Understanding Judas

SERMON: 2008-11-14--ac0806--understanding-judas SOURCE DURATION: 00:37:54.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 8 concludes the pastoral application and theological discussion on helping others in darkness. Candidates 9 through 15 transition into highly repetitive, lyrical material ('Change my heart, oh God...'), which is characteristic of a hymn or musical prayer segment, marking the end of the main sermon narrative. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:35:09.440-00:37:52.500 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 --- Well, I think you'll agree with me this morning when I tell you that surely the figure of Judas is one of the most tragic figures in all of biblical history, chosen by the Lord Jesus to be part of His inner circle, carrier of the common bunny purse, eyewitness to the miracles that Jesus did in His presence, and for that matter, a participant in the ministry of Jesus. He nevertheless, at the end of the road, turned His back on Jesus, betrayed Him to the religious authorities, and ultimately, therefore, was instrumental in His death. And all of that for the measly sum of thirty pieces of silver of the price of a slave. No wonder then that Jesus, in Matthew chapter 26, has this to say about His betrayer. He says, "The Son of Man will go, just as it is written about Him, but woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man. It would be better for him if he had never been born. It would have been better if he had never been born." And so it's not surprising then that with rare exception, the name of Judas has gone down in history as the ultimate example of betrayal. But the question remains, and the question that I want us to try to grapple with a little bit this morning is, what made Judas do this? Of all the disciples of Jesus, all of whom shared in varying degrees of disappointment at one point or another, why was it that Judas turned Him in and was instrumental in bringing about His death? Well the obvious and the clear answer is, of course, and the easy answer is, the devil made Him do it. And that's not as far-fetched as it sounds, because twice in the gospels we are told that at critical phases of the story, Satan entered into Judas. That is to say, Satan took control over Judas and used Him for His purposes. But you know just as well as I do this morning, the devil can just willy-nilly enter into somebody's life. You and I, we don't have to go through life living in fear that all of a sudden the devil is going to come along and he's going to grab a hold of us and make us do things that we don't want to do. There are all kinds of barriers that God has established, and for Satan to enter into a life, those barriers have to be broken down not only, but he's got to find a fertile soil that he can play around with. And so the question then is, what was the fertile soil of which the scripture speaks? What is the fertile soil that enabled Satan to enter into his life and to give him this kind of power? Well there's a good clue for us, I think, in the New Testament passage of John chapter 12, the verses 4 through 7. Let me just put that verse in context for you a moment. This is the story where Jesus gets anointed by Mary at Bethany, and you will recall that she took very expensive perfume and poured it over Jesus. And you will recall perhaps the response of Judas in that story. Here is how it's recorded. One of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected and he said, why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year's wages. And then John adds these words. He did not say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief. As a keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. Judas was a thief and as a thief, he clearly did not share in the values of Jesus. As Jesus, you will recall, his primary goal was the kingdom of God. In the kingdom of God, as you know, God is sovereign. He rules over all. And in the kingdom of God, doing the will of God and trusting Him and obeying Him is the primary value. When Jesus came to redeem us from a world of sin, to restore us to fellowship with God by way of the cross, Judas hadn't counted on this because Judas, as a typical Jew of his day, thought of Jesus as the one who would build the kingdom now. And so Judas got on board with Jesus because Judas wanted more than anything to see a political and a religious kingdom of his day. And so for Judas to discover that Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem, that Jesus was going to die on the cross, and that the kingdom that God was bringing about was not first and foremost the kingdom of the here and now, but a kingdom of the age to come. His disappointment knew no limit. And it's out of that disappointment, it's out of having at a heart wide open and yet being disappointed that Satan found, I believe, the fertile soil in Judas' heart that made him so angry, so disappointed, so discouraged that he didn't think twice about turning Jesus over to the authority. Because you see, love that is unrequited, hope that is not satisfied, will often turn into bitterness and anger. And it's very significant that at the Last Supper when Jesus identifies Judas as the one who is going to betray him, that Judas leaves in a fit of anger and the Bible says in John's gospel fittingly, "And it was night." Why was it night? Because this was the hour of darkness when Satan was going to do his worst, when Satan through the hands of wicked people was going to put the Messiah to death on Calvary's cross. Ultimately of course for our salvation, ultimately because God had wanted it to happen, but it happened because Judas had fertile soil in his heart that Satan could use to make him betray the Messiah. Well it's very easy then for you and me to sit here this many hundreds of years later and point our finger at Judas and say, "My, oh my, what a wicked and a crooked man he was." And that is absolutely true. The Bible never makes excuses for Judas. And all current attempts and theological circles sometimes to try to rehabilitate Judas' reputation ultimately end up in failure because fact of the matter is it would have been better for that man never to have been born. That is the weight of guilt and shame that for all eternity will rest on his shoulders. But remember that whenever you point a finger at somebody, you've got how many fingers pointing back at you. Because fact of the matter is you see that but for the grace of God, there probably isn't even one of us here in this place who also by times would have turned his or her back on Jesus and similarly betray him. The reason being that to one degree or another we often have a divided heart. And when our hearts have been wide open and we have lived fully without defense mechanisms and we have fully entered into our hopes and dreams and expectations as Judas did. And then when those dreams are quashed, when they're shattered right in front of our eyes, the pain, the hurt, the disillusionment can be so great that at a moment's notice we will turn against the object of our pain. Be that other people or be that God himself. And this of course plays out in many different ways. Here's a wife feeling particularly tender towards her husband and she says, "You know, I'm going to go all out tonight and put the best kind of dinner on the table that I can." And she cooks the kind of meal that she knows he will love. She gets out the special dishes and she gets out the candles and she has starry pictures in mind of the romantic evenings that we're going to have together. And her heart's right out there. And then he, well, he doesn't show up. Maybe he's got grace enough to say, "Well, sorry I got caught up in a meeting and I'm going to be an hour or two late." Or he doesn't say anything at all. And she sits there with candles burned down to a stub, the roast fried crisp in the oven and all the food getting cold. Now some of you wives and mothers, you've been there. Maybe some of you husbands, if you cook at home, you've been there. What happens to your heart? Well, I can pretty well guarantee you it's not going to be a very romantic evening in that household that night. I think there's going to be a few tears shed and a few recriminations back and forth. Because you see, the wider your heart is open, the more prone you are to being disappointed. And the only way that you ever avoid that kind of disappointment is to keep your heart closed, which is what a lot of people do. But that always comes at a cost because then you live as an island in an isolated castle. They always say the walls that keep you safe are also the walls that keep you isolated. Or to use another example, you come to a church community like this and you discover people that are alive and people that love doing life and people that just enjoy each other's company and each other's fellowship and gradually but slowly you allow yourself to be drawn into that. You make new friends and you develop new relationships and you tell people things that you've never ever told anybody before and it's wonderful to know that you matter to somebody. And then you discover somebody else becomes more important than you. Or you discover that what you thought was a friendship is no longer a friendship maybe because the demands that you make are too great and so people start ignoring you because they don't know what to do with you. Or worse yet, somebody talks about you or somebody takes something that you said and they've passed it on to somebody else and you feel so betrayed. I don't know if you've ever felt betrayed. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you laid your heart out and it got shot down and I can tell you that when that happens, what's the natural tendency? Well, the natural tendency is to say burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. And the world is full of people who go through life with all their guards in place making sure nobody's going to mess around with me and nobody's going to mess around with my heart. Or to use still another example, here you are. You know, you've grown in the grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus after years of resisting God, after years of not trusting God. God has softened your heart. You have responded maybe to an altar call. You have prayed as many of you did a while back to receive the Holy Spirit and you will have thought as I did many years ago that you'd sprout wings, sport a halo, and fly to glory and you step out in faith. You start tithing in ways that you've never tithed before because you're going to trust the promises of God now that as you give it will be given to you, pressed down, shaken together, full measure running over. Or you've heard the call of God in your life and maybe you've quit your job or maybe you've stepped out into an area of ministry that you've never stepped out in before. You've begun to live in places where you've never learned how to live before. And you say, "I can do this because God is with me." And you expect God to carry you and to be with you as He has promised. And maybe nine times out of ten that's what's happened in your life and in your experience and it has encouraged you to go on and on and on. And then maybe one day you find yourself in this situation where you're out on a liam and you've put all your hope and your trust in God and you said, "Oh God, if you're not with me here, I'm dead." You're out further than you've ever been out before. You're walking on water now and you don't know how you got there, but it's like God lets you down and everything that you had thrown yourself into all of a sudden crumbles before your eyes. I don't know if you've ever found yourself in a place like that. I don't know if you've ever found yourself in a spot where you dared to hope, where you dared to live, where you dared to let your heart fully come to life only to wonder, "God, where are you?" I remember a good many years ago listening to an interview with Oral Roberts, founder of Oral Roberts University, on television where he talked about having to forgive God. And that sounds like strange language, but it was in the context of what he believed was God's call on his life to build this huge medical complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma where they were going to combine Western medicine with spiritual healing. It was an incredible step of faith, and it ultimately ended all collapsing, and how disappointed and discouraged he was, and how he felt that he had to forgive God. And as I said, that sounds funny, but what he's really talking about is getting over the hurt and the disappointment of having stepped out in faith and found that God didn't appear to be there. And you and I, we hear stories like that, and our heart shakes a little bit, doesn't it, because why do those kinds of things happen? Well, that's beyond the scope of our conversation this morning, but what all of these stories that are just related to you have in common is a resonating with Judas' situation where your heart's wide open, you throw yourself into a cause, whether rightly or wrongly, into a relationship, your heart is fully alive and fully engaged, and then it falls apart. And it's in the place of that hurt, in the place of that pain, and in the place of that disappointment that Satan finds his most fertile soil to breed resentment, irritation, and ultimately a spirit of anger and murder. And while there are many examples of that in Scripture, Judas being clearly one, the best Old Testament example of that, I always think, is the story of Cain and Abel. And you know this story, I trust. Cain and Abel were the two sons born to Adam and Eve after they had been kicked out of the garden, and the Bible tells us in Genesis chapter 4 that as Adam and Eve grew up and became young men, they each brought an offering to the Lord, and Abel brought an offering of his flock, and Cain brought an offering of the firstfruits. And the Bible says that the Lord God accepted Abel's offering, but He did not accept Cain's offering. And I wonder this morning if you can remember what the Scripture says about Cain's reaction. Let's read it together. The Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it." Here you have Cain. His offering has just been rejected. Now here he is. He's put his heart on the line. He's come to the Lord God thinking that what He was doing, God would be pleased with. I don't know if you can imagine, but there's not a lot more hurtful than God saying to you, "Well, excuse me what you're doing. You may mean well, but I don't like it." That would make you a little upset, wouldn't it? And Cain here has the choice. Am I going to try again and resist sin that is crouching at the door, or am I going to give in to this spirit of sin and become the kind of murderer that ultimately he chose to become? And when you and I get to those places where our heart has been laid out, whether in relationship with your spouse, whether in relationship with community, whether in relationship with your friends, whether in relationship with the world, any of those places where you and I lay our hearts on the line and we experience rejection, I want you to know sin is crouching at the door. The devil is right there to stir you up and to try to keep you from resisting that spirit, but rather drawing you into it. And you know why? Because the devil understands rejection. Remember, he was one, supposedly according to Scripture, one of the highest angelic beings in the very presence of God originally until pride settled in his heart and he wanted to ascend on the throne of the most high and he said, "Why can't I be God?" So God threw him out of heaven and he's been fighting ever since trying to regain the kingdom and trying to frustrate all of God's purposes. And so you and I, whenever we experience rejection, whether real or imagined, the devil is right there and sin is crouching at the door, trying to overcome us. You know how he does it? He plays on all our fears, whether real or imagined. First of all, he amplifies the pain, then he fills us with righteous indignation, "How can that person do that to me?" And he helps us to remember every wrong, whether real or imagined. And now, of course, what begins to happen, and you'll have noticed this, once you have that sense of resentment in your heart towards somebody, now you notice it wherever you go and you pick apart everything that person does, everything that person says, and it just falls into that same spot and you become harder and harder and you close your heart off more and more. That is Judas's history. And I can tell you, there isn't one of us here who is totally immune to following in his footsteps. And I'll tell you, the more alive the church becomes, the more alive your hearts are, the more you truly live your feelings, the more you truly feel your longings, the more prone you are to that kind of hurt, and the more prone you are to that kind of temptation. Am I making sense here? Am I just talking about myself or am I talking about you two? Because I dare say there isn't one of us, if we live with our hearts wide open, that isn't going to find himself or herself in that place sooner or later. So here's the question then, how do we avoid this? Because the temptation is to think, "Well, this is inevitable," but go back to Cain. God says to him, "Sin is crouching at your door, but you must overcome it." We don't have to be victims to other people's agendas. We don't have to be victims to other people's rejection. We don't have to be victims to other people's lack of respect or indecent treatment of us. Sin is crouching at the door, but you must overcome it. How do you do that? Well, three quick steps as we wind up this morning. The first is be brutally honest with yourself. Scripture says in the book of Hebrews, "Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God." Take care lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart. You and I don't even know what lives in our hearts until we get in these places where we're not respected, where we're not loved, where we're not understood, where our dreams come dashing down. That's when you discover what's inside you. And my experience has been that our tendency is to minimize the pain we feel in those spots. And that is especially true because, you see, normally, typically in life, what we do is this. We've got our armor on. We're on guard. We don't allow our hearts to live fully. We keep it hidden because we know the world is not a very safe place. And so when our guards are all in place and people say things and people do things and people hurt us, it doesn't really hurt us as deeply because it runs off our backs because our armor is in place. But every so often, as we get deeper into relationships, as community becomes safer, as we lay our hearts on the line, we sort of forget about our armor. We get lulled into a sense of security. And so our hearts are wide open. Our guards are not in place. And now, when somebody betrays me or when somebody slights me or somebody hurts me or somebody talks about me or somebody rejects me, it doesn't run off my back any longer. It goes right into my heart, and frankly, it hurts like get all. And so when that happens, what do you do? Well, you close around the wound, right? You pretend it hasn't really happened. You deny that those feelings are there. And life goes on, except now you're a more cautious individual because you're not going to let yourself be caught again in that particular situation. Well, if we want to avoid Judas' trap or Cain's trap, it begins by being brutally honest with ourselves and saying, "Yeah, you know, that really hurt. I was really confused there. I was really hurt there. I can't just pretend that it's not there." Now, that doesn't mean that everything has to be spoken out. It doesn't mean that I got to throw a hissy fit or whatever else, but what it means is that I've got to be in touch with my own soul because if I'm not, then my soul will harden and I will be deceived and I will think that I'm the path of righteousness when in fact I'm on a path towards evil. So we've got to be honest, just brutally honest and say, "Lord, whatever is in my heart, show it to me. Create in me a clean heart, O God," is what David said many years ago. And then of course, we've got to deal with the issues that are at stake. Scripture says, "Don't just be hearers of the word, be doers of the word." Scripture says, "See to it that no root of bitterness springs up to cause trouble." And dealing with it means that I not only own what is there, but I take responsibility because you see the temptation for all of us in places of pain is to try to shunt responsibility off to other people. If you didn't say what you said, I wouldn't be hurting as badly as I am. If you didn't do what you did, I wouldn't be feeling what I'm feeling. And so we're always passing the buck and we're always opening room for the devil to step in there because that's the kind of justification that he uses. If you hear nothing else at all that I say this morning, please hear this. Nobody else is responsible for your interior life but you. You can't blame your anger on other people. You can't blame your frustration on other people. You can't just blame your hurt on other people or on God or the devil or anybody else. Can some of those be instrumental in bringing you into that place? Yes. But part of being an overcomer in Christ is learning to accept responsibility for my own pain and getting the help that I need from God to deal with my staff. Now most of us find up to a certain point we can do that ourselves, maybe with God. Many of us cannot do that alone because part of getting into that place is you don't even know what you feel anymore, isn't that true? Isn't it true that after you've been badly hurt, battered or run over and you feel all numb on the inside, you don't even know why you're feeling what you're feeling, let alone have the grace to step out of that? And that's of course why God raises up community, confess your sins, your weaknesses, your failures one to another. Pray for each other that you may be healed. That little seed of bitterness that we so carefully nurture over in the corner, over yonder, under Satan's watering and empowering, will grow into a huge tree that will one day take you down and make you do things that you never ever thought you could because you're now allied with the powers from below rather than the powers from above. So we need to be brutally honest with ourselves, we need to deal with it and then we need to emphasize the positive. I love Philippians 4, 8 and 9. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put into practice and the God of peace will be with you. There is something very perverse about the human heart, I don't know if you've ever discovered it in yourself, you get hurt, you get disappointed, you feel that somebody has failed you and you know what, it feels pretty darn good to stay mad. Have you ever noticed that? Like I'm not going to let go of this, this is too good. I've got the edge over on you and I'm going to stand on what is right here until you come and you apologize and you get marriages where two partners dig in, pulling on the tug rope and you get friendships like that and relationships like that and everybody loses because you see the longer you stay in that place, the harder it is to back out because the more and more convinced you are about the self-righteousness of your cause. You know what's the best way to keep dandelions from growing in your lawn? Grow a good lawn of grass. You know what's the best way to keep that kind of sin from rooting in your life and in my life? It's to live a life of gratitude to God and to look for the positive instead of the negative. I don't have to look very long at any of you to find all kinds of things that I could pinpoint as being wrong and you hasten to respond well I could look at your life and it doesn't take me very long to find your weaknesses, all true. And we can look at that until the cows come home and all we will is be irritated with each other. Or we can look at each other through the eyes of grace, know that we're all under construction, we all need the Lord Jesus and that in the midst of all the crud, the sin and the shortcomings of our lives God has still deposited a great deal of grace. And if you and I will but focus on those things in our marriages, in our friendships, in our communities then you know what happens? We discover the God of peace will be with us. And you know what happens when we don't? We'll end up where Cain ended up and we'll end up where Judas ended up. And where did Judas end up? He ended up committing suicide. An ignomous ending for a life of betrayal. And Lord willing when we come back to that subject we're going to look not only at Judas's suicide but why do people kill themselves? How can we avoid that temptation in our own lives? And how can we help other people when they are driven into that kind of darkness that [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:35:09.440; remove through 00:37:54.000] makes them do [CUT] that kind of unimaginable thing? Change my heart, oh God, make it ever true, change my heart, oh God, make it ever true, change my heart, oh God, may I be like you, change my heart, oh God, make it ever true, change my heart, oh God, may I be like you, you are the Father, I am the Grave, hold me and make me, this is what I pray, change my heart, oh God, make it ever true, change my heart, oh God, may I be like you, you are the Father, I am the Grave, hold me and make me, this is what I pray, change my heart, oh God, make it ever true, change my heart, oh God, may I be like you. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:37:54.000; resume after this marked segment]