HOW TO BE WISE, WITH A LIVING RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
James 2:8: If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well
R-O-Y-A-L
R is for repentance
How do we exchange what we cannot keep for what we cannot lose? The lord Jesus tells us how to do this because
he doesn’t want to keep us in the
dark. Yesterday I talked about the royal law.
The word “royal” consist of five letters, r-o-y-a-l, each of which stands for something significant for
our present topic.
The first step in the royal law, or the law of the king, is repentance. You learned about repentance
in Sunday school, but do
you know what repentance really is?
One of the great difficulties
in teaching is dealing with those who think they
know
something when they really don’t.
Everyone says, “Oh, I know
what repentance is,” yet does not begin to understand what repentance is.
In Matthew 4:17, the very first word that the Lord Jesus preached was “repent”. Why repent?
Because God’s kingship is about
to be implemented. God is about to reign as King upon this earth. The Bible does not teach that
God is King only in heaven.
The point of Jesus’ message is that God is going to reign here in Melbourne; God is going to reign
as King on this earth. And
Jesus is saying that because God is going to reign soon, you had better repent. You need to repent
in order to enter into a
living relationship with God.
Repentance is not just saying “sorry” and then repeating
your
sin the next time. That is not repentance. Repentance in the Bible means that your whole direction
of life has changed.
To use Jim Elliot’s statement, the true
substance of repentance is to
give what I cannot keep to gain what I cannot lose. It is a complete change of direction
in life.
I can expound each of these
points with a whole message, but I am just touching on them and moving on to the important last
part of this message.
O is for Obedience
The second thing is obedience. If you want to know the living God, you must learn obedience. In the
Bible, obedience does not
mean obeying with a long face, but obeying joyfully, as we read in Hebrews
10:7: “I
have come to do your will, O God.” If you
tell me with a long face, “From now on, I will obey God,” I will say, “Forget it.” But if you say, “Can
I have the privilege of living
in obedience to God?” I will see that you are beginning to understand the truth.
The gospel as preached in the churches today is some kind
of
intellectual exercise: believe and you will be saved. Yet the gospel is not just to be believed, but
obeyed, as we read in John 3:36;
1 Peter 4:17; 2 Thessalonians 1:8; 1 Peter 3:1; 1 John 5:2.
Y is for Yoked
The third point is yoked. To be yoked means to be joined to the Messiah. Those who are going to be
baptized today will be yoked to the Messiah through baptism as new people,
just like two persons getting
married will be yoked to each other,
bound to each other, through
marriage. So we have the sweetness of
communion with the Messiah, and
through him with God, because now we have “commitment,” a term we use often. Yoked means commitment: I am committed to the Messiah, he is committed to me.
And this yoke is most important because it is the source of
our strength. In a marriage, when one person is weak, the other will support him or her.
What is the point of getting married? Is it to come home for
a
good quarrel after a whole day’s work? Is it to throw plates at each other as some kind of physical
exercise? What is the point of
getting yoked together? When two animals are yoked together in a farm, they both carry the
load. Likewise when two people
are yoked together, they carry the load together instead of working individually.
But in many marriages today, there is a brake on the yoke
such
that one is trying to go forward, and the other is trying to go backward. It reminds me of cars for
driving schools where the
instructor has a brake on his side and the student driver has one on his side. When the student steps on
the accelerator and the car doesn’t move, it is because the
instructor is stepping on the
brakes on his side. That’s how it is with many marriages
Those of us in pastoral work have to counsel people with marriage problems, and you wonder why they
got married in the first place. Maybe
they got married because they enjoy kung fu or
boxing, and had no one to fight. Let me assure you that God does not want us to get baptized and
yoked to Christ so that
we fight him every day. The lord
Jesus has better things to do
than that. God wants us to be bound with the Messiah so that in him we can walk forward hand in hand in
sweet fellowship and encouragement.
A is for All, Absolute
The next letter is a, which stands for “all” or “absolute.” This part is very important in the lord Jesus’ teaching, yet it is on this point that most Christians are stuck.
I don’t know how many
endless hours of counseling that I, not to mention all our coworkers, have spent with people who
don’t understand this basic
principle of how much one ought to be committed to God. The person may say, “I am 75%
committed to God, so can I be
baptized?” and we say, “No, that’s not enough.
75%
will not do.”
“80%?”
“No.”
“85%?”
“No.”
It is like bargaining at a Hong Kong market. They don’t understand that God requires all
or nothing. That
is the Scriptural teaching,
not something we invented. Those of you who
have gone through Commitment Training would
know this, so I don’t need to spend time on this point.
You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your mind, with all your strength.
You are to love Him with all
- with everything - you have.
The words in Luke 14:33 are even more uncompromising:
“He who does not forsake all that he has cannot
be my disciple.”
This does not mean that you go sell your car and house, and
sleep
on the streets. What it means is that from now on you will say, “God, You have redeemed me with the
blood of Jesus. I belong
to You, and everything I have is Yours.” It
is just like in a marriage. Everything I possess,
including this beautiful jacket, belongs
to my wife. I gave up everything when I married her under this yoke. If she wants my wallet,
she can have it. I would never
say, “Don’t touch it, it belongs to me,” about anything I own. When I married her, I forsook myself;
everything is hers, and
she is mine. So why do we find it so terrible that the lord Jesus
says, “Unless a man forsake all that he has, he cannot be my disciple”?
L is for Launch out
L is for launch out. One of the reasons Christians do not enter
into
a deep relationship with God is that they are cowards. Many people are eager to get married, yet
do not understand that
it takes a lot of courage to get married. If you have never been married, you wouldn’t understand this
whole problem.
You are going to give your life to someone for the next 50
years, or however long you will be together. Yet it takes even more courage to be a Christian. The problem with many Christians
is
they don’t have the courage to launch out into something new. Marriage is something new, but
becoming a Christian is something
even newer.
America became great because of its pioneering spirit: Go west, young man! Launch out into the
unknown! That is the kind
of attitude you see in Peter. In Luke 5:4, the lord Jesus
tested
Peter by saying, “Take the boat and launch out into the deep.” In Luke 8:22, Jesus told his
disciples to launch out and cross
over to the other side of Galilee. But they launched out straight into a storm! The lord Jesus knew that the storm was coming, yet he said to them, “Take the
boat out into the lake.”
Becoming a Christian is not for cowards, for it takes
courage to launch out into
something new. And it takes great courage to give up what you cannot keep
to gain what you cannot lose.
Written by Eric Chang.
This small portion is taken from Eric Chang’s book: The Parables of Jesus in
the Gospel of Matthew, Volume 1.
You can download this
book at the website listed below:
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