Saved from Death

SERMON: 2006-09-24--js0630--saved-from-death SOURCE DURATION: 00:34:24.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidates 0 through 3 constitute the sermon's conclusion (theological exposition and prayer). Candidate 4 marks a clear transition into hymn lyrics ('Would peace like a river...'), indicating the start of non-sermon music material. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:30:36.900-00:34:20.380 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- So, what happens when in obedience to scripture we bring the sinner back from the error of his ways? Well James tells us two things happen. We save him or her from death. And number two, we cover a multitude of sins. Once again, how he puts it in the closing verse of his epistle, "Remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins." Cover over a multitude of sins. Let's take a look then this morning at each of these. First of all, we save him or her from death. Now it's very helpful to understand that in the Greek it literally reads, "Save his soul from death." Whoever brings a sinner back from the error of his way will save his soul from death. The word "soul" as you may remember is the Greek word "souche" from which we get the English word "psyche," "psycho," "psychology" and related words like that. And the "soul" in biblical thought refers to our interior, our immaterial life as opposed to our physical life. And in translation, it is often used in scripture to represent the sum total of our personality, the sum total of our being. Why is it so important for you and me when we see somebody wandering from the path of truth to bring them back to a living relationship with a living God through faith in Jesus? Because the Bible says we will save their souls from death even in the age of inflation. The wages of sin is still death. Ezekiel said many years ago, "The soul that sins shall die." Now I find it very helpful this morning also to understand that this punishment of death upon our sin takes place on two levels in the human experience. It takes place first of all in the here and now. Many years ago when the Lord God said to Adam and Eve in the garden concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "The day that you eat thereof you shall surely die," they did not experience physical death immediately. In fact, they lived on for many, many hundreds of years. But the stain of death had already attached itself to their innermost being. It started by poisoning their spirit and impairing their relationship with the living God. From there it spread into their soul. Relationally, they began to fall apart. Emotionally, they became fragmented. And ultimately it impacted their bodies physically and they died. And from that day to this, all the sons and the daughters of Adam, barring the second coming of the Lord Jesus, we all must die. Scripture says it is appointed unto man to die. And Paul writing to the Romans says, "As sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all men, because all have sinned." Now here's what I want us to understand about death in the here and now. This process of dying is accelerated to the degree to which we individually and corporately drift away from the living God. In other words, the more we sin, the more we sow the seeds of destruction which eventually catch up with us and produce death, whether in spirit or in soul or in body. There is a way to man that seems right, says Scripture, but the end thereof is death. Let me try to illustrate it this way. Let's suppose that you're the type of person who lives recklessly. You take chances, you drive with your eyes closed and your hands off the steering wheel. Well, chances are, all things being equal, that you're much more likely to experience the tragedy of an accident than somebody who drives carefully and obeys all the laws of nature. But for some reason or another, and I don't quite know where the inspiration came from, but as I was working on this this past week, the name that came to mind was Evil Knievel. Now are you old enough to remember Evil Knievel, most of you? Evil Knievel was a motorcycle stunt driver who was very prominent in the '70s and the '80s. That's why I'm asking you if you are old enough to remember. He was born, Robert Craig, in Butte, Montana, and his first claim to fame was doing a wheelie on big earth moving equipment. And in so doing, he took out the main power line that fed Butte in Montana, and he lost his job. And that also was sort of the inspiration that catapulted him into significant stunt driving. He would line up any number of buses or any number of cars, and he would leap over them, drawing huge crowds. He drew more people to Wembley Stadium in England and to the Astrodome in Houston than anybody else in history. Now sometimes he succeeded, but occasionally he fell short. And for that he paid a terrible price. He has the dubious distinction of being in the Guinness World Book of Record with the most broken bones, 40 in awe, and has long since retired, but I saw him on television not that long ago. And he is on oxygen 24 hours a day, and he is a shadow of his former self. Now that can happen to anybody, and anybody can experience accidents and ill health, but I think you'll agree with me that that kind of lifestyle, he prided himself in being fearless. And how many times he got hurt and said that he was going to retire, he never did. And he would always go back into it, and he'd always get hurt all over again. His most ambitious program was to jump the Grand Canyon, but he never got permission to do that, so he found some other thing to jump over. My point is, the more we deviate from the path of truth, the more likely we are to bring upon ourselves the consequences of our lifestyle. That's true too, for example, in areas of sexuality. The scriptures have very clear instructions whereby God tries to safeguard our souls, spiritually, emotionally, and physically in every way. A lot of people think God is just a spoilsport, why can't we just do what we want to do? Well it's because when we violate what God has ordained, we bring into our lives an incredible degree of brokenness. You see that in the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases. You see that with the horrors of HIV/AIDS, not only in North America, but especially in Africa, the millions upon millions of children who grow up orphaned. And while it's true that not everybody brings that on themselves because of their own sin, in fact of the matter is always that our sin has an impact on other people. And the more we turn away from the true and the living God, the more broken we become. And this is not only true individually, this is also true corporately. People are going to spend a lot of time, ink and air time over the next couple of weeks trying to figure out why is it that all these mass murders in Canada appear to be taking place primarily in the province of Quebec. This is now I think the third or the fourth. And there will be a lot of soul searching and a lot of self analysis and I don't profess to know fully what the answer is to that question except this. To the degree to which we collectively depart from the way of truth, we are creating brokenness we're sowing seeds of destruction. And all it takes is for enough things to go wrong in somebody's life, they get pushed over the edge and you have the kind of tragedy that we have experienced this past week with these shootings in the city of Montreal. Tremendous tragedy but the fruit of brokenness. You see it in communism for example, the spread of communism in the Soviet Union. The tragedy of communism is not only the many people that had died in order for the new ideology to take root but the fact that it destroyed the soul of a nation. Sin destroys the soul of a nation. Sin shortens people's lives and as we'll see in a few moments, one of the reasons it is so important for you and me to stand in the breach, to pray for people to march up to them to try to pluck them from the path in which they're going is they are shortening their lives, they are shortening the effectiveness of their lives by the deliberate departure from the way of truth. Death has consequences even in the here and now. More than that however, there is also what the Bible calls eternal death and damnation. In the Bible that is called the second death. It's described for us in the book of Revelation. The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death. Scripture teaches life doesn't end when you die in the here and now. You live on beyond death and when Jesus comes back again there is going to be a resurrection of the dead and not only will those who through faith in Jesus Christ have been righteous be raised to death, to life, but also those who were unrighteous and who have rejected Jesus. And the Bible says in that final day all the nations are going to be gathered before the judgment seat of Jesus and those who through faith in Him have been righteous are going to hear those wonderful words, "Well done, you good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master and forever they will share in glory that is beyond our comprehension today." But those who have been unfaithful, those who have wandered from the path have not repented, have not bent their knees before Jesus, they're going to hear those terrible words, "Depart from me you workers of iniquity into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Not very popular teaching today and I can't say that I'm a hell fire and brimstone preacher, but I'll tell you if we're going to do justice to scripture, if we believe in heaven we need to believe in hell and if we believe that Jesus came to save us from hell and eternal condemnation, then the onus of responsibility is on you and me to do whatever it is that we can to keep people from being lost forever, rescue those who are being led away to death, says the book of Proverbs, hold back those staggering towards slaughter. Picture it this way, you're driving along the road, you're discovering the road has been washed out, you manage to pull your car to a stop just before you go over, traffic is coming behind you, you know they're going to go right over into the abyss unless somehow you can motivate them to stop, wouldn't you do everything in your power to run backwards on that road waving your hands, shouting at the top of your lungs stop, stop, stop or you will be dead because the bridge has been washed out or the road is gone. There isn't no one of us here who wouldn't do that and yet how many of us stand by, we have family members that have wandered away from faith, we have relatives that have never bent their knee before Jesus, we rub shoulders with our co-workers, we never once mentioned the name of Jesus, we never once inquire about the state of their soul and we are careless about the damnation that waits a world that is lost apart from Jesus and you know why? Because we have this magical notion in the back of our head that somehow or another God's going to save everybody and that if we can find but one good little thing in somebody's life, somehow the good will outweigh the bad, well you know when I read scripture it's not that easy to be saved and it's very easy to be lost, I warn you says the Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians after listing a whole row of sins that we participate in, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, faction, envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like, he says I warn you as I did before that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God and then in the book of Ephesians he says let nobody deceive you with empty words for because of such things God's wrath come on those who are disobedient but you say well you know people aren't going to listen anyway they're just going to do what they're going to do, well maybe and if so that's their responsibility and our responsibility is to warn them and if we don't warn them the judgment is on us. Listen to what the Lord says to Ezekiel when you say to a wicked man you will surely die and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil ways in order to save his life that wicked man will die for his sin and I will hold you accountable for his blood but if you do warn the wicked man and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his evil ways he will die for his sin but you will have saved yourself. Why is it important to win the sinners back from the error of their ways because we will save their souls from death both in the here and now and in the future. So let me ask you again who is there in your life that the Lord is inviting you to get involved with who is there in your life that you need to pray for that you need to look for opportunities to speak to that you need to do everything that you can to warn them about the error of their ways so that they can be brought back to a saving faith in Jesus Christ you owe it to God you owe it to them and you owe it to yourself because the things of the kingdom are serious business. Why is it important for us to reach out to those who are perishing because we save them from death in the here and now and in the future and because scripture says we will cover a multitude of sins whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will not only save him from death but he will cover a multitude a multitude of sins. See here's the problem with sin. Sin has a way of following you around and it haunts you and limits your future potential. Let's suppose that you live recklessly let's suppose that like a man in the first congregation that I pastored in your teenage years you drove while under the influence of alcohol you got into an accident and you caused a man's death that stays with you for the rest of your life or let's suppose that you really messed up in a relationship and you caused great tragedy and heartache to your spouse or to your beloved or to your children or to your extended family that stays with you. Or let's suppose you broke the law you got charged you didn't tie him. See the tragedy of sin is that it fills you with shame and it keeps you from lifting up your eyes and courageously looking into the future. Every time you go a new place you ask yourself the question I wonder who knows about my past. Every time you overhear two people in whispering conversation and they stop when you draw near you say to yourself I wonder are they talking about me. And every time God wants to bless you and every time God wants to bring something good in your life there is something inside you that says I better not hope I better not dream I better not dare to think because it's not going to happen anyway because nothing good ever comes my way. Do you understand what I'm saying? Sin fills us with shame and that shame binds us. Nobody can live with shame. Adam and Eve couldn't live with shame and so different people have different ways of coping with that kind of shame. Some of us we run away from it. We sometimes run away physically I can't begin to tell you how many people I've talked to over the years right in this community who when the Lord opens their eyes and breaks their denial and they begin to look at who they are and where they have been and those feelings of shame overwhelm them they want to get in their car drive away and never come back. And a lot of people will come to a point where they say well I think I'm going to make a new beginning in a new place and guess what they forget that wherever they go they are and when the Holy Spirit is on your case it doesn't matter where you move to he's going to find you. Make your bed in hell and he'll find you because he loves you he's not going to let you go. Some people cope by fighting it and we all know people like that they become aggressive they become arrogant they're right in your face I don't care what you think I'm going to do what I want to do nobody's going to stop me. Sean Penn this past week Toronto International Film Festival it's a good illustration of that you know Toronto is no smoking he sits there and he smokes blatantly at a press conference in a hotel and today that's about as big a sin as you can commit because it's the modern leprosy. Well interestingly enough Sean Penn gets off scot-free he doesn't get fined the hotel gets fined even though the hotel has not evolved in the press conference other people have rented the facilities but they get fined because they don't have a sign up that says you're not allowed to smoke here it's a fascinating and an interesting world. But you know people like that they're always in your face they're always trying to show you that they're not scared of anybody and we forget that however it is that we cope with shame whether it's fight or flight or any other number of coping mechanisms we're never authentically living from our heart because we're still trying to prove to the whole world and to ourselves that we're okay and I cannot tell you how much bad fruit is born the sons and the daughters of Adam who cover their nakedness with fig leaves and who pretend to be better than what they really are. You know why it's important to bring sinners back from the error of their ways because when people come to the cross own their shame repent of their past lay it before Jesus depart from it publicly it breaks the power of shame and there are two things that happen when God through the grace of Jesus covers a multitude of sins the first is we experience forgiveness. Forgiveness blessed is he says David in Psalm 32 whose transgressions are forgiven whose sins are covered blessed is the man who sinned the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit there is no deceit. See sin in scripture is often compared to being in debt forgive us our debts says Jesus as we forgive those who are indebted to us. A debt gives somebody else legal power over you and you groan under the load and you cannot rise above it unless you can pay the debt and the problem with sin and the problem with shame and we've all done things that were deeply ashamed of and that we wish we could rewrite and erase from the past. The debt we could not pay Jesus who didn't owe it paid it on the cross and when we confess our sins to him and to one another in those places where it is necessary and where it is appropriate and Jesus pays the price then God pronounces forgiveness and our forgiveness is experienced not only in our relationship with God it's also experienced in our relationship with one another and God that even grants us grace so that we might forgive ourselves and you know of all the forgiveness we need sometimes that is the hardest place because in those places where we really messed up in those places where we are deeply and utterly ashamed we hate ourselves we don't like those parts of ourselves we we want to push them away as far as we can particularly if they keep coming back and they keep getting us into a lot of trouble but all our sighs and tears and fears aren't going to solve that issue that issue is only resolved when encouraged by Jesus we embrace the fact that we have strayed from the path that we cannot make it right and we invite Jesus to enter into those very deep places of our lives knowing that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us that's what gives us a future and that's what gives us a hope because when that debt has been paid we don't have to keep on paying for the screw-ups that we accomplished in life gone by because in Christ we are a new creation we not only experience forgiveness then we can make a brand new beginning because as I just quoted the scripture says if any man any woman is in Christ he or she is a new creation the old has passed away behold all things have become near God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself if God before us who can be against us not only do we have our sins forgiven but our debt having been paid God gives us a brand new crack at life the past no longer has to follow us the past no longer has to color us the Bible is filled with the stories of men and women whose stories are told in the most earthy of details because God wants to illustrate that it is by grace that we are saved and not through faith men and women who drifted far from God who experienced the discipline of God because of their sin and yet who were gloriously and wondrously restored to serve the true and the living God think of King David an adulterer and a murderer all he paid a price it cost him dearly but God didn't throw him away and David goes on to not only remain king of Israel but David goes on to become the forebear of Jesus Christ himself and think of the Apostle Paul of the New Testament he calls himself the foremost of sinners persecutor of the church killed men and women imagine the shame and the pain of his road to Damascus trip when suddenly his eyes get opened and he knows that he has been so wrong and he has shed so much blood and he is in so much trouble God comes along and he not only forgives him the church many of whom have lost brothers and sisters and family members to his treatment they embrace him and God goes on and makes him one of the most blazing apostles the church has ever seen how critical that in our own lives we understand the grace of God how critical that we don't keep hiding behind our shame don't keep turning inwardly because we can't live in the real world how important that we not hold each other's pasts against them but understand that in Jesus Christ we are a new creation and while that takes time to work out and to leave out the most beautiful incredible thing is we don't have to keep on paying the price for who we were or for what we've done we have a brand new beginning because of Jesus who is the Christ the son of the living God give him glory [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:30:36.900; remove through 00:34:24.000] , God give him glory. Would peace like a river that had left my way when sorrows like sea billows roll? Whatever my God now has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul. It's nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my Lord. It is well, it is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul. Oh Lord raise the day when my face shall be sight. The clouds be rolled back as the storm. The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend in the snow. It is well with my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:34:24.000; resume after this marked segment]