JESUS – An Example of Tough Love
Illustration
“Living in this house is like living in hell,” screamed the young girl as she stamped her feet on the way upstairs to her room. The mother stood looking at her daughter, a hint of tears forming in her eyes. She wanted to run up the stairs and hug her daughter but she knew the timing would be wrong. Her daughter had openly refused to clear off the table and put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher: she had to be disciplined. Still, her daughter’s earlier acquisition that her mother did not love her had hit a raw nerve. The mother had come very close to shouting at her daughter: “who was it that always stood beside you in tough times; who was it that cheered the loudest during your soccer games; who was it that constantly encouraged you when you felt like you were failing; or just who do you think it is that constantly keeps you in her prayers?” But she had choked back the harsh questions. Instead, she said a silent prayer that her daughter would eventually come to understand her mother loves her very much. As she watched her daughter angrily slam her bedroom door, the mother wondered if perhaps her daughter wasn’t just a little bit spoiled: perhaps by too much loving attention from her parents. To be honest, her daughter had reached that age where she seemed to think that her parents only existed to serve her wants. The young teenage girl had lost sight of the fact she was part of a family and that she was expected to contribute to the family as well as take from the family. A smile began to creep across the woman’s face as she reflected on her daughter’s attitude: “almost reminds me of me during my last prayer!” As she turned and walked back to the dining room the woman thought: “do I really act like a spoiled child in my expectations from God?” The woman sat down at the table and stared at the dirty dishes, she reflected on her Christian attitude: “its true, sometimes we Christians get to the point where we think God exists for the sole purpose of filling our lives with health, wealth and happiness.”
Sermon
Is the gospel message only about God’s love for us?
Most of us in Christendom never reach the point where we get tired of hearing about the positive and loving teachings of Jesus. After all, God so loved the world that He sacrificed His only begotten Son that we might have the opportunity for eternal life. (John 3:16) Jesus, Himself, reinforced the importance of love by telling us the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our fellow man. (Matthew 22:36-40) There is no way we can minimize the importance of God’s love for us. After all, and beyond any shadow of a doubt, the combined teachings of Jesus all point to just one thing: loving forgiveness is God’s greatest gift to mankind. For by grace are we saved through faith, it is God’s gift, there is nothing man can possibly do to deserve this loving gift. (Ephesians 2:8-9) Paul, who Peter accused of being a hard teacher, went so far as to teach that our Christian works amount to nothing unless they are done in love. (1st Corinthians 13:1-13) Now think about this for a moment; how could a Christian ever get tired of hearing warm and fuzzy sermons?
Love is certainly the cord that binds Christianity together; God’s love for us surpasses human understanding; and it is God’s greatest desire that we love Him and we love one another. But, does all this love prove that the gospel message is primarily made up of positive, warm and fuzzy teachings? The answer is no! Yes, the gospel message is about our accepting Jesus as our Savior, but a greater portion of the New Testament is about our developing a servant-lord relationship with Jesus: more accurately, a slave-master relationship. Love is why Jesus wants us to be His servants, and love is why we should want to be servants of Jesus; yet, the fact remains that we must work very hard to develop our servant-lord relationship with Jesus. The heart of the gospel message may truly be the soul-saving sacrifice of Jesus, but the bulk of the gospel message is all about our making Jesus the Lord and Master of our life.
Making Jesus the true Lord and Master of our life is the most difficult thing we will ever do. The gospel message tells us that a Christian is someone who has been spiritually transformed: Born Again. (John 3:1-8) Therefore, a true Christian is someone who is a new creation: ergo, a servant of Jesus Christ. As a servant of Jesus, every single one of us has been given the job of living a life, which is a testimony of God’s reconciling love. (2nd Corinthians 5:17-22 and James 1:1) But remember this, a Christian must carry the loving message of reconciliation in a world that is far from loving. The message may be about love, but we must carry this message in a world filled with trials and tribulations; (James 1) we must live this message in a world where we are constantly under the threat of attack from evil spiritual forces. (Ephesians 6:10-18) Lets face it, most of us do not like to be confronted with the reality that Satan rules this world; we would much rather view life as a walk in a sun-filled meadow of wild flowers. The New Testament, however, does not paint a warm and fuzzy picture of Christian life. The New Testament paints a picture of God’s love transforming us into Christian for the sole purpose of our maturing into faithful servants of Christ: we are transformed into warriors who are in a constant battle against evil. (John 16:33, Romans 7:23, 1 Corinthians 9: 25-27, 2 Corinthians 2:11, 2 Corinthians 12:7, Galatians 5:17, Ephesians 6:12, James 4:7, 1 John 2:14 – 15, 1 Peter 2:11, 1 Peter 5:8, Revelations 12:17) If you are a mature Christian you are an active servant, an ambassador for Jesus Christ; and, this is the most rewarding, challenging and dangerous adventure anyone can undertake.
You are right; God did put a hedge around Job. Why did God put a hedge around Job? God put a hedge around Job because Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and who was the most righteous man on earth. (Job 1:1-10) Now, I admit that we may work very hard at serving Jesus; but are we so foolish as to think that we warrant God building a hedge around us. Who among us is in a class with Job? Who among us has the right to demand that God make their life a daily walk though sun-filled meadows? We need to face reality, we are on a battlefield and we must continue to fight the good fight; we must continue to endure in the strength of the Lord. It is true, some of us, at one time or the other, will crouch in the corner sucking our thumbs; but, thank God we have brothers and sisters who will come to our side and lift us back to our feet. Remember, God has not left us alone on this battlefield: we have the Holy Spirit. Thus, our trials and tribulations bring joy and not sorry, for we have fixed our eyes on things that are above, where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God. (Colossians 3:1-4) We do not have to seek an Old Covenant hedge because we live in the certainty of eternal victory. This then is the secret for facing the reality of Christian life; we do not deny this battlefield for we know it is like a morning mist, which is soon swept away by the rising of the Son.
What did Jesus really teach?
It is so easy to say that we must set our mind to the things that are above. The sad truth is, however, we are constantly lured into placing more emphasis on earthly things, such as health, wealth and happiness, than we are on developing a spiritual relationship with the creator of the universe. This is not good, for if we do not have a steady diet of gospel meat we will grow weak and immature; we will eventually get to the point where we are so shallow we can only digest milk. Before long, we will find that we have become so shallow that we only listen to preachers who will tell us exactly what we want to hear: a health, wealth and happiness message. (2nd Timothy 4:3-4) We may want to have our eyes fixed on heavenly things but it won’t happen as long as we are only milk drinkers!
It is obvious that we must be careful about wanting to drink too much prosperity gospel milk. Instead, we need to gather about us those who preach without deception or secret evasion, and who will feed us meat from the entire New Testament message. If we look to those who make it a point to preach the complete message of Jesus, as it exists in the New Testament, we will find that we are spending less than 30% of our time listening to warm and fuzzy sermons. Not that this is something to recommend nor are we suggesting a minister needs to preach messages in direct proportion to their existence in scripture. The point we are trying to make, albeit poorly so, is that we must not be a people who will only listen to a small part of the gospel message.
I do not think that I stand alone in my enjoyment of warm and fuzzy sermons, for I am sure there are many others who have a preference for hearing about God’s love. I am also quite sure that I am not the only one who finds it difficult to leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity. I prefer to be held and comforted and told that everything is all right! I don’t like to think about the roaring lion that seeks to destroy my Christian life. I want to shut out images of the spiritual battlefield, where my soul is under constant attack from evil spiritual forces. Still, I am under an even greater conviction that we are obligated by the blood of Jesus to stand on our feet and go beyond the elementary teachings about salvation and God’s love for us. I believe in my heart and soul that we must learn to live as a servant, or more accurately slave, of Jesus Christ. (Hebrews 6:1-2) How else could a Christian possibly believe? After all, over 70% of Jesus’ teaching is about our serving Him and enduring the hardships of a Christian existence.
Well, this is a grand notion; but just how do you defend the position that less than 30% of Jesus’ teachings were elementary doctrine, which is being turned into warm and fuzzy sermons. There is only one-way: examine everything Jesus taught. In an attempt to accomplish this, all four gospels where copied and put into an Excel database. Each verse was evaluated for its message, and a key word was chosen to describe the basic theme of the verse. After a number of readings and evaluations, of the four gospels, the list of keywords was narrowed down to 20 basic teaching themes. The database was then analyzed to determining what percent of the overall teachings is given to each keyword. The summary data was placed in a table format containing the key word, how many times it occurred and percent of total keyword occurrence. For example, eleven percent of the time Jesus taught about Christian service: Christian service being what is expected from us as His servants and followers. Three percent of the time Jesus taught through His healing of the sick and crippled, and one percent of the time He talked about God’s wrath.
The last step in our analysis was to determine which key words could give rise to an elementary message and which keywords are related to a message, which is beyond elementary teachings. This was a very subjective step in the analysis, even more so than determining keywords. It is inevitable that classification of keywords will vary with individual opinions regarding the definition of elementary gospel teachings. In any advent, based on Paul’s comments to the Hebrews, the list of keywords for elementary teachings is: Faith, Forgive, Holy Spirit, Love and Salvation, which add up to 27%. Based on this type of analysis, Jesus spent 27% percent of His time teaching about elementary things, and 73% percent of the time He taught about things, which are more serious or challenging. In other words, Jesus taught hard lessons about serving and enduring almost three times more often than He taught about warm and fuzzy subject.
Now, let me say right up front, do not take this information and go off quoting it as being factual: because it is not! The conclusions generated by this analysis are very subjective and most assuredly open to discussion. I will admit that a lot of work went into building this database and even more work went into analyzing what Jesus taught. But the person doing the analysis will undoubtedly influenced the selection of keywords, and the determination of what is meat and what is milk. One should be very confident, however, in proclaiming that there is overwhelming evidence Jesus taught significantly more about our service to Him than He did about elementary things. Or, you might say that this analysis proves Jesus spent more time preaching challenging messages than He did preaching warm and fuzzy messages.
Conclusion
We can understand why people want to hear a prosperity gospel message but we also know that this is the lesser of Jesus’ teachings. We also know that the prosperity gospel is not reality. The only way to make the prosperity gospel message true would be to throw away history, and limit Christianity to America: perhaps only post World War II America. After all, where was the prosperity message when Nero was feeding Christians to the lions? Where was the prosperity message when Christians slaughtered Christians on so many battlefields throughout history? Are Christians in places like Africa, the Middle East and China allowed to suffer in poverty and persecution because they do not deserve health, wealth and happiness? Of course not! Yes, health, wealth and happiness can be a part of a Christian’s life, but so can sickness, poverty and persecution. People may want to hear only prosperity sermons but we all need to hear the complete message of the New Testament.
We can wean ourselves from the prosperity gospel opiate if we will just take the time to understand we are part of a family, which is living in a foreign land. It does not matter if we live in a mansion on Long Island or in a dirt hovel in Africa. Both places are only temporary dwellings and of very little importance in light of eternity. We need to realize that God does not exist for the purpose of serving Christians with a constant flow of health, wealth, and happiness. Remember, the Holy Spirit, on His own volition, empowers the believer for the purpose of doing God
