Well, let me see if I can't preach
a little on this matter of God's grace. I've entitled this message, and
it's from the passage that we read earlier, Luke chapter 16. I've entitled it Believers and
Religionists. Now, if you've listened very much,
my way of preaching, you know that most commonly when I use
the word religion, what I mean is what men practice in their
attempts to worship God, as opposed to what the scriptures tell us. And so I've often said, you know,
religion says, but God says, or religion says, but grace says. I realize that, I can't remember
if it's James or Jude, but he said, true religion, pure and
undefiled, is to help widows and orphans. And so I understand
in the broad sense what you and I do is religion. But it's not
just religion. At least I hope it's not. What we do here what our intention
is, what our desire is, is truly to worship God, to express our
gratitude to Him for His wonderful grace, to stand in awe of Him
for who He is, not just to put on a show, not
to try to impress Him, but be impressed by Him. So, of course, when I say that
the message is believers and religionists, I am distinguishing
between those who possess the grace of God and those who merely
profess it. Distinguishing between those
who say, I believe and worship God, and those who actually do. Now, first let us note that this
story is not a historical story. This is not our Lord relating
events that actually happened. We are not to consider that what
we have in this text is a literal description of hell and heaven, nor does it reveal to us what
it shall be like for us when this life is over. Rather, as the Lord often did,
he took the beliefs, some of which were mistaken. They were
misconceptions of how things were. They were traditions. But
he used that framework that they would set up by their misconceptions,
and he would use that as a stage on which to tell a story that
would point out some error in their thinking. It would show them that what
they highly esteemed was an abomination, a disgusting thing to God. that
the path they were walking, which seemed, according to their understanding
of things, to be the right path, was not the narrow path that
leads to life, but the broad road that leads to destruction. And so our Lord told us what
we would call a fictional story, and understand this in literature, Fiction is, generally speaking,
used to tell truth. It's nonfiction that people use
to tell lies, because they'll put it in the nonfiction section.
And people will pick it up. Oh, this is how things really
are. Normally, what you'll find, at least in a great deal of nonfiction,
is that the author is simply trying to twist the truth to
make up a reality or prove a reality he believes. But fiction? When you read fiction, when you
read a story that someone wrote, you know that it's not historical,
but the author will make up that story, and his purpose, her purpose,
is to reveal truth. Our Lord did this with the parables.
They're fictional stories, but they are the truth. And this
is a, in all like, well, I know it's a fictional story, and here's
how I can tell you. First of all, people in hell and people
in heaven can't talk to each other. Can you imagine living
forever in the state of blessedness in heaven, and just across the
way, you can see all those people in whatever kind of torment it
is that awaits the ungodly? That would hardly be heaven,
would it? Here's another thing that lets
me know this is not a literal description of our existence
after death. Who is the central person in
the place of blessedness? Abraham, right? Now Abraham's side was
a common way for Jews to refer to the afterlife of the righteous.
But they referred to it that way because their faith was in
Abraham. Do you remember that the, I don't know if it was just
the Pharisees, but it was some religious leaders, and they were
rebuked with these words, do not say in your hearts, we have
Abraham as our father. I tell you, God could raise up
children to Abraham from the rocks and the ground. But see,
that was their boast. They said, in what I believe
was a kind of a veiled reference to our Lord's peculiar birth,
they said to our Lord, Abraham is our father, we're not born
of fornication. They trusted in Abraham, therefore
they considered Abraham to be, excuse me, they considered heaven
as being at the side of Abraham. So our Lord accommodated their
misconceptions about the hereafter simply to use it as a stage to
describe, to reveal the difference between their end and the end
of those who believe. Also, this story does not teach
us that rich people go to hell while poor people go to heaven. Some rich people are going to
go to hell, maybe the most of them, but they're not going to
go to hell because they're rich. After all, Abraham himself was
a very wealthy man, David became a wealthy man, and Solomon was
considered to be the wealthiest man on the earth in his day.
They didn't perish. So, typical wealth, money wealth,
is not what our Lord is referring to here. Also, there are some poor people. People whose lives in this world
are miserable and they go from the misery of their existence
here to an eternal misery under God's judgment. Now we like stories
where the mighty are brought down and the low are lifted up
somehow. They make good stories. And there
is a sense in which that is true in the gospel, but it really
has nothing to do with a person's natural state in this world. Where Peter says, urges prayer
be made for, he says for all men, and he goes on for kings
and so forth, you know. And his point was, let prayers
be made for all kinds of men. You can imagine being a believer
in the first century, and a lot of your persecution was coming
from kings and people in power, and you would hardly feel inclined
to pray for them. And Peter says, no, pray for
them, and then he goes on to say that God wants to save all
people. Your people don't believe in
sovereign grace. They say that Peter is teaching
that God desires the salvation of every individual. No, he starts
out saying, pray for all people. And the meaning is obvious, all
kinds of people. After all, I don't even know
all people. How can I pray for them? And when he says that God
desires the salvation of all, he means all kinds of people.
And God has put among his elect some to whom he has given a wealthy
and, as we look at things, carefree life. And he has among his elect
some whose lives, well, you wouldn't wish them on anybody, and everything
in between. So this story is not about our
natural state and how that plays into our eternal state. Now the
Lord says there was a rich man who was dressed in purple and
fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate, this
is verse 1920, at his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus covered
with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's
table. Even the dogs came and licked
his sores. Now, our Lord, again, he uses
this picture of a rich person who lived in luxury, who did
not have a care. And every day he wore the finest
clothes, ate the finest food. Now, this was both a literal
and spiritual description of the Pharisees with whom he was
engaged in conversation. Notice in verse 14, It says,
the Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering
at Jesus. He said to them, you are the
ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men. But God knows
your hearts. What is highly valued among men
is detestable in God's sight. Now the Pharisees were, by and
large, a wealthy group of people. And they were able to become
wealthy because under the guise, excuse me, under the guise of
following the law, they abused the people. Our Lord said of
them, these are the men, these are the kind of folks that devour
widow's houses. Now can you think, especially
back in this culture when a widow, you know, It was destitute for
all intents and purposes. Can you imagine anything lower
than depriving a widow of what little she has to live on? Simply
to enrich your already overflowing treasure chest? That's what they
do. You say, how did they do it? I'm not sure, but I got an
idea of how they could pull it off. Some fella gets, he gets killed
unexpectedly. And suddenly there's a widow,
maybe got some children. Well, immediately the cash flow
stops. And unless they're among the
upper class, there is no treasure for them to live off. They are
almost immediately plunged into a state of desperation. If something
isn't done quickly, they start going hungry very quickly. And
here come the guys with money, the Pharisees, in their fine
robes, looking good. The people maybe didn't like
them, but held them in high regard. And they come, and the widow
needs money, and she needs it fast. And she's got her husband's
property. And he says, you know, if you wait, you might be able
to get, and I'm just going to use some dollars, modern values, you might
be able to get 500,000, but it's going to take a long
time for you to sell this property. I know your extended family,
none of them have the money. Tell you what, I'll give you
150,000 cash right now. What's he doing? He's taking
advantage of her desperation. That's awful. Really. I mean, just looking
at a human, that's an awful thing to do to someone in desperate
straits. But that's what they do. But
there was a spiritual angle to this. In their riches, they justified
themselves. And how would they do that? Because
our Lord said to them, you know, you're the ones who justify yourselves
in the eyes of men. How would they do that? Well,
they would say, well, you know that God blesses the righteous and punishes the unjust or the
unrighteous. Look how the Lord has blessed
me. Look at what I've got. I got the finest house on my
street. I never worry about where the next meal's coming from.
And that demonstrates that all my religious strictness has paid off. And God counts me righteous because
of what I have done, and He's proven it by making me rich. In the church I was raised in,
They'd have what they call a watch night service on New Year's Eve
and it would be open to people to give a testimony if they wanted
to and there was one fella in the church, I heard him do it
at least two or three times, but he'd get up and tell his
story and he wasn't content just to stand there, you know, stand
up at his pew. He would go up there and get
behind the pulpit and he would say, X number of years ago I
was walking around Huntington and I couldn't rub two nickels
together in my pocket. And then I guess he got religion. And he started a clothing business.
And at the time he was saying this, he was quite wealthy. What was he saying? I followed
God and he made me rich. And I remember sitting there
thinking, wow, what a story. That's exactly backwards. The Pharisees did not please
God. And in all reality, all the riches
that they piled up, and it was a significant amount, all of
them were not a blessing to them. They became a curse to them. I would be more impressed by
a testimony that says, I was rich. I was at the top of my
game. I had made some very good decisions.
I was a religious man. But I was also wealthy. But God
opened my eyes to the gospel and I believed Christ. And then
I started talking about that and all my former colleagues
backed away from me. My business collapsed. I lost
it all. But thank God, I'm a blessed
man. Now that's something I believe. That's something I would say,
well, that sounds about right. Blessed is the man who can lose
everything he has and call himself blessed. This man was a religionist, that's
all he was. He was very good at his religion. And he thought his riches were
proof of it. But what everybody else was impressed
with, God found deplorable. Isn't that what our Lord said?
What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight. The Pharisee prayed, you know,
I thank you God, I'm not like other men. And he went on to
list why he thought he wasn't like other men. And he thought
very highly of what he had done to distinguish himself from other
men. And other people thought very highly of what he had done
to distinguish himself from other men. You know how God saw all
that? Well, the old-fashioned word,
it was abomination. an abomination. You know that's
a tough one to take. That's probably one of the biggest
hurdles to anybody believing the gospel. That everything they
had done up to that point, thinking that it was going to or enhance
their relationship with God, maybe even establish their relationship
with God. All that that they have done,
all that all their religious friends have been patting them
on the back for, and made them deacons and then elders, and
big shots in the church, and folks see them and they say,
well, there's so-and-so. I tell you, we're fortunate to
have him in our church. All that, God saw it. And it was awful. Awful. You know how it feels, probably,
if you show something to someone else and you think you've done
a good job at it, and they look at it, that's awful. Well, no
wonder people don't believe the gospel, because men come to God,
it's in their nature. And I say men, I mean men, women,
you know. They come to God with what they've done, with what
they've made, and they're proud of it, and other people are bragging
on them for it. And they come up to God and they
say, see? That's disgusting. In the gospel, that's what God
says, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Get it out of
my sight. And that's why people hate the
gospel, because the first thing the gospel does is make nothing
out of everything you've done in an attempt to gain the favor
of God. And let's face it, that kind
of hurts. The prouder we were, the more aware we were of our
supposed righteousness, the more it hurts when God says, that's
not righteousness. That's just finely dressed sin,
that's all. But there's that man that laid
at his gate was a beggar named Lazarus. Now the New Testament
name Lazarus is the same as the Old Testament name Eleazar. You know me, I like to look up
things. You know in the Bible, names quite often have a significance. They mean something. So often
we've pointed out that the name Jacob essentially means heel
grabber. But it predicted him as one that'd
be willing to trip you up, to take advantage of you however
he could, scoundrel, ne'er do well, whatever you want to call
it. And then he was, by grace, he was given a different name,
Israel, which means one who prevails with God or a prince with God.
I was surprised when I read the meaning of the name Lazarus. God has helped me. You may recall in my Old Testament
history, I know that things happened, but I can't remember when they
happened or who they happened to quite often. But I do remember
that they set up a stone, and it was called Ebenezer. And Ebenezer
means, and we sing it in that song, Come Thou Fount of Every
Blessing, that one, Stanza starts with, here I raise mine Ebenezer,
hither by thy help I have come. And that's what Ebenezer means.
Hitherto has the Lord helped us. And the ezer part of it is
the word help. El ezer. El, God. Ezer, has helped. Now if you
had come up on that property, on the property of that rich
man, and beyond the gates of that guy's estate, you see a
fine house, and you see servants here and there, and you see lush
gardens, and you see that fellow walk out, and he's wearing purple,
and purple was a very costly dye, so if anybody wore something
in purple, he was saying, I'm rich. And he had linen. Nice, smooth linen, not itchy
wool. And you see that and then you
look there at his gate and here lies this man. Poor. Wretched. Covered with sores. Starving. Sick. And the dogs would come and lick
on his wounds. Now let me ask you. Game show time. They set up the
rich man and they set up Lazarus and they say, all right, get
your hands ready. Rich man's been helped by God.
Bzz, rich guy. No. The man covered with sores. The man with nothing. The man who's in pain, who hungers
and thirsts. And he would love to have some
of what it looks like that rich man has. Interesting thing in the law,
concerning the laws concerning leprosy, if you had leprosy,
which by the way, that word covers a lot of skin diseases, not the
one, not the modern, just the modern version of leprosy. But if you had leprosy, you were
unclean and you couldn't you weren't supposed to go out among
people. And if you did, you were supposed to cry out, leper, so
that everybody would stay far away from you. Because if you
touched a leper, I guess you were unclean too and had to go
through a ritual cleaning process. But for a leper to be declared
clean, one of two things had to happen. He had to be cured
or healed of his leprosy. And what I know of most skin
diseases, there's some of them, you're never cured of them. Now, back then, they didn't know
what caused these diseases. They just know people had, you
know, maybe some psoriasis or some of those other things they
have, and it's something you live with all your life. Well,
to them, that would have been something that put you outside temple worship. You had to live apart from others. Well, the way you could be brought
back in to be declared clean is if you were healed, if you
got rid of your leprosy somehow or another. And there was some
rituals involved. You had to go present yourself
to the priest, and he would examine you. and declare you, he's clean. And I think there was a sacrifice
to offer and that kind of thing. But interestingly enough, there
was another way to be declared clean if you were a leper. And that is if you were completely
covered with leprosy. If there wasn't anything on your
skin that was whole, that was healthy, Lazarus covered with sores. What's the significance of being
declared clean if the leprosy was all over you? The one who
has been made aware of who God is and his nature, been taught
about him, his glory's been revealed in the face of Christ, he sees
himself as nothing but sin. He doesn't say, okay, I've got
some sins. I got a little bit of, you know,
leprosy was a picture of sin back then. I got a patch of it
here and a patch of it over there. I'm working on it. I got a salve
I'm putting on it. This work for somebody that may
work for me and I put bandages over it so people can't see it.
So they don't have to be offended by doing the best I can. That
person was unclean, was not fit to go into the temple and worship
God. but somebody who is nothing but
leprosy, and if God ever brings you to realize you're nothing
but sin, what can you do? You can go to
the priest and show yourself to the priest. Say, look at me. There isn't a square inch of
my skin that isn't covered up with this horrible disease. And you know what that priest
will do? He will declare you clean. Our Lord said, I didn't
come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And the
only kind of sinner the Bible knows of is someone who is completely
a sinner. They recognize there's nothing
else to me but sin. And that's Lazarus here. Here's
the one helped of God. How was he helped of God? God
has put him in a state where he recognizes that he's nothing
but sin. And that has put Lazarus, the
one God helped, made him crave something. Now,
the Pharisee didn't have any real righteousness, but he was
supposed to be a picture, you know, a picture of a so-called
righteous man. And just, oh, Lazarus, if I could just have
some of that. And you know, the believer, the
Lord said concerning believers, Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Now, you and I who have believed,
a righteousness has been assigned to us, imputed to us, and that
word In the Greek language, it simply means it's been said about
them or considered about them. So when God imputes righteousness,
all that means is he says, okay, you're righteous. And for all intents and purposes,
that's the only righteousness we've got. But you know what? Having that righteousness makes
us hunger. It makes us thirsty. What? To not just be considered righteous,
but to actually be righteous. You know one way we can tell
that many people who claim to believe God really don't, who
claim to want or possess salvation, they don't. The desire for righteousness
is not to be found in them. They're glad they're not going
to hell. That's the main thing. They're glad they're going to
heaven because that's a nicer place. But their concern was not with
being saved from sin. They didn't look at themselves
and like Paul say, Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver
me? And yet every believer, maybe
not always with that intensity, but still that runs through our
mind, doesn't it? Tell me, don't you wish you weren't what you
are? Don't you wish, don't you desire
that you could love like the Lord Jesus loved you? Don't you wish that you could
be thankful You know, I stand up here and
preach and I talk about the greatness of God's grace and all of that,
and then I look at me and I think to myself, oh, Joe, how utterly
unthankful you are for the grace that's been given to you. You
walk through the day assuming it's there and give it no thought that the
only reason it's there is because God put it there. Like Lazarus, the believer in this life suffers his bad
things. No matter, and we can say this
to a believer, both in terms of the things that happen to
him naturally and the things that are going on in him spiritually. To the believer, when he dies,
he has already experienced the worst he will ever experience. For the unbeliever, when he dies,
he has already experienced the best he will ever experience. Those who trust in their own
righteousness, their own spiritual riches, they live a sumptuous
life in this world, They have on purple, which was commonly,
you know, it was worn by kings, generals, and those, you know.
And they strut around as though they're something else. And they
got the fine linen, and they're in comfort. And they've got riches.
They feel, well, they're not hungry for
anything. They think they've earned it all and got it all.
And they die. And the moment they die, what
happens? They find out they had nothing.
Nothing. And they've already experienced
the best they will ever have. Those who believe. I hate to say that we American
Christians have anything bad. You look at the rest of the world,
and we Americans, let's face it, we live better than the rest
of the world. I don't mean we're better people.
I mean, if somebody goes hungry in the
United States, they're not even trying. It's almost against the
law. We've got it good. So when I'm
talking about the difficulties that we American Christians face,
I'm not talking about necessarily the difficulties of this life.
I'm saying that the life of faith is a life of recognizing you're
covered with sores. It's the life of hungering for
what you do not yet have. It is the life Well, I don't want to say spiritual
misery, because it's not. I don't know exactly what to
call it. It's a mixture of the joy of the Lord which upholds
us, but the joy of the Lord arises from the knowledge that miserable
as I am, all my sins are forgiven. As covered with sores as I am,
God sees me perfectly, and in due time, this covering of leprous
sores is going to be taken away and I shall stand in his presence
not only without any legal guilt but there'll be nothing in my
being that is repulsive to God. Now think about that. Friends that's what salvation
is to be able to stand in the presence of God not with your sins covered but gone, not dressed up in your religious
duties, but in your very nature because God has remade you. You are without sin. Well, I'd like that. Well, right now we don't have
it, do we? But if you hunger and thirst
for righteousness, you will be filled. You will get what you're
longing for. If you hunger and thirst for
the Lord's favor, not only declared as a matter of promise, but experienced
in its fullness as you gaze on Him and He gazes on you, and
both are looking at one another with equal affection, if you
hunger for that, you'll get it. Blessed are they who mourn. Do
you mourn over what you are? The day of your mourning will
come to an end, and you will rejoice. Old Lazarus, he didn't own anything. The proud Pharisee had it all
inside the gates to his estate. And our Lord said, blessed are
the meek. for they shall inherit the earth. Now, I do not think he means
that we're going to inherit this one. Quite frankly, if that's
my inheritance, you'll keep it. Actually, in both Greek and in
Hebrew, the word translated earth could also just be translated
land. And you know, in the old covenant
economy and the promises made actually to Abraham and on through,
there was always talk about the land. It was their inheritance. And those who mistook the possession
of some real estate over there in the Mideast, they thought
that was the fulfillment of the Lord's promise. Their mind was
on earthly things and they got what their mind wanted. But Abraham
said he sought a better land. He sought a city with foundations. He sought something that was
built by God, not something that's been here since creation. And
that land, or what is pictured by that land, all of God's blessings,
all of his promise wrapped together in one package, that belongs
to the meek. who make no boast in their own
righteousness, who don't strut around in religious robes of
purple and linen, and who do not ignore the other
beggars around them. We've gathered here this morning
not in fine robes, We've not come here to impress everybody
with how healthy we are. See, no swords. We are here like
Lazarus at the gate. We have nothing. We can offer
nothing. But to us is promised everything. And what should we do? I remember
hearing a song, this was minimum 20 years ago, probably more like
30. But it's one of these contemporary
Christian songs. I don't remember much about it.
I just remember the fella, it's as though he's talking to an
unbelieving person. And he's basically saying, don't
get upset with what I'm saying. Ignore me and don't think I'm
trying to set myself up as some high and mighty person. Then
he said this line, I'm just a beggar showing other beggars where to
find food. I am the pastor of this congregation. When I accepted the call here,
we were having that meeting over there, and they said, what do
you want us to call you? Well, I got a name for it, Pastor
Beggar. That's all I am. You can leave off the pastor
if you want. For these years we've been together,
I'm just one beggar telling other beggars where to find food. And in this time, have we not
seen many walk by in purple robes and white linen and go on their way with a clear conscience? And
we might think, oh, I wish I had a clear conscience like that.
But that's not what's here for us right now. Oh, our conscience
is clear before God in terms of judgment, condemnation, but
we know what we are, don't we? And we long not to be that. We
long not to be covered with sores. We're not satisfied if 95% of
our skin heals up. We want to be perfect. And we will be.