No Hidden Light

When you have the light of Christ, it cannot be hidden in you.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

[00:00:00] Well, I once had a conversation with a mom who was struggling with how to think about her adult son. I’ve had a lot of these conversations over the years. It seems like more and more I’m talking to parents about their adult children more all the time, but this one stands out to me because of the way this very loving mother was hopeful for her son, almost to the point where she was willing to believe things that she knew, deep down weren’t true. See, her son had become very openly antagonistic against Christ. This was back when New Atheism was was a movement for a time. It was popular. Back in that 2005 2015 range, New atheists decided to become angry and belittling as a way of getting their message out, and this man had decided that he was going to be this way with his newfound atheism. He was. He was going to be this angry, uh, worldly anger focused on on other people, focused on Christians. That’s how he wanted to carry his new found anti-Christ worldview. He decided to openly live out all of his sinful choices, and then excuse them simply by being mean to people who were of faith people, including his family. And this mom, understandably, was having a very difficult time with this, this conversation with him. But what stood out to me about this particular conversation that I had with this, with this woman, was the way that she was trying to find hope.

[00:01:42] See, she was clinging to the idea that her son was somehow still a Christian, because when he was a child, he had prayed a prayer of salvation. He attended church regularly, and he was actively part of the youth group. In other words, he’d gone through all the steps that she believed were necessary for salvation. And since he had salvation, she reasoned, this new behavior had to be some sort of a wayward place within the kingdom of God, under the umbrella of Christ’s salvation. Now I completely understand that, that desire to think that way, I get it. I get wanting to think like this. There is there are no Christian parents on earth who who don’t have right at the top of their list, the hope that their children will be saved from their sins through salvation in Christ. There’s there’s no parents like that. All of them want that. And I know many of you are in the same sort of family situation that I described here just a moment ago. You hear that? And you go, yes, I resonate with that. You have close family members who have reactions to the gospel that range from disinterested to antagonistic. Some really don’t want to talk about Jesus, others. Others want to attack Jesus and anybody who trusts in Jesus. So what I say today, I say in love as always, always. I want to be careful to build you up in Christ, while at the same time not sugarcoating what Jesus says about salvation and giving you a false hope because you don’t need false hope.

[00:03:24] Any real hope. The consistent message of Scripture. From Genesis to Revelation is that there is no category of a person who is saved by the Lord from the penalty of their sins, who is not also obedient to the Lord in what they say and do. There is no category like that. Romans ten verse nine says, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. So confession and belief are inseparable. Now a person can say something that they don’t believe, but then either they are lying or they’re delusional. They’re either lying to you. They’re lying to themself. True confession comes from true belief. And furthermore, James chapter two, verse 22 says that faith is active along with works, and that faith is completed by works. And so there’s a connection between what someone believes and what they say and what they do. You can’t see a person’s heart. I can’t look into your heart. You can’t look into mine. You can’t look into another person’s soul and see spiritual things. But you can listen to them talk about Jesus. You can you can see the works of righteousness that they do because of Jesus. We’re saved by faith.

[00:04:54] Alone in Christ alone. Works don’t save us. They don’t. But confession and works are the evidence of faith in Christ. And without them, there’s there’s no faith. And there’s no reason to believe that someone has saving faith. I think the church, some churches, have done a great disservice to in giving the false hope to people who are counting on a category of wayward Christian as the solution for their loved one, and that’s not where the hope should be. The hope should be found in the sovereignty of God and in the proclaiming of the gospel and evangelism. That’s where that’s where the hope should be. We should be praying for God’s work and sharing the gospel with our friends and family members, even the ones who, at one time in their life claimed with their mouth to follow Jesus, but now currently do not. Evangelism is the answer there. That’s one of the takeaway takeaways from the parable of the soils that you heard last week. See, there can be a a time in a person’s life when he appears to know and embrace the Lord. But we have to see the fruit of true conversion. Passion for Jesus over a lifetime and perseverance in Christ through difficult times are the evidence of faith. That’s how you can see faith. There will be fruitfulness as this person engages in the mission of Jesus. There’s going to be an unquenchable fire for worship in the heart of a man or woman who has become a new creation in Christ.

[00:06:30] This morning, we’re going to explore this truth more deeply as Jesus elaborates on the parable of the soils using a different metaphor. He’s going to use the metaphor of light. When you have the light of Christ, it cannot be hidden in you. So if you have your Bible, go ahead and open to Luke chapter eight. We’re going to begin in verse 16 today. Jesus describes in this passage what I am going to call inescapably evident salvation. Inescapably evident salvation. Jesus is going to describe real, saving faith that transforms a person’s heart as something that you can see. It’s evident. And it has to be that way. It’s inescapable. It’s inescapably evident. Now, if you don’t like that phrase, you are welcome to get out of thesaurus and come up with your own phrase. Uh, because the words that I used here are not the important thing. The biblical teaching is what is important. Let’s walk through Jesus message here a sentence at a time, so you can see how Jesus describes the evidence of real salvation. First, he’s going to show us that it’s evident. Then he’s going to show us that it’s inescapably so. And finally he’ll tell us what we should do about it and how to know that we have it. Let’s begin in verse 16. No one, after lighting a lamp, covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand so that those who enter may see the light.

[00:08:02] So the first big question we have to answer is what does the light represent here? In this passage, you can’t assume what it means, because light is used in various ways throughout Scripture to represent slightly different things. For instance, you hear me quote all the time that we are sent into the world as salt and light. One of my favorite metaphors to use for how we are to interact in the world that comes from Matthew chapter five, Jesus Sermon on the Mount. It’s a really good metaphor for the kind of evangelism that we should be doing in the world. We carry the light of the gospel into a dark world. Here, light serves a little bit of a different role. It still has to do with the gospel, but it’s it’s in reference to a person’s own display of the gospel. So the light of the gospel here is not so much focused on illuminating the world, but it’s focused on whether or not it has illuminated our own dark hearts. You’ll remember from last week that the parable of the soils teaches us about the four different ways that the gospel will be received or rejected by people. It’s the last soil, the good soil, that represents the person who has had a heart transformation so that they receive the Word of God.

[00:09:22] And when they receive it, then they become fruitful. That good soil person is the focus of this light imagery. So what Jesus is doing here is he is elaborating on the good soil guy or girl, and he says that no one, after lighting a lamp, puts it under a jar or puts it under a bed. I think the people down at Yankee Candle are just trolling Jesus here. They’re like, we didn’t put the candle under the jar. We put it in the jar. I think that is dangerously close. Also, by the way, do not put a lamp, a lit lamp under your bed unless you hate your home and everything in it. Okay. What’s Jesus saying here? What’s he. What’s he saying? Well, he’s saying that when the gospel has illuminated your heart, you won’t hide it. You won’t hide it. You’ll display it. And there’s a very important a very important distinction here. Jesus is not instructing us not to hide the light of the gospel. He’s telling us that the light can’t be hidden. Okay. See that he’s not. He’s not saying don’t hide the light under the jar or under the bed. He’s saying no one does that. Nobody does that. If you light a lamp, you put it on a stand so that others can see it so that it’s useful. There’s. There’s no such thing as salvation in Christ that can’t be seen.

[00:11:00] There’s no such. There’s no category. It’s all always evident. I talked to a guy one time that I met through my involvement in community theater and his wife. He and his wife were were Mormons, and they found out that I am a Christian. And so I started to talk to them about faith issues, but they shut me right down because he said that they believed that spiritual beliefs were deeply personal issues and should be kept that way, not shared with other people. I don’t think I have ever met a mormon who felt that way. Not not one time. I mean, I thought that is what they’re known for is sharing the beliefs that they have. This guy must have been part of the keep it to yourself subset of Mormons, I guess. But church. There are people. There are people who claim the name of Christ. There are people who who claim the name of Christ or Christian as their identity, but they appear, for all practical purposes, to have the same philosophy as my Mormon friend. My Christian belief is just my personal view, and it doesn’t really affect my life in any discernible way. And frankly, I’d rather not talk about it. Friends. Jesus says here that faith in him is never going to look like that. If you have true faith in him, it will never be hidden like that. It will never be hidden inside of you.

[00:12:25] If it is, you don’t have it. Of those four soils that we talked about last week, do you know which ones concerns me the most? It’s that third soil. The people in and around the Christian community who know the words. They know how to blend in. They even enjoy the community, but they don’t display the transformation of their hearts by the gospel in any evident way. They’re content with a brand of false Christianity that doesn’t make much of God, of the glory of God. It doesn’t make much of the mission of Christ or of the work of the Holy Spirit. And so what they’ll do is they’ll pick and choose when they want to be obedient to Jesus based on what suits their tastes and what they want in life. They want just enough obedience to keep the label and remain reasonably comfortable within the church. But when obedience is costly and difficult and requires repentance and sacrifice, they choose their own way. They go their own route. They do what’s right in their own eyes. In that moment, they’re not denying themselves and picking up a cross any time soon. They’d rather just be labeled Christian and left alone. And if that is you, if that’s how you feel, let me warn you. You are trusting in a false gospel that cannot save you. The evidence of salvation is a passion to display the glory of God, to engage in the mission of Christ, and to walk in step with the Holy Spirit.

[00:13:55] You can’t do that in a hidden way. You can’t do that hiding at the same time. And that’s exactly what Jesus says next. He says the evidence is inescapable, for nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. A lot of times we think of this sort of teaching in relation to sin, and we do see places in Scripture where hidden sin is revealed by the gospel. First Corinthians four five, for instance, says that when God’s judgement comes against sin, for those who don’t trust in Christ’s atonement for their sins, it will, quote, bring to light the things now hidden in darkness, and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Later on in this book. In Luke chapter 12, Jesus describes the leaven of the Pharisees, or the sins of the Pharisees as something that they might try to cover up to keep their sin hidden. But Jesus says it will be made known. He says, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in quiet rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops. So sometimes this this revealing, uh, applies to sin in general. Those who who have Jesus have their sins covered by Jesus. Those who don’t will answer for every single sin before the Lord.

[00:15:25] It will all be uncovered. But here, in the context of Luke eight, there’s a slightly narrower sense to what he’s saying here. This is talking about revealing a person’s true identity. Nothing is hidden that won’t be made manifest, specifically the type of soil that each person is. There’s there’s nothing secret that won’t be eventually brought into the light, including the secret true identity behind that, that facade that we like to put forward to other people. A follower of Jesus who has been filled with the light of Christ will be evident. You’re going to see the light in what that person says and does. But the nominal Christian guy that the private faith guy that don’t make a big deal out of Jesus guy, he’s eventually going to be seen for who he is, the faithless guy. Eventually, every person will stand before the Lord with their true identities exposed. All that excuse making and lack of repentance, all that judgmental attitude, that lack of grace, all that fake going through the motions. Christianity gets exposed for what it really is a Christ less philosophy that cannot save you. You know that part in Matthew chapter seven? It’s right near the end of the sermon on the Mount, where there’s this group of people who stand before the Lord on Judgment Day, and they they start to list off all the things they did for Jesus. Do you remember that part? End of the sermon on the Mount.

[00:17:02] I’ve always been concerned for these folks. See church. There’s a set of people who will stand before the Lord and rattle off a number of the good things that they did. But when they get to the end of that list, Jesus says to them, I never knew you. Yeah, you did things. You said my name. You did things, but I didn’t know you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness! There’s a there’s a set of people who don’t know Jesus, but they’re not. They’re not what we would call bad people. They did nice things. They might have even done nice things in Jesus name. But they didn’t know Jesus. Their hearts weren’t transformed by him. They were trusting in their goodness, not in his grace. That should that should cause every one of us to sit up and take stock of our own hearts, to actually look inside of ourselves. Because this is not a game. You can rest in the grace of Jesus Christ, but you should not rest until you see the evidence of that grace in your life. If there is not a great love for Jesus, a passion for his mission, a yearning to see the glory of God shine out of your life, then you have missed the gospel somehow. And you’re in grave danger. That’s why Jesus warns us, take care then, how you hear. For to the one who has more will be given, and from the one who has not.

[00:18:26] Even what he thinks he has will be taken away. Take care, then how you hear is not exactly the same thing as listen carefully. Listening carefully just means making sure you don’t tune out. Taking care of how you hear means considering your own heart, attitude, and your heart posture toward the thing that you’re listening to. See earlier. Earlier, Jesus said at the end of his parable, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. So take care. How you hear is like asking the question, do you have these ears? Can you actually hear this? I know that you heard what I said. Do you understand it? Are you applying it? You ever talk to somebody who asks you for your advice, and then you start to give them your advice? And when you get to the end of your advice, it’s pretty clear that they were just going to do whatever they wanted to do, even when they started that conversation with you. Right? They didn’t really. They heard you. But they didn’t really hear you. If I share biblical truth with a person who doesn’t love Jesus, they’re either going to be transformed by that gospel and have their eyes of their hearts open to receive that truth, or they’re going to explain it away and excuse it away. There’s only two outcomes to the light of God’s Word.

[00:19:52] Now, last week we saw that there are four responses to the gospel represented by the soils. But there are only two outcomes. There’s only two destinations. Think of it like AA4 lane highway that’s going to merge into another highway. And three of the lanes go off to the left and one lane goes off to the right. So you have four lanes, but only two outcomes. There are those who have had their hearts transformed. And what’s happening now is they are soaking up God’s word like water. This is water to a dying man or woman. To them they they need God’s word. They are seeing the fruit of righteousness coming out of them. And they want to they want to grow in that. They they lean into biblical truth because the more their their minds and their hearts are conformed and transformed by the light of the gospel, the more they want to grow in their passion for Jesus, they have Jesus on display in their life, and they’re going to receive more of him more and more and more until they’re with him. The other reaction is not to hear and understand the gospel, not to be transformed by it. And these folks might be able to explain the gospel. But they’re not listening to it. They don’t have ears to hear it. Jesus says that they may even be delusional about it. You see that? You see where it says what they think they have.

[00:21:22] They would say they have something. They think they have something. They think they’re covered by Jesus. They think they’re good to go and they’re not. Whatever it is that they’re trusting in, whatever they think that that they have that justifies them before the Lord, even that is going to be taken away from them in the time of judgment. Maybe you’ve heard me say this is the hardest part of being a pastor. I’ve mentioned this before. One of the hardest parts of being a pastor is trying to discern the difference between a person who has been transformed by the gospel, and one who can simply parrot it back to me. That’s really hard. It’s hard to discern. I believe the hardest deception to overcome is self-deception. This is the hardest one to overcome. If someone if someone lies to me, okay, another person lies to me, I can hear the words and I can consider the tone of the words that are coming at me. I can investigate the facts. I can interview other people involved. I can I can work my way to the bottom of the issue and and and discover the lie, find the truth. If that’s if it’s coming at me, I can do all of those things. But if I lie to myself, I say the words and I say them in the tone that I want. I choose the facts to consider, and I’m the only one to interview.

[00:22:48] If I’m. If I’m determined to believe lies and to make them the truth in my mind and my heart, I will find a way to do that. So how do we know our own hearts? How do we know? How do how do we how do we read ourselves? Well, Scripture gives us many ways to discern and many pictures of the evidence, and this passage ends with one of them. Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, your mother and your brothers are standing outside desiring to see you. But he answered them, my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it. So Jesus gets on teaching the crowd the the parable of the soils and the and the light metaphor. And suddenly his family shows up and they want to see him, but they can’t get through the crowd. You know, the crowd often got around Jesus, and it was hard for people to make their way into where Jesus is. And so they see some of the disciples see his family standing out there, and they go to Jesus and they say, Hey, Jesus, your, your mom and your brothers are out here and they want to see you. And Jesus says, one of the coldest things I’ve ever heard of in Scripture is you see how cold that sounds? Does he not like these people very much? Is he trying to get away? Oh, no.

[00:24:15] They found me. Know Jesus loves to use loves to use opportunities, right? He loves. He loves teachable moments. He loves to turn to something like a fig tree that he sees there and turn it into a teachable moment. He’ll take a a moment and an encounter with a woman at the well, or even the death of his friend Lazarus, and he’ll turn that into an opportunity to teach a spiritual truth. So, of course, he loves his family. But when he heard about family, he thought, you know what? This is a moment where I can teach about what true family is. His family was unable to get to him. Jesus says, you know who’s really in my family? It’s the people who hear the Word of God and they do it. Obedience to the Word of God is the evidence that you are in the family of God. If you want to know how to discern that you’re in God’s family, that you’re a brother or sister in Christ, you need to ask yourself, when God speaks, do I listen and obey? Is that my reaction when, when I, when I, when I, when I have a question, I go to the God’s Word and I see what it says there. And I listen to it and I obey.

[00:25:20] Is God’s Word giving me direction, our God’s words, my marching orders. And not just when it’s easy. Church. Let me tell you when you’re going to have the most assurance that you’re firmly fixed within the family of God. It’s when you are obedient to Christ, despite your sinful inclination to follow your own heart’s desire. That’s when you’ll know. And I’m not talking about when you have pressure from outside the world that that in the world that’s always going to be there. There’s always going to be that pressure from outside in the world pushing us in various directions. I’m talking about when you start to feel the pressure from within. When you have an internal desire to to make a sinful choice that you think will make your life better or easier, or more comfortable or more pleasurable in some way, when that inner pressure comes up and that choice is before you and you want to go in that direction, and you take that choice to Scripture and you say, Lord Jesus, what would you have me do? And you and you hear God’s word very clearly command you to go the hard route. To go the hard route to take up the cross and follow Jesus, knowing full well that that will be very, very hard. And you do it anyway. You go that way anyway, and you do it because Jesus is more precious to you than any fleeting, sinful pleasure in this world.

[00:26:48] It’s in those moments of inner turmoil when you remain firmly obedient to Christ, that you will solidify your confidence that you’re in Jesus family. For years I have watched people in the church. Supposedly Christians talk a good game about obedience to God’s Word right up until the point that it costs too much. They were faithful. They were doing it all. They were. They were walking alongside when it was easy and convenient, and they got patted on the back for it. But when it got to the point where there was an obstacle in the way where they didn’t get what they wanted and it cost too much, they decided, no, now I’m going to go my way. I’ve had a hard week this week, this week, imploring supposed Christians to hear and apply God’s Word to turn from their sin and not shipwreck their faith. It’s in those terribly difficult moments that we get to see the full evidence of our own hearts transformed by grace. The light of Christ, if it is truly in us, will shine out of us. It is unable to be hidden. Your inclusion in the family of God, if you are indeed part of it, will never be hidden. It will always be evident. It will cause you to rejoice in Christ, to live in obedience to Christ, and to faithfully carry out the mission of Christ. Take care how you hear this. Good news of the kingdom of God. Let’s pray.