Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. In every Olympic race, someone must take home the gold medal.
It's inevitable. In running life's race, we sometimes think we can control all of our variables. But the truth is, there are some things that must happen. And when God says they must, they will.
What are these things? To find out, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, it's both comforting and alarming to think that some things must happen and that we can't control these things.
Dave, you're absolutely right. As a matter of fact, there are very few things that we can control. We can control things around us, but then even that which we control can suddenly change.
It can fall apart. And as the saying goes, it is so important for us to know the difference between what we can control and what we can't control. And this message focuses on things that Jesus said must come to pass. It has huge implications. Meanwhile, I'm holding in my hands a book entitled Seven Snares of the Enemy. I won't take time to read the snares that it discusses except to say that around us in a sensual society, there are so many opportunities to become addicted, to become a slave to sin. The question is, how does that happen?
And most importantly, how do I get out after I have fallen? For a gift of any amount, we're making it available for you. Now, I want to tell you that immediately following this message, I'm going to be giving you some contact info. But it's important for us to realize that failure is a possibility. For many years, I've had this idea in my mind about necessity and the musts that there are in the Bible. So early this week, I had put up the sermon topic, things that must come to pass, and all week I've been so excited wondering what it is that I'm going to say on Sunday. It's wonderful sometimes to just say, you know, I think that it's going to come together.
So yesterday, I believe it came together, but you will be a better judge than I will be as to whether or not you think that is the case. It's a difficult message because I have the fear that I might be scaring up more rabbits than I'm able to shoot because we are going to get into some philosophical and theological ideas. But we're glad that you are here. We want you to relax, bring your mind, your heart, your Bible, and away we go. Back in 1934, Reinhold Niebuhr prayed this prayer, O God, give us serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Today, what I'd like to do is to speak to you about those things that will not change or those things that cannot change.
Now, the Bible says that prayer changes things, and that's true, but there are some things that prayer cannot change and will not change. For example, in the 24th chapter of Matthew, and today, by the way, we will turn to some passages of scripture, others I will simply quote and remind you of them. In the 24th chapter of Matthew, Jesus was speaking to the disciples, and he says that there have to be tribulations that comes, there will be wars and rumors of wars, there will be earthquakes, and then he says, these things must come to pass.
Do you realize that we could get a prayer meeting together, we could fast and pray, and we could intercede, and we could beg God, and we could repent, and there would be no way that we could prevent the coming of antichrist to the world, because there are certain things that must come to pass. One day, the apostle Paul was writing to the people in Corinth, the believers there, and he even said these words. He said that it is necessary that factions be among you.
He says factions must be among you, that those who are approved might be made manifest. There are some things that just must be. Now let's think about that little word must, that four letter word, and the word necessity. What kind of necessity is there in the world? For example, there is what we could call logical necessity.
Two plus two is equal to four. The conclusion follows necessarily. It must, must be so. There's also what we could call the necessity that is driven by obligation. I must pay my bills. My wife and I pay our bills, but the other day, because evidently we overlooked our gas bill, we get this red envelope that says, this is your warning. If you don't pay this bill, your gas is going to be turned off. So the next day I wrote a check and paid the bill, and I thought to myself, I must pay this bill. Obligation.
There's another kind of must, and that is the must that is driven by purpose. I have a car that needs to get fixed, so it must be taken to the garage. And if you knew how little I knew about cars, you'd know why that word must be taken to the garage is so important. By the way, did you hear about the wife who came to her husband and said, you know, the car isn't running. It has water in the carburetor.
And her husband was both surprised and pleased and struggled with that a little bit. And he said, how do you know that it has water in the carburetor? And she said, I know it. Just trust me.
Just trust me. It has water in the carburetor. He said, well, okay, I'll go check it out. He said, where is it?
And she said, in the swimming pool. You want to get the water out of the carburetor? There is also the must of purpose. The car must be lifted out of the swimming pool. There's another kind of must, and that is the must of duty.
You must help that stranded motorist, though I suggest you do it with great care. But you must. Now with that background, what we're going to do today is to look at the life of Jesus Christ. And I'm going to give you five different musts in his life.
And by no means are those all the musts. And then we're going to analyze them. We're going to learn from them. And we're going to leave changed because we have seen God.
At least that is my prayer, that that's the way we will end. First of all, I want you to notice in the life of Jesus Christ, our blessed Savior, his vocation, his vocation, number one, was necessary. At the age of 12, he goes to Jerusalem and what does he say?
I must, must be about my Father's business. One day he healed the man who was blind. And he said, I must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.
I must. He was talking to his disciples, giving them various information. And he looked over them and saw the crowd. And he says, other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, them also I must bring.
I must bring those sheep. In fact, you look at his life and you're amazed at all those musts that even seem to have filtered down to what we would call a mundane experiences of life. Here's Jesus in the city of Jericho and he's walking by and there's a little short man.
I guess if he's little, he's also short, but he's, at least this one is, he's in a tree. And Jesus looks at him and says, Zacchaeus, come down because I must dine with you today. You almost get the impression that God the Father and God the Son in eternity past decided to write a symphony and they mapped out the life of Jesus Christ, both the harmony and the dissonance. And, and they said that this is what is going to be followed. This will be your job description so that whether it is preaching the sermon on the mount, whether it is the raising of Lazarus or whether it is having lunch with a tax collector, you will fulfill the plan that we agreed on. That symphony written in heaven will be played out. His vocation was necessary. It had the stamp of necessity.
I must. Secondly, you'll notice that his death was necessary. For this, I want you to turn to Matthew chapter 16, a very familiar passage of scripture, Matthew 16, where Jesus said, who do men say that I am? And you'll recall, of course, that none other than Peter answers and says, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.
What a wonderful reply. And Jesus said, Peter, I want you to know that you'd have never come on to this truth on your own. Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you. But my father who is in heaven parentheses, if you're here today believing that Christ is savior and you have received him, it is because God has revealed it to you. Then we pick up the text in verse 21 of Matthew 16.
From that time, Jesus Christ began to show to his disciples and there's our word, don't miss it, that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer these things from the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day. He must do it. No choice.
He must. Now, of course, Peter incidentally begins to rebuke him and Peter was saying, in effect, that's beneath your dignity because you are the son of God. I want to see you have the glory, but I don't want you to see or experience the grime. I want you, O Lord, to inherit the crown, but I don't want to see you on the cross.
Lord, this cannot happen to you. And Peter was trying to stand in the way of what Jesus said must come to pass. By the way, Peter had no idea what he was saying.
He meant well, just like some advice that may be given to us at times, may be given by well-meaning friends. But Jesus said, you are not experiencing or seeing things from God's viewpoint, but from your own Peter. Peter didn't realize that if Jesus had taken his advice, Peter himself would have been lost in eternity forever. By telling Christ that he should cancel Easter, he was, in effect, undercutting the very work that would, in the end, redeem him.
So Peter, the rock, here becomes a stone of stumbling. But for our purposes, it's that little word must in verse 21. I must go to Jerusalem.
I must suffer from the elders and from the chief priests. Christ must do that. Thirdly, not merely his vocation and his death, but even the details of his death. His betrayal, for example, and the details of his betrayal and the night before he was crucified.
All of that had also been driven by the necessity of a must. Notice Luke 22. Take your Bibles and turn to Luke chapter 22 where Jesus is speaking here and he is preparing to go to the cross. Ahead of him lies Gethsemane and all of the horror of what he is to experience. Verse 37, for I tell you that that which is written, there's our word, that which is written must be fulfilled in me. And he was classified among the criminals for that which refers to me has its fulfillment.
In other words, the father and I mapped this out. And the reason that I have to go this route is not because the prophet said so, but rather the prophets said so because they were merely reflecting what the father and I agreed upon. Now if we had enough time and we don't, we could look at a whole list of other musts that cluster around the cross.
It was necessary that his garment be taken and that they might cast lots for it. Why? That the scripture might be fulfilled. It was necessary that Judas betray Christ.
Why? Jesus said in John 17 that the scripture might be fulfilled. It was necessary that when the soldiers came to Jesus when he was dying there that they did not break any of his bones. That the scripture might be fulfilled, not a bone of him will be broken.
It went according to the plan. No wonder Jesus said in John 17, he said, Father, the hour is come. Three times previously in the book of John it says they could not take him because his hour was not yet come. Now his hour came.
He was immune from their ability to kill him until his hour came. So I want you to notice that his betrayal and the details regarding his death, not just the fact of it, but the details regarding it, those also were necessary. His resurrection was necessary. Turn to John chapter 20 now. John chapter 20.
I want you to notice that the tomb is empty. It is what we call resurrection Sunday and Peter and John are hurrying to the tomb and John is a faster runner than Peter and John gets there first. But Peter is the one who lags behind.
But when Peter gets there, he does what only Peter would probably do. He hops into the tomb and he sees there the face cloth, verse seven, which had been on his head, lying with a linen wrappings rolled up in a place by itself. Verse eight, he entered in therefore he and the other disciple also who had first come to the tomb and he saw and he believed. I guess eventually both of them were there in the tomb.
Here's the text that we are interested in. Verse nine, for as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must, must rise from the dead. And we could go on. We could go on to show that Christ's present reign in heaven is driven by necessity. It says in first Corinthians 15, 25 for he must reign until all of his enemies be made his footstool.
He must reign. Well, we've encompassed a lot of different musts. We left some of them out, but I want you to get the point. The Jesus Christ life was like that symphony written in heaven now played out upon the common warp and roof of his own earthly experience. Everything was driven by necessity. But now let's reflect and ask what kind of necessity drove Christ? Was it logical necessity? No, it wasn't that very few things are driven by logical necessity.
It's not like two plus two is equal to four. Was it the necessity of obligation in the sense that I need to pay my bills in the very same way Jesus had to do it because after all we were in trouble and we were worth so much that he had to do it. I think this is where many theories of self image go wrong. The impression is that we were so valuable, so very valuable that Jesus really had no choice because our value was so, so high on the heavenly Dow Jones industrial average that he could do nothing other than to buy some of our stock, so to speak. Actually, what the Bible teaches is quite the opposite, that there was really nothing in us that would have merited such a payment.
In fact, that's what grace is really all about. It is because we were unworthy and I like the words of Martin Luther, Christ does not love us because we are valuable, says Luther. But rather, we are valuable because he loves us.
It is a conferred value. So it was not driven by obligation as we normally think of obligation. Are all of these musts in the life of Christ simply the must of duty? Perhaps, yes, if we look at it in a narrow sense of his duty to do the Father's will, what about the must of necessity or rather I should say not the must of necessity but the necessity of purpose? That also is a part of it because God is doing something and God is accomplishing his will.
But now I want you to think of it this way. Here we have a whole series of musts like a series of dominoes that once the decision was made that Christ would come, this followed and that followed and all followed with these musts. Question, what drives the whole series? What is the ultimate factor that drove Christ to be willing to fulfill the Father's will, to accomplish the Father's purpose? I would like to think that the overriding must and all of these may contribute to it is the necessity that is imposed simply by love, by love. For when we were yet without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. When we were enemies, Christ died because love has its own necessity.
It has its own musts. I remember reading a story about a woman whose husband committed adultery. He left the marriage and as so often happens, he ended up divorcing this wife and marrying the other one with whom he was going to live happily ever after.
At least that's the plan. So within time, this man had children by his second wife and when he had cancer and knowing that the wife who bore him his children was incompetent, he asked his former wife if she would adopt these children that he had by his second marriage so that they could have a stable, loving home. And this dear woman, bless her, said yes and loved those children and brought them up as if they were her own. Now that's the way love is.
I must bring up these children. I must love them regardless of the past, regardless of the hurt, regardless of how they came into this world. Love is filled with a sense of necessity even if that love is not reciprocal, even if it does not come back. Love sometimes just loves. That's why the Bible says that God even loves his enemies who have no intention of loving him back. Love just is.
Let me ask you this question. What is it ultimately at the end of the day that held Christ on the cross? Why did we read from the book of Matthew that he must go to Jerusalem and then he goes to Jerusalem and he comes to the city at the very time that he and the Father agreed that he would die?
What is it that's going on there in the text? Is it because of the overwhelming power of the chief priests and Jesus was a helpless victim? He was a victim, not a helpless victim. No. Jesus said, I lay down my life of myself. No man takes it from me. I lay it down of myself because love is driven by necessity. I must go to Jerusalem because I would die for sinners and redeem them. This is Pastor Lutzer.
That's what love does. Well, I'm holding in my hands a book that we want to make available for you and we do that because I think it is critical as we run toward the finish line. Just think of the number of Christians that you know that have fallen into various sins and addictions. The title of this book is The Seven Snares of the Enemy.
It not only analyzes how people fall into these sins, but also, of course, it gives instruction as to what to do when you find yourself in the midst of a bog to use a figure of speech. For a gift of any amount, we're making this book available for you. You can go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337.
It's a brand new year ahead of us. Failure is a great possibility for any one of us and I believe that this book will help you. Go to RTWOffer.com. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Next time, more about the things that must come to pass and why the must of the cross means there might be crosses in our lives as well. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
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