Beware! Caution! Danger!
Sermon
A 'NEW AND IMPROVED' JESUS?
Sermons For Lent And Easter
We may not always heed warning signs, but we still like to feel we have been told of approaching danger. We see signs everywhere that read: "Beware of the Dog," "Watch Your Step," "Danger! Thin Ice," "No Smoking. Oxygen in Use," "Watch for Wet Paint," "Dangerous Crossing," "Caution! No Lifeguard on Duty," and on and on they go. One cannot help but recall the story of the preacher who stood and announced his text. He began to read with increasing fervor, "Behold, I come quickly!" Then, for added emphasis, he read it again, "Behold, I come quickly!" Then he stepped to the edge of the chancel platform, and in a loud, commanding voice, repeated, "Behold, I come quickly!" Just then, he lost his balance, fell off the pulpit platform, and right into the lap of a lady seated in the front row. Terribly embarrassed, he began to apologize profusely. She interrupted the apology to say, "It's all right, pastor. After all, you warned me three times!"
This text is a warning. It is not one of the happier, positive sections of the Word, but it does have some high moments in it. And there is no doubt about the valuable lessons we can learn.
Beware The Temptation To Take Praise To Yourself
Paul and Barnabas are still on their first missionary journey, and now have moved to Lystra where they are involved in a strange incident. Paul healed a crippled man, and the people of Lystra are so impressed that they are determined to make gods of them.
It seems that there was a legendary history of Lyconia that told of Zeus and Hermes coming to earth incognito and in disguise. There was none in all the land who would grant hospitality to them, except for on old peasant couple who took them in and treated them kindly. The result was that the whole population of Lystra was wiped out by the gods, except for the old man and woman who took them in.
Now the people of Lystra are so carried away with the miracle of healing that they suspect that Barnabas, with his imposing appearance, is Zeus, the king of the gods, and Paul is Hermes, the god of speech, because he seems to be the main spokesman. Then, too, they don't want to get caught as they were before when they slammed their doors in the face of the gods. After all, you have to watch out for these gods. They get pretty touchy when they aren't treated right, and the people don't want to get in their bad graces again.
So it was that in most places, the people had heard Paul and Barnabas gladly, but these folks were too eager. They want to deify them. They heard little of what Paul and Barnabas had to say of salvation. They were so excited about a visit from the gods that they lost the message entirely. "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!" they shouted. Then they began to plan ways to celebrate the presence of the "gods" among them. Oxen were prepared for sacrifice, garlands of flowers were woven to honor them, and the festivities began to get bigger and wilder and more and more expansive. What a tumultuous welcome the apostles were receiving!
But when it dawned upon Paul and Barnabas what was happening, they were horrified. These people had not heard the gospel preached at all. Instead they were going to put the messengers in the Greek pantheon. They always had a lot of gods there and there was always room for one more (in this case, two more). Paul and Barnabas wondered what they could do. How could they proclaim the truth of the one, true, living God when these Lystrans were so mistaken? The apostles tore their garments - not a very godlike thing to do, when you think about it - but it was a radical Hebrew way of expressing horror and dismay over such a sacrilege. They had to help these men of Lystra realize that they were badly mistaken. They protested, "We, too, are only men, human like you." They wanted them to know they have the same kinds of problems all humans have; they bleed when they are cut, they suffer fatigue, they grow hungry, they are no different from anyone else.
Paul and Barnabas wanted no personal triumph for themselves, no crowning with garlands as gods, while their message was being ignored. So with strong words they turned the spotlight away from themselves and centered it upon the message they had brought.
Christian ministers, and Christian workers still have a similar danger in our time. Power, even power for good, is sometimes misinterpreted and misunderstood. Just as the dramatic healing drew a crowd at Lystra - or is seen on Sunday morning television - so it is dangerous when one is mistaken as the source of the power which belongs to God. Sometimes when I am conducting revival services I am asked to pray for the sick, and sometimes in marvelous grace and mercy, God will heal the individual. Then it is my responsibility to let it be clearly understood, "I am not the healer!" God heals them, when any divine grace is given, the work is always God's and his alone! Every misapprehension must be corrected when others would give the glory and praise to a human. Paul had it right when he said, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ crucified." All persons who work for Christ would do well to remember that "God is a jealous God and his glory he will not give to another."
This is not always easy to achieve; this shifting of attention away from one's self. A lot of the messenger's effectiveness, be it preacher, teacher, singer, worker, or whatever representative of the gospel, comes from his personal qualities. Marshall MacLuhen, mass media expert, said, "The medium is the message," and Phillips Brooks spoke of the same truth when he said, "truth through personality." When one deletes entirely the play of personal gifts, talents, and graces, it sometimes enfeebles the message. Of course all of this must be kept in a tension and balance with a strong God awareness that remembers that too much attention centered upon the messenger tends to dim and diminish the truth he is bringing.
Every preacher who takes his calling seriously, must make Christ preeminent in all things. There are always subtle temptations to take some of the praise to oneself. But this clever lure to self-aggrandizement is a danger to personal integrity. Caution must be given so that we never fail to give our undivided allegiance to Christ and Christ alone. John the Baptist had the proper motivation when he cried, "He must increase and I must decrease."
Motivation for Christian service has to be screened at all times. We must often ask ourselves, "Do I do this for Christ, or so that people will say, 'What a fine job you've done,' 'What would we ever do without you,' 'You are one of the best we've ever had!' " Helmut Thielicke, in his book, Life Can Begin Again, tells how he was once taken care of by a nurse who' did her work perfectly. She told him that for 20 years she had worked on the night shift. Thielicke asked her if the strain were not tremendous, and where did she get her strength? She said, "Well, every night that I work puts another jewel in my crown, and I already have 7,175 in a row!" He said some of his gratitude for her immediately vanished, for he could no longer feel she was doing it out of concern for him, but instead had her eyes secretly fixed on that crown in heaven. Jesus reminded us that pure motivation in our good deeds is important. He said, "If your alms are given to be seen of men, you already have your reward."
It is so easy to fall into the trap of accepting the garlands of praise, and forget who we are serving. Paul took the only route that any of us can take. He disclaimed any kinship with the gods, and reminded those who would place him on a pedestal that he was "just like they were." Paul lived out that conviction of self-abasement in all his ministry. Later he would write, "It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me."
Beware The Temptation To Compromise The Truth
The crowd at Lystra tried to blunt the edge of this new Christian truth by putting it in with the old categories. If they could just get these two new personalities, Paul and Barnabas, who had a new message, to conform to the old familiar gods, they would be safe. They would not need to change if they could just add on this new message to the old precepts and traditions.
This is a trick that has been around for a long time. The Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods; syncretism was nothing new. Why not just combine and reconcile all the gods and concepts and become tolerant of every other belief that came down the pike?
Doesn't that sound familiar? There are those who still try to press the gospel into molds that make it more palatable to all; new age, pluralism, humanism, and anything else that spares us from the radical allegiance that Christ calls us unto. The Christian gospel can easily be distorted beyond all recognition. How skillful we become in proclaiming tolerance, acceptance, and good in all other religions, until the unique truth of salvation through Christ is warped into a one-size-fits-all-religion.
I admit to frustration by the well-intentioned comments of those who so glibly say, "Well, after all, we're all headed for the same place," or "We all worship the same God, don't we?" I know they mean well, but how very dangerous such comments are! I believe in tolerance as much as is humanly possible, and will almost run from most fights, but when we must compromise the basic truth of the Bible, then we finally must recoil in horror, and say, "No, no, no!" One God is not as good as another, we do not all go to the same place, we do not all worship the same Lord. Christ is essential and imperative, and knowing him is the difference between eternal life and death! Other religions do have much to be respected and admired, but they do not offer equally salvific paths to God. A religion, as many are, that is diametrically opposed to Christianity cannot be right.
We live in a relational day when many are saying, "Relate to me, don't confront me." But where is the thundering spokesperson for God, saying "Repent, or ye shall all likewise perish?" Instead we are advised to use "soft terms," so rather than speaking of the absolutes of the Christian faith we speak of relevancies. But changing words does not change the facts. Sinners still need a Savior, and Christ died to save us from sin. Sin is a reality. The prophet said, "Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20)."
Just suppose Martin Luther had been asked (maybe at a potluck, ecumenical church supper with Germans and Italians), "Luther did you or did you not write these books?" Suppose Luther had replied, "Well, perhaps I have been a tad negative, but you know I've had problems with my self-esteem lately, and everyone has a bad day now and then." And they could have replied, "Okay, Martin, let's just take your books out of circulation and your theses off the door, and let's try to understand one another a little better. After all we worship the same God. We simply choose different ways of doing it."
Crazy, isn't it? But this scenario is no more foolish than replacing, "Ye must be born again," with "Let's all try a little harder to be tolerant, because God is such a God of love he would never let anyone be lost." When will we ever get it through our heads that Christ is the Way, and that we walk in darkness toward certain destruction without his grace and salvation? When we forsake the illumination of the Word and Christ the true Light, we become like blind men looking in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there.
The Lystra crowd was not opposed to another god or two, they just didn't want their old ones destroyed. David L. McKenna, President of Asbury Theological Seminary, was quoted in International Christian Digest as saying, "When we confess that Christ alone is the universal hope for our salvation, we indict all utopian schemes and humanistic programs in which the church gets embroiled."
Paul, who had been blinded on the Damascus Road, and then had both his physical eyes and the eyes of his soul enlightened, had caught a vision of Christ that remained clear and unshadowed by the temptation to take praise to himself or to compromise the truth of the gospel. May God grant that the same zealous fervor possess all those who follow in his train!
I was teaching a course on preaching some time ago at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The course was being offered in conjunction with the annual Moravian Music Festival, and the preachers taking the class were all Moravian ministers. One of the persons in attendance was The Right Reverend Jay Hughes, Bishop of the Moravian Church, who told of a time when he was pastor of the Home Moravian Church in Old Salem. There came into his study an old man; Brother Heath. He had been a stalwart giant of the Christian faith, a missionary who had translated the New Testament into several languages, and was now back in America. He was 80 years old. He said to the pastor, "Brother Hughes, you will probably conduct my funeral. I want you to promise me that when I die you will say very little of George Heath, and very much of Christ. Tell them of him!" Count Zinzendorf had the same conviction about it when he said, "I have one passion, it is he."
One More Warning: Not Everyone Will Like It!
But you need to be warned: people won't like it if you take their gods away. You see, it is far easier to make matinee idols (or television celebrities, or "jolly good fellows") out of our leaders than to hear the message. It is far easier to make new gods - and keep the old ones - than to accept the Gospel and come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Notice how quickly the atmosphere changed when Paul and Barnabas, these "visiting gods," refused to be exalted and deified. The rest of the chapter, not a part of today's text, reads that Paul was stoned by the bitter, angry mob at Lystra. He was left on a garbage heap outside the city, for they believed he was dead. You see, folks become very threatened when a "new god" wants to take over their lives and replace the old habits and the old ways.
Happy endings are not always immediate for the Christian who will not compromise faith and convictions, but things do have a way of being all right. Paul was not dead, and once again Paul proclaims the message, and this time many believed! When he returned on his second missionary journey he found waiting for him a strong, vital church. When it is "Jesus first," and "Jesus only," you lose some and you win some - but you always win more than you lose!
This text is a warning. It is not one of the happier, positive sections of the Word, but it does have some high moments in it. And there is no doubt about the valuable lessons we can learn.
Beware The Temptation To Take Praise To Yourself
Paul and Barnabas are still on their first missionary journey, and now have moved to Lystra where they are involved in a strange incident. Paul healed a crippled man, and the people of Lystra are so impressed that they are determined to make gods of them.
It seems that there was a legendary history of Lyconia that told of Zeus and Hermes coming to earth incognito and in disguise. There was none in all the land who would grant hospitality to them, except for on old peasant couple who took them in and treated them kindly. The result was that the whole population of Lystra was wiped out by the gods, except for the old man and woman who took them in.
Now the people of Lystra are so carried away with the miracle of healing that they suspect that Barnabas, with his imposing appearance, is Zeus, the king of the gods, and Paul is Hermes, the god of speech, because he seems to be the main spokesman. Then, too, they don't want to get caught as they were before when they slammed their doors in the face of the gods. After all, you have to watch out for these gods. They get pretty touchy when they aren't treated right, and the people don't want to get in their bad graces again.
So it was that in most places, the people had heard Paul and Barnabas gladly, but these folks were too eager. They want to deify them. They heard little of what Paul and Barnabas had to say of salvation. They were so excited about a visit from the gods that they lost the message entirely. "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!" they shouted. Then they began to plan ways to celebrate the presence of the "gods" among them. Oxen were prepared for sacrifice, garlands of flowers were woven to honor them, and the festivities began to get bigger and wilder and more and more expansive. What a tumultuous welcome the apostles were receiving!
But when it dawned upon Paul and Barnabas what was happening, they were horrified. These people had not heard the gospel preached at all. Instead they were going to put the messengers in the Greek pantheon. They always had a lot of gods there and there was always room for one more (in this case, two more). Paul and Barnabas wondered what they could do. How could they proclaim the truth of the one, true, living God when these Lystrans were so mistaken? The apostles tore their garments - not a very godlike thing to do, when you think about it - but it was a radical Hebrew way of expressing horror and dismay over such a sacrilege. They had to help these men of Lystra realize that they were badly mistaken. They protested, "We, too, are only men, human like you." They wanted them to know they have the same kinds of problems all humans have; they bleed when they are cut, they suffer fatigue, they grow hungry, they are no different from anyone else.
Paul and Barnabas wanted no personal triumph for themselves, no crowning with garlands as gods, while their message was being ignored. So with strong words they turned the spotlight away from themselves and centered it upon the message they had brought.
Christian ministers, and Christian workers still have a similar danger in our time. Power, even power for good, is sometimes misinterpreted and misunderstood. Just as the dramatic healing drew a crowd at Lystra - or is seen on Sunday morning television - so it is dangerous when one is mistaken as the source of the power which belongs to God. Sometimes when I am conducting revival services I am asked to pray for the sick, and sometimes in marvelous grace and mercy, God will heal the individual. Then it is my responsibility to let it be clearly understood, "I am not the healer!" God heals them, when any divine grace is given, the work is always God's and his alone! Every misapprehension must be corrected when others would give the glory and praise to a human. Paul had it right when he said, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ crucified." All persons who work for Christ would do well to remember that "God is a jealous God and his glory he will not give to another."
This is not always easy to achieve; this shifting of attention away from one's self. A lot of the messenger's effectiveness, be it preacher, teacher, singer, worker, or whatever representative of the gospel, comes from his personal qualities. Marshall MacLuhen, mass media expert, said, "The medium is the message," and Phillips Brooks spoke of the same truth when he said, "truth through personality." When one deletes entirely the play of personal gifts, talents, and graces, it sometimes enfeebles the message. Of course all of this must be kept in a tension and balance with a strong God awareness that remembers that too much attention centered upon the messenger tends to dim and diminish the truth he is bringing.
Every preacher who takes his calling seriously, must make Christ preeminent in all things. There are always subtle temptations to take some of the praise to oneself. But this clever lure to self-aggrandizement is a danger to personal integrity. Caution must be given so that we never fail to give our undivided allegiance to Christ and Christ alone. John the Baptist had the proper motivation when he cried, "He must increase and I must decrease."
Motivation for Christian service has to be screened at all times. We must often ask ourselves, "Do I do this for Christ, or so that people will say, 'What a fine job you've done,' 'What would we ever do without you,' 'You are one of the best we've ever had!' " Helmut Thielicke, in his book, Life Can Begin Again, tells how he was once taken care of by a nurse who' did her work perfectly. She told him that for 20 years she had worked on the night shift. Thielicke asked her if the strain were not tremendous, and where did she get her strength? She said, "Well, every night that I work puts another jewel in my crown, and I already have 7,175 in a row!" He said some of his gratitude for her immediately vanished, for he could no longer feel she was doing it out of concern for him, but instead had her eyes secretly fixed on that crown in heaven. Jesus reminded us that pure motivation in our good deeds is important. He said, "If your alms are given to be seen of men, you already have your reward."
It is so easy to fall into the trap of accepting the garlands of praise, and forget who we are serving. Paul took the only route that any of us can take. He disclaimed any kinship with the gods, and reminded those who would place him on a pedestal that he was "just like they were." Paul lived out that conviction of self-abasement in all his ministry. Later he would write, "It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me."
Beware The Temptation To Compromise The Truth
The crowd at Lystra tried to blunt the edge of this new Christian truth by putting it in with the old categories. If they could just get these two new personalities, Paul and Barnabas, who had a new message, to conform to the old familiar gods, they would be safe. They would not need to change if they could just add on this new message to the old precepts and traditions.
This is a trick that has been around for a long time. The Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods; syncretism was nothing new. Why not just combine and reconcile all the gods and concepts and become tolerant of every other belief that came down the pike?
Doesn't that sound familiar? There are those who still try to press the gospel into molds that make it more palatable to all; new age, pluralism, humanism, and anything else that spares us from the radical allegiance that Christ calls us unto. The Christian gospel can easily be distorted beyond all recognition. How skillful we become in proclaiming tolerance, acceptance, and good in all other religions, until the unique truth of salvation through Christ is warped into a one-size-fits-all-religion.
I admit to frustration by the well-intentioned comments of those who so glibly say, "Well, after all, we're all headed for the same place," or "We all worship the same God, don't we?" I know they mean well, but how very dangerous such comments are! I believe in tolerance as much as is humanly possible, and will almost run from most fights, but when we must compromise the basic truth of the Bible, then we finally must recoil in horror, and say, "No, no, no!" One God is not as good as another, we do not all go to the same place, we do not all worship the same Lord. Christ is essential and imperative, and knowing him is the difference between eternal life and death! Other religions do have much to be respected and admired, but they do not offer equally salvific paths to God. A religion, as many are, that is diametrically opposed to Christianity cannot be right.
We live in a relational day when many are saying, "Relate to me, don't confront me." But where is the thundering spokesperson for God, saying "Repent, or ye shall all likewise perish?" Instead we are advised to use "soft terms," so rather than speaking of the absolutes of the Christian faith we speak of relevancies. But changing words does not change the facts. Sinners still need a Savior, and Christ died to save us from sin. Sin is a reality. The prophet said, "Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20)."
Just suppose Martin Luther had been asked (maybe at a potluck, ecumenical church supper with Germans and Italians), "Luther did you or did you not write these books?" Suppose Luther had replied, "Well, perhaps I have been a tad negative, but you know I've had problems with my self-esteem lately, and everyone has a bad day now and then." And they could have replied, "Okay, Martin, let's just take your books out of circulation and your theses off the door, and let's try to understand one another a little better. After all we worship the same God. We simply choose different ways of doing it."
Crazy, isn't it? But this scenario is no more foolish than replacing, "Ye must be born again," with "Let's all try a little harder to be tolerant, because God is such a God of love he would never let anyone be lost." When will we ever get it through our heads that Christ is the Way, and that we walk in darkness toward certain destruction without his grace and salvation? When we forsake the illumination of the Word and Christ the true Light, we become like blind men looking in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there.
The Lystra crowd was not opposed to another god or two, they just didn't want their old ones destroyed. David L. McKenna, President of Asbury Theological Seminary, was quoted in International Christian Digest as saying, "When we confess that Christ alone is the universal hope for our salvation, we indict all utopian schemes and humanistic programs in which the church gets embroiled."
Paul, who had been blinded on the Damascus Road, and then had both his physical eyes and the eyes of his soul enlightened, had caught a vision of Christ that remained clear and unshadowed by the temptation to take praise to himself or to compromise the truth of the gospel. May God grant that the same zealous fervor possess all those who follow in his train!
I was teaching a course on preaching some time ago at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The course was being offered in conjunction with the annual Moravian Music Festival, and the preachers taking the class were all Moravian ministers. One of the persons in attendance was The Right Reverend Jay Hughes, Bishop of the Moravian Church, who told of a time when he was pastor of the Home Moravian Church in Old Salem. There came into his study an old man; Brother Heath. He had been a stalwart giant of the Christian faith, a missionary who had translated the New Testament into several languages, and was now back in America. He was 80 years old. He said to the pastor, "Brother Hughes, you will probably conduct my funeral. I want you to promise me that when I die you will say very little of George Heath, and very much of Christ. Tell them of him!" Count Zinzendorf had the same conviction about it when he said, "I have one passion, it is he."
One More Warning: Not Everyone Will Like It!
But you need to be warned: people won't like it if you take their gods away. You see, it is far easier to make matinee idols (or television celebrities, or "jolly good fellows") out of our leaders than to hear the message. It is far easier to make new gods - and keep the old ones - than to accept the Gospel and come under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Notice how quickly the atmosphere changed when Paul and Barnabas, these "visiting gods," refused to be exalted and deified. The rest of the chapter, not a part of today's text, reads that Paul was stoned by the bitter, angry mob at Lystra. He was left on a garbage heap outside the city, for they believed he was dead. You see, folks become very threatened when a "new god" wants to take over their lives and replace the old habits and the old ways.
Happy endings are not always immediate for the Christian who will not compromise faith and convictions, but things do have a way of being all right. Paul was not dead, and once again Paul proclaims the message, and this time many believed! When he returned on his second missionary journey he found waiting for him a strong, vital church. When it is "Jesus first," and "Jesus only," you lose some and you win some - but you always win more than you lose!
