The Real Thing

Brothers and sisters in the Lord, in the passage that we have before us tonight,
the Apostle Paul focuses on one of the most common problems encountered by what I call religious people.
And I use the word "religious" advisedly. Religious is not the same as Christian.
A person who is religious knows there is a God, has some ideas of what it is that this God wants him to do,
and also has some measure of real desire to do it.
But not understanding the grace of God in Jesus Christ, he or she tries to do it in his or her own strength,
and for that reason ends up falling far short of the things that God requires. The Apostle Paul before his conversion was a prime example of a religious person.
Filled with zeal, but it was a zeal that was misdirected because he wasn't filled with the spirit of God.
Religious people says Paul and these verses that we've read together.
Have a tendency of reducing the claims of God upon the lives of his people to mere externals.
Thinking that if they do things correctly on the outside, it doesn't really matter so very much what lives on the inside.
And the whole argument that he develops in this particular passage is that as far as God is concerned,
it's not good enough to focus on the outward, God wants genuine reality to the core of our being.
Listen to him how he puts it. He says circumcision indeed is a value if you obey the law.
But if you break the law, your circumcision becomes un-circumcision.
And then he goes on in verse 28 and 29. He is not a real Jew who was one outwardly.
Nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly.
And real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal.
Real circumcision, he says, is a matter of the heart, it is spiritual and not literal.
What he's really saying in these verses that we've just read together is that even under the old covenant made at Mount Sinai,
God wasn't interested merely in external conformity to the will of God.
Already under the terms of the old covenant, God was looking for a people that loved him with all of their heart and all of their soul and all of their bind.
Under the terms of that covenant, God promised to be their God. He would guide them. He would bless them and he would lead them.
They in turn promised fidelity and faithfulness to the Lord and they said that they would serve him with all of their heart.
The sign of that covenant you will recall was the sign of circumcision.
And every time in Israel I observed his or someone else's circumcision, he had a visible reminder that number one he belonged to God
and that number two because he belonged to God, he was obligated to live the commandments of God with all of his heart and his soul and his strength and his mind.
Now time and time again, if you look at the history of the nation of Israel under the old covenant you discover that even though they profess the outward symbol of that relationship,
they slide back time and time again into observing the externals without holding on to the inward reality.
They become dependent upon the sign, they think that as long as they're circumcised and as long as they're able to call themselves Jews,
it doesn't matter how they live, it doesn't matter what they do, they're God's children and they can live as they please.
That's why earlier in this passage he blessed them when he says, "While you preach against stealing, do you steal?"
You who say that you must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?
You who boast in the law that you dishonor God by breaking the law, for as it is written the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.
You see the problem with the law is that it can tell you what you ought to be.
It can tell you that you got to love God with all of your heart, it can tell you that you ought to love your neighbor as yourself.
But the law is like a cruel taskmaster, it tells you what to do but it doesn't help, you do it.
And so therefore time and time again throughout the old covenant and you'll find this anywhere where people live under law, people do one of two things.
They either go around feeling guilty all the time because they're not leaving up to the standards of the ought to be living up to you.
Or more commonly what people do because they don't want to live with guilt all the time is they take the law of God and they bring it down to their own level.
And they begin to measure God's standards by their own lifestyle and that way they feel pretty righteous because they're doing okay.
That's what the Jews are doing. They're breaking the law, they're not even keeping the letter of the law that alone is spirit of law.
But all the while they're going around saying well we're God's people, we've been circumcised, we can live anyway that we want to live and it's alright.
And Paul's argument here is that as far as God is concerned the symbol of the covenant is only as meaningful as the reality that it represents.
Circumcision he says is a value if you obey the law but if you break the law your circumcision becomes un-circumcision. It's like the marriage ring.
You've heard me say before that in our culture one of the few remaining signs that we have of covenant relationships is the marriage ring.
And when the Lord willing this coming Saturday Casper and Anita and Kim and Gerald stand before this congregation and are united in marriage most likely I suspect they're going to be exchanging rings.
And that ring is a symbol of the trough or faithfulness they pledge to one another.
And from that moment on any time they look at that ring, any time anybody else looks at that ring that ring is a symbol of the fact that they're married.
But the ring doesn't make the married.
You can have people that go through life not being married, living common law or for that matter being unfaithful to their spouses and they carry wedding rings around with them looking like they're married but they're not married in reality.
The wedding ring doesn't make you be married.
Likewise you can be married but have no wedding ring and still be married.
But the symbol has meaning as a dovetails with the inner reality.
And what Paul is saying here to the Jews is that it doesn't matter if you have all the trappings of religion.
It doesn't matter if you're born to do, it doesn't matter if you're circumcised.
It doesn't matter if you go through all the right motions.
What God wants he says is circumcision of the heart.
He wants you to live the reality that is represented by all of the things you take for granted.
He wants a heart that is real before God.
Circumcision, he says, is a value if you obey the law but if you break the law your circumcision becomes un-circumcision.
Now if you understand what I've said so far then you'll have a pretty good idea where I'm going.
Because you say the problem that was encountered by the Old Testament religious Jew is not very much different but the problem that is encountered by the quote-unquote religious Christian.
Even though we live under the new covenant which is a covenant of grace which means that Jesus not only washes away our sins but he comes to live within our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So that from the inside out we can be changed to become all of the things that God wants us to be.
The danger and the tendency that every last one of us faces is the time and time again we slide out of grace back into the law.
We begin living in our own strength.
And we hold on to the externals of our religion while our hearts are removed from the reality that we're trying to portray by being the children of God.
Let me give you a couple of examples that I hope will help us to sort of grab hold of this and understand that number one baptism. We witness baptism this morning in the 11 o'clock service for some of you that had a clutch of fear there for a moment that you slept through the service of the new clon.
Under the new covenant baptism is now the new symbol of the covenant.
Whenever somebody submits to baptism or whenever somebody receives the mark of Christian baptism that person too confesses at least two things.
Number one I belong to God and number two I am committed to living before the face of God in obedience to his commandments, commandments that flow out of the heart.
Now the danger is and you can see it happening everywhere is that people embrace the outward symbol without laying hold of the inward reality.
There are people all over the world who want nothing to do with God. They don't practice their faith, they don't pray, they don't gather for worship, they don't manifest the fruit of the Spirit of God in their lives.
But if they come out of a tradition where the infants are baptized I can guarantee you if they have some religious background they will want their children what they love to call done. I love that term don't you? They want their kids done.
Why do they want their kids done? I mean they don't you know we don't have as much of that in our tradition as we do in a lot of other traditions although we have some of it.
But they want their children done. They want their children baptized. Why do people want to have their children baptized when they're not serving the law?
Because they're superstitious. They think that that little bit of water on the child's head or whatever is going to provide some measure of spiritual protection regardless of the reality or the lack thereof in the life of the parents.
I submit to you that is a bunch of unbiblical nonsense because the reality of baptism as a symbol is only as real as the inward reality of the parent who promises to raise the child in the ways of God.
And the parent who will do all that he or she can till a hold of the promises of God to raise the child in covenant faithfulness that's why when we have baptism parents are asked to respond to questions.
And those questions are vows that they're making before God that they will take hold of the realities that are represented by the symbol of baptism.
They will do all that they can to bring up their child so that when he or she comes of age that person will lay hold of the covenant blessings of God in his or her own life.
The symbol is only as meaningful as the reality that lies behind it. If you don't understand that you can't understand why there are uddles of baptized people all over the world who are going straight to hell because they will not repent of their sin.
Circumcision is a value only if you keep the law.
If you break the law your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. He says to the Jewish community who thought that to be circumcised was to be safe regardless of how they lived.
Let me give you another example. Go into church or any of the kind of activities that as Christians we are called upon to engage in Bible reading prayer, a variety of Christian activities. Let's just limit it to going to church.
One of the duties and one of the callings and one of the desires that God places in the lives of his children is to gather as we are tonight for the purposes of worshipping the Lord for the purposes of being instructed in his word for the purposes of being able to build up one another.
We just don't come together because we get nothing else to do when it's something I. We come together because the spirit of the Lord gives us a desire to worship.
And don't you sense that growing in our lives, you sense that growing in our community, just to desire to give God the glory that he deserves because of who he is and because he is an awesome God and he's entered into covenant with you and me through faith and Christ.
And we want to hear his word because we want his word to shape our lives so that when we go out and we live in the marketplace day to day, we can learn increasingly by the grace of God to be obedient.
And in that way that obedience flowing through our lives, we can become people who invest their lives in the lives of others for his praise and for his glory.
There's always the danger though, isn't there? And none of us has ever immune to it that we lose the reality and we slide back into form without substance.
There are people all over the world that wouldn't think of ever skipping church. And every hymn that is sung, they'll sing it with everything that is within them, but they have no idea what it is their sin.
I know people that wouldn't think of ever missing church, but when the word of God begins to come across their lives and God begins to uncover and reveal sins and they've got to change in repentance and faith, they harden their hearts and they stubbornly keep on going their own way.
But they wouldn't be caught dead ever skipping church because going to church is the right thing to do.
I know people that wouldn't ever think of skipping church. They wouldn't ever think of calling themselves anything but Christian, but they sit in the fellowship of believers and they carry grudges and hate in their heart against brothers and sisters without ever being willing to confront and to repent of it and to deal with it.
They were in our church years ago, elderly people. They were at odds with each other, they weren't a husband and wife, they were two separate families.
And they'd had a serious argument years before about a job application that one had gotten and the other hadn't gotten it and the first one was sure that the person that got it was sure that the person, let me get it the other way around.
The other person who didn't get it was sure that the person who did get it had sabotaged their application. It was a fantastic story, but there was bad blood between them.
This carried on for years and years they went out to see the preacher and the preacher couldn't solve it either and he said, well then one of you said in one side of the church and the other side of the church stay out of each other's hair.
When I came to that church that's what they were doing. One was sitting over here and the other was sitting over there to the best of my knowledge to this day it's never been resolved in their lives.
You see we can talk the talk, we can sing the songs, we can profess love for God but that isn't good enough from God's perspective.
God is looking for reality. He is not a Jew who is one outwardly nor is true circumcision nor is true circumcision something external and physical.
He is a Jew who is one inwardly and real circumcision is a matter of the heart.
God is looking for authentic Christians who live the reality that they profess. One other illustration just quickly to try to tie this together the question of obedience and we've touched on it a little bit already but let's expand on it.
The Lord is calling us to love Him with all of our heart, with all of our soul and with all of our mind. He's calling us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
It's a love commandment. It will show you in a few moments that cannot be lived apart from the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ because that's what Paul is trying to prove in his whole passage. He's trying to prove that good and bad people they only Jesus because apart from Jesus you cannot keep the commandments of God.
I know people, so do you, who pride themselves in their righteousness in certain areas of their lives. I know a whole generation of people that are the most honest people in all of the world.
They would give you the shirt off their back. They would never cheat you. They are hardworking, righteous people and they are proud of their honesty and their proud of their righteousness and they measure themselves and everybody else by that standard.
But some of those same folks entertain scenes in other areas of their lives that are just a sinful before the sight of God as a person who is a thief or who is dishonest.
But as far as they're concerned, it doesn't really matter because they just ignore the fact that that is sin. Had a man in our church one time, one of my good friends, he was an elder and he was one of these fellows who was really strong and Sabbath observant.
So he really was the kind that if you were cutting your grass on Sunday, he knew where you were going and it wasn't up because good Christians didn't do those kinds of things.
And if he ever catches you buying an ice cream to somebody watch out because you're in big trouble and I'm not suggesting you got to cut your grass on Sunday.
I think anybody that wants to work seven days and six has got way too much energy. But that's not the issue.
In spite of the fact that he was so self-righteous about what it is that ought to be done in the Sabbath or ought not to be done mostly.
There were areas of anger in his life where he had run a foul of people over the years where he carried grudges in his heart, world without end, amen.
And if you ever touched on it in his life, it was goodbye because as far as he was concerned, he was right in what he was feeling, he was right in what he was doing.
And he could do what he wanted to do. Do you hear me when I'm saying tonight?
The law makes hypocrites out of people because you either go through life feeling under condemnation because you aren't measuring up to the letter alone, the spirit of the law.
Or else you've got to start denying that areas where you were failing really matter.
And so religious people can be identified because their private lives are oftentimes very different from their public lives. You've noticed that haven't you?
I remember one time and I don't say this critically at all, a bunch of us in seminary, we had gone preaching out to Iowa.
They have this thing that they call seminary Sunday. They load everybody up and they assign us and set us loose in the church.
And that's what happened that particular Sunday. And I remember being in a car full of seminarians on the way back from our preaching assignment the next Monday.
The pressure was off and you could tell with the guys the pressure was off because now that the pressure was off the conversation. I want to say this charitably began to deteriorate.
And the jokes became increasingly off color. And I remember sitting in that bunch not because I was feeling self-righteous but because there was something in my spirit that was saying Lord.
Yesterday some of these guys were up in the pulpit, they were proclaiming the reality of Jesus Christ and the truth of your kingdom and today their mouths in some cases are in the gutter.
I don't say that to condemn. I know how hard it is to be consistent. I know how hard it is for our private lives to measure up to our public lives.
But what I'm saying is Jesus Christ who died and who were old and poured out his spirit came to call us into a renewal and into a maturity that we not only observe things correctly on the outside.
But we begin to live the reality. Paul says the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.
It is the inconsistency of quote unquote religious people that gives the cause for the world to be full of cynicism because they look at us and they say I see you saying one thing but I see you living another God's play.
Paul's play in this passage is for God's people to be a genuine people who are on the inside what we profess to be on the outside are people who are as real privately as we are publicly.
People who observe not only the letter of the law but who can hold on to the spirit of the law and who can love God with all of their heart with all of their soul and with all of their mind and who can love their neighbor with the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ.
How do you get that way? Not by making more resolutions and not by lambasting yourself because you feel that you failed but rather by focusing on the person of Jesus Christ.
Remember, that's the theme of the book of Romans. The theme of the book of Romans is that God takes rebels and sinners like you and I by nature and by birth and he transforms us to be like Jesus.
And Paul here in Romans chapter 2 is setting the stage for his conclusions in Romans chapter 3 that there is none righteous known out one because you see morally good people tend to think they're better than morally bad people because we all measure ourselves by our own standards.
And Paul's argument is that whether you were a Jew, raised in a religious environment, raised with the knowledge of the law or whether you were a Gentile raised in the gutter without an understanding of who God is.
True righteousness, the kind of transformation of the heart cannot take place apart from the grace of Jesus Christ.
No human being he says in Romans 3 verse 20 will be justified in his sight by works of the law since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law of the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus for all who believe. For there is no distinction. Since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift.
Through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus who God put forward as an expiation by his blood to be received by faith.
How do we become real? How can we live out inwardly the reality that we profess extra delay?
It is as the Bible by faith in Jesus Christ. It's by acknowledging and by confessing that no matter how much I pride myself in all of the good things that I am by virtue of my birth, by virtue of my education, by virtue of my trading, by virtue of my religious upbringing.
None of those will make me acceptable in the sight of God for all of sinned and fallen short of the glory. There's only one who is acceptable and his name is Jesus.
When I give my life to him, when I plead his righteousness before the face of God instead of my righteousness, when I honestly acknowledge my failures and acknowledge my sins, he not only forgives me for my past, but as you know he comes to live in my heart.
And the Spirit of God written upon my heart is going to change my life from glory to glory. And that doesn't mean that I'll be without sin.
It doesn't mean that there won't be those times when I'm still inconsistent, but when I am there will be the conviction of the Spirit of God.
And the Spirit of God from within me will draw me into deeper praise and deeper worship and deeper obedience.
The Spirit of the Lord will rebuke me when I fall short not of my own standards or anybody else's, but of the standards of God.
By repentance and faith in his name, he begins to transform the core of my heart. Until from inside more and more I begin to glow with the presence of the glory of God.
Not necessarily making me feel better, not necessarily making me look more righteous to my own eyes, but changing my heart, changing my life, and making me increasingly a person of integrity.
I believe with all my heart that one of the things that God is doing in the church today, he's doing the kind of shaking that he's doing, because he is wanting to build a people of integrity.
A people who live the reality, that outwardly they confess.
And I want to ask you tonight, have there been a time in your life when you've come to the cross of Jesus and acknowledged that even your religion self was not good enough to inherit the favor of God that you needed Jesus Christ.
If you haven't, do you need to do that? Because all the efforts and all the works of your own heart will not drum up in you the spirituality that you need to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.
And if you're here tonight and you've done that, and I know many of us have done that, and the fruit of it is demonstrated in our lives.
Then my question for you is this, are you willing to let the Spirit of the Lord search out those hidden areas, those delightful areas of sin that we clutch to our hearts, because the message of the cross is too painful for us to let go of those areas and to uncover those fears.
We all have them, you know, I have them, and so do you. Are we willing as a community, to the soul of the grace of the Lord Jesus flow through our lives that he will flush that all out, filling us with integrity and filling us with life in the Spirit of God, so that increasingly we are on the inside, when we profess to be on the outside, a minimum of redeem by God learning to live with increasing measure, a life of obedience knowing that all our failures are covered by the blood of Jesus, but we want to bear fruit in the kingdom of God.
That's what Jesus died. He died to set us free. He died to deliver us, He died to make us righteous, He died to make us obedient.