Scoundrels in Heaven
TCF Sermon
November 16, 2014
In the midst of preparing this sermon this past week, our brother in Christ, Mike Ferrill, went to be with the Lord. I considered what the best way to honor Mike’s memory would be – to preach what I’d already begun to plan, or to do something else?
But as I thought about Mike, and what was important to him in this life, I thought that the best way to honor him would be to preach this message, because Mike’s heart was to see the lost saved, to see those in darkness brought into the Kingdom of Light.
It drove nearly everything he did, so as I thought about this, I could hear Mike appreciating the things we’re going to explore together this morning. I trust that, most importantly, it will glorify God, but also honor the things in this life that were the most important things to Mike.
Have you ever thought about the people you know who seem to be unsavable – or the least likely to be saved? I want you to picture some of these people you know in your mind. It might be a neighbor. Or a co-worker, or a schoolmate. It might be a family member.
But now, with a picture of that person or persons in your mind, I want you to take a moment to consider why they seem to be unsavable? Some of those people Mike worked with in one of his passions, his work with the Christian motorcycle association, probably would look to many of us as unsavable.
My guess is you’re like me when I did this exercise. You probably think that this person seems unsavable because of what you know they believe or don’t believe, or you know they do, or both. Maybe it’s their hostility toward God or Christians. Maybe it’s a blatantly immoral lifestyle. Maybe it’s their atheism.
Maybe it’s their piercings or tattoos, or their alcohol or drug abuse. Maybe it’s because they’re homosexual and proud of it, or an adulterer, and it doesn’t bother them. And we have some scripture that, without a proper context, seems to justify this kind of thinking.
How about this one:
1 Corinthians 6:9-10 (ESV) 9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
But here’s where we get to this morning’s sermon title:
Scoundrels in Heaven
We look at these people we’re thinking of, and we think, there’s no way this person could become a Christian, or at the very least, even if we’re a little more trusting in God than that, we might think – boy, it’s sure unlikely that person will ever come to Christ.
Or even the reverse is true. We see someone who lives a good life. Very moral.
Maybe they share your politics. Maybe they even go to church sometimes. They’re decent, kind, compassionate people, but you happen to know they’ve never been born again. And you think, “I could really see this person easily becoming a Christian.”
Now, let’s be honest with ourselves. We might never voice it, but most of us have probably thought something like this before – that is, either we have a hard time imagining this person getting saved, or we have an easy time imagining another person getting saved.
But when we do think either of these things, we’re undermining the grace and mercy and power of God, that’s at the heart of the way we’re saved, and dismissing the true gospel, the good news, of how people gain eternal life.
For starters, let’s read the verse immediately following the passage we read a moment ago.
1 Cor 6:11: And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Such were some of us. Some of us were sexually immoral. Some of us were adulterers or idolaters. Some of us practiced homosexuality. Some of us were thieves, or greedy, or drunkards. We were scoundrels. Just bad people.
Actually, all of us were bad people, scoundrels, even if this list of sins, which is hardly a complete list, doesn’t include the kinds of “respectable” sins everyone here is guilty of.
Romans 3:10 (NIV) As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one;
But we must remember what scripture tells us, which is why there will be scoundrels in heaven. Of course, they’ll all be former scoundrels, because their sins will have been covered by the blood of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 6:11, it says we were washed, sanctified, justified.
We’re no longer scoundrels when we’re in Christ. But the original language in this verse indicates clearly that this washing, sanctifying, justifying, was something done to or for us, by someone else. It’s never something we can do for ourselves. Here’s a key verse fleshing out this theme:
Jesus said in
John 6:44 (ESV) No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
No one. No one. Not the quote unquote good person, that many of us may have at one time thought we were. Not the quote unquote bad person who’s a thief, drunkard, greedy or sexually immoral.
The bad people and the good people all come to Jesus the same way. The Father draws them. The Lord takes the first step. It’s His initiative.
The word can in this verse, i.e. no one can come to me, Jesus said of himself… is from a Greek word that means power, or to be able. So another way to say this is that no one has the power, no one is able or capable, of coming to Jesus, without God taking the initiative by drawing us,by pulling us toward Jesus, by inclining us to seek Him, by softening our hearts toward His grace.
The good, loving, compassionate person apart from Christ, can’t find his way to God without God first drawing him, any more than the scoundrel.
So yes, there will be scoundrels in heaven. Scoundrels like the apostle Paul, who persecuted the church, and then God, in His lovingkindess, drew him to Jesus.
Scoundrels like John Newton, a womanizing, carousing slave ship captain, who raped some of the slave women, and then later, was drawn to Jesus, became a minister of the gospel, and wrote a hymn we still sing 400 years later, Amazing Grace.
When you know Newton’s story, you see how truly personal the verses were:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
If it sounded more poetic, he could have said a scoundrel like me.
Or how about more contemporary scoundrels like Rosaria Butterfield, a feminist lesbian university professor, who says she despised Christians, before she became one herself. She wrote of this time in her life:
The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it. Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.
But, God drew her, too. Now she’s a pastor’s wife and author. Let’s listen to a few minutes of her story.
Play VIDEO clip
If you’re interested in seeing the whole interview, it’s about 40 minutes, and it’s available online and I can give you the link if you want to email me. It’s a very encouraging story. She’s also written a book called Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.
Just the kind of person many of us thought of in our little exercise at the beginning.
So, Rosaria Butterfield was a scoundrel. But then, by God’s grace, she was washed, sanctified, justified. And here’s an important point.
For all of us, coming to Him means a turnaround. A radical change. A total departure from our old life.
It means a contrast from the way we were before, to the what we are becoming.
• From being spiritually blind to being able to see the eternal realities of heaven.
• From being in darkness to entering into the light.
• From being condemned for our sin to being forgiven of all our sin.
• From being spiritually and eternally dead to spiritually alive.
• From being enslaved to sin to being set free, voluntarily enslaved to righteousness.
• From being without hope and without God in this world, to being assured in our hope of eternal life and a never ending relationship with Christ.
• From being under God’s wrath as enemies of God to becoming one with God, at peace, completely forgiven and reconciled.
• From an old self, which was self-centered, to a new self, which is centered on Jesus Christ.
• From ungodly sinners lacking any power at all to correct our situation, to justified and cleansed saints filled with the power of the Spirit of God.
We read in
Romans 5:6 (ESV) 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
Weak, powerless, unable to come to Christ. That’s why all of us needed God to draw us. To bring us from being scoundrels to being saints.
Saints is the word used quite often in scripture to describe believers in Christ. Not in the sense that any of us are perfect – because even when we’re in Christ, we’re in process in this lifetime.
But in the sense that God has claimed us, redeemed us, and sees us as clean and set apart to Him, through the lens of the blood of Jesus, which has washed us from our sin.
One of the things that’s always on my heart is something that I’m certain is on the hearts of so many here. I know this, because I’ve spoken with many of you who carry this constantly on your heart. That is, you have a loved one, a family member, or a close friend, or a neighbor or a co-worker. And you want to see them in the Kingdom of God. You want to see them saved. You want it so badly you can almost taste it.
So, you look for opportunities. You try to love this person. You try to have a real, genuine relationship with them, not as a project, but as a genuine friend, or parent or brother or sister or uncle, or whatever your relationship is with this person.
Often, when you’re preparing to be with this person, you go with high hopes. You think, “maybe this will be the time when I’ll see a breakthrough.” Maybe this will be the time that I’ll really have a good chance for a quality talk with this person. Maybe this will be the visit that I’ll finally see results of my years of discussion. Maybe this will be the time that I’ll see them come to Christ, get saved, come into the Kingdom of God.
Can you relate to that scenario, those thoughts? How many times have you been there? And how many times have you come home disappointed, grieving perhaps, at the lost state of some friend or family member, and feeling, too, like you’re somehow a failure, because you weren’t a better witness.
I’m guessing that all of us who care about the spiritual state of our friends and loved ones can relate to this. But this morning, I want us to have hope. Hope because our loved ones are being pursued by God, and He is faithful, and whether we see Him at work or not, He is at work.
And I also want us to avoid guilt, which only brings condemnation. I want us to have hope, because God loves these people more than we do. That’s hard for us to imagine sometimes, because our love for them is so intense and deep.
But it’s true. His love is so much greater than ours. What’s more, it’s up to Him, not to us.
Yes, of course, we must be willing instruments in the hands of God. The Word says we are His witnesses. The Word says we are to do the work of an evangelist. But the Word never tells us to save anyone. Salvation is entirely a work of God. No one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws them. They’re not capable. They’re not able. They can’t even work up the wanna.
This truth should do two things in us. First, it should free us of guilt. Sometimes, we might say “I’ve blown my witness.” Maybe that’s because we exhibited our sin nature in a conversation or an action, and we think – wow, I blew it, because now they’ll never want to receive the grace of God in Christ. Why would they, when you’re such a poor example? Imagine that – we’re not perfect.
Or maybe we’ve studied our apologetics well, but in the moment, when a discussion turned in a hopeful way, and we think – now’s my chance – we really weren’t ready, we didn’t have the right words, the right scripture, or the conversation quickly went downhill because we overreacted, or this person overreacted, and again, we’ve blown it. We blew our chance. How can we ever measure up?
We can’t all be Josh McDowell or Greg Koukl. We’re not Ravi Zacharias, always ready with answers to hard questions. But, remember what Jesus said:
No one can come to me unless the Father draws them.
It’s His work. Yes, He can, and will, and wants, to use us. And yes, apologetics is good. Winsomeness is good. Being ready with an answer is good. Loving people and earning a right to be heard is good. All these things and more are good. But salvation is God’s work.
The bottom line is this, summarized by three different commentaries on the verse in John 6:
no human being in the world, on his own, has the moral and spiritual ability to come to Christ unless God the Father draws him, that is, gives him the desire and inclination to come and the ability to place trust in Christ ESV Study Bible
God, not people, plays the most active role in salvation. When someone chooses to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior, he or she does so only in response to the urging of God's Holy Spirit. God does the urging; Life Application Study Bible
People are so ensnared in the quicksand of sin and unbelief that unless God draws them (cf. v. 65), they are hopeless. Bible Knowledge Commentary
So, what’s missing from this equation? First, let’s relax a little bit. It’s not about us. It’s about His glory. Do we really think that person God is drawing to Jesus,
will be kept out of heaven just because we, in our human frailty, failed to say the rights words at the right time? Don’t we think that God is able to do what He says only He can do anyway?
Certainly, let’s be obedient to do what God has asked of us as His witnesses. But let’s be freed of the guilt or angst that comes when we feel like we’ve blown our chance. Surely God is big enough, powerful enough, able enough, to save those He’s drawing to Himself.
The second thing this means is that, rather than always having the right words or the right demeanor or the right circumstances, as important as those things are, there’s something else we can and must do that’s significantly more important.
We can pray.
This spiritual truth that no one is able to come to Jesus, unless the Father draws them, means that prayer is the most important way we can participate in this process. Now, we always want to do something, and sometimes our tendency is to think less of prayer, as if prayer is not doing something, or as if it’s a last resort.
We have too high an opinion of ourselves, as if God can’t do it without us. So, again, yes, He chooses to use us, and yes, we are to be available, but He doesn’t need us – He has everything and everyone else at His disposal, plus the power to use it effectively.
God never blows His witness opportunities. He will accomplish His purposes in each individual life. Do we really think we’re so absolutely indispensable to God’s plan of salvation for the ones we love?
Again, let me be clear here. God, without a doubt, chooses to use us, so we cannot use the reality that it takes God’s drawing us, for any of us to come to Christ, as an excuse for total inaction.
But if God’s drawing is the key, the essential element to seeing someone come to Christ, and we are unable, powerless to come to Christ without that, then what should we major on?
Prayer. Prayer. Prayer is coming before God as needy servants; Prayer is the tangible expression of our total dependence on God. The very act of praying recognizes that God is able to do something we cannot – so what do we do?
We ask. And we ask again. We knock, as scripture says, and keep on knocking.
We sometimes lament that we don’t see the large numbers coming to Christ that the early church saw. But there’s a hallmark of the early church that most often we cannot say honestly describes us as present day believers.
They were devoted to prayer.
They were devoted to all of the ordinary means that God has given to transmit His grace to us.
Acts 2:42 (ESV) 42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
They were devoted to the means of grace God has given us. Teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. Paul wrote to the Romans:
Romans 12:12 (ESV) 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.
So prayer was the lifeblood of the early church. And the early church, despite living in a depraved and in many ways evil culture, despite opposition, despite being misunderstood at best, and hated at worst, thrived and grew and saw many come to Christ. They saw scoundrels come to Christ.
So, if no one is able, or capable, of coming to Christ unless the Father draws them, we must regularly, faithfully, devotedly, go to the Father, and ask Him to do what cannot happen without His working.
God has been faithful to hear and answer our prayers the last three years as we’ve intentionally come to Him, asking the Lord of the harvest to send laborers to join us in our little corner of God’s harvest here at TCF. We’ve called this the Help Wanted Prayer Challenge. From that has grown our monthly prayer advances.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as we continue to pray, and become ever more devoted to prayer – wouldn’t it be wonderful to see those new laborers come more often from the harvest itself? To see people come to Christ because the Father draws them in answer to our prayers.
Moreso, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see those friends, neighbors, family members or other loved ones – those scoundrels we’ve longed to see in His Kingdom – come to the Savior who loves them and pursues them?
Is it likely that any of us would be saved? NO! This is the point! It is all of grace and always of grace. But at the same time let’s not over complicate this. God does save people and he uses his prescribed means which are his ordinary means. God is not so much calling us to be creative as much as faithful. Part of this faithfulness is believing that God can do great things, far above what we can even imagine. And another part is remembering that he does these great things through his prescribed means in the lives of his church. As a result, we pray big and live faithfully. Eric Raymond
So church, let’s resolve to pray big, and live faithfully, so that in eternity, we’ll have the joy of many other scoundrels, just like us, joining us in His eternal Kingdom.
Pray
