Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to The Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life, right here, right now and we're working our way through the Sermon on the Mount because it has so much to say to us right here, right now. It's not just an ancient text. It's actually something that speaks to our hearts right now.

Paul Tripp [00:00:23]: Yes, and our whole topic for this year is how to live a godly, productive, hopeful, courageous, joyful life in this world gone crazy and I've just been blown away by how Jesus, as He addresses His disciples in this ancient culture, is addressing the stuff that we struggle with.

Paul [00:00:48]: I wish I could say as I read this, I live above these struggles, but I don't and we're now at a place that is as radical as Jesus' teaching gets; and it tells you how serious Jesus takes these moral struggles. Whether it's anger or lust or unreconciled relationships, none of those are light and unimportant to your Lord; and He cares about the mundane, subtle sins in your life and He does not see those as unimportant.

Paul [00:01:42]: I think we can just become casual with those and learn to live with those. I think of, you know, you lose it with your children as you're trying to get them all to church on Sunday or you have your argument with your wife in the car, and none of it gets dealt with. You put on a happy face as a family and go into Sunday service.

Paul [00:02:14]: Jesus doesn't look at that that way, and this passage has again and again reinforced to us that we need to take these things as seriously as our Lord does. And I could go back to early podcasts in this season because He wants us to stand out as something different in our culture, to be part of His work of redemption, to be like a city on the hill that you can't miss or salt that fights corruption.

Paul [00:02:45]: He's got a purpose for us. Your life, between the "already" of your conversion and the "not yet" of your final homegoing, is not just a meaningless waiting pattern. God has a plan for you. He's called you to something that is literally eternally important.

Paul [00:03:06]: So one of the reasons that He can be so demonstrative is because as His blood-bought children, the result of His eternal plan that we would be covered by His mercy, our lives don't belong to us anymore. Paul again says, "Don't you know you were bought with a price? Therefore..."

Shelby [00:03:36]: Honor God with your body.

Paul [00:03:38]: And you are not your own.

Shelby [00:03:39]: Yes, you're not your own.

Paul [00:03:43]: Well, that's all to set up the radical nature of what we're going to talk about. Could you read verses 29-30? Matthew 5.

Shelby [00:03:53]: ²⁹If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. ³⁰And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

Yes, pretty radical.

Paul [00:04:16]: John Piper once said that if you don't know that life itself is war, then you don't know how to pray because you're praying into that war (that war that exists in your heart, that war that exists in your family, that war exists in your culture) and you're praying down the power of God to help you in this spiritual warfare.

Paul [00:04:53]: So here's the Christian life. We're called to live for God in the midst of an all-out war. When you're reading your Bible, you're reading in the midst of bombs being dropped, lives being lost. It's war and that war most dominantly is fought on the turf of your heart. It's fought for control of your soul.

Paul [00:05:29]: That used to be a little mantra that I would give to my sons as they were leaving the house. They would be taking a subway into Center City. I'd say, "Remember, there's a war out there. It's fought on the turf of your heart," and they would say, "Yes, I know, Dad, it's fought for control of my soul."

Shelby [00:05:43]: Okay, Dad.

Paul [00:05:43]: And I would say, "Be careful." So here's the Christian life. You have to emphasize two things to get it right. God meets me with the inexhaustible resources of His mercy and His grace, but that's not enough while He calls me to radical, personal, self-sacrificing obedience, you got to have both of those.

Paul [00:06:23]: Think of it as an old-fashioned teeter-totter. This is the law side. This is the grace side. Okay? If you overemphasize law, what do you get? You get legalism. It produces defeat and depression or pride because I think I'm keeping the rules. It's a distortion.

Paul [00:06:55]: If you only emphasize mercy and grace, then the tendency is to get easy believism. My behavior doesn't matter because it's all forgiven anyway. The balance is in the middle there, where I am free from the burden of the law because Christ has fulfilled the law. He's the perfect Son on my behalf, but I'm not freed from the requirements of the law; but the law doesn't alleviate my need for God's grace because the law can't do for me what grace can do.

Paul [00:07:39]: So you have to understand in this moment where Jesus is calling us to radical, self-sacrificing obedience, He's not walking away from His grace. In fact, that call is a tool of His grace because that call reveals my need, makes me hunger for God's grace, makes me realize that I'm not the law-keeper that I thought I was.

Shelby [00:08:16]: Yes, and I think we miss the point, too, when we hear that obedience is just something that we have to do in order to keep God happy, living obediently as a follower of Jesus is who we were made to be. It is true life. It is a call into true life. It's not necessarily a call into this mundane, boring, or kind of like, "Oh, I got to keep your in mind or God's going to smite me." No, it's actually the fullest extent of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Obedience is.

Paul [00:08:48]: Well, that's why we don't just celebrate justifying grace. We celebrate sanctifying, transforming grace because the seeds of justification planted in the soil of my heart are meant to produce the fruit of a new way of living. In fact, Jesus used the example of a fruit tree. He's given that exact illustration that the roots of grace in my heart should produce the fruit of behavior that's honoring to my Lord.

Shelby [00:09:25]: Yes, and you mentioned the teeter-totter and that I think the temptation is always to tip from one side to the other. My temptation, my whole life, my bent has been toward being a rule-follower, being an arrogant kind of Pharisee, but I've met students in particular who have... they call it hyper-grace. They live in an environment like it's all forgiven anyway, so I could basically do whatever I want. Why should I be obedient? And I think this passage answers those things.

Paul [00:09:53]: What appears as hyper-grace is grace that's not fullness yet because it doesn't emphasize sanctifying grace. That's partial grace. I've been justified. Praise God for that. I stand righteous before God, but what does God do? He rolls up His sleeves to make me actually what He's declared me to be in Christ. It's beautiful.

Paul [00:10:25]: So Jesus understands that every self-centered, lazy moment of moral compromise opens the door for the devil to do his evil work in my heart. That's why this call to obedience is so important because this is war. There is a roaring lion.

Paul [00:10:49]: I mean, think of Ephesians, the last chapter of Ephesians, where he's talking about all these practical things: your relationship, your communication, your anger, your unity to the body of Christ, your money, your work, and he ends talking about principalities and powers.

Paul [00:11:07]: You think, why is he talking about this? Because what he's saying is, "Everything I've talked about so far is spiritual warfare." All those mundane little things that we don't think are that spiritually important are the battleground of war and you give away those little things, you'll lose the war. And he says, "You don't wrestle against one another. It's principalities and powers."

Paul [00:11:35]: And so, we can't allow ourselves to have these little moments of behavioral compromise of what seems to be innocuous little moments of disobedience and it sounds funny to say, but Jesus is pretty good at using illustrations.

Shelby [00:12:14]: Yes, He was kind of perfect at it.

Paul [00:12:16]: Yes, you know, this guy just had a way with words.

Shelby [00:12:19]: He really did, yes. He was very good at it.

Paul [00:12:22]: And so, He gives us word pictures that are meant to just stop you in your tracks. If your eye offend you, pluck it out. If your right hand offend you, chop it off. Now, why the eye and the hand? Well, the eye is a gate where you take in the world and so, if your eye is wanting to take in evil, then you just need to pluck it out. Your hand is an example of behavior reaching for something. Now, it shouldn't need to be said, but it should be said: Jesus is not calling us for Christian self-mutilation...

Shelby [00:13:19]: Right, it's really important to understand.

Paul [00:13:21]: ... where our churches are stained with blood.

Shelby [00:13:25]: Literal blood.

Paul [00:13:26]: But what He's saying is our obedience should be just that radically self-sacrificing.

Shelby [00:13:37]: Yes, there's just the places that we need to actually say no to, like back when I was early in ministry on college campuses, back when laptops weren't as much of a big deal, but desktops, I had a guy who was in my Bible study who had been struggling with lust and he was like, "I'm going to take my computer and put it in the living room, not in my room anymore." And so, he put his desktop computer in the living room.

Shelby [00:14:04]: I was like, "Bro, what you're doing is you're cutting off your right hand. Good job. Cut that right hand off. Get rid of the temptation in the ways that you say you actually want to walk with Jesus. This is an example of how you're doing that."

Paul [00:14:18]: So there ought to be places we will not go. There should be things that we will not watch. Things we won't do with our phone, our iPads, our laptops.

Shelby [00:14:32]: Compromises we won't make.

Paul [00:14:33]: There ought to be things we won't listen to. There should be people that we won't hang with. I'm going to say this. It's kind of embarrassing. If you're a man who struggles with lust, don't take your phone into the bathroom. You're just giving the devil an opportunity.

Paul [00:14:53]: Say to your Lord, "I'm not going to do that anymore," because if that's a problem with you, you could be looking at Twitter and before long, you're looking at things you should not be looking at and doing things you should not be doing.

Paul [00:15:13]: That's what he's calling [me] to. Am I willing to make costly sacrifices so I can walk in obedience with my Lord? Could there be a more graphic way of teaching this than a word picture of cutting off a part of your body because you haven't been able to control it.

Shelby [00:15:43]: Yes, we should care about obedience because Jesus was obedient and Jesus is our righteousness. Jesus lived perfectly obedient. We want to be like Jesus. We should be living obediently. We're not going to do it perfectly the way that Jesus did because He is our righteousness. He is the one who lived it perfectly for us, but if He valued it, we should value it, too, and not be in the business of constantly explaining away why it's okay that we should be allowed to do whatever we want to do.

Paul [00:16:13]: Well, it's also a place where you need to have a practical street-level theology of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't just convict of sin. He empowers righteousness. So you can't allow yourself to say, "I've tried to say no, but it doesn't work," because the truth of the gospel is with raging passions and raging desires and raging emotions, you do have the power to say no and turn and go in another direction because the Almighty Holy Spirit of God now lives inside of you. We deny His presence and we deny His power when we say, "I have no ability to do this."

Shelby [00:17:16]: Yes, you have access to the God of the universe living inside of you.

Paul [00:17:20]: And you know, the promise of God is He would make us a temple where He dwells. Jesus said, "Lo, I am with you always. I will never leave you nor forsake you." How many passages say that there's help for us because God is in us and for us and with us?

Paul [00:17:48]: And our problem is not that we don't have options. Our problem is we resist making the radical personal sacrifices that godliness calls us to make because we underestimate the grace that we've been given.

Paul [00:18:17]: You can be patient and kind to that child that happens to be the one of your children that irritates you the most. You can come in to the house after a really bad workday, and be sweet to your wife and children. You can make a decision that the electronics in your house, you're not going to use for evil but for good.

Paul [00:18:52]: You can make those choices and, you know, one of the choices I've made is I respond to nothing on Twitter/X. Sometimes, there are vile things said to me and about me. I never ever respond. I've made a moral commitment not to do that.

Paul [00:19:10]: Sometimes, that's very hard. I feel so misunderstood and so violated, and I'm concerned with other people reading that, how it's going to affect my ministry. I will not respond because it's just anger that's going to come out of me and so, I would end this.

Paul [00:19:29]: Where is God calling you to cut something off, to make radical choices of self-sacrificing obedience? Have you underestimated how His grace will meet you there? His grace can empower those choices and wouldn't it be great to lay down a legacy of good choices rather than bad choices? Grace can get you there.