Actions Louder than Words (Part B)

It's insulting to God to think that you can get to heaven without the blood of Christ because you are simply saying to God that his son died for nothing. That there's another way to heaven. If I can just be good enough, I can earn my salvation.

That is a lie. Salvation is received, it is not earned. And that is the message of the Gospel.

Who needs a Savior if you can be just a goody two shoes and march into heaven? This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Gospel of Mark.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will continue his message called Actions Louder Than Words in Mark Chapter 2. Holiness comes before happiness and the mission comes before the men. That is the principle of all successful military commanders. It is a principle even with the kingdom of God.

That's what the cross, the emblem we have, says that the cross of Christ. Nevertheless, not my will be done, but your will be done. It is hard to get to that place.

It is not easy to stay in that place. One has to continue to build up the inner man, to build up the faith. Faith comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. One has to be around other Christians to develop these things.

By the sweat of the brow, we go through this life and that's an understatement. But we are still supposed to be victorious in the midst of it all. And those who convince themselves that they are somehow not so bad of a person in the presence of God are spiritually delusional. The greatest need is to be forgiven of their sin and if they don't see that, they've missed the message that God has for humanity. Isaiah 64, we are all like an unclean thing and all our righteousness are like filthy rags.

We all fade as a leaf and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away. There's not one without sin and you can go through this life healthy until you die. But if you have not had your sin forgiven, it does not profit you.

You will not be healthy after this life. Isaiah says we are all unclean. We are an unclean thing and it's an emphatic in the Hebrew, incidentally. But then he points out our righteousness is like filthy. Good deeds compared to God are just not enough.

They're not acceptable. It's insulting to God to think that you can get to heaven without the blood of Christ because you are simply saying to God that his son died for nothing, that there's another way to heaven. If I can just be good enough, I can earn my salvation.

That is a lie. Salvation is received, it is not earned. And that is the message of the gospel. Who needs a savior if you can be just a goody two shoes and march into heaven? And this is part of the lesson, part of the picture that is painted for us in these broad strokes by the Holy Spirit, that sinners are paralyzed until Christ forgives their sin.

Then they can be healed. In verse 2, and some of the scribes are sitting there and reasoning in their hearts. This was their silent criticism and Jesus saw it on their faces. He knew that look, but he also knew that they connected it to blasphemy. Now others were sitting there and they probably could sense too that this wasn't good, but they did not understand that charges of blasphemy were going to come. That was through spiritual discernment according to how Mark tells the story or Peter told it to Mark. Verse 7, and here's what they were reasoning in their hearts. Why does this man speak blasphemies like this?

Who can forgive sins but God alone? Again, this detail, the onlookers did not discern, but Jesus alone, he knew exactly what was going on. Mentally, they were accusing Jesus of insulting God, of overstepping any authority any human being could ever have and making themselves equal with God. This is why when Paul says that Jesus made himself a servant, though equal with God, it is a profound statement that shuts down any cult movement that would dare say that Christ Jesus is not God the Son, as we have in the various cults that are come knocking on your door trying to sell you their magazines. For the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, Watchtower is their authority, not the scripture. Charles Russell is their authority. The Mormons have the different groups. The authority for the Christian is God's word.

It doesn't work any other way. We know what happens when men begin to usurp the authority of scripture and they do it in subtle ways and many times they appear to be well-meaning and very friendly, but they're doing the devil's work. Why not just accept the scripture? Why do I need a man to come along and edit what God has preserved? In verse 7, here they are charging him with blasphemy.

The foundation for this suggestion was scriptural. Isaiah 43, 25, I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins. Okay, God is the one that forgives sins and no one else. The sin of the sinner.

I mean, we can forgive someone for trespassing against us, but God is the one that ultimately forgives sin. What if Christ was God the Messiah? It was in their writings. They had reason to accept that, to believe that, but they were irrational in their unbelief. They were determined to overlook unwelcome facts because he wouldn't do it their way. He would not conform to what they wanted him to do which was to overthrow the Romans. At this early stage, they should have looked at his miracles and listened to his sermons and said to themselves, this man speaks the word of God and he is fulfilling the prophecies of the prophets in what he is doing.

And what he is doing and what he is saying qualifies him to be Messiah. They had no excuse. Peter got it. The untrained fishermen, they got it. Common people, they understood it.

They received it. What was the problem with these religious leaders? Well, the problem is that they thought that they knew better than what the scriptures were saying and this had become a big problem with Judaism because of the rabbis and the leaders, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the lawyers, the scribes.

They locked down the faith and you either conformed to their view or you were out. And this is going to heat up as we go through the Gospel of Mark as most of you know, verse 8 now, but immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, he said to them, why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Now here's an interesting thing. He confronts them. He does not ignore this. He goes after it with the hopes of winning them. He asked them a fair question.

Why are you having a hard time with this? And if they do not submit, then he is exposing them. So he's trying to win them, but he will expose them if they will not accept the facts that are before them, handed to them by God. It was their choice. 1 Timothy chapter 2 verse 4, speaking of the Lord, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Don't ever forget that. Christ wants men saved. No matter what they say, no matter what they do, he wants them saved. Now if we harden our hearts and say, well, I don't like that verse.

They're people I hate. I don't want to see them saved and you become like the Pharisees. The fact of scriptures, the fact of your faith is secondary to your personal feelings.

And of course we must guard against everything. Verse 9, we guard against everything that would attack the faith. Verse 9, Jesus still speaking, he says, which is easier, to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven you, or to say, arise, take up your bed and walk. Christ is essentially saying, you know, talk is cheap.

You say anything you want. I can say your sins are forgiven and you can't prove if they're forgiven or not. It's easy to say your sins are forgiven, but can you back it up, and in this case, by curing the person, by giving him the healing, and that's what he's going to do. Anybody can say your sins are forgiven, but not anyone can couple that with proof and say to show you that his sins are forgiven, he can also walk because God is the healer. And this was not an isolated healing.

He had been doing this all the time. There just was no way anyone could justify rejecting Jesus Christ from the scripture. His preaching and his miracles just took away all the excuses. This is why Nicodemus struggled. He became a prisoner of bad theology.

However, his heart knew, his heart knew that this had to be, there had to be something more to this, and that's why he has this meeting, of course, with Christ, this private meeting, and in the end, Nicodemus is a believer. Joseph of Arimathea, another one. If those two can get saved, then the others had no excuse. But these men were doing other dirty things also.

It wasn't that they were just rejecting Christ and his miracles. They were imprisoning the people with their bad teachings and their corrupt ways, and Christ warned his disciples. He says, you know, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, beware of the leaven of the Sadducees. Watch out for these guys.

They're corrupt. He said unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, that's like saying unless you become better Christians than all the pastors, you can't get to heaven. That's what he said to them. So he said, unless you go beyond with how these Pharisees are behaving, using God's name, using the scriptures, but being corrupt at the same time, unless you get past that, you'd be just like them, ready to be judged.

And so this is a big deal. And then in verse 10, he says, but that you may know that the Son of God has power on earth to forgive sins. And of course he's going to now, he's going to say to the paralytic, I say to you, arise, take your bed, and go home. But back to verse 10, but that you may know that the Son of Man, the Son of God became the Son of Man so that the sons of men could become sons of God. The Son of Man is here, Christ Jesus is the Son of God. He became, he took on humanity so that people, sinners, could enter into heaven through him. Man was made in the image and likeness of God. Sin ruined that image. Jesus came in the image and likeness of men, though he is God the Son.

There's so much packed into this. When he says that you may know the Son of Man, none of the Pharisees could stand up and say, I'm the Son of Man, not like Jesus is applying it. He can say, they can say, I am a son of a man, but not the Son of Man. And he joined himself to humanity to be what he was, both God in his being and man in his flesh, in his, we call it his humanity, the days of his limitation. He had to be what he was to live as he lived, and he lived entirely dependent on God the Father. He came to show us, this is what Israel should be, this is what Adam was supposed to be, joined to God, completely dependent and obedient to God, and ready for service and sacrifice.

That's, we get these lessons, we look at the scriptures and we see it, it comes off the pages right to us. As God, he was never anything less than God. And as a human, he was never anything more than a human. In other words, if you drove a spear into his side, he would bleed, because his body was human. And yet, you couldn't kill him. He gave up his spirit.

No man takes my life from me, I lay it down. That has so many powerful meanings to it. He says he has power on earth to forgive sins. Now this heats up a little bit for us, because the one who has power on earth to forgive sins is Jesus Christ alone.

He delegates this power to no one. This is the authority, that Greek word for power is not dunamis, where we get our English word dynamite, it's not that word, it is excusia, and it means the authority. Now what we do is, we have the authority to say, if you believe in the gospel that Jesus Christ, of course is the son of God, died for our sins, rose again, there is no other savior. If you believe that, then we have the power to say to another person, then you shall be saved. That is the authority that has been given to us, to be able to preach the gospel with confidence, with assurance. But we don't do the saving. That still always belongs to him. And yet, embedded in these words is a very profound truth.

Power on earth. If our sins are to be forgiven, it must be while we are on earth. It will be too late once we are dead.

A lot of people don't like this. They think there's such a spiritual mulligan out there that you're going to get a do-over. That this life really doesn't count.

You can still have a second chance. The Bible doesn't preach that at all. Hebrews chapter 9, it is appointed once for men to die. After this, the judgment. This is very point blank. It's very right there in accordance with what Jesus is saying. You see, in this life, our character and destiny is established.

It's fixed. That's it. You are either going to believe him in this life or you're not. Revelation 21.11, in context of these very things, He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still. He who is holy, let him be holy still.

There comes a point where the band stops playing. And your destiny is going to be in heaven or not. And the Bible offers no hope of redemption beyond the grave. In fact, Luke's Gospel chapter 16 verse 31. This is where Jesus is talking about the rich man and the poor man who both had died and they were separated by this chasm. One is on the righteous side, the other one is not.

The rich man is not, the poor man is. And the rich man wants to send the poor man back to earth. The theology is still messed up even after death in the parable.

He wants to send him back to tell his brothers about this awful place. But this is how Abraham in the parable responds. He said to him, if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead.

This is the proving ground right now. According to the scripture, Moses and the prophets for them, because the New Testament wasn't written at the time that those words, that parable was given. So there's a path. And that path runs from earth to heaven. And there's another path and that one runs from earth to hell. But there is no path from hell to heaven. This is it.

And should it be any other way? This is what Jesus had to say. And Jesus said to him, assuredly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise. That man had evidently lived a life that was loaded with sin.

He was an outlaw. And though his crimes are not detailed, Rome thought they were bad enough to crucify him. And yet Christ forgives him, because the man received Christ as Christ. He did not say, well, look at all of my good. Well, he probably didn't have many good deeds. But even if he did, he would not have been able to say, you owe me salvation. You better let me in.

I've been a good boy. We are innately sinners. As David said, we are born in iniquity. We are born lost. I do believe, you know, the unborn that are slaughtered, I do believe that they have access to heaven because of Christ. Only because of Christ still.

Before the age of accountability. It's kind of a madness on this planet, right? In one part of the hospital, they're doing all they can do to save the newborn's lives. In the other part, they're trying to kill them before they're born. The madness and sickness of man. Well, we get our sins forgiven on earth or not at all. This should be something that we don't have a problem with. Why would we have a problem?

What is unfair about that? In verse 11, I say to you, arise, take up your bed and go to your house. I get the question when he says here, I say to you, the question is who do you say Jesus is?

And that's what's going on right here. He's sort of blocking out the Pharisees and he's saying, I'm telling this man he can get up and walk because I've forgiven his sins. Then the man gets up and walks out.

Well, he has to struggle to get out because it's so crowded. Consider what's going on in the heads of these Pharisees and other witnesses. They heard the sermon.

There's nothing they could disagree with. They saw the roof being broken through. They'll never forget that. They saw the man being lowered down in his helpless, humiliated state, just lying there, dependent on people, hoping that it wouldn't drop him. Then they see the man get up and leave and slowly leave the building. He's leaving slowly because it's so crowded.

He has to squeeze out. They can see this. So when we come to the description, we read certain stories, we're forming a picture in our head as we're reading and it sticks with us. The thief on the cross, for example, which is such an easy sermon to give to an unbeliever. Which one are you? Are you the one that thinks it's bah humbug and don't believe it or are you the one that gets it? After, of course, we lay out the gospel to them why there's... No sinner can deny they're a sinner. No sinner can deny that they do wrong, not only to God's commandments, but to other people.

And how is this accounted for? No one could see the man's sins forgiven, but here was proof. He gave them something everyone could see. In verse 12, immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all so that all were amazed and glorified God saying, we never saw anything like this.

I mean, what do you say to this if you've experienced it? If you were sitting in that room that day and you leave the room and you go, I don't know, to Bethlehem, this is Capernaum. You leave Capernaum and you go to Bethlehem and you say, you won't believe what I just saw. We heard this rabbi preaching and everything was right with the preaching.

And then he explains what happened and how they lowered the man down. Now the people that are hearing him tell this story, are they going to believe him or not? And if they believe him, what are they going to do with what they hear? So the challenge to this day is to tell the story as we've seen it.

But whether they believe it or not is up to the Holy Spirit. We're the ones that are messengers. We're not to mess with the message. We're to deliver it. We're not to open up the message and edit it. We're to deliver it as it has been written. And of course, we get to use our own words to recite the gospel message to others. If we would be more concentrated, or if we would concentrate more on getting this message out than wondering what's going to happen tomorrow in the news, I think it'd be better for all of us.

I think that's what Christ has in mind. You can read the newspapers or, what do you call it now, online? Does it even have a name?

You can read the news sites. There you go. And just ring your fingers and hem and haw and shake your head. Or you can say, Lord, what do you want me to do with this? Get me in front of somebody so I can preach the gospel. I mean, why aren't we crying out, Lord, get me in front of somebody so I can preach Christ. I think that's our response.

I think that's one of the ways we should respond. Well, had this man remained paralyzed, of course, then Christ would not have been the Christ. Jesus would not have been the Messiah.

But he did get up. But you can defeat someone with truth, and they will still tighten their grip on lies nonetheless. Then you have to move on to someone else. They're not ready. They may never be ready.

But don't waste your time. That's what Jesus said, knock the dust off your sandals, move on. There are others to be saved. You can pray for them still, but don't fall for the decoy.

And so he has power to forgive sin, and we have power to side with him against our own sin and to receive his love and his care and his goodness. You know, you're going to be charged as a pastor, I know, I can come up here and just preach the Bible, just recite the words, and there will be some that will dislike me for it and accuse me of being mean-spirited and all those things. The same is going to happen to you and share the gospel. But at the same time, there will be others that will be very grateful, that will benefit from you preaching the word. And that's how it will be as you go out into the world.

There will be those that will never take it, but you want the ones that will. And so that is our encouragement. Don't let hell do all the preaching. And when you turn on those news sites, hell is doing the preaching.

They're holding up in front of you what they're getting away with, and it steams your sense of decency and righteousness. So what are you going to do about it? And I just, I believe what you and I should do about it is say we are going to strike back with the truth. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross Reference Radio.