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Introduction
Today’s text comes from although for our reading we will read verses 1-10.
Read and Pray.
I want to begin today’s service by asking you a question.
After you have lived this life to it’s fullest and you stand before the Lord, will the account that you give be on the basis of your performance before man or before God?
Will the way in which you handled yourself stem from a desire to please the Lord?
Or will it stem from a desire to appease a man?
Will God look upon everything that you did in this life and see it as truly being done for Him?
Or will He see most of what you have done in this life in His name was actually done out of reverence for men?
Now trust me when I say that I do not ask this question lightly.
I spent some time trying to get the wording just right so that it’s not my words that might be offensive but that it would be the Proclamation of the Word of God that would quicken the hearts of His people.
So I ask this question once again.
Should you stand before the Lord tomorrow, would He see your life as lived out for Him?
Or would he see within the depths of your heart a desire to be pleasing to those around you?
I think that if we were honest with one another, our answer would have to be the latter.
Most of us have sought out to be appeasing to the voices of men.
We might not have done it outright but we have none the less done it.
We could have 25 different and random people tell us what we should be doing and ignore it entirely.
Yet the very second someone we respect, fear or adore tells us what we need to do, we’ll move mountains to bend towards their words.
Now I’m not saying that we reject Biblical authority in this as there is a vast difference in being obedient to the commands of Scripture and being obedient to the commands of men.
The former is a by-product of the regenerated heart that seeks after the things of the Lord.
The Latter is a heart motivated by something other than Biblical conviction.
The heart set upon the attention to men will always be bound to act according to what man says.
The heart bound upon the Lord will only act in what the Word of the Lord tells them to do.
This is nothing new!
This has been the condition of the Human heart for many countless generations.
The Pharisees did it by forming for themselves doctrines of men and practicing those things with such staunch accuracy that they left many in the wake and their path of destruction.
Not only was there a devastating path left behind them, but they spent countless many years becoming white washed tombs.
They had everything on the outside that looked so perfectly right, and yet on the inside there was nothing but an empty grave full of dead mens bones.
John Calvin said it like this:
The flesh is willing to flatter itself, and many who now give themselves every indulgence promise to themselves an easy entrance into life.
Thus men practice mutual deception on each other, and fall asleep in wicked indifference
It’s our fleshly side of us that makes us believe that everything will be alright.
And not only do we deceive ourselves, but we then begin to do the same with others.
We begin looking upon men to seek after their approval.
We look horizontally to men who would lift us up or tell us what to do.
The problem is that what we need isn’t found horizontally.
We cannot seek after the approval and affirmation of men in the things that only the Lord Jesus Christ can affirm for us.
Our affirmation has to be vertical.
It has to come from the one place that it truly counts.
For if it doesn’t come from the Lord, then it is truly in vain.
Think for just a moment about great men from Scripture such as Shadrack, Meshack and Abendigo.
How would their time in the fiery furnace have turned out if they were seeking after the approval of men?
They would have never went into that furnace at all.
For when King Nebuchadnezzar required all of the people to bow down and worship that golden idol, they would have merely bowed.
They would not have stood their ground and dealt with the consequences.
They would have bowed to the desires of man and been spared the trial they endured.
Their actions would have been approved by men and that would have allowed them to continue on without any issues coming their way.
Yet, do you realize what wouldn’t have happened?
The Glory of God would not have been revealed in showing King Nebuchadnezzar His power.
King Nebuchadnezzar would have continued running the land in such a way where he had no true reverence for the one who was truly in control.
I mean just think about the events of that story for a moment.
Because Shadrack, Meshack and Abendigo chose to stand their ground, worship the one true King, they were to be cast into the furnace.
A furnace designed to melt metals.
Metals such as what was used to build the Golden Idol.
They used it to smelt minerals and bake bricks.
This thing was not like your oven in your home.
For one thing it’s very reasonable to assume that this thing could reach temperatures of around 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Not only did it get that hot, but the very guards who carried the men down there were killed just by getting that close to the fire.
Back up for a minute and think about the thoughts that had to be going through those men’s minds.
They knew that to serve God and have their approval come from Him meant that it may very well cost them their lives.
Yet in the midst of the trial their feet were set firm upon the Lord.
They wanted no outside assistance, no outside approval but only cared for standing firm upon the Lord.
As we all know full well, the outcome of that incident left Shadrack, Meshack and Abendigo walking around the furnace with some other unknown person.
They came out of that furnace alive with no issues.
Not even so much as their clothes smelt like smoke.
They were completely untouched!
And while that is a beautiful end to standing firm upon the Lord and seeking only our approval from Him.
That’s not always how it ends is it?
Fast forward a couple thousand years and we find the story of John Huss.
A man who was a follower of John Wycliffe during the time prior to the reformation.
Huss was a forerunner to the Reformation.
One who followed the ideas of Wycliffe in asserting that the Scripture alone held the authority for the Church.
That the Papacy was to be done away with and that Priests and leaders within the Church should not be able to buy their positions.
Something else that is not widely known about Huss though is that he advocated for the Christian conscious.
That no authority over the mans conscious should exist except that which is Given by God.
If we could for a moment place that into our own place in this Text today, we would find it applicable in that we seek not after pleasing man but pleasing God.
We seek not after following rules set out by man but living by grace through Christ.
And how can a person live a life pleasing before the Lord if their conscious is bound by something laid out by men and not by God?
They can’t!
For when they desire to move in one direction their conscience is bound and it restrains them.
It’ll restrain their voice and it will restrain their actions.
Huss knew that!
That was part of his position in fighting for a freedom of the conscious.
Huss stood for Biblical truth in a period of time that was absolutely life threatening.
To defy the Pope or any form of Roman headship was to basically write your own excommunication papers.
Not to mention it was like lighting your own fire to be burned at the stake.
And that’s precisely what Huss did.
He was summoned multiple times to answer for both his teachings and his writings and each time, he stood his ground.
Not once did it cross his mind to bend his thoughts to the desires of men.
Not once did it come from his mouth that maybe he should relinquish his ideology and fall back into line with Catholicism.
The very last time that Huss stood before the Council that condemned him to death was July 4th 1415.
They brought charge after charge upon him and yet Huss refused to recant from his positions.
After their demanding he recant failed.
They went as far as having a sermon preached concerning the destruction of heretics from the text which says, “Let the body of sin be destroyed.”
It was after this that they censured him, ordained that he should be degraded from the priesthood, his books publicly burned.
And that he was to be delivered over to the secular powers.
Which in turn meant that he would be burned alive.
Huss received this sentence without even the slightest emotion.
The only thing that he did was kneel down, lift up his eyes towards heaven saying this:
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