Dealing with Offenses by Faith

Prayer

Almighty God and heavenly father.

You are our God, and we are your people.

We praise your holy name for your goodness to the children of men.

Thank you for the healing of our diseases and the forgiveness of our sins. Thank you that you have plucked us out of the miry pit and set our feet on dry ground.

Thank you for your covenant faithfulness and your tender mercies.

Thank you for executing judgment and righteousness for all who are oppressed and cast down.

And thank you for your revelation. Thank you for the revelation in nature, that every blade of grass that you have made was made to gladden the hearts of mankind.

Thank you that you have filled our mouths with good things, for the oil and the wine, the corn and the fruits of the field.

And we thank you that you have had pity on us in our misery. That you have not left us to our destruction but you have plucked us out of the fire and raised us to the throne of Christ.

And you still remember that we are dust.

Thank you for remembering our frailty. We call upon you because we are so weak in ourselves that we cannot stand a moment without your compassion and strength. And yet you do not chide us or ridicule us for being weak. You do not rebuke us for ignorance or cast us away because we can't stand up - but you lift us to our feet. You take pity on us, you clothe us with the richest garments and bathe us with the choicest perfumes - even the blood of Christ, which takes away all of our sins.

For this, and for so much more, Father, we bend our knees and bow our heads before you, marveling at your wisdom and lovingkindness.

Forgive us, Father, for our murmuring and complaining. Forgive us for not giving you thanks as we ought, for not seeing your good hand in everything around us. Lift up our heads again, to where Christ is at your right hand governing all things. And give us patience, for we do not yet see everything placed under the feet of Christ. In our thanksgiving, we also long for that heavenly City

Until that day, Father, we pray that your good hand would continue to sustain us. Give us our food today. Give us health. Give strength and patience to all who are struggling with the weakness of the body. We pray for safety and peace, that we might know that all things come not by chance but by your fatherly hand.

So heal our bodies. Give peace to our hearts and minds. And give us calm, in whatever the future might hold. We are so tired, Father. Give us endurance and patience along the way. Let not our footsteps stumble. Keep our eyes focused on You. And give us oases of rest on our journey.

We pray that you would give Clark peace in his body and his soul. Soften his heart to the gospel and bring him to yourself. Give Susan and all of us the right words to say and the opportunity to do good. Give patience to Lisa Marie.

We thank you that you are exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. Open our eyes to see your works and praise your name.

Send rain, we pray. Without your care and blessing, we will wither away. Protect those fighting the fires and we plead with you for rain. Protect us from foolishness and wicked men.

Give wisdom to our governor and deliver us from the violence of wicked men. And forgive us our sins. Cause the fruit of the spirit to grow in our lives, that everyone around us might see and know that we serve the living God, and not a dead idol.

Bless the preaching and the reading of your word today. Soften our hearts. Guide my lips. Give us ears to hear, for we are deaf and blind unless you take pity on us.

Text

Luke 17:1–10 NKJV

1 Then He said to the disciples, “It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come! 2 It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. 3 Take heed to yourselves. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. 4 And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him.” 5 And the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” 6 So the Lord said, “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. 7 And which of you, having a servant plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down to eat’? 8 But will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something for my supper, and gird yourself and serve me till I have eaten and drunk, and afterward you will eat and drink’? 9 Does he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not. 10 So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.’ ”

Sermon

We have an ugly tendency - the root is pride. The way I do things and the way that I think is the proper way, and more approved by God than your way. We tend to view the people around us through our own lenses, as if we were the yardstick by which appropriate behavior is measured.

“I raised my children right, therefore the way you are doing it is unapproved by God.”

“I don’t have anxiety, therefore your anxiety is proof that you are not trusting God as I do.”

“I don’t have brain damage, which proves that if you make the right choices as I did you would not have brain damage either.”

“I don’t suffer from depression, so your depression is just because you make bad choices.”

If you are suffering, you are most likely making poor choices and living an unapproved lifestyle.

From “Everything Sad is Untrue”

“And then he sees a stiff blind horse and thinks it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen. But he doesn’t know what to do to help him. He can’t just leave it there in the bloody field. But he doesn’t have a way to help either and he wants to keep going. Suddenly he starts to talk himself into caring less about it. Little by little, to make sure his heart doesn’t break, he makes himself immune to the pain of the horse with its shut eyes underneath the rusty mane. Then he says, “He must be wicked to deserve such pain”

“Just like that. It’s the horse’s fault.”

(Daniel Nayeri)

The thought that a creature could be blind through no fault of its own is unacceptable. For it is most terrifying to live in a world where we are not gods and we aren’t sure that God sees us or even cares.

So we respond to protect ourselves. We don’t fully trust that God will make all things right and open blind eyes and heal the brain damage and raise the dead - so we trust in our own choices, our own cures, our own remedies

And those work well until the blindness strikes YOU and death comes to take you. But that is another story.

We are fully entrenched in the thoughts of our hearts that we and people like us are more pleasing to God than you and people like you. I am sorry for your hurt, but you are stupid and made bad choices. The only solution is for you to make better choices and be more like me.

But the teaching of scripture is this:

The curse of death that is on this world is so deadly, so ugly, so powerful that the only solution is the death of the son of God.

God saw the absolute best that the best human heart had to offer - and marveled that there was no one, not one, worthy of the name “servant”, much less the name “son”.

Isaiah 59:15–16 NKJV

15 So truth fails, And he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. Then the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him That there was no justice. 16 He saw that there was no man, And wondered that there was no intercessor; Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him; And His own righteousness, it sustained Him.

There is no hope in our good intentions, no hope in our political coalitions, no hope in our religious services, no hope in the flesh at all.

When you think that God owes you because you performed well, then you are thinking like a slave, or like an employee. So - lets look at life as if you WERE a slave.

To illustrate, Jesus takes what grammarians call an unreal condition. We are supposing that something is true just for the sake of argument, in order to understand something.

Here is what we are going to suppose - that from the time of your birth to the time of your death, you complete every duty and every act of service towards God perfectly.

And lets also suppose that you were a good slave, and did everything exactly the way that you were supposed to.

What would God owe you then? Didn’t you just do everything that you were supposed to do anyway?

The horse is blind and the boy is not. Did the boy do something that merited his seeing eyes? If the horse is blind because the horse is wicked then that presupposes that the boy can see because the boy is righteous.

And when we think like that, we think like slaves. And the one thing that God hates above all is when those who are the influential ones in the church teach everyone to think like a slave. Do good things, and good things will happen. If bad things happen, it must be because you have made bad choices.

Faith teaches us to look to God as our Father, the rewarder of those who diligently seek him, the one who provided salvation from sin, redemption from bondage, adoption as sons

Faith is the contrary of thinking like a slave. Faith holds to the merits of another, and responds to the embrace of love.

When a person believes that - truly believes it, everything changes. Even the smallest faith if it is saving faith, unites us to Christ, the object of our faith. We are weak, but he is strong. Even when a man still struggles with the flesh, he relates to others differently if he is united to Christ by faith.

Responding consistently with faith - you desire, above all, to point people to Christ, not to point them to yourself.

And you also desire to reconcile, to be at peace and for everyone to know the rest that comes under the wings of the Lord.

Woe to those who cause stumbling

Jesus warns his apostles to be very careful - don’t entrap people and cause them to fall away -

The word means a trap, a snare. It means to increase someone’s bondage. It can also mean to cause someone to trip and fall. And in this cursed world, there are many things to stumble over.

Be very careful that when people do stumble, you don’t cause it. Let them stumble over the cross and not over anything else.

The Pharisees divided the world between the righteous ones and the sinners. Sinners were poor, sick, outcast, or ensnared with moral failings.

They were in bondage to sin and misery themselves and ensured that the rest of Israel was ensnared right along with them.

Matthew 23:13–15 NKJV

13 “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. 14 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation. 15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.

The church today has become just like them. We point to ourselves, our politics, our personalities, our culture -

We have our rules about illness, anxieties, health disorders, child raising, marriages, politics -

Those who are in:

Those who homeschool, those who have the financial means to keep a wife at home, those whose children are low-key and have no health issues, those who do not struggle with anxiety or depression or ADHD, those who raise their children right, who have the right personality and the right pedigree...

Those who are OUT - everyone else.

Those who aren’t married, who have pasts that are uncomfortable, whose brains work differently, who can’t memorize catechisms, who have uncomfortable disconnects in their brains that I can’t understand, who talk too much, who talk to little, who have icky sins that are different than mine…the introverts, the ones who can’t spell correctly, those who weren’t “raised in the covenant” whatever that means.

And we put these stumbling traps in front of people and point them to the solution:

Be like me. Make choices like my choices. Stop being the way that you are and be more like me. Get married, raise kids, keep quiet about abuse, put on a happy face, don’t talk about things that make us uncomfortable...

And we never point them to the only one that saves - and he saves from every kingdom, every tribe, every culture - a great diversity, all clothed with one garment - the perfect righteousness of Christ. The garment doesn’t look like you. It looks like Christ

Revelation 7:9 NKJV

9 After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands,

We teach them instead, in our conversation and our lives that what they seek can be found if they just apply the right dedication and fortitude and make the right decisions.

And so we think like slaves, rather than sons. We think in terms of God as a taskmaster who owes us blessings because we are the right sort of people - rather than sinners adopted by grace, made beautiful by the blood of the lamb, and adorned as a bride ready for the groom.

It isn’t out of merit. It is out of love; from love flows mercy and grace and favor.

This is why faith as a grain of mustard seed, if consistently lived, will not allow stumbling blocks to be placed in the paths of the little ones.

The little ones - either children or humble believers, who have no strength, no resources, nothing to offer - who know that they aren’t as strong and wise and righteous and holy as they ought to be…they are crushed and discarded, rather than encouraged, strengthened and pointed to Jesus.

May we never, ever lose a sheep because they couldn’t keep up with all of our rules. May we never lose one of Jesus’ sheep because they were afraid to express themselves and afraid to speak.

May we never lose one of Jesus’ sheep because they didn’t look like us, and everyone pointed it out to them.

This is what Jesus is talking about.

When the gatekeepers of the church begin to demand payment for entry - whatever that payment might be - we are setting traps for the people of God, especially the “little ones” who have nothing to offer.

David prayed that the Lord would keep him from those who satisfy their lusts for power by laying traps for the sheep, seeking to keep them ensnared by all the rules.

Psalm 140:4–5 NKJV

4 Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; Preserve me from violent men, Who have purposed to make my steps stumble. 5 The proud have hidden a snare for me, and cords; They have spread a net by the wayside; They have set traps for me. Selah

And when he refuses to place himself under bondage, they seek his harm - they seek to destroy him and catch him in his words.

Psalm 35:21 NKJV

21 They also opened their mouth wide against me, And said, “Aha, aha! Our eyes have seen it.”

This was ultimately fulfilled by Christ, when the Jews watched him closely to catch him in something they could accuse him of - because he refused to allow the wolves to ensnare the sheep with impossible standards that no one could keep.

These enemies that David is speaking of were inside the church, not outside. They were from the house of Israel.

They hated Christ because Jesus took away their power over the little ones. They could no longer lay their traps because their salvation was compete in Christ.

The gospel of grace, which we embrace by faith, takes away the power of men. And powerful men hate that.

So they seek an opportunity, just as they did with Christ.

And Jesus warned his disciples to beware that they don’t also become like that. Point the world to Jesus so that they might be free. Don’t allow anyone to ensnare the people of God again.

But every age, the wolves continue to trap the sheep.

The country is littered with those who have left the church - not because of Jesus, but because of the stumbling blocks that have been cast in their path.

Sexual assault covered up - theft of tithes and offerings, preachers with million dollar mansions, powerful cult leaders masquerading as sheep, money and power , all designed to keep the people of God in bondage to standards that no one can keep- and it is destroying God’s people, while churches are emptying.

Women - be feminine, smile all the time, be sexually responsive, never speak back to your man, never have a thought and put to death all of your goals and desires.

Men, be more masculine, be better leaders, get your family under control, rule society, take dominion at work and at home...

And then sickness, poverty, death, tribulation, the curse enters. You find out you married a real woman not a Stepford wife, and that is good.

You find out that you love your daughters and want them to thrive in whatever they do.

You find out that you no longer fit the mold - and you can either shatter and stumble and fall - or you can leave

And the powerful leaders trample the bodies and whisper “They went out from us, because they weren’t of us...”

Because they have forgotten Christ and started preaching power and money and man-made rules and no one dares question the powerful ones.

But God sees. And God judges.

And that brings us to the next casualty of faithlessness: continuous blood feuds.

Forgive one another

There is tremendous wrong that takes place in institutions of power. There are many wounded.

In the days of Jesus, the wrongs committed by the Pharisees were many. And the wrongs committed by the Sadducee and Essenes and Herodians were many. And these wrongs were committed against each other.

This led to centuries of blood feuds between the groups. There was a continual struggle for power and when one group got into power, they slaughtered and exiled their enemies, until the enemies got into power.

Jesus isn’t directly talking about that here. He is talking about the prevailing attitude in the church - those who commit sins against each other must be punished. Vengeance must be taken for honor to be restored. Justice must prevail.

This leads to continual unrest and continual suffering.

And so Jesus gives his disciples another principle to follow in the church that flows from faith - forgive one another.

Here in the context, it is conditioned on repentance. Repentance is not just words, but includes actions - the dying of the old man and the making alive of the new.

If he repents, forgive. Don’t continue destroying yourself with enmeshed anger, but realize that the kingdom of God is about grace and mercy to forgiven sinners. God changes hearts and reconciles alienated people.

That is what the gospel is all about.

He isn’t talking about continuing to put yourself in danger. He isn’t talking about faking repentance to avoid consequences. And the discussion about horrible wrongs in marriage and the necessity of divorce at times is a subject that must be spoken of at another time.

But the heart of the gospel is the forgiveness of sins.

Sin is far, far uglier than we think. It separates us from our creator and from one another. It destroys families, churches, societies - it is truly heinous and truly ugly.

The forgiveness of sins is certainly not saying that sin is no big deal and we’ll just forget about it.

No - we must understand sin the same way that scripture does. It is worse than we thing, and so deadly that even the approval of sins in others is hated by God.

Psalm 50:16–21 NKJV

16 But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to declare My statutes, Or take My covenant in your mouth, 17 Seeing you hate instruction And cast My words behind you? 18 When you saw a thief, you consented with him, And have been a partaker with adulterers. 19 You give your mouth to evil, And your tongue frames deceit. 20 You sit and speak against your brother; You slander your own mother’s son. 21 These things you have done, and I kept silent; You thought that I was altogether like you; But I will rebuke you, And set them in order before your eyes.

All of this is true.

But what hope have any of us if God did not provide a way for us to be cleansed from our sins? What hope would we have if God had left us in our sins?

The same God that speaks so harshly of the judgement against sin also says this:

Psalm 130:3–4 NKJV

3 If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? 4 But there is forgiveness with You, That You may be feared.

The triune God so loved the world that the word became flesh for the purpose of taking our sins upon himself - all the ugliness, without pretense and without covering.

Naked, he bore my sin upon the cross so that I might be set free. Here is the ugliness of sin unmasked, displayed for the filth that it is, and then put to death.

By faith, I lay ahold on the forgiveness of sins.

But then can I deny the forgiveness of sins to those who ask me? Can I shut my heart to those who are seeking to reconcile and to be free from the bondage of sin themselves?

Can I refuse a word of peace to one who seeks peace without damaging my own soul and my own faith?

Certainly not!

I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

Heidelberg Catechism 21. Sunday

QUESTION 56. What dost thou believe concerning the FORGIVENESS OF SINS?

That God, for the sake of Christ’s satisfaction, will no more remember my sins, neither the sinful nature with which I have to struggle all my life long; but graciously imparts to me the righteousness of Christ, that I may nevermore come into condemnation.

Jesus Christ, the only one who ever lived who had the right to flinch at the ugliness of sin, and turn his back on the rebellious traitor - instead, took him in his arms, took away that sin, and gave him his Spirit

He removed all condemnation from me...

How then can I refuse far, far less to my neighbor who seeks my forgiveness?

Take heed to yourselves - Jesus said.

Even 7 times a day isn’t even a fraction of what you have been forgiven.

You don’t need more faith. You need to live consistently with the faith that you have.

We don’t think like slaves. Like slaves, even if we were perfect, we still would not merit a seat at the table.

The seat at the table is for family.

Strive higher than a good slave. You can’t even come close anyway. Never in this life will you accomplish enough to deserve life from God. If it were possible to do your duty perfectly, you will have simply just done your duty which you owed to begin with.

But the grace of God gives you a seat at the table in Christ.

You are sons and daughters by grace, never by merit.

So live consistently with that. Live with open hearts and an awareness of what Jesus has done for you and offer that same freedom, friendship and reconciliation for all who seek it, whoever they might be.

We can sit with the blind and the broken and the sinner and the wounded and allow our hearts to break with them, knowing that perhaps the Lord brought them to us for that purpose - to point them to the one who heals, the one who forgives, the one who reconciles and raises from the dead.

And yes, weeping with those who weep puts us at risk of a broken heart - but the solution is not to ensnare them and keep them in bondage to misery; the solution is not to drive them from Christ because we cannot bear to look on suffering - but to show them the way to life and to peace - not in being like you, but in fleeing to Christ.

He walked the same field dripping with blood. He saw the same things that break your heart, and he bled and died that they might be saved.

This is what the gospel is - he came to seek and save that which was lost. We can’t. We can’t raise the dead. We can’t change the heart. We can’t heal the sick or open the eyes of the blind. But we can point them all to the one who receives sinners and sets them free.

He makes the paths smooth. He forgives freely. He has the power to take away the curse, and he is doing that. And so we wait.