Romans 2:21–24Scripture
Today we have the awesome privilege of looking in Romans chapter 2. And today I want to look at Romans chapter 2, verses 21 through 24. Last week we got to see some of the awesome privileges that come along with being a Jew, and although the list was not bad but good, we get to see today how sometimes a good thing can become a bad thing if it's done or viewed with the wrong heart.
So God is trying this morning, and I believe in our lives, to do more than change our thinking, more than change what we do, but also to change how we feel about God and what he has done. It is one thing to know something, it is another thing to do something, and it's quite another for it to come from a good place in your heart. And really what the Apostle Paul is talking about, whether in chapter 1 or in chapter 2, as we see the religious leaders of the day, those who have the law, as we begin to look at their lives, one of the things we note is that people can know a thing and people can do a thing, but they can know and do it wrongly. So for our lives to really have an eternal impact in the world in which we live, our heart has to be captured by him as well.
And I'll be honest, that's the hardest work God has to do in you, because as we saw in chapter 1, many of us have been so captured and enslaved by
Introduction
Sin that our heart has been corrupted by it to the degree that we would rather choose sin than God. And then if we choose sin instead of God, then we would choose sin instead of the people that are with us. This is a bad thing. I'll read this morning Romans chapter 2, verses 21–24. The Apostle Paul continues on, and he says, "You then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal?" This is a little bit passive-aggressive here, it's questions with an answer. "You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law.
For, as it is written, 'The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'" Oh, how concerning it is to know that our lives can blaspheme God in the presence of men. What a tragedy it is that people can come to church each week, walk out of the church, and go down, by their lifestyle, and really blaspheme the name of the Lord with our life. There is a, if you guys, how many of you ever listen to DC Talk? All right, so that's like back when I was in high school, so in the '90s they were still not very big, they were traveling around, they were kind of a, they did a lot of rap actually, and so we would go different places and see them. I had watched them in concert, and in between one of their songs, and I think it was "Jesus Freak" or something like that, I think that was the name of the CD, but in between one of their songs they would have these like little moments where they'd pause and they would talk in between the songs, and I always thought that the phrase they said in between one of these songs was from them, but it actually was from, it was a quote by a man named Brennan Manning, who was a priest. And here's what it says, and I feel like this in some regard summarizes this portion of text we read this morning, at least the heart of it, if you will. Brennan Manning says this:
Point 1Christians who deny Jesus by their lifestyle
"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 4:36
Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable." And, ladies and gentlemen, that happens every Sunday. It happens every Sunday in churches across America and the world. We come and we hear from God, we gain knowledge about God, but we have not been transformed. It is simply a head knowledge with no life change. We come to be filled up and to be edified the way we want to be edified. "Don't challenge me, just tell me how awesome I am today, Shawn. Just tell me how awesome I am." And we neglect to live the way God intended. And the Apostle Paul is really speaking into the heart of that, and he's saying that is atheism. It is a denial of God, his ways, and his plan. We have what is referred to in the world today, in much regard, Christian atheists coming to church every Sunday. They proclaim that he is Lord with their mouth and they deny him with their life. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Apostle Paul is talking to and about when he speaks to the Jews in this portion of the Scripture. Now let me just pause here for a second. Romans chapter 2, some people and many theologians have called the book of Romans, specifically this chapter, the Magna Carta of the Christian faith, perhaps the greatest document stating the gospel of Jesus Christ in the entire new Testament. And we get the privilege today, not everybody has this privilege, to go through it verse by verse, to be enriched by its words and challenged by its purpose. Now, as we learned last week, the Jews, of course, believed that they were absolutely secure, that they had a spot, a ticket, if you will, maybe a reserved seat waiting for them in eternal life. They believed they were heaven-bound.
They believed there was nothing that could knock them off of the course, because God has chosen them, and they were absolutely secure in their faith with God.
They believed that they would never face final condemnation or judgment, and that at the day of judgment they would bypass it like a business route around all the chaos. They would get away from being judged. Paul goes through painstaking steps to let them know every single man, woman, boy, and girl would stand before the Lord one day and be judged, all of us, and ultimately they would not be punished because of who they were, what nation they were a part of. Now maybe back, eight years ago, that wouldn't have been an issue for us today, but here in America we think we're special because we're in America, and some of us believe we're going to bypass judgment because we're in a Christian nation. And I just came here to sound a bullhorn across the bow this morning and say to you, this is not a Christian nation. Period.
Any more than every single person that comes to church on Sunday is a hundred percent a Christian, because just being here or just having some Christian-ish language in our government doesn't make it Christian. The behavior makes it Christian or not Christian. And the reality is, today we have so diminished what God says is true that we no longer are a Christian nation. We say it, as our presidents say it as they're brought into office, that they are Christians, but then they do policies that murder people, they create policies for marriage that's unbiblical. We have denied God in our policies, and we have proclaimed him as God with our lips, and that is not acceptable. We are not a Christian nation. It is amazing just the unraveling that we see in our generation. Like, look at it's fascinating to me. For instance, I there are so many articles today. In Cambridge, at Trinity College, there is a dean by the name of Dr. Michael banner who, during a chapel service, stood up and professed, let me get the name of the article, that Jesus must have been transgender, and if we're going to worship him, we must worship him properly as a transgender person. That's happening in our culture, and the reality is we call it Christian. We have redefined who God is to the degree that in our chapel services we bring Christ down to the sinful nature of man that we might be comfortable worshiping at his feet. It is unacceptable. It is disgusting.
It is a sin, and God will not tarry long over this stuff.
It is not acceptable. The reality is we've grown so comfortable with sin that we refuse to deny that lifestyle and walk away from it, so our only option is to make Christ like us, nothing but a sinner, and hope that God we worship, who is not the real God, will save us in the end. And I came here today to say, if you stand before the Lord in the end and you proclaim a Christ like that, the true Christ will tell you who he is, and he'll send you to hell.
It's a problem. "Shawn, why do you have to be such a downer?" I'm not being a downer, it's a downer, what's happening in our world, and sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it go away. Now we see behavior that's unbecoming of what God has labeled a Christian.
Point 2Paul aims to obliterate false security
So Paul now zeroes in particularly on the Jews who feel themselves so very assured, so very assured in their salvation. And Paul's design here, his goal, if you will, in this section, and don't miss it, because this is Shawn's goal, this is the writer's goal, is to obliterate false security. That's his purpose here.
He has set them up and he spoke about all the good things, and then he's coming at them with a fury to let them see, with the law, which is a mirror, how much of a sinner they are, in need of a savior, and all the feelings they felt about how secure they are. Paul is wrecking them like a wrecking ball crushing a dilapidated building that needs to come tumbling down. It's his purpose, it's his aim, it's his goal. And if we're going to do what the Scripture is trying to do without skirting around the issue, the goal today with this Scripture is for all of you who have security in Christ that you should not have, and it is false, that you would sit here today and you would be concerned and you would have fear and you would repent. That's the goal of this text, because knowing the right thing, quoting the right thing, teaching the right thing, they were teachers, teaching it in Sunday school class and Sunday morning class, in small groups, in youth groups, in children's groups, they were teachers who should not have been secure.
Guys, it's relevant for today that just because you're a teacher doesn't mean that you have reached a position that secures you forever.
Only Christ secures you, not your position.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 14:10
I suppose at first thought we might assume that what Paul is doing is cruel, that to take away a man's security is something very cruel. But that's just the opposite of the truth, because the man who has false security needs to know how false it really is.
Love does that. Love does not skirt the issue so you can feel good on Sunday morning.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 14:54
Love says you might have false security today.
For instance, if I had a friend that signed up for an insurance policy, and I found out through the grapevine, maybe through a conversation with somebody or even through personal experience, that insurance company that my friend was paying toward wasn't even a real company but rather it was a scheme to scam money off people, and they provided no actual solution for times of trouble or death or issues in life, that insurance company never paid out because it wasn't even a true insurance company, my friend would probably want to know that. They wouldn't want to be paying into something that wasn't even true.
That would be, wouldn't it, a false sense of security. But in the church, for some reason or another, whenever we get to a place where someone says you might not be saved, the Bible, constantly, all through it, in the New Testament, says test your salvation. It constantly calls us to test our faith. Why?
Because the most dangerous thing in the world is to think you're secure when you're not.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 16:10
So the issue today is, how do we reconcile people testing your faith with "do not fear"? How do we reconcile these two different messages? That's a great question. We're not going to answer today, but I just wanted to let you know, I know it's out there. This Scripture does not yet talk about that second part, "do not fear," how do we stand in confidence knowing that if we're in Christ we are saved? How do we do that? We want to talk about that. Romans, he talks about that. But today I want to talk about those who think they're secure but they might not be.
They might not be. That's what Paul's doing here. He's exploding the myth of Jewish false security in order that they might be brought to a point of true and genuine assurance. Now, they felt themselves secure before God, and they felt that someday they would go to heaven and enter the kingdom. They felt that they would never be judged or punished or condemned for three basic reasons, and here they are, you can write them down. I'm only going to talk about two of them today, and I'm going to talk about them briefly. One is national heritage.
Another is the law, and another is a sign. We're not going to talk about a sign this week. Brook has to talk about it first on Wednesday.
Thank you very much. So happy she gets to talk about it first. It's circumcision. She used to talk about it first, and then I got to see how she deals with that, and then I get to come on Sunday, after all you guys have already dealt with the stress of circumcision and preaching this to every single person in the church, I get to come and go, "Yeah, what they said." All right. So these are the three things that they put their confidence in. Listen to me, the Jews put their confidence in, right, their national heritage. I want to talk about this today because we have something called, and you have heard much of, Christian nationalism. I'm going to talk about that, because you may feel like, I don't, my national heritage is not something that I put my confidence in.
You'd be shocked. Another is the law, because they had the law. We know that they're having issues because they find confidence in the fact that they had it, but they deny the idea of doing it, but they thought just because they had it they were covered. And then the sign, which is circumcision.
We're gonna talk about those this morning. All right. Before we jump in, I want to say this, and then they're going to show an image back here that I think will help us. I suppose a classic illustration of this false security would be what many have talked about, and you've probably heard this, the sinking of the Titanic. Here's what happened: although they were short on some boats, they had lots of them that were not used. Here's what happened: the people felt so secure in the boat that they refused to get into a lifeboat, and they perished. This is not what I want to happen for our church, because I love you, I pray for you, and I care about you. Paul writes this, listen, not just for the men and women in that generation but for us today, that we might have sight of what is to come. Listen, my wife sent me this image this morning and I love it, and so I'm going to read it to you: Husky, collie, beagle, Afghan, poodle, pug, yorkie, Shih Tzu, corgi, and then the doctor says, "Your hindsight is 20/20." I love that. I love that. I was thinking today a little bit about that, and isn't it that way when you look back at your life five years ago, 10 years ago, hindsight really is 20/20?
When you're in it you can't see it, but when you look back you can see it. You know what the beauty of this is? That it helps you see forward.
This is why he tells us, "fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith." What is faith? It is trust in the things we cannot see. So we look and we picture Jesus. How do we picture Jesus? By watching and reading this, by seeing his life as it was, by seeing where he is now. Guys, we know that judgment is coming. What is that? That's foresight. That's God telling us what's coming. He is trying to help you, if you're secure and your security is false, that there is a day we will stand before Jesus, and he is telling you before it happens, that your foresight might be 20/20. The only way you can see forward is through his Word. That's a guarantee. This is how he reveals things to you. This is revelation.
This is revelation. And so we should be encouraged today that God is showing us what's coming. He's preparing us. He's doing it because he loves us.
The reality is today that many of us want to feel secure. This Bible and this text is trying to show us how to gain security.
Everyone wants to feel secure. No one wants to feel unsecure. And the goal of this is not for you to feel unsecure, but for you to be secured in the truth. So one way or another, people find a true security in Christ or they imagine themselves to be secure by some other means.
They convince themselves that they're religious, or they convince themselves that they're good, or they convince themselves that God wouldn't punish anyone because he's loving.
And so the world goes through many different paths trying to discover many different ways to feel secure. No one wants to live life unsecured. So the Apostle Paul positions each of the readers and each listener basically to understand their security comes from one place: one Christ.
We want to be secure in our marriage. I want to know that if my wife gets in a plane and flies across the country somewhere by herself, that I'm secure enough in our marriage to believe that she will be faithful. But when I feel secure, I want to be secure that she loves me, that the bond is true. We want job security. How many of you were just like, "I don't want job security, I just want to live every day not knowing if I have a job today"?
No, we want security. We want financial security. We want security in our retirement. Listen, many of the decisions you make in a day are based on security. Paul then comes at the heart of men, comes at the very heart of men, to rattle us to the core when we are on unstable ground, that we might then reach to the one thing that truly secures us in all things. Are you with me?
I think of a song. This song has been coming to my mind a lot lately, and I don't know why, but maybe because of what we're reading in Romans, specifically here. And I'm going to read the whole thing because I love it's a hymn, all right? Not a hymn, but you get what I'm saying. It says this: "my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name. On Christ, the solid rock, I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand." And then verse 2: "When darkness veils his lovely face, I rest on his unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil. His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood. When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay. When he shall come with trumpet sound, O may I then in him be found, dressed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne." Ladies and gentlemen, your only hope that you can be assured of is found in Jesus Christ. It is not in your job, it is not in how much money you have, it is not in your retirement account, it is not in your relationships and marriage, friendships, or family. You cannot place your hope on those things, because you will be let down.
There is only one thing in this world that you can fully, with all assurance, place your hope in, and his name is Jesus Christ. That is it.
Everything else in life fails you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 26:55
Oh, it might be temporary satisfaction, it might temporarily ease the pain. There are things in this world you can turn to that will ease the pain and curb the hurt, but I came here today to tell you, it will never satisfy.
Only Christ satisfies.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 27:07
Point 3National heritage provides no security at all
Only Christ. The first thing they put their assurance in was their national heritage. They found security in their heritage.
They found security in the fact that they were a Jew, and not only that they were a Jew, but they were a part of a nation that God had literally protected. That nation, listen, armies rose up against it, problems rose up against it, and God crushed their opposition. God fought for that nation and for the people in that nation. It was not only their heritage, but it was the nation they put their hope in. Today we have this word called Christian nationalism, and let me tell you, trying to hit the bullseye on what that is, it's like shooting at a bullseye moving 2,000 miles an hour. There's a thousand different definitions for this, but I'm just going to do this, and let me tell you, there's a lot of talk about, if you just go out there and you type that, there's a current book that just got released, and let me tell you, I haven't read the book, because I don't want to hear it. I don't, I don't want to hear it.
I'll go back to the hymn: our hope is found on nothing less than Jesus Christ and his righteousness. Let me tell you how you can't miss the mark: by making that the mark. So we can get in a conversation today about, well, Christian nationalism, that's really good, that comes from a good place. Yeah, there's a lot of things that come from a good place that kind of really came from the devil, because his goal is not to get you believing in something that's crazy. His goal is to throw Christian words in it so you actually embrace it, and then it leads you off into a deep, dark pit of despair. And so the church needs to get wise, and we need to fix our eyes on Jesus, who's the author and perfecter of our faith, and stop getting hung up in new words that have "Christian" in it and then making that our source of assurance. There's this book, it's called "Taking America Back for God."
Sounds good, doesn't it? Christian nationalism in the United States, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework, a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems that idealize and advocate a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. It includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with a divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious. If that was confusing to you, it was to me too. Basically the point is they don't really have much of a point, so they just shot at everything.
That's my opinion about it. The authors create the four groups partly based on whether they answer, or would answer this, and when they poll people, viewers, answer strongly agree, mostly agree, undecided, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree on these six questions, and this is how they would scale whether or not you are a Christian nationalist or you were not. Here are the five, here are the six questions they would ask. Many of these sound very good. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation. You were to answer strongly agree, mostly agree, undecided, mostly disagree, strongly disagree. Number two, the federal government should advocate Christian values. Number three, the federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state. Number four, the federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces. Number five, the federal government should allow prayer in public schools. Let me just pause here and say, we have people in this nation fighting for prayer in schools, and they don't even have prayer in their home. That's what's the problem, that's what's the problem with this kind of stuff, is you're fighting for something for the nation that you don't value enough to do in the privacy of your own home. It is amazing the people that I've seen pick it up and fight for Christian values in the world that they don't even uphold in their private life. The reality is, I'd rather tell everyone else how to live and deny Christ with my lifestyle in private. It's pathetic, and the last thing we need to be doing as Christians is trying to straighten everybody else out.
What we need to be doing is straightening ourselves out.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 32:23
Are you with me? It's what the Apostle Paul said: you're teaching and telling everyone else how to live, but you don't even do it, you don't even do it yourself. We run on tickets fighting for God to show up, and we don't even care if he talks to us through the week.
And today, if you think you're not like the Pharisees of old, there are people in our fellowship today that do this, and God's rebuke is strong. It is not light-handed, it is heavy-handed. Repent for that mess. Repent.
And so we would rather identify more with the nation that we conjure in our mind than the kingdom that we can be real with in our lives.
Essentially, people who answer strongly agree to all or most of the questions, they labeled as ambassadors of Christian nationalism. That was their position. People who answer mostly agree to all or most of the questions, they labeled as accommodators. People who answered mostly disagree to all of these questions are resisters, and people who answer strongly disagree to all or most of these questions are rejecters. There are dangers of identifying, this is my thought for all this, there are dangers of identifying more with our nation than the heavenly kingdom we're a part of. That's just a general problem I see in our world today, that we would rather identify more with our nation than the kingdom of God. Listen, we are aliens when we become a part of the kingdom of God, and let me tell you, just in case you didn't know, we're not aliens that are doing a hostile takeover. Foreigners who shouldn't feel welcome in this world, and as a matter of fact, we don't want to feel welcome in this world.
We're aliens, we're not of this place. The goal then is not, let me, the Jews too were proud of their Abrahamic descent. They felt secure in their heritage. Just being a Jew meant that you were God's especially favored people, and surely you would not ever be brought to judgment. In fact, the rabbis had even said that no Jew would ever be thrown out of the kingdom of God.
That's false security. Jesus later on said this, and I quote: "the people who are the sons of the kingdom will be shut out of the kingdom, and strangers will be allowed in." The people who are sons of the kingdom will be shut out of the kingdom and strangers will be allowed in. So in other words, he was saying just being Jewish was no security at all.
Our heritage provides no security at all.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 36:02
Christ provides the security, not the Christ you conjure, the Christ who is in the Bible, not the Christ you make a sinner and call them trans, but the Christ we read about in the Bible. Yeah, that's a special level. Listen, that article that I read, it said that half of the chapel left in total despair over that comment. Thank goodness that there is a remnant of young people across the colleges in America, well, in the world today, that would reject that and walk out. Thank goodness, because I just, quite honestly, sometimes I wonder, watching social media, if there is any young person around the age of 20, 19 to 28, that has a common sense in their head. And I'm not being hateful, and let me tell you, young people, it's not your fault, it's our fault. We taught you, we taught you how to not think. But it's encouraging to know that there are young people who entered into total despair and rejected that and walked out.
Ladies and gentlemen, we need some adults who would do the same. And what I'm realizing is that the problem might not be the young people, the problem is that we might have some parents who have not demonstrated a lifestyle that would not put up with that mess, because they learned it somewhere. And so today we need parents who will go to the movie theater and if it gets inappropriate, we'll walk out. We need parents who, if something comes on the TV we don't like, we won't just say, "Close your eyes, and oh, we don't support that," you'll turn it off, that you will make a stand for God and his ways, and you will be offended by things that they want to shoot into your life that you may become enticed by sin. We have, and for those that are in there between the age of 40 and 55, 60, we grew up in a very stifling religious environment, that everything was off limits, if you breathe sideways or too loud you might go to hell. And so what we've done is we've so accommodated sin in our life that, in the process of accommodating it so we don't become overbearing, we have endorsed it, and our young people are going to pay the price for us accommodating sin to the degree that it has become commonplace to our children.
You want to make a difference? Make a difference at home, because your nation won't save you.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 39:01
You want to help your children? Don't put them in the hands of the nation. The nation will not save them. You want to help your children? Preach to them the Word, speak it over them, read the Word in your house, share God in your house, talk to them about God in your house. Your youth group and your children's group at church and the school system will not save your kids. Why, as parents, are we giving our children over to things that will never save? We cannot play the card of apathy any longer. Parents must be parents in this generation. Our heritage provides no security at all, and it's time for parents in the church to wake up and realize that everything in this nation is trying to take your children away and lead them into all sorts of depravity, and you are the only thing blocking them from getting there.
We talked a little bit about how other people feel that their heritage may secure them. Maybe they were raised in a religious family, or they have received a religious tradition, or perhaps they have gone to church regularly growing up as a child, perhaps their parents had taught them about the gospel of Christ, and perhaps they feel that because of some factor of their heritage God is obligated to them. Maybe as a child they were put through baptism or training or confirmation and so forth and so on.
But heritage, even in the church, is no security at all, for it is not us plus our heritage that stands before God, it is merely us. It is not us and our church denomination that stands before God,
It is just us. It is just us that stands before God.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 41:12
They had false security in their national heritage. Number two, they had
Point 4Knowing the law without doing it condemns
False security in the fact that they had the law. They had been catechized, listen, they had been catechized out of God's law, and with God's law, and as a result of that kind of catechizing, that oral instruction they had learned in the home and also in the synagogue, they knew God's law, they knew God's will. They knew it. They knew God's law and they knew God's will. They were able to discern what was right and what was wrong. They had tremendous knowledge of God's truth as revealed in the Old Testament, but it was all in their heads for the most part. Sound familiar? They did not perceive that the knowledge they had was to affect the way they lived. That was the problem. It was not a problem that they had a law, it was not the problem that they knew the law, it was not the problem that they knew God's will through the law. That's what Paul's been breaking down slowly. The problem was they had it, they knew it, they knew his will, and they still did not do it. In other words, there is a place you can get to where all you pursue is knowledge and you think that will save you. They did not perceive that the knowledge they had was for the purpose of affecting the way they lived.
They went on living in a sinful manner with the knowledge they had. In effect, they ignored their knowledge. They had all the privileges, they had all the knowledge, and in that alone they felt secure. Man, this is so many of us today. It's amazing how much of a bad rap the Pharisees get in church services in America, yet many of us are not like the first group of pagans in chapter 1, many of us in the church are like the pagans in chapter 2 who call themselves godly.
Security does not come in what you know, it comes in what you do in response to what you know.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 43:33
Are you hearing me today? In fact, again, if you don't do what you know to do, you simply wind up in a greater state of condemnation and guilt. That's what it says in here, that knowing and not doing only condemns you further. And Romans 9:31 says this: "Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law." And so listen to this, they followed after the law of righteousness, but they had not attained it. In other words, actually that word "not attained" there is passive, so some would interpret it as it had not attained them rather than us attaining it. In other words, they had the law, they pursued the law, but they never caught it.
They never attained it, or it never attained them, because they sought it not by faith but they sought it by works. Notice here, faith first, which gives way to works, and if you don't have good works, it's only evidence that you truly have not believed in Christ. That's how we test ourselves, whether or not our faith is simply in knowing but not in doing. That's how we test ourselves. That's how we have assurance or know that we shouldn't be assured.
In other words, they knew it in their minds but they never apprehended it in their hearts, and it simply meant greater judgment. Listen, we spent a considerable amount of time over the last year and a half talking about this. Write these three words down, and we're almost done, it's going to be a miracle. I got 30 seconds. Oh no, I'm 40 seconds over, but
Point 5Right belief, right living, right heart
I'm about done here. Here's the three words real quick, I'm going to give them to you quick: orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. We've talked about orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Here's what orthodoxy is.
Orthodoxy literally means right belief, right understanding, right knowledge, orthopraxy means right living, and orthopathy means right heart. When God captures you, when you become a believer in Christ, all of these become evident in your life, not just one of them.
So if you have somebody who has right understanding, a right belief, but they don't have right living and they have a wrong heart, the Bible says that
When God saves you he saves you completely.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 46:27
Matter of fact, the way that he does that is he makes you a new creation. Now that you have a new heart and you are a new creation, guess what?
What you know affects what you do and affects your heart. Now your heart is changed, your doing is changed, and your thinking has changed. We've preached a gospel that says you can be saved if your thinking has changed and you don't have to do it and you don't have to have the right heart about it, but that's not what God promised us. God promised us that he completely changes us, and now our desires are different, our attitudes differ, our hearts are different, our mouth is different, the way we act is different, the way we think is different, because we are his and we are a slave of his. That's it. That's the gospel. That's good news, not that he gets you in part but that he gets you completely. So they felt secure in what they knew, but that is no security at all if it's simply a mind change with no life change, because if you have no life change you really haven't changed your mind.
You may know about Christ, you may know about the Bible, you may know about heaven or hell, you may know about the devil or God, you may know about sin, you may know about God's goodness, you may teach about all those things.
What you know is not the issue, what you do about it is.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 48:07
If it remains in the head, it only becomes the basis for greater condemnation. So they were falsely secure because they knew, and God held them responsible according to what they knew but did not do. That's what Romans 2:12 says: "For all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified." James says it this way: don't be hearers only but doers, deceiving, don't deceive your own selves by merely hearing and never doing.
You are deceived if you think just knowing is security.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 48:57
It isn't. It only gives you the greater responsibility for behaving the way God intended. And in case you didn't know, some of you think, "I can know a thing and I can act a certain way, but I don't have to do it with the right heart." Wrong, because there are religious people, there are so-called godly people who know God's word, knowledge-wise, and they do a lot of good things, but their heart is rotten. And he said, "Beware, because if you stand before me and you do this in part, you have not been saved." Let me throw this out for you: it isn't that you're going to be perfect, but you will not make a habit of doing things that offend God. You will not live your life in disregard. Let me tell you, first-degree sinning is what I call it, where you contemplate and you decide, you sit there and you think about it and you think about it and you think about it and you decide to do it anyway. That's dangerous. It's dangerous. And so if you're here today and you have false security, then Jesus is your hope, and Paul would say, if he could be here today, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is as close as your right hand reach. Reach out, in other words, you could reach out and grab it. That's the hope for us today.
Well, we love you, we thank you for this Word. Thank you for this Word.
I'm going to take a few moments right where you're at, just sit, just in silence, and I know this makes someone uncomfortable, that's okay, because you're going to walk out of here today and you're going to walk into the business of your life and your schedule, and you may not have time or space, you may not create that to talk to God, so we're going to create that for you here. I want you to take three minutes, just three minutes, it'll go by fast, and I want you to consider where you're at in your journey, and if you're unsure, the Bible says repent and turn to me. Let me tell you,
Christ is your only hope.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 51:44
God is righteous and holy and he's just, and he's coming to deal with our sin. He is coming to deal with it. It is inevitable. But God knew that we had a problem, that our sin could not be dealt with by us simply doing good, because we just don't do good, and so instead of him getting us to a place where we place our hope in our good deeds, he sent Jesus, who lived a perfect, righteous life, who was persecuted, who died on Calvary's cross and was beaten and bled although he was not at fault at all.
The Bible says that he rose from the grave and ascended to the right hand of the Father, and he sits there, and all who believe in him can be hidden in his righteousness in spite of the fact that you're a sinner, and that just simply believing in him and turning and placing your hope in him, not in your knowledge, not in your doing, but in him, he would change your life. And I believe that. Today I preached that, I preach that every week. I know that people need hope. So we're going to take a moment, and if that's you, I would encourage you to reach out to Christ in your way. If you're here today and you've gotten caught up in the religious activity, God has changed your mind, he has changed your heart, he has changed your life, but you've just gotten busy being religious and you've forgotten your first love, then you need to turn your hearts toward Christ this morning. Three minutes, just to visit with the Lord.
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