The Ancients Were Told #4

If you've been here for a while, you know that Advent is a time for me where I have to figure out if I'm going to preach an Advent sermon series or whether I'm going to not preach an Advent sermon series. And this year I've decided not to preach an Advent sermon series, but rather to just continue on through our current sermon series, which is through the Sermon on the Mount. This week we're going to be returning to the section in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus addresses adultery. Two weeks ago, the last time I preached, we started this section. And we saw that adultery is not limited to just the final act or expression of it, but it includes everything that leads up to it. The goal of that sermon was not to define adultery in such a way that makes you think you aren't an adulterer, but rather to convince you that this is one of many sins that you do indeed fall into and are tempted by. The reason I did that, and sought to do that at any rate, is because

I believe we tend to trim down God's commands to the point at which we think we don't violate them anymore or that we are close to violating them, but that we haven't yet. And in fact, that's the reason Jesus preached this section of the Sermon on the Mount. He took their understanding of the law of God. You have heard that it was said, but I say to you, and he says, you think that all these sins that we're going to talk about are things you don't do, but my goal is to show you that these are the things you do struggle with, that you do fall into, that you are committing. Because if we don't see those things, then we can't repent of those things.

And so this morning, we're going to be focusing on verses 29 and 30 of Matthew chapter 5. My hope is that God will use this sermon to convict each one of us of our sins and to bring us to true repentance. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? This is Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 to 30. It is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So if you were to ask what the topic of the sermon is today, what are we going to be talking about or studying, we'd simply say, Repentance. What is repentance? In a nutshell, if we had to describe what Jesus tells people to do here with regard to having committed adultery, he says, you're to repent. And then he describes how. The instructions are not difficult to understand. And we're not sitting there scratching our heads going, I wonder what that means. Though with this text, actually, it is possible to do that. And I want to talk about it.

What I don't want is for you to think that repentance is some hard concept, something that you can't quite wrap your head around. It's actually a very simple concept. It is very difficult to do, but it's not a hard thing to understand. And so how does Jesus define repentance? Well, he says, if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you. And again, if your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. Now, if I were to ask you, is he being literal? I think all of us would say, no. you do know that that's not always been the way the church viewed these passages. There have been parts of the church, especially earlier on, where they would read this and look at it very literally. And they'd say, oh, well, if something causes me to sin, if it causes me to stumble, if it's the source of my temptation on my body, I need to get rid of it. Now, there's a few things that are wrong with this. One, it has a view of sin that is only associated with your body.

That only your body causes you to sin. You only sin with your body. But Jesus has just got done saying, he says, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, if anyone has looked at a woman with lust for her, he's already committed adultery with her in his heart. You realize that the sin that was committed was not an actual physical act, but something that happened inside of him. It happened in his heart. And so sin is not something that we commit just through physical action. But it is something that extends even to our desires, our lusts, things that happen in our minds, thoughts we have. These can be sinful. I'd ask you, if that's the case, how do you cut those things off? If it were the case, what would be left of us? Consider for a moment what the Bible says about our hearts. In Jeremiah 17.9, it says that the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. And John the Baptist in Matthew, when the...

when Jesus was speaking, I'm sorry, I've misspoken. In Matthew 21, he says, you brood of vipers, how can you being evil speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. And so if we were to go about doing literally what Jesus says here, we would realize that actually the source of all the problems we have is not our hands or our eyes or our minds even, but our heart. Our heart's the problem. And so are we to cut our hearts out? And we'd all say, well, no, that would be a violation. The sixth commandment, we'd be killing ourselves. And so these words are not literal. Jesus is not saying literally, cut your hand off, pluck your eye out. And the reason is because it makes sin too small. It says it's only in this place. And it's easily dealt with. Many of us, if we could get one big thing, even if it was hard, if we could have one thing to do and then be guaranteed we'd be free of sin, we probably would say, yeah, I'll do that. Because then I can be free of it. If you'll assure me.

that if I do this one thing, I won't have to deal with it anymore. You say, tell me what it is, and I'll do it. These words are not literal. Jesus is not talking about plucking out literal eyeballs or cutting off literal hands. I mean, after all, if you cut off your right hand because it's caused you to stumble, what will you do with your left? Same thing you did with your right. And so we read this passage, and we see it's sort of bombastic. We're like, whoa, that's just, Jesus, he's gotten a little out over his skis here in the way that he's speaking. This seems to be over the top.

Certainly he's not speaking literally, and so we say, because he's not speaking literally, we've dealt with it. We know that's not what it means. But have we worked out what it actually does mean? Jesus didn't say this so that we could just pass by it without taking his words to heart. And so what do these words teach us? What does it mean to pluck out your eye if it causes you to stumble or cut off your hand? Well, these words teach us that we should give up whatever. leads us to sin and not just the sin itself. You remember that these are in a context where Jesus says adultery is not just what you do with your body at the final stroke, but everything that leads up to it. And so it's incumbent on us to sort out what leads us to sin, okay? If you've been around a while or if I've done your premarital counseling, I often use the example of a roller coaster. And I say all of us feel the rush.

of the roller coaster when you're on the big, you know, the big drop at the beginning, and we go, whoa, you know, we realize we're doing the thing now. But you signed up to do that thing. Whether that is super exhilarating to you or super scary to you, you made a whole line of decisions before that moment that brought you to that point, right? What things came before? Well, what indicates to you the big fall is coming? Well, that ominous click of the roller coaster, you know, as you're going up, you know it's coming. even before it happens. And if we work back a little more, you got in line for the roller coaster. Or we go back even further, you said, let's go to the roller coaster park. And all of that was, if the goal was, if you were to say, I don't want to go show down the roller coaster, but you did all those other things. Yeah, Martin's saying, you want to go down the roller coaster. And that's sort of a profound thing for us to think about with regard to sin. To say at the point of, you want to go to the roller coaster park.

You want to go into the sin. You're actively pursuing it. We say, no, you can't say that. I haven't done anything yet. I'm still at home. And I say, yes, but you want to. And you're preparing your life and organizing your priorities in such a way that you can go do it. And so we should not separate an action from its preparation. Our sins, they don't come to us out of nowhere. We don't go, how in the world did that happen? Where did this come from? I never knew. We might say that to other people to put on a show of hatred or disdain or of awe. But if we're honest, and if we've been trained to know ourselves, we go, yeah, I can see how that was coming. I could map it out. I could see it. I've said to men regarding adultery sometimes, I said, you do realize that what's going to happen is you're going to commit adultery if you continue in this behavior. And they say to me,

Why would you say that? And I say, because you're doing all the stuff that leads up to it. And they say, no, no, no. And I say, yes, yes, yes. I've watched it. I've seen it. We have this thing inside of us that says, as long as I don't finally go through with it, I haven't committed any sins. If we think of sin this way, whether it's adultery or any other sin, if we only focus on its final expression, we will conclude that there is never anything ever in our lives to cut off or throw away. But as we examine our lives, we go, well, I...

I would cut it off if I could find it, but it doesn't seem to be anything. Have you ever had it happen in your life that you fall flat on your face and then you realize the mess that you've made? Was there anything that led up to that? Were there any indicators that that fall was coming? Another way of asking the question was, was there anything to cut off before the fall happened? Or are we so hard-hearted and so stiff-necked that the fall has to come to break us free from it? Do we have to make shipwreck of our lives or the lives of the people around us?

before we're willing to admit, I might have done something wrong. It shouldn't be this way. We should recognize ourselves and our sins and our temptations. We should fight at the level of our desires, but we never will if we're always telling ourselves that I haven't really fallen into the sin yet. There is a line, and I'm still on the good side of it. But if you're honest with yourself, you know that that line moves. Just like the shore of the ocean, it moves. You move it. and you keep moving it just beyond what you're currently doing. Then at some point, you fall in and you go, I don't know how this happened. I do. The Lord does. If we do this, if we repeatedly absolve ourselves and say, I haven't done it yet, I haven't done the thing yet, it's no, no, no, no, no. What we've effectively done is taken this passage of Scripture, torn it out, and said, it doesn't apply to me. There's nothing in my life that ever needs to be cut out or thrown away because I would never do anything that is that bad.

And then we look around at people who've done worse things than us, and we say, well, see, I'm not like them. They've done these bad things. If you measure your righteousness or your obedience to God or your love for Jesus by looking at notorious sinners and unbelievers, and you say, well, at least I'm not like them, that is the surest path to joining them. And so these words tear it out and throw it from you, teach us the true essence of repentance. I'm going to set repentance aside for just a second. I want to talk about obedience. Have you ever had an inclination in your heart to negotiate obedience? I'll do what you want if I get what I want. Don't you do the same thing with repentance? I'll stop this sin if I get what I want. Now here's the question. With regard to obedience, do you actually stop committing the sin if you get what you want? You don't. And neither do you repent.

if you think that you can negotiate it, that you can come to terms with God about what he needs to do or give you to get you to stop. Your repentance is never going to be tied up with you getting what you want out of this life. Repentance is built on the foundation of the knowledge that you're a sinner and that God is holy and that that's a problem. You can deny that problem and you can say, well, I don't really care about that or I don't believe in that. That's not for me. Many people do it. For a long time, I did that. Some of you do that, have done that. Does the fact that you reject the truth make it untrue? No, it just means that you're not prepared for it. It means that when your obligations to love God and to obey him come due, you've not prepared for that day. Our lives, until we die, the only goal of it all, the only goal of your whole life,

It's to prepare to stand before God and to not go to hell. That's the only thing you need to accomplish in this life. And it will take you all of yourself to do it. It's not a short thing. It's not a little thing. It's not a simple thing. And the thing that's at the very bottom of it and is most essential to it is your repentance. And if you don't ever repent and there's never anything, you say, you know what? I had to throw that off of me because it was going to lead me to hell. I know that I was going to stand before God.

And I'm going to have to give an account for what I did, not what my spouse did or my parents did or my friends did or my siblings or my boss or whoever, or I was sick and I lost someone, none of that. When you stand before God, you're going to have to deal with the one who made you. And if you don't ever say, I can't stand before that one, what must I do to be saved? Then you will not be prepared for that day because you will have never repented, okay? I know some of you have come up in the church, and it may not have a time where you can say, this is when I became a Christian. This is when I felt the weight of my sin. This is when it was this crushing thing on my back. You don't have to have had that experience. That's more similar to where I came from because I didn't grow up in the church. Some of you did, and you think, well, I've always just believed in Jesus. That's fine. But there should be somewhere in your head.

This thing that's cemented into you that is the fear of God that says, I'm going to stand before him and all of my excuses that I'm offering to myself and to the people around me and demanding that they accept them, they will not be acceptable to him. And these are the things we offer in place of repentance. Instead of turning away from our sins and throwing things away from us because they're going to lead us to hell, we justify them. We say, well, it's not that big of a deal or you shouldn't be that upset or I'll repent later. There's all kinds of things we say and do.

You will never negotiate repentance. I'll cut my hand off if. I will pluck my eye out if. You've misunderstood what sin is and how tight of a grip it's got on you and what it will mean for you in the end. Repentance is something that needs to be sought now and not later. You guys remember Esau, the story of Jacob and Esau? He sold his birthright because he was hungry. And then the Bible tells us that later he sought for repentance with tears and he couldn't find it. Now, that's not a real popular thing to say, but I'll just tell you real simply what that means. It means that if you don't repent now, you will not repent later. The time will be gone. And so this thing you tell yourself of I'll stop later is simply a lie from hell so that you'll end up there. It can get too late for you to repent.

And when I say that it can get too late for you to repent, I'm not saying that God is somehow lacking in mercy or patience or anything like that. What I'm saying to you is that it will get too late because every time you refuse to repent of your sin, you are instead choosing to go further into it. And at some point, it will consume you. In Romans 1, it talks about God giving men over to their sins. It would be right for us to say to them, it's too late. They've gone too far. They will not be recovered. Sin is a destructive force. And to think that you can play with it and think it will not destroy you is to play right into Satan's hands. Scripture constantly warns us against toying with sin. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. And so your job and mine is to figure out what precedes the sin in our lives that we recognize. If you're here this morning and you think, I don't have any sins, then your first work is to ask God to help you see it. And it's not some...

theoretical thing, what I would suggest to you is read the Ten Commandments, think about them for a minute, like what each one of them would require of you, and say, have I ever failed? If you answer yes, then you've sinned. You're a sinner. You've come to some knowledge of it. And then I'd ask you, have you repented of it? And if the answer is no, then your work is to ask God and older, wiser, godly Christian men and women, Mothers and fathers in the faith, what does repentance look like for this? Here's what I've done. I'm confessing my sins. What does repentance look like? What does it mean for me to turn away from this? That work, whether you realize you could name one sin in your life, 10 sins in your life, or 100 sins in your life, is a work that will continue for the rest of your life. Sorting out what your sins are, how you prepare your hearts for them. As I've grown in...

my faith and become more mature. I'm able to see now more quickly and earlier on in the process when the sin's coming. My wife's an incredible help to me in that. She says, I know what happens when you do this. I know what comes. And I can say the same to her or to our children. And so this is a pursuit. This is something that... we're going to spend our lives doing. Now, you might say, that's awfully morbid and miserable, and you're telling me that's what the Christian life is? It's just a life of searching out my sins forever? And I say, if you take Jesus at his word right here, yes. Because the consequences of not doing what I'm saying are catastrophic and eternal. What are some of the lies that we tell ourselves when we actually see a sin? You might look at it. If we were to go back to the roller coaster analogy, and you're like, can't I go to the roller coaster park without getting on the roller coaster? Can't I go and just...

Walk around. Can't I restrain myself? Do I actually have to cut something off? Do I have to excise the whole roller coaster park? Or can I go over there, get close, can I drive by and watch other people ride the roller coasters? Surely I can restrain myself. How's that going? That's my question. How's that going? How good are you at restraining yourself? Isn't the very question of the impulse to say, I should be able to go do this, isn't that itself a preparation for sin? I should, you know what, I can go over there and I can do that because I won't fall into the sin. The majority of the time you tell me, what happens? What do you do? You fall into the sin. And then that leads into another excuse or another frustration.

Then you realize, I can't repent. It's impossible for me to repent. God will just have to do it for me. Because I can't turn away from the sin myself. I don't have any strength in myself to do it. And so we sit and we give ourselves to sin, waiting for God to somehow miraculously pluck us up out of it, change our heart, our desires, and our actions, all in one fell swoop without any effort from ourselves. But you do realize this text puts the responsibility on us. which is not to say that you don't need God's help or the Holy Spirit to do it. You do. But if we read this text, he says, if your right hand makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you. It does not say, if you notice that you're falling into sin, pray and sit on your hands and wait for God to deliver you from it. So much of our lives is marked by this back and forth inside of us about why we shouldn't have to throw things off from us, why we shouldn't have to change the way we live.

why we shouldn't have to until we want to. When you were a child, weren't you made to do things you didn't want to? And as you learned to do those things, and you probably didn't do them well or quickly or as often as you should have, but as you learned to do the things you were told to do before you understood them and before you wanted to do them, do you not see the fruit of it now as you're older? Are you not somewhat thankful for your parents telling you no? So throwing the thing away from us, cutting it off and throwing it away, literally means removing the occasion, the environment.

Where you sin. One, because it leads to the sin. Two, because you're not strong enough to resist the temptation. And three, because it will cast your soul into hell. That's the end of it. And so if you wait until you want to throw it off from you, you'll never do it. If you wait until you don't need to throw it off from you, that time will never come. These are the excuses we make to ourselves for continuing in sin. And if you have any level of self-awareness, if you've ever thought about these things, you know that what I'm saying is true. You know what you're doing. While you may expect everyone else to give you the benefit of the doubt, if you're honest with yourself, you know what you're doing. And you're responsible for what you're doing. And the choices you make at that level, God sees them. And you'll give an account for those things. There are times in counseling where a couple will come in or a person will come in and...

I'll talk with them, and I'll say, okay, give me the download of the sin or the struggle or the question, whatever it is. And so they will do their best to give me the rundown. This is what's happened in the past. This is what I've done in the past. This is how, you know, here's how it all worked out. And they'll tell me the whole story. And their sins, you know, the thread that's woven through all of it. And I say, okay, what have you done to repent? What does repentance look like? and they'll say to me, well, I should do this or I should do that. You know, I say, well, what are you going to do to prevent that? They say, well, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. And I'll say to them, you know, you've had that knowledge. Everything you just said to me is not new to you. You've known that. They're good answers. I'm not saying you shouldn't read your Bible and pray and set up accountability and all this stuff. But the question bears asking, why haven't you done it yet? You didn't just have an epiphany and go.

I think that this is what I should do. You'll sit and tell me, you know what? When I read my Bible, I don't struggle with this as much. And I go, so if you tell me what I'm going to do is read my Bible, I say, okay, well, why is this time different? That's not repentance telling me you're going to read your Bible more. You've thrown nothing away. Nothing's gotten cut off. Nothing's been thrown away. Nothing has changed. Now think for a minute, if someone said that to you, if you were in there and you were upset and you were caught up in some sort of sin and someone says, you know, I don't think that you understand what repentance is. What you've just told me is all this theoretical stuff you should do, that you've known you should do, that you haven't done, but you want me to say, that's right, and if you do those things. If I were to go along with that, I would be agreeing with your own view of the assessment of the situation, which is that...

You have the strength to do it. You have the will to do it. And I don't agree. I don't agree because of my own experience as a Christian. And I don't agree because of my experience as a pastor and as a husband and as a father. And so I push back and say, what are you going to change? What is going to change? Repentance is a turning away. Cutting something off and throwing it away is a change. What is going to change? I don't know. I'm not sure. This is where I find many Christians don't know what to say. They don't know what to do. They don't know what repentance is. What we've been taught is what we should think and what we should say and what we should want. But when it comes down to how we live our lives, we don't know how to engage the clutch and say, that's what I'm going to do. I shouldn't need external constraints. I shouldn't need accountability. I shouldn't need to get rid of my smartphone. I shouldn't need. Here's the thing. You do. You do. You do need them.

And God doesn't despise you setting up your life in such a way as to avoid sin. You remember in Proverbs where the young man, the naive man, the foolish young man, he walked by her house. And you remember how he's described? He's described as lacking sense, not knowing the danger he was in. And so Solomon sits and he looks out his office porch and he says, I see a young man lacking sense. What did that young man do because he lacked sense? Well, he took the wrong path home. And he walked by there at the wrong time of day. And he walked by there too often. So what was that young man naive about? Well, he was naive about what was going to lead up to his destruction. But he was not naive about why he was doing what he was doing. Why is it, young man, that you wanted to walk by her house so much? I don't know. Yes, you do. I really don't know. Yes, you do. You should know. Shame on you if you don't know. I should be able to walk by. I shouldn't have to change my path home. Sure, you should. Sure, you should. Why wouldn't you? I can tell you why.

You don't want to repent. You want to put on a show of repentance, not actually do it. Remember I said at the beginning, repentance is not a hard thing to understand. It's a very hard thing to do. We can understand what it is to say, you know, I really shouldn't do that. And I do know when I fall into those temptations. And if I were to just not go into those scenarios, then our mind explodes with like, well, what will people think? Won't people be offended or hurt? Won't people make fun of me? Won't I be just an unhappy wretch because I can't have the thing I want? All these thoughts come into our heads about how unfair, unreasonable repentance is. It's just unreasonable. If we're just honest, that's what we would say is, I think repentance is unreasonable. I don't think I should have to say no to the things I really want. I think I should be able to manage them and work my way out of them slowly over time without ever having to cut or throw anything. So what does repentance finally look like?

First, it looks like making every effort to kill the sin, every effort to kill the sin. It's sustained effort. It's not just an effort for a season or an effort when people are watching. It means sitting down and considering everything that could possibly contribute to the sin and then sorting out what needs to be thrown away, what needs to be gotten rid of. And if you determine at the end of it that nothing really needs to change, nothing major anyway, you won't be surprised to find yourself having fallen into the sin again. What else does repentance look like? Well, it looks like humbling yourself and confessing your sins. If you think that you can repent of your sins all by yourself, you'll never repent. You'll never repent. And I know that's me pushing awfully hard, and I stand by it. If you will not confess your sins without excuse to the people around you, the people you've sinned against, to your elders and pastors, you will never repent. You won't do it. Because what would they think? What would they say? Or what would they do?

For the Christian, repentance has to become the ordering principle of their lives, the humbling work of repentance and of acknowledging their sins. And if it doesn't have an impact on your daily habits and your thoughts, then it's not true repentance. It's one thing to acknowledge your sins. You know, if the kid has his hand in the cookie jar and mom comes around the corner and says, what are you doing? He says, I was sneaking a cookie. It's true, not repentance. If the only time you ever acknowledge your sins is when you get caught, you should not count that as repentance. Even though the act of being caught may be very embarrassing, very painful, and very costly, that does not make it repentance. It just doesn't. Unbelievers get ashamed of getting caught doing the wrong stuff. And we would recognize in them that if they didn't feel shame about doing something that was wicked, that there was something wrong with them.

So for you to feel shame as a Christian about getting caught doing something you shouldn't do, you should never think, and I have repented because they caught me in the act. It's just not repentance. Why do I say it's not repentance? Well, because you knew that it was a sin. If you're a Christian, you knew it was sin, and you worked to hide it. You concealed it. That was your goal. That was your aim, was to put on a face and project a persona to the people around you, but secretly. You built your own life and you did the things that you wanted to do out of the eye of your brother or sister or your wife or your husband. And only when you're caught with it and there's nowhere else to go do you say, yeah, yeah, I did it. I did it. This is what happened. Another thing I'll tell you about repentance, if you want to know what it looks like, there's this paradox between your desire and the reality, your pursuit of it. Your desire is to be free from the sin and never to commit it again.

But if you define repentance as I will never, ever, ever be tempted in this way again, you set yourself up for failure. Don't hear me saying that I'm saying, well, you're going to fall back into it and it's no big deal. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you're such a sinful person that even when you apply yourself, all of yourself to it, you'll have lapses. If we were that close to perfection, that we could just will ourselves to never do it again. then we would be something other than how the Bible describes us. You will fall into sin again. And you remember earlier where I said, you know, you say, well, I should have the willpower to resist it. And then you find out you can't. You go, I can't repent. You don't want to repent. You don't want to pay the price of repentance because it's not a perfect process, because it's not simple and quick and easy, because you might not get what you want. Repentance in your life, when it comes up, it means everything in your life, not just...

In your estimation of it all, but in the people around you's estimation, everything in your life comes on the table and we say yes or no. Yes or no. Big things like your job, whether you have home internet, whether you go to school there. What are the big things that you're like, well, that certainly, we couldn't change that. Yeah, yeah, you can. Sure you can. You may need to. You know how crazy it is to talk to a young man about purity and tell him, you know, I think you should just get rid of your smartphone. And they look at me like. You can't be serious. And I'm like, yeah, I'm serious. Like, you know, I lived still more than half of my life without a smartphone, and I've made it. I found a wife without one. I got a job without one. It's incredible. But they look at me, and they're like, I couldn't do that. If I didn't do that, like, how would I live more purely? That's how you would live. You'd have to work harder to fall into sin, and that would be a good thing. You'd have to be more honest.

about your desires. And so repentance is not a perfect process, though you do pursue it with all of your effort and all of the strength that the Spirit provides. When you find that you still fall into sin or that, you know, if you were doing a remodel in a house and you thought, oh, we need to replace this drywall. And then you tear the drywall out and you say, oh, man, I found some mold back there and the wood's rotten. And you say, oh, okay, we got to replace that. And then you're like, oh, man, that's roofs leaking. That's why you start peeling it back and peeling it back. At some point when you're remodeling the house, you have one of two choices.

Tear the house down. Well, I suppose there's three. There are two good choices. One is tear the house down if it's to be condemned. The second is fix all the problems. You didn't know that all the problems existed, but now you have found through the process of starting the work that there are more problems than you anticipated. You can either fix them at greater expense and greater cost, right, cutting more stuff off, throwing more things away from you, or just throw the drywall back up. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. We're going to sell the house anyway. No big deal. So what do you do when repentance comes and you find that it's harder and more deep-rooted than you anticipated? You just go, yeah, we're just going to spray it with some kills, hope that works it out, and put some drywall back up, get it on the market. You can do that, and then the next owner will have to redo what you did. And you know what they'll say when they tear open the wall with the brand-new drywall and the rotten studs and mold behind it? You know what they'll think of you? They'll think, this man doesn't know what repentance is.

He was unwilling. He took the easy path, the comfortable path. He didn't have the will to fix it. He got in over his head and decided, yeah, I've done enough. It'll have to be okay. And it will be okay for a little while. A few months later, a few years later, all of a sudden the paint will start to pop on the wall. There will start to be these, like, spots, you know, and you wonder what it is. You'll go over and try to wash it off, and it'll wash off and it'll come back. What happens if you tear the wall open then? Second time around, you tear the wall open. Is it worse than the first time? Yes, if you've ever done it, you know it's worse than the first time. There's a good lesson in that. That repentance is harder. The longer you push it off, the harder it is. If you were unwilling to do the work the first time, why in the world would you think you're going to be willing to do it the second time? Or the third time? Or the tenth time? Or the hundredth time? The man who wants to be free from his sin will make every effort to kill it.

realizing that his efforts will not be sufficient to put it away. It will not be a perfect process. He will have to confess that sin again. In the process, he will continue to throw things away until he's finally free of it. This is what it means to actually repent. Is it worth it? That's the question. It's a ton of work. Repentance is hard. Here I am saying it. Is it worth it? Well, Jesus says in the rest of our passage twice, it's better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. We're very good at stacking up the reasons not to repent. Jesus offers us one reason to put on the other side of the scale that is heavier and weightier than anything we can come up with. Whatever repentance requires of you, be it pain or discomfort or ridicule or scorn, it is better than the alternative. If you don't repent of your sins, you will pay for them in hell forever. And that is Jesus' point here at the end. He doesn't de-escalate the tension.

and speak of the grace of God, he says, your whole body will go into hell. That's what will happen if you don't repent. And I'm afraid that in our society today, we've been fed such a diet of grace, of cheap grace, that is not rooted in repentance and in gratitude for the work of Jesus Christ, that we don't think it's that big of a deal, that hell probably isn't that bad. That hell will just be like living here, because you know, there's sin here, and then there's sin there. No, no, no. In this world, God is gracious to all of his creation. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. In hell, it will not be that way. You will be the object of God's constant wrath. The flame will never go out. The worm will never die. You will never be able to escape it. It will be awful in a way that we can't conceive of it. And so there really are only two ways to deal with our sins.

to repent of them, to cast off and to cut off and throw away from us all the things that lead to it, or to pay for them ourselves for the rest of eternity. At the beginning of Matthew, when John was baptizing out on the Jordan River, it says that when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Keeping with repentance. Keeping with it. So I'm not actually arguing or advocating for one giant act of repentance. One concentrated time of humiliation. That's not actually what I'm arguing for a whole lifetime of it. And rest and glory and joy everlasting at the end of it. And I'll tell you, if you repent now, you'll have a taste of that joy now.

The freest people I've ever seen in my life are people who unburden themselves of their sins and confess them and say, help me. What do I have to do? Just tell me. Just tell me what I have to give up, what I have to repent, what I need to do to never fall into this again. They're the happiest people, the freest people, the most peaceful people you'll ever meet. And it's a shame that we don't live that way more often. and that we accept the counterfeit of repentance that really is just putting on a show for the people around us and doing what is absolutely necessary to keep from being exposed. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Repent and believe. This is the Christian life. When you see a sin that's gotten a hold of you, certainly do pray and ask God to be merciful to you and to show you what your failures have been and ask him to show you what you need to cut off, what you need to throw away.

what you need to never, ever, ever be around again, and ask him to give you the grace to accept the cost of that in the eyes of the onlooking world. You won't be understood. That's okay. Your priorities will not jive with the priorities of anyone except a Christian who understands what repentance is. They'll say, that man values his soul more than his hand or his eye. That woman wants to be with Jesus in heaven, and that's why she goes, away from these things and without them. This is what it means when Jesus said, if your eye makes you stumble, tear it out from you and throw it away. For it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. Repentance means taking your whole life and saying, what do I have to do to be free of it? Just tell me what do I have to do? And then doing it. And then doing it. Not toying with it, not negotiating it, not getting around to it next week or next month or next year. What do I have to do?

There's two responses when people ask that. I've already told you one of them. One of them is that they're free, and they're happy, and they have peace. They're not perfect, and the truth is their life's still a mess. It's not all better because they confess their sins. It's like, oh, all the hardships and all the consequences and all of the trouble that my sin caused is gone. That's not true. Now they're just having to wade into that pool and start to sort out all of the mess. It's very hard, but they're free to do it. The other response is to resent repentance. And especially to resent those who call you to repentance. To despise those who would say to you, if you continue to do this, you're going to be back in my office again. And I don't know if it'll be in three months or six months or five years, but you're not repenting of it. You can despise them for saying that. Your parents, your pastors, your elders, your deacons. I've found in my life that the people who've loved me the most and been the most helpful to me are the people who are willing to say that when that's the truth. Are you really sorry for your sins? Do you actually want to be free of this?

I find them to be the most helpful in fighting against sin. And so the question that I put to you at the close is, do you want to be free of it? And if you do, what are you going to cut off? Don't do it so people can see and go, oh, look, they did this thing. Do it as an act of worship and love and devotion to God. Don't do it because anybody will see it. Don't think that, well, if the Christians around me will say, hey, good job, that it will somehow counterbalance the ones who don't. Do it as an act of obedience to God because you love him and you want to serve him better in the future. And you realize that your sin is a huge impediment to that. And if you'll repent of your sins and cut off the circumstances that lead to them, God will meet with you. And he'll strengthen you. And he'll give you joy and he'll give you peace to endure the hardship and the struggles of getting rid of this stuff. And that's how he'll prepare you to stand before him. This is the life of a Christian and this is the work of a Christian.

This is our work if we claim his name. And I'll tell you, there's nothing in your life that's untouchable. Not your relationships, not your job, not your wealth, not anything. He who loves father or brother or mother or sister or husband or wife more than me is not worthy of me. There's no place in your life where you're like, well, I will change everything except that. That's probably the thing that needs to change. If the thing that rose to the top of your mind was everything except that, then we know where the problem is at. We know where the sin is. We know where the idolatry is. We know where the change needs to happen. Why does it have to be so painful? Why does it have to be so hard? Why does it have to be so costly? You tell me. Because that's what it takes to demonstrate that you love Jesus Christ. That's what it takes. Being a Christian is not a simple thing or an easy thing. It's not a low bar. It's a very high bar. And we should be able to look back on our lives and say, these are the things that I cut off and threw away for the sake of Jesus.

and preparing my soul to enter into his presence. There's a pile of them. If there's no pile of anything that you've ever cut off, then you should wonder, am I a Christian? Can we say that? Can we ask that? Or can we not? Yes, we should. But I got baptized, but I did this, but I did that. But what would people think if I said I wasn't a Christian? I can tell you that if you become a Christian, there'll be joy in heaven and joy on earth. Because that's what the Bible tells us. So we ought to be a repentant people. Let's pray.