himself is our Sabbath rest. He’s the completion of the picture that the Sabbath painted. There will come a day when we enter into a final Sabbath rest with Jesus forever. If you’re trusting in him, that’s where you’ll be. But the celebration of the Sabbath as a sign of being under God’s covenant ended when Jesus’ New covenant was established with his death and his resurrection.

[00:24:04] That’s why Paul wrote in Colossians 2:16-17, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival, or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” So Ceremonial shadows are now done. They are complete because they pointed to Jesus and Jesus came. Jesus was here. So, our Sunday gatherings are historically on a day that the early church called the Lord’s Day, and it was specifically not a replacement of the Sabbath. The Old Testament Sabbath. So, if you have a shift at work this afternoon, you’re going to be okay, right? It’s going to be just fine for you. But in our story here, in the story here right now, there is still a Sabbath day to be kept in accordance with the Mosaic Law. And Jesus doesn’t violate it. He doesn’t. Nowhere in all of the Old Testament law is it said that a person cannot touch another person on the Sabbath day, that it’s somehow work to touch another person. That’s not in there. Furthermore, if the Lord wants to extend his power and break Satan’s grip on this woman’s body, what better day to do it than on the Sabbath day? You know, did you know that God can work on any day he wants to. He’s not bound by any of it. He can do any kind of work he wants to do.

[00:25:29] But to make his case, Jesus once again sees through the hypocritical view of the religious leaders. He says, you untie your animals. You untie your animals to make sure that they have water on the Sabbath, but you won’t allow a woman to be healed on the Sabbath. How backwards is that? You show compassion to your work animals on a day you’re not supposed to work because they’re thirsty, they’re suffering thirst, and you show them compassion. But if a woman, a member of God’s nation, made in God’s image, has suffered 18 years, she can’t be shown compassion by the Lord on his own day. That makes no sense at all. And this is a huge, huge indictment of rules-based religions, including the ones that skew the gospel, that pretend to be Christian. The rules tend to favor those who are in charge of making them. Now please hear me, church. I’m not talking about sin as the Bible defines it. Okay? We’re not talking about sin here. The Lord has instructions throughout Scripture that keep us away from the corrupting, destroying power of sin and keep us walking in holiness so that we can glorify God. I’m not talking about biblical instruction here. I’m talking about the added man-made rules, the cushion that people build around holiness here. Okay, we’re talking about man-made rules that are not found in the Bible, but get added to Christianity as if they are in God’s Word too.

[00:27:08] Those rules tend to be enforced on other people by the people who made them. Yet the creators of the rules always have loopholes and exceptions. That tends to be how man-made false religions get set up. The leaders always have some exceptions for themselves. The rules are selectively enforced and they’re bent when inconvenient to those who are in charge. And that makes a lot of sense if you’re the ones making up the rules, why wouldn’t you? If a rule can be made, then it can easily be remade, right? It can change on a whim. Remember when you were playing tag as a kid and you were about to get caught and suddenly you declared, I’m not playing. Remember that? Oh, I’m not playing. You can’t tag me out because I’m not playing now. And then they get away and you’re like, I’m playing now. And then you run off. Remember that? Or remember when you could just cross your fingers behind your back and lie about whatever you want? And somehow that made it okay. Remember that? We had a lot of these kinds of rules, didn’t we? Jesus is telling us that the human heart doesn’t outgrow that nonsense. It just gets more sophisticated and it gets more dangerous. Because if we add man-made rules to the gift of God’s saving grace, we can end up in two terrible places.

[00:28:21] We could prevent people from seeing and hearing and savoring and ingesting and experiencing the healing, saving power of Christ. We could prevent people from seeing Jesus. But worse, if we tie our rules too tightly to the gospel, we could create a different, graceless message that isn’t the gospel, and it can’t save anybody at all. And we will have effectively created a false religion. So how do we prevent that? How do we prevent this from happening? How do we keep ourselves from falling into the same hypocritical trap that the religious leaders of Jesus’ day fell into? Well, the first thing we have to do church is we have to lead with grace. That’s the first thing. Grace is what saves. Grace that came through Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for us for our sins. That’s what saves us, not the rules. Grace is what we must preach and share and help the people around us to see. We can’t expect and should not expect non-Christians to conform to the holiness and righteous pattern of life that comes when you love the Lord. If they don’t love the Lord, why would they? Why would a non-believer even want that? How could we expect that of someone? Let’s not ever prevent our friends from getting to the gospel through our witness, because they don’t meet our expectations for what we think they ought to look like. And the second thing that I’d suggest that we all do is make sure that what we think is God’s instruction, really is God’s instruction, that it really is in the scriptures.

[00:30:00] Consistently ask what the Lord requires. Where is it written? What has God said about this? Paul tells us God’s Word will train us in righteousness. It certainly will do that if you if you read it and you treasure it, and you carry it in your heart and you live it out, and you allow it to saturate your mind and your heart so that your actions follow and it applies. But if we add our own homemade rules to what it means to be faithful to the Lord, we could find ourselves losing the gospel altogether. We could skew the gospel so that it’s no longer grace based and isn’t a gospel at all. It’s not good news at all. It’d actually be misleading news. I’d encourage you on every rule that you hold dear, every rule that you think is super important to ask yourself, do I believe this because I prefer it? Or do I believe this because it’s what God said and we’re all on this journey together, church. All of us have these blind spots. We all have areas in our life where we got to ask, is this really what God has said? We’re all there together, and that’s why we need to consistently be opening the Bible together. Let’s pray.

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