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 need his transforming power in our lives.

Paul Tripp [00:00:18]: Well, we're here to talk about how to live a God-honoring, joyful, hopeful, productive Christian life in a world gone insane, and we're looking at the Sermon on the Mount, and we've just been realizing that it really does speak to all the things we're facing in our culture right now. Our last episode was on anger and, wow, it's just...

Shelby [00:00:45]: What's more relevant than that right now? Yes.

Paul [00:00:46]: Yes, it's just everywhere. This is a continuation, but with a different sort of focus. I would title this episode "Worship and Reconciliation", and you may be listening to that right now and think, "What is that about and how is that practical?" Well, read 23-26 and then we'll jump in.

Shelby [00:01:16]: Yes, Matthew 5.

²³So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, ²⁴leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. ²⁵Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. ²⁶Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Shelby [00:01:48]: It can be confusing when you first look at that, so let's unpack it.

Paul [00:01:52]: So one of the things you have to realize that Jesus is doing here is he is addressing inconsistent discipleship, inconsistent Christianity. The fact that I can live with a separation between my Sunday worship life and my everyday life.

Paul [00:02:21]: Now, if you don't think that inconsistency exists in your life, then again, you're just not being honest with yourself. Somehow, we all have areas where the way we live doesn't match what we say we believe, or the kinds of things we sing and hear on Sunday are radically different than the choices we make during the week.

Paul [00:02:54]: Because I've written a lot of books and people know me, when I'm out and about, somebody will stop me on the street and say, "Oh, we really love what you do," and often, at the end of the conversation, they'll say, "How can I pray for you?"

Paul [00:03:12]: The first thing I always say is, "Pray that I would live what I write," and then I say, "Because it's way easier to write it than it is to live it." And so, that dichotomy that you can just learn to live with, where you actually have a sector-divided heart, where on this side you're opening your heart up to God and his truth and worship and the Christian community and your small group and Bible reading, and on this side, you're thinking things, doing things, pursuing things, allowing for attitudes, relationships, whatever that don't agree with this other side; and his example is unreconciled relationship with a brother or sister.

Paul [00:04:09]: Now, think about this. What do we do in worship? We celebrate the fact that by grace, we've been reconciled to God. How can you do that and be comfortable with living in unreconciled relationships with a brother and sister?

Shelby [00:04:27]: This is what we do all the time.

Paul [00:04:28]: So he's choosing something that is a clear example of this dichotomy. It's like the example argues a broader principle, so it's... in this case, He's talking about a reconciled relationship, but it's an example of a kind of dichotomy that can live in a lot of places in my life, and so, you need to ask yourself the question: where is there a disharmony between Sunday and Wednesday or between what I have said I believe is true and the way that I live in my everyday experience?

Paul [00:05:19]: It may not be for you that you have unreconciled relationships, although I think that's very frequent. There are people this Sunday who will go to church and sit across the room from people that they've quit speaking to or that they're harboring bitterness against or that they no longer trust, and are comfortable celebrating God's reconciling grace while living in unreconciled relationships.

Shelby [00:06:00]: Yes, we need to ask ourselves where's the hypocrisy in our lives as well and not just "let's wipe the slate clean for Sunday and then I'm good for the week". No, it's [an] all-day, every-day kind of process. Where am I living as a hypocrite, where what I say, or what I say that I worship, even, doesn't match up with how I live on a day-to-day basis.

Paul [00:06:21]: Well, then you ask yourself the question, there's a lot of examples of this disharmony that Jesus could have pulled on, why does he choose relationships? Well, there's two places in the Bible that answer that.

Paul [00:06:37]: First, the two great commands. When Jesus is going to summarize his law, the summary is love. Love God above all else and love your neighbor as yourself. If you think of the Ten Commandments, that's all they're about.

Paul [00:06:57]: You have the first commands that are about God being in his rightful place, and then all the rest of the commands are about your neighbor being in the rightful place in your heart because they're all offenses of relationship.

Shelby [00:07:10]: Yes, and the beginning of 1 Corinthians 13 teaches us that we could do all the Christian things; we can even perform miracles, it talks about, but if we don't have love, we are nothing, Paul says. We are nothing without love, so that's the primary thing that God calls us to.

Paul [00:07:26]: Here's a key Christian social media verse. It's Jesus in his final moment with his disciples before he faces his betrayal and the cross, and he says, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, by the correctness of your theology." Not what he says. "By your love for one another." What a powerful statement!

Paul [00:08:00]: The great Christian philosopher, theologian, Francis Schaeffer, called that the final apologetic, that Jesus knows that all of your preaching truth won't mean much if you stand in culture as a person of anger and hate.

[John 13:35] ³⁵By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Paul [00:08:33]: So in the passages we've read, love has the highest priority in the plan and purpose of God for us right here, right now, so I said this social media verse. What I should be known for on social media is not mockingly correcting every brother that I think has fallen short of some theological standard. I should be known by my love.

Shelby [00:09:02]: Yes, which is something that doesn't necessarily get you a lot of followers or reposts, but, yes, a lot of things are driven by what's the economy of how will it pay for me, and if you're someone who's mocking others, if you're someone who's belittling others, you're going to get a lot more traction, and so, it's just easy to follow that road.

Paul [00:09:29]: There's one other place where I think this becomes what we're talking about. This example that Christ is using of this disharmony in my life is Ephesians 4. So Paul, in Ephesians 1 through 3, does one of the most glorious gospel rants in all of Scripture.

Paul [00:09:49]: It is just... I've often thought I could live my entire Christian life in just the first three chapters of Ephesians. They are so deep and so beautiful and so heartwarming and so encouraging. But then, what he wants to do in Ephesians 4 through 6 is address, "Okay, how do you live in light of these glorious truths?"

Paul [00:10:20]: It shouldn't be missed by us that his very first set of applications is to our relationships. Listen to these words. ^4:1I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord [that's Paul], urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. That's just Paul's way of saying don't have disharmony. Be consistent with this glorious message that you've embraced.

Paul [00:10:50]: ²With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴There is one body and one Spirit (just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call) ⁵one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Paul [00:11:15]: Seven "ones". Now, think of what he's... when he's saying here, be completely humble, be gentle, be patient. Then I love this: bear with one another in love. If I have to bear with you in love, it means you've irritated me.

Shelby [00:11:38]: Yes, there's some sort of obstacle there.

Paul [00:11:40]: Yes, and make every effort or be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. Now, here's what Paul is saying, and this is the heinousness of unreconciled relationships. If God's Spirit lives in you and God's Spirit lives in me, God will agree with God.

Paul [00:12:03]: We have the most phenomenal platform for unity that the world has ever known. We just need to get out of the way, and what gets in the way? My pride, my impatience, my anger, my unwillingness to bear with the fact that you're less than perfect, although people have to live with that with me all the time, and I forget that God's call is that we do nothing to mar the unity of the body of Christ because that unity is meant to preach the gospel. Jesus said, [John 17:23] "I am one with You, and they are one in us, so the world may know that You sent Me."

Shelby [00:12:58]: Yes, it's a powerful testimony if we could only embrace it the way that God calls us to, as opposed to what the cultural norms are right now.

Paul [00:13:08]: Now, what's the rest of the passage about? Well, the core example is just Jesus saying, "If you don't deal with unreconciled relationships, bad things happen. Unreconciled relationships don't go anywhere good." That's what He's trying to say and so, the call is to keep short accounts.

Paul [00:13:30]: Again, if I could go to Ephesians [4:26b], Paul says, "Don't let the sun go down in your anger." One of the early commitments Luella and I made in our marriage is that we would not go to bed angry with one another. It's been a huge help for us.

Paul [00:13:51]: Now sometimes, that means we would lay in bed propping our eyes open, waiting for the next person to apologize before we did, but we have been very, very blessed by the fact that we don't build up this big closet of stuff that, you know, you start arguing and pretty soon, you're not arguing about today. You're arguing about six months ago. That's what Jesus is trying to keep you from and he uses a court example, but He's just saying, "Don't you get it? There's never a good harvest to unreconciled relationships."

Paul [00:14:29]: I mean, think well about this for a moment. That moment we talked about in our last podcast where you get angry at your daughter. Let's just say you leave that and you don't ask for her forgiveness, and she doesn't ask for forgiveness.

Paul [00:14:50]: You stew on that in the car. You stew with that throughout the day. You get home. You're in a bigger huff than when you left, and now, you look at her through the lens of her worst moment, and she looks at you through the lens of the worst moment, so you interpret everything that night through the lens of the worst moment. You get up the next morning angrier. Well, you can see where this goes.

Shelby [00:15:15]: It builds and builds and builds. Yes, the infection gets bigger and bigger and bigger if you're not willing to go after it earlier, and then you bring other people into it, and they do one minor thing, and you snap at them because you're not really mad about them. You're mad about the previous thing, and then you create more dissonance between you and other people. It just compounds on one another.

Paul [00:15:37]: And Jesus is basically saying you will not live this unless you say, "The place where I needed the greatest reconciliation ever was with God." He is perfect in every way all of the time. He has only ever responded to me with utterly spotless, perfect, blameless responses, yet I've ignored him.

Paul [00:16:12]: I've rejected him. I've fought him. I've rebelled against him. I've broken his beautiful standards. I've walked away from his love, yet he still moves toward me in grace. How can I celebrate that and live in unreconciled relationships with my family, the family of God?

Paul [00:16:42]: It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. How can we let that live in our hearts, and so we'd say, who do you need to go to? If you're a parent, maybe it's your children. Maybe there's been a theme of impatience with your children, and wouldn't it be wonderful for you to confess that and say, "I'd like to forge a new relationship with you"?

Paul [00:17:10]: Maybe it's your marriage. Maybe the sweetness of your marriage is gone because you've allowed yourself to harbor anger with one another, and unreconciled things have never been properly dealt with. Maybe it's a coworker. Maybe it's somebody in the body of Christ.

Shelby [00:17:29]: Yes, brother and sister, you're talking about ignoring at church.

Paul [00:17:32]: Maybe it's a neighbor. Where in your life have you chosen not to be reconciled, while at the same time celebrating the magnitude of God's reconciliation with you in his Son, the Lord Jesus?

Shelby [00:17:49]: Yes, it's Godward-focused first when you recognize what God has done for you that lets everything work horizontally this way, so go vertical before you go horizontal, and when you see the grace that's been given to you, and you're worshiping and reveling in that, recognize that if you're not living that out with other people, you're living in dissonance with what you truly say you believe.

Paul [00:18:13]: I want to make a particular application. There are a lot of 18-, 19-year-olds living in Christian homes who can't wait to get out of the house, and it's not just because of truth. It's because the way that truth was wielded in anger and self-righteousness, horrible moments of accusation that were never confessed and never dealt with, and in that heart, that teenager is bubbling, "If this is what Christianity is about, I want nothing to do with it."

Paul [00:18:56]: That's Jesus using his court example. "Don't you know this won't go anywhere good?" May God help us to face things that are hard to face. It's hard to go to someone and say I was wrong. It's hard to confess. It's hard to reconcile a relationship that has been unreconciled for a long period of time, but it's worth it.

Shelby [00:19:20]: Yes, and God says he calls us to go take care of those relationships "before you even come talk to Me about stuff". That should be convicting.

Paul [00:19:29]: Yes, you cannot allow yourself to go to worship after worship after worship after worship when there's unreconciled relationships in your life. Don't let that kind of division and that kind of disharmony live in your heart. There's help available.