Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When you face a decision and the Bible doesn't give you a clear, thou shalt not command, when the issue is not black or white, what should you do? How do you make decisions that honor God in the many gray areas of life? Unfortunately, questions like those often get answered with lists of do's and don'ts.
And we rarely ask the question, why? Well today on Grace To You, John MacArthur considers this issue of Christian liberty and the thought process that should guide you in making decisions in areas where God's word is silent. It's part of a series of messages that John preached during chapel services at the Master's University, where John serves as chancellor. But this is not a message only for students. Whether you're starting your career or nearing retirement, whether you're single or newly married or a grandparent, whatever stage of life you are in, today's lesson provides important wisdom for you.
So follow along now as John continues his study called A Course For Life. As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, it's exactly what are we free to do. There are things that are very obvious in the Scripture, clear commands, clearly things that God forbids us to do, spelled out in no uncertain terms. There are also not only negative commands, but positive commands, things we are to do and they're very clear to us as well. But there's a whole world of things that are not talked about in the Bible and that always poses the issue of how do I make a decision, how do I make a choice about what I will do regarding something that's not in the Scripture? Things like, well the Bible talks about these things in this category, food, drink, alcoholic beverages, recreation, sports, television, music, movies, Sunday activity, poker, other kinds of games, smoking, smoking dope, hair styles, clothing styles, and it goes on and on and on. How are we to make decisions about things that are not clearly indicated to us in Scripture? How do we develop criteria to make those kinds of decisions in a way that honors God, in a way that benefits us, in a way that causes the growth of the body of Christ, and in a way that makes the gospel believable and attractive to the unconverted? Number one...number one, we ask a question, will it be spiritually beneficial?
Will it be spiritually profitable? We're not looking for those kinds of things that we can get away with minimum damage. We're not looking for high-risk Christian living. We're not looking for how close can we get to the edge and still not get burned.
And there are a lot of people who think that it's their freedom to live on the edge and try to avoid the disaster. That's never the question. Say it a second way, here's the second point. We'll call the first one expedient, that is it is profitable for me spiritually. The second one, will it contribute to my spiritual development? Will it build me up? If the first one is expedience, this is edification. There's a third principle, will it slow me down in the race?
This is another way to view anything I choose to do. First of all, will it advance me spiritually? That's a positive. Will it continue to progress in the path of edification? That's a positive. Here's a negative approach to it. Will it slow me down in the race?
Will it slow me down? Let me show you the language, therefore we have so great a cloud of witnesses who have testified, as we saw in chapter 11, to the life of faith and its benefits. Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.
Let me give you a fourth one, 1 Corinthians 6, 12, all things are lawful for me but not all things are profitable, we already talked about that. But look at this one, all things are lawful for me but I will not be mastered by anything. So here's the question, will it bring me into bondage? Does this thing develop such an appetite that it becomes habit for me?
It takes over. Number five in my list and a very important principle, kind of turns a little bit of a corner here, this is a question you have to ask, will it really be a cover up of my sin? Will it really be a cover up of my sin? Number six, will it train me to ignore my conscience? Will it train me to ignore my conscience? Now we could spend a whole week talking about the conscience, a very important thing, maybe some day we'll do that. But turn to Romans 14 for a moment, just want to kind of give you the big picture today. When you understand the role of conscience, you benefit greatly from it.
Let me just give it to you real quick, okay? We have the Law of God written in our hearts from birth, Romans 2. Even those who do not have the written Law have the Law of God written in their hearts, okay? There's a moral ought. There's a substantial foundational sense of what is right and what is wrong built into the human mind. It's part of being human to know right from wrong. In fact, in the Old Testament when the prophet Jonah at the end of the prophecy refers to the city of Nineveh, he says that there are about 120,000 who don't know their right hand from their left hand and that is a description of children that parallels one in the Mosaic writing that says they do not know right from wrong. They are below the age where they understand right from wrong. We're talking about pagan people who don't yet know what's right or wrong because they're just little infants, little children. The assumption then is that they will grow to know what is right and wrong. It's part of being a mature human to have that moral sense. Now that moral sense then becomes conditioned by your culture, it becomes conditioned by your religion. So you can see that whatever concept of right and wrong they were born with and the fabric of being human has been massively altered by the religious culture that they have been raised in.
And that is the same thing in America. Ours is a different religious culture and what we have today is a population of people who have had any sense of right and wrong mitigated so that we laugh at homosexuality, we laugh at sexual perversion. We have lost the pristine reality of our moral understanding that comes from God even to an unbeliever and is really a foundation for further conviction and conversion at a later time. Now that's the moral law. It can be misinformed and it is misinformed in our culture so that people's consciences are then misinformed and can't convict people of what they should and should not do.
Let me explain what I mean by that. You also are given by God a mechanism called conscience. Conscience is not a moral law. Conscience is not a set of rules. It is not right and wrong, it is simply a mechanism triggered by your moral law. If you're a Muslim, it triggers your conscience and your conscience moves your emotion and your emotion moves your will and you act. Conscience is a skylight, it's not the light, it's the skylight that lets the light of whatever moral law or ethical law you subscribe to in.
Conscience is only a mechanism. The parallel to it is pain. Pain is a divine mechanism given to you by God. It is a good thing because pain is the mechanism that tells you there's something wrong with your body. The pain is not what's wrong, it's the mechanism that's triggered when something is wrong. Stop doing that, you're hurting yourself. Get help, something's wrong.
That's a gift from God. No pain, you die...you die. That's what leprosy is. Leprosy is a disease of the nerves, you can't feel anything so you rub your fingers off, you rub your nose off, you rub your ears off, you rub your face off, you rub your feet off.
It doesn't eat you, it's just insensitivity and you don't know how much pressure to apply and you rub off your extremities. So that's what conscience does, it's like pain. It simply reacts to a set of convictions. Now that leads me to say this, you want to have the right set of convictions and you have that. You also want to make sure you don't train your conscience to ignore those convictions. The Bible talks about having your conscience seared, that means covered with scar tissue so you can't feel anything. The middle of my back, I lost the entire middle of my back being thrown out of a car when I was a college freshman, sliding about 125 yards down the highway. I've never had any feeling there at all, it's just scar tissue.
It's desensitized. You don't want to do that to your conscience because you want to feel. It was Charles Wesley who wrote a hymn on the conscience, I think it's the only one that's ever been written, nobody ever sings it. But he wanted the conscience to feel every single impulse of the righteous law of God that was in his mind. And you never want to train your conscience to violate that.
You can destroy yourself by having the wrong set of moral convictions, you can also destroy yourself by training your conscience to ignore those convictions. Now with that in mind, go to Romans 14 and this passage...well we'll just start at the beginning. Now accept the one who is weak in faith but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinion. Here we've got an issue where somebody comes to Christ out of a Gentile world, this guy has some convictions, some feelings about his past life that control his freedoms. Could be true of a Jew as well. If a Jew, an orthodox Jew came to Christ, you couldn't feed him a ham sandwich the next day.
Couldn't do it. Couldn't violate his kosher law because if he lived that way his whole life, even though he's come to Christ, his conscience is still going to prick him and convict him about those things that are part of the fabric of his life. And if you were a Gentile and you grew up with idolatry and all that was connected to idolatry, there would be certain things about idolatry when you came to Christ that you would reject wholesale, like meat offered to idols and if you tried to feed a new believer, meat offered to idols and say, ah don't worry about it, you're free to eat this meat, he would gag on it, he would choke on it because his conscience would strike him because he remembers the orgies and the horrors and the blasphemies of that kind of life and wants nothing to do with it.
So there are a lot of scenarios where conscience hasn't yet had time to respond to a new set of laws that are being developed in the heart through the ministry of the Spirit and the Word. So there are some people who are still weak in faith, don't understand their freedoms, they don't think they can eat all things, maybe they eat only vegetables cause they don't want to eat meat offered to idols, maybe they're Jewish, they don't want to eat anything that's unclean. Verse 3, let not him who eats regard with contempt whom he doesn't eat. You can't look down on these people.
Come on, get with your freedoms, guys. Let him not who does not eat judge him who eats, for God has accepted him. Why are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls, stand he will, for the Lord's able to make him stand. One man regards one day above another. If you always were in a Jewish environment, you believe the Sabbath was the right day, you're going to believe the Sabbath is still a critical day of worship to the Lord because that's the conviction system that's embedded in you, your conscience is going to react to that.
On the other hand, if you came out of a Gentile environment, you're not going to have any particular concern about the Sabbath day, so it's going to differ. One man regards the day above another, another regards every day the same. Let each man be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day observes it for the Lord. He who eats does it for the Lord. He who gives thanks to God, he who eats not, for the Lord he doesn't eat and gives thanks to God. We're not living to ourselves, we're not dying to ourselves. If we live, we live for the Lord.
If we die, so forth. It's all because somebody is trying to honor the Lord. So you just don't ever want to do anything that violates your conscience.
And I think that's important to remember in a community even like this. You've got many of you who have come from backgrounds where there were certain things that you felt were wrong. You were raised in a family to think those things were wrong. If you go against what your conscience tells you, even though you have the freedom to do it, you will begin to train your conscience...train yourself, I should say, to ignore your conscience.
That's not helpful. You don't want to train yourself to ignore your conscience. Go to verse 22, the faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Don't train yourself to ignore your convictions because in time you'll grow.
In time you'll understand. In time you'll enjoy some liberation from those things and your conscience will affirm you rather than convict you. Your conscience will excuse you, in the words of Paul, rather than accuse you. But the rest of us who may be a little further along, we affirm that you ought not to do anything that violates your conscience. Sometimes somebody's with a group of people, they're going to go do something and they say, well I don't feel I should do that, I have convictions about that, I don't feel comfortable doing that. And you want to honor that person completely, there's a perfect illustration of a weaker brother whose conscience you do not want to defile because not only will it bring conviction, it will bring a loss of joy, it will bring a burden of guilt and it will push them back the wrong direction. The Lord is in charge of each of us.
The faith which we have is the faith which we have. Happy, verse 22, is he who doesn't condemn himself in what he approves. You don't want to get to the point where you are in the name of freedom and under some kind of pressure doing what you feel is not right because if you doubt, you're going to be condemned if you eat because you're not eating from faith, whatever is not from faith is sin to you. Don't train yourself to ignore your conscience.
Be patient. Whatever your conscience convicts you about wonderful, that's who you are before the Lord. Have as your own convictions before God and over time God will grow you to enjoy your freedoms.
I call that the principle of encroachment. You're encroaching, in a sense, on sacred territory, the territory of conviction and conscience, okay? Number seven...number seven, will it help others by its example?
Will it help others by its example? First Corinthians chapter 8, we'll just do this one quickly. Verse 9, First Corinthians 8 and 9, take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. The end of verse 13, I will never eat meat again, in the context meat offered to idols that I might not cause my brother to stumble. Is it wrong to eat meat offered to idols? No, Paul just said it's not wrong to eat meat offered to idols. An idol is nothing, an idol is nothing, it doesn't matter. You can eat meat offered to an idol, that's not an issue.
But for some people it is an issue. They were saved out of idolatry and they can't have the freedom to eat that meat that was offered to those blasphemous idols with which they were once associated in such sinful ways. And they're just not free to eat that meat.
Well then, if you're with them, don't eat it. Do not use your freedom in any other way than to set a virtuous and godly example for others. So you limit your freedom. Tom Pennington said that in the little Q&A. He said, you know you're spiritually mature when you're free not to use your freedoms.
Why? Because you're concerned about setting an example for someone who if they followed those freedoms would stumble into sin. When people ask me about that, I say, well there are things I don't do. The things I could do, I don't do them.
And the reason I don't do them is because if I do them, I would then become the person who sort of granted defacto permission to everybody else to do that and they might not be able to handle that and it might cause them to sin. That's the reason I don't drink alcoholic beverages, for example. First of all, I don't need to drink them. I can drink water just as well and Diet Pepsi if I have a choice.
Or I can drink juice or anything. I don't need it. I'm not living in the Middle Ages. I'm not living in biblical times.
I'm not living in a time when all there was was the fruit juices that fermented in a hot environment and had to be diluted with water to protect against drunkenness. I don't need to do that. And is it wrong to do that? No, it's not wrong to do that.
And that's not the point in and of itself. It's wrong to be drunk. It's wrong to lose your control and to lose your senses. But I choose not to do that because as sure as I would do that, that would be enough for anybody to say, well John MacArthur does it, it must be fine, let's have at it and pretty soon somebody's drunk.
Is that my fault? Not really, but I just don't want to be the excuse that causes somebody to stumble into sin. Paul talks about this constantly in his writings which we looked at a minute ago in Romans 14 and 15, maybe just one quick reference, Romans 15, 1, we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves.
If you're strong, you bear the weaknesses of those who are weak, you don't just please yourself. Let us each please his neighbor for his good to his edification. So you just want to do whatever is going to be to the benefit of others who are watching your life. You don't want to cause them to stumble and there's more in 1 Corinthians 8, you don't want to cause them to grieve, be devastated, you don't want to pull down the work of God in their lives.
So that's the principle of example, all right? Number eight, will it lead others to Christ? Will it lead others to Christ?
That's an evangelistic issue. Just quickly, Romans 14, 16, do not let what is for you a good thing be spoken of as evil for the Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. He who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.
That's the operative statement, approved by men. When you live the kind of life that never abuses freedom, you give the best opportunity for men to make a positive commendation on your life. If you're calling yourself a Christian, declaring you're a Christian and living on the edge of freedom, then the message may be a little bit harder to communicate because the model and the example of your life is so close to what people are all engaged in. I think it's the restrictions of our spiritual lives that show people in a visual way the distinctiveness of the work of Christ in our hearts. And if our lives are going to be approved at dachimos, if they're going to be tested by the people who watch us and approved after such examination, then we have to live lives that are far from the edge. We've got to pull back into the zone where we are manifestly different than our culture.
Two more and I'll just mention them because time is gone. Will it be consistent with Christ's likeness? The principle I just gave is the principle of evangelism, if you're writing them down, the principle of evangelism. Number nine, will it be consistent with Christ's likeness? First John 2, 6, you can look it up. First John 2, 6, if we say that we're in Christ, that we abide in Him, we ought to walk as He walked. So you ask that big question, what would Jesus do, right? What would Jesus do? Would Jesus do this? Can it pass that test and a final test, will it glorify God? By the way, the what would Jesus do is emulation if you're looking for an E, emulation. And the last one, will it glorify God? Whatever you do with it, eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God, the principle of exaltation.
All right, expedience, will it be profitable? Edification, will it build me up? Excess, will it slow me down? Enslavement, will it bring me into bondage? Excuse, will it be a cover for my sin? Encroachment, will it train my conscience in the wrong direction?
Example, will it set a helpful pattern? Evangelism, will it lead others to Christ? Emulation, will it be like Christ? Exaltation, will it glorify God?
I call this the ease of decision making. Let's pray. Father, what a great morning of fellowship and worship and just wonderful to be together and consider Your Word and how rich it is. May we apply it to Your glory in Christ's name.
Amen. That's John MacArthur looking at five principles that will help you honor the Lord with your decisions, even in matters that the Bible doesn't specifically address. It's part of a foundational series titled A Course for Life. Along with teaching each day on Grace to You, John is also a pastor, author, and chancellor of the Master's University. Now, John, what we've been listening to is obviously applicable for anyone at any age, but I understand you're especially concerned that younger people let these lessons sink in, reaching people early, helping them make those important course corrections.
It doesn't get much more strategic than that. No, it doesn't, and I fear that kids, young kids, make bad decisions. Parenting can be a liability. The ubiquitous presence of lies and deception and pornography and all this kind of garbage can lead young people down the wrong path, and then what happens is later in life the Lord gets ahold of them, but they've got a past history of sin that just keeps getting recycled in their mind, and it's so debilitating. This is why we do what we do at Grace Church. We want to get them when they're born, and we want to begin to teach them the Word of God from the very, very beginning. I think the reason people just keep flocking into Grace Community Church is, I mean, I think the preaching of the Word is a powerful influence, but I think it's as much as anything our children's ministry.
Parents are frightened about what direction their kids are going to go and what influences they're going to face in this world, and I think the same thing at the Master's University. We've been doing this series on chapel in the Master's University, and it isn't that we have a student body full of people who are afraid and their parents have sent them there, but there are kids who have come to understand that this is a very, very dangerous world they live in, and they want to be able to be prepared so that they can honor the Lord and not become a casualty, not become a disaster. So we've endeavored in this series called A Course for Life to bring you into chapel at the Master's University. This was sort of a top ten collection for students of any age serious about living a life that honors our Lord, and I've been doing chapel for almost 35 years at the Master's University, and this has been a kind of selection of some of the top messages.
It's really a blueprint for every believer, but boy, we want to get it started when they're young. So if you are a student, this would be a great series to get. It's a 10-CD album, and much more teaching than we had time to air on the radio. We didn't give all of it, but the 10-CD album is available, and you can order it from Grace to You, and by the way, only from Grace to You. So get the series, A Course for Life.
Get it for your children, get it for your grandchildren, get it for the young people in your church, get it for your youth leaders, and begin to feed the Word of God into this young generation that is so being assaulted by the enemy. Yes, for anyone at a crossroads looking for guidance for the immediate future or life further down the road, A Course for Life is packed with practical insight and direction, and as John said, it comes with a lot of material that we didn't have time to air. To get a copy for yourself or a few copies to give away, contact us today. Call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org.
A Course for Life comes in a 10-CD album. The cost is reasonable, and shipping is free. Again, to place your order, call toll-free 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. At our website, you can also download this series in audio or transcript format, free of charge. In fact, all of John's sermons from over 51 years of his pulpit ministry are free to download at gty.org. And, friend, thanks for remembering that your support helps us take John's verse-by-verse teaching to people around the globe, from Southern California to Australia to countless places in between and on the other side of the world. To partner with us, make your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. You can also make a one-time donation when you visit gty.org or when you call 800-55-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here Friday as we break from our normal schedule to air a Bible Q&A session. Tune in tomorrow and see if John answers a question about the Bible that you've had. It's sure to be a practical half-hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
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