Plugged in and Powerless?

The people at the Harris polling organization conducted a survey this year, asking people the following question: “If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

Twenty-one percent of Americans chose pizza, beating out steak, tacos, pasta and even hamburgers.

Here are a few other interesting slices (see what I did there?) from the survey:

65 percent of Americans consider pizza a perfectly acceptable choice for breakfast.

38 percent believe that it should be illegal for pineapple to be used as a pizza topping.

Nearly one in four Americans eat pizza five or more times a month. (No wonder we have a weight problem!)

And 23 percent of Americans who have ever been married wish they had simply served pizza at their wedding receptions.

When we visited France this summer, I thought I would never hear of something better than the vending machine my friend and I saw that dispensed paté and other deli treats. But then Annette went into town the next day and — I’m not even kidding here — she came back later and described the PIZZA vending machine she had seen.

Paté vending machines and pizza vending machines. Can you imagine a better time to be alive?

Anyway, one question the survey did not address was how many people have burned the roof of their mouths on hot pizza. I suspect the number is close to 100 percent.

Surely I’m not the only one this has happened to: You’re sharing a pizza with friends or family, and someone who got one of the first slices looks over as you’re about to take your first bite and says, “Be careful; it’s hot!”

And if you’re anything like me, you just bit right into it anyway, and you suffered through the rest of your meal with a blister on the roof of your mouth.

Sometimes, that’s just how it is. No matter how well we’ve been warned about something, we just go ahead and do it anyway.

Frankly, that’s how it has been for me as a pastor. I was warned by more than one pastor that this would be a hard job, and I just went ahead and took it anyway.

Now, hard work doesn’t frighten me. I was a newspaper editor for nearly 30 years, so I understand long hours and stress and the withering disdain of people who disagreed with everything I did and who wished I was gone.

I was warned by more than one pastor that this would be a hard job. Now, hard work doesn’t frighten me. I was a newspaper editor for nearly 30 years, so I understand long hours and stress and the withering disdain of people who disagreed with everything I did and who wished I was gone.

But after more than a year pastoring this congregation, I have come to realize that none of that is what those other pastors were talking about when they said this would be a hard job.

What’s really hard about this job is the emotional toll it takes.

You see, I don’t stand up here each week to make a good speech. I stand here each week hoping that the Holy Spirit will use something I have said to draw some lost soul into an eternal relationship with my Savior, Jesus Christ.

I stand here each week hoping the Spirit will rekindle the dying embers of faith in the lives of those whose faith has too long been starved of the Spirit’s breath. I stand here hoping to see the flash of renewed life — revival — where life seems to be ebbing.

It may be surprising for some of you to hear this — and some of you simply may not believe it — but I yearn for your souls. I yearn for your salvation. I desperately want to see you have half the experience with Jesus Christ that I have had.

But the statistics — and Scripture itself — tell me that some of you simply are not here for that kind of experience.

I do not say that judgmentally. In fact, I say it with great regret and with more sorrow than most of you will ever understand.

Ask my wife or my mother sometime. They will tell you that what breaks my heart more than gossip in the church, more than church politics, more than grumbling, is the fact that it is almost certain there are those within our fellowship who do not have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

What’s hard about this job is that no matter how hard I work — no matter how many hours I put in or how much effort I put into a sermon — there is nothing I can do to MAKE you see the Light.

I can only preach the truth of your lost condition without a true relationship with Jesus Christ. In the end, the Holy Spirit will convict you, and YOU will choose whether to come to the Lord in repentance and faith.

What’s hard about this job is standing here and looking out and knowing that the relationships I have with some of you here on earth are the only ones we will have — knowing that some of you have allowed yourselves to be blinded to the Truth by the ruler of this world, knowing that you have been inoculated against the Truth by a lifetime of hearing that Jesus just wants you to be good, or that you’re a Christian because you grew up in the church, or that you are saved because you were baptized.

Here is the truth: We are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory — the perfect righteousness of God. The penalty for sin is death — eternal separation from the perfectly holy God who created us in His image, to be like Him. Because of our sin, each one of us deserves to spend eternity in Hell.

But God is gracious and merciful, and so He sent His perfect and only Son, Jesus, who is all God and all man, to show us exactly what God is like and to show us exactly how man should live.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus came to show us how to be good, though He certainly did that. What it means is that He came to show us how to live in absolute faith and in complete obedience.

And having given us the perfect demonstration of perfect faith and perfect obedience, the sinless Christ then sacrificed Himself on a cross, taking on the sins of all mankind and paying the debt that each of us owes. And then, rising from the dead on the third day, Jesus demonstrated that God had accepted His sacrifice as payment for our sins.

But His resurrection leaves us with a choice to make: Will we accept His sacrifice on our behalf, or will we choose to stand before God on our own two feet, confident in our own goodness or our church membership or our baptism or our participation in the Lord’s Supper?

Will we follow Jesus Christ in faith, taking on His character and allowing the Holy Spirit to change us into His very image? Or will we put our faith in our family’s Christian heritage, in a confirmation ceremony or some creed we learned because all the kids in the church did it at that age?

My heart breaks to think of how many millions of people are walking around thinking they are saved because they were baptized or because they learned and could recite the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed — people who show no evidence of having been made into the likeness of Christ and yet think that some ritual by which they took His name has sealed their eternal destiny.

Paul reminded the people of the church in Corinth about just this problem.

Our focus passage of Scripture today is , and I want you to listen to it carefully. In this portion of his letter to the church, Paul is warning about the danger of Christians getting mixed up with idolatry.

But he starts out with an illustration taken from the history of the people of Israel, reminding these believers about the Exodus.

1 Corinthians 10:1 NASB95

1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea;

1 Corinthians 10:2–3 NASB95

2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; 3 and all ate the same spiritual food;

1 Corinthians 10:4 NASB95

4 and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ.

1 Corinthians 10:5 NASB95

5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the wilderness.

You see, when the people of Israel passed through the Red Sea after Moses had parted the waters through the power of the Holy Spirit, it was a picture of baptism.

And the manna and water that God provided them as they wandered through the wilderness are a picture of the Lord’s Supper that we will share today.

Their spiritual food and drink were from Jesus Christ, just as the spiritual food and drink we will share later this morning are from Him.

But what I want you to see is this last verse, Verse 5: “Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the wilderness.”

Now, theologians are split on whether or not the people who were delivered out of their bondage in Egypt were also delivered out of their sins and, therefore, into heaven upon their deaths.

But I would submit to you that the whole story told in the books of Exodus and Numbers is one of an utter lack of faith on their part and a complete failure to display the image of the God who had rescued them.

They thought that their baptism, their walk through the Red Sea, had saved them. They thought that their eating and drinking of the spiritual food of manna and water from the rock had saved them.

But God did not allow most of them to enter the Promised Land. Of that generation, only Joshua and Caleb showed they had faith in God, and so Joshua and Caleb were the only ones to cross the Jordan River and into the land of Canaan.

Yesterday, while we were visiting the Autumn Care Nursing Home, I was asked to do something that I had committed myself never to do: to baptize a man whom I did not believe was saved.

He was comatose, and the nurses told me that his death was imminent.

I hesitated, because baptism is biblically mandated as simply the action by which a new believer proclaims his new identity in Jesus Christ. It has no power to save.

But then they told me that the family was there and asking for the baptism as a way of giving peace to the man’s Catholic wife.

So I went to talk to the family, and I shared the Gospel with them all. While the man lay in his bed beside us, they told me, essentially that he had never been a believer. I told them that baptizing him would not save him — that only by repenting of his sins and placing his faith in Jesus could he or they be saved.

Then I dipped my hand in a cup of water and held my fingers to his forehead and prayed for his salvation. This was not a baptism, not even in the sense that the Catholic church might recognize.

But here’s the thing: The nurses told me afterward that the sense of hearing is the last to leave the body, and as I had held my hand on that comatose man’s head and prayed aloud for him, he had begun to move a bit.

I do not know what that means, but I know that God is merciful and gracious, and I believe that He will accept even that man’s silent confession of faith if it took place in the midst of his coma in those moments or even after I left.

If he came to a saving knowledge of Christ in those moments, the fact that he was not baptized will not matter in heaven any more than it mattered to the thief on the cross who acknowledged Jesus as his Lord and Savior at Calvary.

If he was NOT saved, at least I know that I was able to share the gospel with this family of nominal Christians. When I came into that room, they believed that sprinkling him with water would save his soul. By the time I left, they knew the Truth.

The members of this family attend a church here in Suffolk. They call themselves Christians. But when I asked about their faith and that of the father who lay in the bed, they didn’t describe to me a transformative experience of having put their faith in Jesus Christ.

What they talked about was how long they had attended their church. What they talked about was baptism.

I do not expect most believers to be able to explain the difference between propitiation, justification, sanctification and glorification, much less the difference between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity.

But if you cannot tell me that you were saved by grace through faith that Jesus Christ is the sinless Son of God who bore your sins on a cross and then was raised from the dead on the third day and will return from heaven to take home those who have followed Him in faith — if you cannot tell me that, and if you do not believe that, then the truth right out of God’s word is that you are not a Christian, no matter what you might call yourself.

The sad fact is that the world is full of people who call themselves Christians but are not. They may be plugged in to the church, but they are powerless. They do not have within them the power of the Holy Spirit. And if they do not have the Holy Spirit, they do not have Christ.

Jesus talked about them when He said, “Not everyone who says to Me Lord, Lord will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of My Father will enter.”

Matthew 7:22 NASB95

22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’

Matthew 7:23 NASB95

23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

Jesus was teaching about false prophets when He said this. He was talking about people who would be part of the church and would call themselves by His name.

And notice that these people actually would think that they are allied with Christ simply because of their affiliation with the church! They will have done work in the church, even to the point of casting out demons in His name.

We are not Christians because we are nice people who do nice things. If you are a Christian, it is because you have placed your faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ to wash away your sins.

Christians should BE nice people who do nice things, but the nice things are the result of their salvation and not the cause.

Matthew 7:15 NASB95

15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Matthew 7:16 NASB95

16 “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?

The ruler of this world wants you to get that backwards, and the truth is that Hell will overflow with those who have done just that.

Matt

Matthew 7:17 NASB95

17 “So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.

I cannot say that I was not warned about how hard this job would be, and I should not be surprised at the emotional toll of knowing that there are some who will simply reject the Truth with which they have been confronted.

But Truth is what I have been called to proclaim, even if it’s painful, even if you dislike me for it, even if it’s different from what you’ve been taught in the past.

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man comes to the Father except by Him.

THAT, my friends, is the Truth, and I will proclaim it here or somewhere else, even until the day that I am taken home to be with the Lord.

Now, we’re going to change the order of the service a bit from what’s in your bulletin. We’ll close today’s service with the Lord’s Supper. But first, I want us to stand and sing Victory in Jesus — verses 1, 2, and 3.

If you would like to talk to me more about this Truth I have shared today — if you’ve always considered yourself a Christian because you were raised in the church, but you’ve never confessed that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior; if you’ve always thought that your baptism as a teenager was what saved you — and if you’re ready to turn your life over to Christ in faith that His blood is the only thing that can wash away your sins and make you whole — if you’re ready to do that, please come down, and let’s pray together.

Now, as we prepare to distribute the bread for today’s communion observance, please remain seated and turn to No. 460 in your hymnals, and we will sing the first verse of Let Us Break Bread Together. When we have finished, the deacons will join me at the front and distribute the bread, and then one of them will come up here for prayer and a Scripture reading. Then we will all join together in eating the bread that represents the body of Christ, torn for our transgressions.

SONG/BREAD

Now, as we prepare to distribute the juice that represents Christ’s blood, shed for our sins, remain seated, and we will sing the second verse of Let Us Break Bread Together, No. 460 in your hymnals. When we’re done, the deacons will distribute the juice. One will then join me on the dais and read a Scripture and pray. Then we will all drink together.

SONG/CUPS

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Now, join me on the floor here, and let’s join together to sing Bless’d Be the Tie that Binds.

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