We talk about nominal Christianity—people who are Christians in name only, but have no passion for the things of God. They may understand theology; they may have their intellects tickled by discussions of doctrine, but their hearts are far from the kingdom. Do you have a passion for the things of God? True Christians are marked by a love for God, a love that drives us to seek Him, to know Him, and as R.C. Sproul will explain in today's message, to press into the kingdom of God.
This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and I'm glad you're joining us today. This week we'll be concluding our brief study in Luke's Gospel, and this also means that today is your final opportunity to receive the digital edition of R. C. Sproul's Expositional Commentary on Luke. You can make your gift at renewingyourmind.org, and thank you in advance for your gift.
Your generosity helps make this podcast available to Christians all around the world, so thank you. Let's join R. C. now with a message from Luke chapter 16. We're going to continue with our study of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, and we're in the 16th chapter, verses 14 through 18.
Now, the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, also heard all these things, and they derided him. And he said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. The law and the prophets were until John, and since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it." And is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fail. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries her who is divorced from her husband commits adultery.
Following the somewhat lengthy parable of the unjust steward, which was given specifically. For the benefit of the hearing of the disciples, we see that those who were standing outside of the group of disciples listening in to that parable were the Pharisees. And so we read in verse 14 that the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, also heard these things. That is, the parable of the unjust steward, who was not a Sound keeper of money, and about whom Jesus said, "You cannot serve God and mammon." That is, God and your money. And the Pharisees, we are told here, were lovers of money.
And I think we are aware of one of the most misquoted verses in all of sacred scripture. Is the verse that people quote as saying "money is the root of all evil," but that's not what the Bible says. The Bible doesn't say that money's the root of all evil. It says that the love of money is the root of all evil, and if the love of money is a root. That root had sprung up in full measure to a forest of trees in the hearts and souls of the Pharisees, and so, being lovers of money, they were seriously offended by Jesus' teaching on stewardship, and their response to the message that our Lord gave to them in the parable of the unjust steward.
Was not to flee to him in repentance, but rather to stand back and deride him, or rather to sneer at him. Can you imagine sneering at Jesus? It would seem that behavior could sink no lower than that. Than to hold the Son of God Himself in contempt, and yet this is the almost universal reaction of the world to Jesus, to all of those who are outside the kingdom of God, though they may make empty compliments of Jesus, calling him a great teacher or a prophet. Nevertheless.
By their response to His word, indicate that in the deepest chambers of their heart, they hold Him in contempt.
So Jesus responded to this sneering of the Pharisees, and He said, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men." Is an abomination in the sight of God. We live in a topsy-turvy world where princes walk in rags and beggars ride on horses. We live in a culture that exalts people of unspeakable immorality. People are praised.
In our culture, while at the same time, they're an abomination to God. Let me just stop for a second here. Do you ever think about that of anything's being an abomination to God? I mean, we're told every day that God loves everybody unconditionally, and we don't have any room in our thinking or in our theology for the idea. That something may be an abomination in God's eyes.
Well, we might say, well, certain behavior patterns are an abomination to Him. God absolutely hates sin. He loves the sinner, but He hates the sin. Where do you find that in the Bible? You read in the Psalms.
You read in the prophets that God abhors the evil doer. That the evil doer is an abomination. In his sight, he doesn't send sin to hell at the judgment day. He sends people there because they're an abomination to him. There was probably never a more abominable group of people that walked the earth than the Pharisees, who prided themselves in their righteousness and their goodness.
These were the people who thought that if they lived the good life. That was enough for them to be justified and to enter into the kingdom of God. How many people do you know who are relying on living a good life to get themselves into heaven? Who are practicing self-justification? Who are resting on their good deeds and their performance to pass the bar of God's justice?
There's no more foolish endeavor, no greater fool's errand, than to seek to enter the kingdom of God by your own good works. But that's not only what the Pharisees did, but that's what they taught everybody else.
Now Jesus speaks briefly about the law. He said the law and the prophets were until John. Not that they were until Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament. But when he talks about the law and the prophets, he's talking about the whole progress of the Old Testament, which he said goes right up to and includes John the Baptist.
So the John the Baptist, though he's written about in the New Testament, belongs to the period of redemptive history that we call the Old Testament or the Old Covenant. The Law and the Prophets ruled until that is up to and including John. But with the advent of John the Baptist' ministry, a crisis point in all of history took place because John. Was the forerunner of the Messiah, and he proclaimed the crisis of human history when he said, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." And then he pointed to Jesus and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." And Jesus enters into his public ministry, and his message is the same: the kingdom of God. Is at hand, and the Pharisees heard that.
And first they yawned, then they sneered, then they murdered, because the last thing they wanted was the kingdom of God. But Jesus said this: since that time, since John, the kingdom of God has been preached. And everyone is pressing into it. I love this text. Jonathan Edwards preached an entire sermon just on those words, entitled "Pressing into the Kingdom of God." And he talked of those multitudes of people who, when they heard Jesus speak about this kingdom, they flocked to him.
They rushed to him. They pursued him. With all of their might, and wherever he went, they were following him in huge throngs, not simply to get healed, but to hear about the kingdom that Jesus was speaking of. And so Jesus elsewhere said they, they were taking the kingdom of God by force, as violent men. You couldn't keep them away.
They were battering down the doors. Anything to get into the kingdom of God. And as they were saved, that striving, that pressing, that forcing didn't stop. It now accelerated. Paul understood that when he said to his readers, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." The kingdom of God has never been a casual affair.
Jesus rebuked the church that led to save because it was lukewarm. Said, "I'd rather that you be cold or hot, but if you're lukewarm, I'm going to spit you out of my mouth." We talk about nominal Christianity. People who are Christians in name only, but have no passion for the things of God, they may understand theology, they may have their intellects tickled by discussions of doctrine, but their hearts are far from the kingdom. They're not pressing into the kingdom of God. If you notice, Psalm eighty-four.
Listen to these words for a second, where the psalmist writes, "How lovely is your tabernacle, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yea, even faints, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh." Cry out for the living God. Does that sound like you? Do you think about coming to church on Sunday morning and think about entering into the sanctuary, and you say, "Oh, wow!
I can't wait to walk in there. How lovely is the court of the Lord, my soul." Longs, it aches, it swoons, it faints to be in the sanctuary of God, because my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
Now we look at times in church history where the Spirit of God visited the people of God in extraordinary ways. We think of the great awakening of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, where zeal for the things of God swept across the land as the gospel was recovered anew. We think of the great awakening in America in the 18th century, with the preaching of Whitfield and Edwards and John Wesley. You think of the Welsh revival, when God visited His people. And woke them up out of their dogmatic slumber, moved these people to great passion of heart for the things of God.
But the greatest awakening that ever took place in human history was in the apostolic age, in the first century, when the King of the Kingdom was present in the flesh, and they heard His voice. And they listened to his words, and they rushed into his kingdom, pressing and striving with all of their might to be there. Do you have fire in your belly for the kingdom of God? How much pressure do you have in your life of seeking? The deepest things of God that you can find.
I can't answer that question for you because I can't read your hearts, but God can, and He does read our hearts. And then Jesus says, "It's easier for heaven and earth to pass away." Than for one tittle or jot of the law to fail. Can I just take a moment about this statement that Jesus makes? We have all kinds of intellectual and theological debates about the nature of Scripture. Is Scripture just a book written in antiquity by some people who were religious, or was it indeed superintended and Inspired by God Himself, then people argue over the extent of that inspiration.
Some say, "Well, the Bible as a whole is inspired." There's an organic inspiration about it. The basic truths are contained in there, with a mixture of errors that come from the pens of human beings. While others say, "No, no, no." It's not just plenary inspiration we're talking about, but we're talking about verbal inspiration, which means that each and every word of Scripture is inspired by God and carries His authority.
Well, I'd like to suggest to you that Jesus didn't believe in plenary inspiration or even in verbal inspiration. If you want to know Jesus' view of Scripture, it was Jot and Tittle inspiration. Not just every word, not just every letter, but every vowel point, every comma, every period was inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that not one word of Scripture can possibly fail. As I've always said, I don't want to have a Lower view of Scripture than Jesus, or a higher view of the Scripture than Jesus taught, I want to hold to the position that He taught. And He says it's easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail.
Why do you suppose we put the Ten Commandments and exposition of them in the bulletin all the time in our liturgy, to remind people that the law of God is not gone? Calvin spoke of three basic uses of the law. The first is that the law of God, the Old Testament law I'm talking about, reveals the character of God. And is the perfect mirror for us when we look into that mirror of the law of God and judge ourselves not by the community standards of where we live and in our culture, but we judge ourselves by the law of God. And we hear the question that the Lord would mark iniquity.
Who would stand? We know when we look in that mirror, we're not going to stand. The law of God reveals to us our utter hopelessness. And helplessness of saving ourselves, and so, as the apostle Paul said, it acts like a schoolmaster that drives us to Christ, that drives us to the gospel. But not only that, the law acts as a restraint on wickedness in the world.
Calvin goes on to say, but the most important contribution he made there was what's called the tertius use, or the third use of the law, saying that for the Christian. The law still has the extreme value and benefit of revealing to us what is pleasing to God and what isn't. And if I'm pressing into the kingdom of God, I want to know what God loves and what He hates. The Pharisees were supposed to be the experts in the law, and at the same time they were legalists and anti-nomians. They were legalists in that they added to the law of God principles and traditions that were not the law of God.
They kept people in chains where God had left them free. It's what legalism does. They were also legalists in thinking that they could. Save themselves through their own righteousness and their own good works. It's another form of legalism.
They were also legalists by trying to find wiggle room to get around the radical demands of God's law. And so they actually became antinomian. They actually became against the law.
Nowhere was that more clear. Than their teachings on marriage and divorce, in the traditions of the rabbis, the rabbis had looked at the Old Testament law regarding divorce, where God in the Pentateuch said there was only one ground for divorce, and that was sexual immorality. As Jesus explained when the Pharisees tried to trap him in Matthew's gospel, and Jesus said. From the beginning, there was no divorce. But to the hardness of our hearts, God condescended to allow divorce in the case of sexual immorality.
Paul added the case of desertion later. But the rabbi said, if a wife breaks her husband's favorite dish, that's grounds for divorce. If the husband thinks the wife isn't pretty anymore, that's grounds for divorce. And so the Pharisees undermined the sacred institution of marriage.
Now, where did marriage come from? It came from God. In our marriage ceremonies, we always say that it was instituted by God and regulated by God's commandments. We're not free to do whatever we want to do with marriage. In 1948, the historian and sociologist Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard University expressed his great fear of the imminent destruction of American culture, and the reason he was so concerned in 1948, he said, was this: that the family unit is the stabilizing force of every nation and of every society.
But the divorce rate had escalated from ten percent in 1910 to 25 percent by 1948, and Sir Ockham said, "No nation can survive when one quarter of its families are breaking up through divorce." Doesn't that sound naive today, when for decades we've been at and over 50 percent? And so, the cultural solution to the disintegration of the home and of the family and of marriage is to do what: grant no-fault divorce, and then do away with marriage altogether. It's more than a trend; it's an epidemic, particularly about young people today who cohabit without marriage. I wish I had the time to tell you all of the professing Christians I know this minute, who are living together, without being married, living in flagrant defiance of the law of God. What difference does that piece of paper make?
It's okay with the government. It's also okay with the church. If you're living together in this church and the members of this church, and we find out about it, you will be brought into discipline immediately, because it's a gross and heinous sin that no church dare tolerates. But churches all over the world take the position we're not judgmental. We're not going to exercise discipline.
A church that will not exercise discipline for gross sin is not a church. Discipline is one of the necessary conditions for a true church.
Now, the government defines marriage between a man and a man and a woman and a woman as legitimate and brings repercussions. The bakers who won't bake cakes for such weddings, for churches that won't allow their halls to be used for such weddings, and it won't be long until there be sanctions against preachers who refuse to perform such weddings. And that objection will come not only from the state, but will come from the church, from churches who have already embraced the legitimacy of homosexual marriage. Which I promise you is an abomination in the sight of God, and it presupposes that the law of God has failed, and that we can live without it. All of our marriages are flawed.
Every one of us brings wrinkles to the bride of Christ, and yet. Because of his righteousness, he has married us. You've been listening to a message from R.C. Sproul on the Gospel of Luke. You know, I first discovered Renewing Your Mind shortly after I became a Christian more than twenty years ago, and this program was so formative for me.
It helped me know God better and understand His Word. And if you've similarly benefited from the daily Bible teaching of Renewing Your Mind, I want to encourage you to share this program with someone you know, maybe someone who's new to the faith or someone who has questions about Christianity. You can also support Renewing Your Mind by liking our videos on YouTube or subscribing to the YouTube channel, or you can follow us on your favorite podcast app. Let me leave you with this question today. Are we justified by faith, or by faith plus works?
This is just one of the questions that we'll be considering next Sunday, as we start a new study in the book of Galatians with R.C. Sproul here on Renewing Your Mind.
