Excuses

LIVING WITHOUT
EXCUSES
DR. JIM DIXON
OCTOBER 10, 2009
LUKE 14:16-23

The kingdom of God was at the very heart of the message of Christ. Almost every parable that Jesus called told had to do with the kingdom of God. Jesus would often begin His parables by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”. Or He’d begin a parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to…”. Or He would begin His parable by making a statement about the Kingdom of God. Or He would tell a parable, answering a question about the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God was at the very heart of everything that Jesus taught. In fact, the Bible tells us, Jesus came preaching the gospel saying, “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Of course, in Jesus, in the Son of God, the kingdom of heaven had invaded our world. So the message of Christ is all about the kingdom of God. Now, in this world, there are some people who never enter the kingdom of heaven and never will in this world. There are other people who enter the kingdom of heaven but they do not value things in the kingdom of God. This is for two reasons, and we examine these two reasons this morning.

First of all, excuses. Some people are just filled with excuses. Some of you may have seen the movie Shrek 3. The Shrek creators took all the villains, all the bad guys, out of every fairytale ever told and put them in a bar and let them share their excuses. The messages is kind of that excuses are for losers. We’ve heard that statement before, haven’t we? Excuses are for losers. But the truth is, we all use excuses. Maybe we’re all losers—at least in the sense of all have sin and fallen short of the glory of God.

There are many excuses out there in the world. You see them sometimes even in humorous ways. I was reading recently (perhaps you’ve seen similar things) of accident reports filed in the aftermath of an automobile accident. These are some of the statements written: “In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole. I thought my window was down, but I found out it was closed when I put my head through it.” Here’s one I kind of like: “I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.” “I’d been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.” “I was on my way to the doctor with rear end trouble when my universal joint gave away, causing me to have an accident.” “An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.” “The cause of the accident was a little guy in a small car with a big mouth.”

These are reports people file. I suppose if you were in the automobile insurance business, you’d see all kinds of excuses for automobile accidents. People even have excuses for not going to church, and I’ve heard all of them, I think, through the years and maybe used a few in my lifetime here and there. There are lots of excuses for not going to church. In this church, we have on an average Sunday—men, women, and children—a little over 6,000 people. We have, however, in our congregation 15,000 to 18,000 men, women, and children. So on a given Sunday, we have a little over a third of our people here. We know that in order to announce anything we have to announce it many Sundays if we really want the whole congregation to hear it.

People in this culture just have a lot of excuses for not going to church. But I thought it was kind of humorous that they took these same excuses and applied them to baseball games. I think we would admit that baseball games are a little longer than a church service. Baseball games are about three hours, church service maybe an hour and 15 minutes. Most of us have to drive further to get to a ball game and might even take longer getting in and out of the parking lot at a ball game. But if you take the excuses people use for not going to church and apply them to ball games, this is what you come up with. “Whenever I go to a game, they ask for money.” “The other fans don’t care about me.” “The seats are too hard.” “The coach never visits me.” “The referees make calls I don’t agree with.” “Some of the games go into overtime and make me late.” “The band plays songs I don’t know.” “I have other things to do at game time.” “My parents took me to too many games when I was growing up.” “I know more than the coaches do anyway, and I can be just as good a fan at the lake in the mountains.”

There are lots of examples of excuses that that people use. And of course, the whole excuse thing began in Eden. I mean, did you know that biblically, the whole excuse deal began in the Garden of Eden? You go to Genesis and you go to chapter three and you see the Garden of Eden. In the biblical account, Eden is the name of the garden and it’s also the name of the area, probably in Mesopotamia, where the garden resided. So you have this testing of Adam and Eve in Eden—the temptation and the fall into sin. When sin came into the world, excuses came with it. So the Lord God says to the man, “What is this thing which you have done? Have you eaten of the fruit of which I commanded you not to eat of it?” And the man says, “The woman whom Thou gave us to be with me, she gave me of its fruit and I did eat.” There’s the excuse. Then the Lord God says to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” And the woman says, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Another excuse. And so, as sin comes into the world, excuses come with sin.

Excuses tend to be at least partially true. I think you would agree with that. Most excuses have some truth in them. It might not be adequate or sufficient, but there’s some truth there. So when the man said, “The woman whom now gave us to be with me gave me of its fruit, and I did eat.” That was true as far as it went. And when the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat,” that also was true. And in our parable of the great banquet, when the first came forth and said, “I bought a field and I must go and see it,” that certain that was probably true. And when another came forward and said, “I bought five yoke of oxen and I must go and examine them,” that was probably true. And when another comes forward and said, “I’ve married a wife and therefore I cannot go,” that was probably true. There’s some truth in excuses. The problem is that in the sight of God the excuses are insufficient. They’re just inadequate to excuse the failure to do whatever it is that God wants you to do. The excuses are inadequate.

Of course, we live in a world a victimization, a world of excuses. So many people in our world feel like victims. Maybe you’re here today and you feel like a victim. And maybe that’s partially true and maybe to some extent you are a victim. To use alliteration, I would say most excuses fall into the category of race, rogues, or roulette. I mean, you hear a lot of people in our culture, and even around the world, just taking a worldview of victimization because they feel like they have been discriminated against racially. It’s tragic because there’s truth in that. Racism is a horrible sin. There are millions of people in this world who have suffered under racism and to an extent are victims. And yet God doesn’t want us to adopt philosophies of victimization because it’s non-productive. I mean, many times if you take a philosophy of victimization you just acquiesce. You just give in or you just become enraged and bitter, but non-productive. So philosophies of victimization are displeasing to God.

Now, maybe you’ve not been a victim of race, but maybe you’ve been a victim of a rogue. Maybe you are part of a Ponzi scheme. I mean, maybe somebody ran a Ponzi scheme and you lost all your retirement. Maybe somebody at work did a bad business deal, or somebody cheated. There are rogues out there everywhere, so maybe you’ve been a victim. But again, you can’t just take a philosophy of victimization in life.

Maybe it’s just roulette. Maybe you just feel like, man, does anybody have worse luck than me? It was bad luck my whole life. I’ve just been a victim of bad luck. So race, rogues, and roulette. And the reality is there’s some truth in it. But what God says to us is that He doesn’t want us to live with philosophies of victimization. In fact, God calls us to production. He calls us to productivity. Did you know that Jesus Christ wants human beings to be productive? Jesus Christ wants His people to be productive. Jesus Christ wants His church to be productive. This is His call, this is His command.

Remember the story of Jesus traveling from Jerusalem to Bethany and then back to Jerusalem. He’s on His way to Mary and Martha and Lazarus’s house in Bethany. As He’s on the way, He stops along the road, goes over to a fig tree, sees that the fig tree is barren, and He curses the fig tree. Now, the disciples are with Him. They’re watching this, and they’re amazed. It had to be a jaw-dropping experience to see the Son of God walk over and curse a fig tree. They’d never seen anything like this. They come back the next morning from Bethany. The disciples go by the very same spot. They look over, they see the fig tree, and in one night it’s withered to the ground in an amazing use of divine power.

I hope you understand, the fig tree is a symbol of Israel. The fig tree is a great symbol of the nation of Israel. And in the sight of the Son of God, Israel had become barren. They had been blessed to be a blessing. They had been called to bless the nations and they had turned inward, and the curse of God was upon them. Now, the gospel went forth to the gentiles, to the nations, and then God grafted the church into the tree of God, the tree of life. But remember that grafting is now called to bear fruit. It’s called to be productive. Jesus said, “You’ve not chosen Me, but I’ve chosen you and I’ve appointed you to go and bear much fruit. So he doesn’t like barrenness. He’s called us to productive lives. He’s called us to accomplishment on the earth. So excuses, when they result in the apathy of victimization or the passivity of victimization, displease Him.

Have you looked at Numbers chapter 13? as you go through the Old Testament and come to the Book of Numbers, you get to the 13th chapter and you see the story of the spies and how 12 spies were sent by Moses. 12 spies were sent by the Jews, one spy from each of the tribes of Israel, into the Promised Land. They were sent to check it out, to see if it really was a land of milk and honey and to see if it really was everything that God had promised. So the 12 spies go in and they later come back and there’s a majority report and a minority report. The majority report is given by 10 of the 12 spies. The minority report is given by two: Joshua and Caleb. Now, the minority report says, “Yes, it is the Promised Land. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, it’s flowing with milk and honey, but…” And they begin to give all their excuses, all the negativity about why they cannot enter it. “It’s beautiful, but we can never enter it. We can never have it. We can never possess it. We’re too weak; they’re too strong. This land is filled with fortified cities, with high walls. And giants, the Anak—the sons of Antioch—are there. We can’t do it. There are a million reasons why we can’t do it.”

Then you have the minority report of Joshua and Caleb, and it’s a message of great faith. And they say, “God has called us to do it and we can do it by His power.” So you had the two reports, and some people look at that and they see, well, you know, that’s because there are two types of people in the world. There are people who just see the problems, and then there are people who see the possibilities. Or they say, well, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who always see the glass as half empty and people who see the glass as half full. There are positive and negative people in the world. And there’s some truth to that. But you see, the teaching of Numbers chapter 13 is far greater than that, because it’s not just about two types of people.

The truth is, there are times when we need to look at the problems. There are times when we need to look at what could go wrong. There are times when we need to take seriously some of the difficulties in anything we engage in. The deeper teaching in the passage is that God had called them to do this. This was the command of God. This was the promise of God. He had promised and He had commanded, and so it was an issue of faith.

Now, I would suggest to you that the kingdom of God is an issue of faith. It’s an issue of whether or not you really believe in the kingdom of God—whether we believe in the kingdom of heaven, whether we believe in the kingdom of Christ, and whether we really value the great banquet. You see, as you look at this parable, it’s not just excuses. There’s a second problem. I want us to take a brief look at it. It’s the problem of relative value.

There are people who just don’t value the great banquet, which represents the kingdom of God. They don’t value it. It has lesser importance than five yoke of oxen or a field that has been purchased, or a marriage that has been made. The kingdom of God has less value. I want to share something with you that I actually shared Tuesday night with our elder board. As I shared it with the elder board, I had no idea I would share it with you and never even thought of sharing it with you. But I feel led to share it with you this morning. When I shared it with the elders, I was just emoting, and so I guess I’ll be emoting a little bit with you.

You go back to the 25th chapter of Genesis, and you see the story of Jacob and Esau. I think most of you know the story of Jacob and Esau, and, you know they were brothers. Esau was the older brother, just born a little bit before Jacob. You know that Esau, therefore, was the firstborn. Now, the Bible tells us that there came a day when Esau came in from the fields and Jacob was cooking something. The younger brother was cooking lentil soup. Esau comes in and he’s famished. He’s starving, and he winds up selling his birthright for a bowl of soup. Jacob says, “Well, you know, yeah, I’ll give you the soup if you’ll give me the right of the firstborn. Esau, not even comprehending the relative value in the situation, said, “what does it matter to me? You can have the rights of the firstborn. Just give me the soup. If I don’t get the soup, I’m going to die anyway.” So he sells his birthright for a bowl of soup, and that means he sells the domestic priesthood. It was the right of the firstborn to impart blessings from God. That also means he gave away the double inheritance that was promised to the firstborn son. And then it also means that he gave away the authority, the signet ring, that would be passed on to the firstborn son. So he gave up all of the rights of the firstborn for a bowl of soup forever.

Esau represents people in this world who don’t understand relative value. Now, I would suggest to you that the world we live in now there is almost no understanding of relative value and proper priorities. I mean, I would suggest to you that we live in a world where millions and millions—indeed, billions—of people are selling their birthright for a bowl of soup. And that’s what’s going on in our culture and, to some extent, even within the church of Jesus Christ. So you come to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew six, and starting with verse 25 you see the parable of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. And Jesus sums it all up with his beautiful statement: “Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and everything else will be added to you.” So the radical teachings of Jesus were summed up in this. Nothing has greater value than the kingdom of God and its righteousness. This is the highest priority. This has the greatest value. Compared to this, everything else is a bowl of soup.

So then you come to the parable of the great banquet, and it’s all about the kingdom of God. It’s all about this thing of supreme value. The great banquet is the kingdom of God. It is the kingdom of heaven, and the people invited just don’t value it. They just don’t value it. They value property more; they value cattle more; they value marriage more. Some of these things do have significant value, but nothing is more precious than the kingdom of God. I mean, you can be very faithful to your spouse, be a good mom or dad, and work hard at your job and keep your nose clean, but nothing’s more important than the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is at war with darkness. There’s a battle going on for the souls of men, women, and children. The world over there is a battle in supernatural spheres and realms. Nothing is more important than the kingdom of God. Eternity itself is at stake, and you’ve been called into that kingdom and you’ve been called to be productive and you’ve been called to make a difference. There are no excuses.

So we have the Lord’s Day. I’d like to take a moment and just revisit the Lord’s Day. What is the Lord’s Day? Well, it’s Sunday. That’s what the early church calls Sunday. They call Sunday the Lord’s Day. Now, why did they call Sunday the Lord’s Day? Well, because Jesus rose on Sunday. Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week. So they called it the Lord’s Day, and it became the Christian Sabbath. So Christian Jews honored the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night into Saturday. But then on Sunday, which Christian Jews called the Lord’s Day, they assembled for worship. Then as the gospel went forth to the gentile nations, as the gospel went forth to the earth and to non-Jewish people, the Sabbath was not honored on Friday night into Saturday but the Lord’s Day became the Christian Sabbath. So for 2000 years on Resurrection Day, Sunday, the first day of the week, Christians have gathered.

The Bible says, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.” The word church—Ecclesia—means assembly. So by the authority of scripture, we come together to sing praises in worship corporately and minister to our minds and touch our souls. We come together on the Lord’s Day to pray. We come together on the Lord’s Day to hear the Word of God proclaimed and preached. We come for the sacraments. But we do all of this by the command of God.

Now, you can look at the Westminster Confession of Faith, a historic document in the Reformed tradition and in Presbyterianism that is precious, and in the 21st chapter you have teaching there regarding remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. It explains how Sunday, the Lord’s Day, became the Christian Sabbath. I’m not a strict Sabbatarian, and I don’t have any desire to be a legalist. I understand that we can and should worship God in all places at all times. But I want you to understand that, in the mind of God, the Lord’s Day is always going be special. It’s always going to be special. If you have an excuse to miss, it better be good.

God understands you. Sometimes you have to miss, but you just can’t come every once in a while. It’s the Lord’s Day, it’s the commandment of God, and it’s for your blessing. Everything else on that day is soup. It’s soup. So if you’re coming once every four weeks, once every two months, or once a quarter… I mean, I run into people and you would not believe it. I’m constantly here and there and someone says to me, “You look familiar.” Of course, I know why I look familiar. I say, “Well, I’m a pastor.” And then you can begin to see lights click on. And I say, “At Cherry Hills Community Church.” And they say, “Oh, you’re my pastor! You’re my pastor.” But you see, I know they don’t come often. I mean, on the Lord’s Day I don’t see them or they me because they’re not here. And it’s the Lord’s Day. I’m just saying the church of Jesus Christ in the 21st century needs to learn faithfulness, because so much is at stake.

I would say this even about giving. We don’t understand the relative value of money. We don’t understand the importance of the tithe and why God established the principle of the tithe. Whatever your view of tithing, I think you would have to admit that tithing represents, in the mind of God, a minimal standard of giving to the cause of heaven on earth. But we just don’t have our priorities right. I explained last week how my mom and dad taught me to tithe and how they taught my brother Greg to tithe and how they taught my brother Gary to tithe. When I was given an allowance, my mom or dad said to me, “Jim, before you spend any of that on yourself, make sure you set aside that first 10% for the church and for Christ.” And of course, as I explained, when I then began to grow up a little bit and take jobs in the neighborhood and mow lawns and pull weeds, again, I’d come home and my dad or my mom would say to me, “Jimmy, before you spend any of that on yourself, set aside the first 10% and for the church and for Christ.”

When I grew older and took real jobs and received my first paycheck (and isn’t it an exciting thing when you actually go out and get a job and get your first paycheck?) my mom and dad said to me, “Jim, before you spend any of that on yourself, take that first 10% and give it to the church of Christ.” And they modeled it in their lives. As I said last week, they went on to double tithe as God prospered them and to give special offerings beyond their tithings because they love Jesus. And they taught my brothers and I to do the same. But how woeful is the church of Christ today, where the average person who takes the name of Jesus gives pennies on the dollar, maybe a penny or two on the dollar.

It has to do with not understanding relative value. It has to do with false priorities. It has to do with selling your birthright for a bowl of soup. So the church does not go forth in power, but in impotency because the people of Christ are not faithful as they’re called to be. We all have excuses. There’s always excuses. You know, sometimes people come up to me and, particularly as I’m getting older, they say, “Jim, when are you going to retire? How much longer are you planning on doing this, and have you thought through a plan of succession? have you thought about to whom you’re going to hand the baton?”

And I understand those questions. And generally when they’re posed to me, they’re expressions of concern. I do want to say that I’m not planning on going anywhere. I mean, the truth of the matter is, I think if God gives me grace and if God gives me mercy, and if the session agrees, I’d like to work for some years. I still feel very much called, but the reality is it’s not about me. When I hear people say, “Oh, if you quit, we’re going to crater,” that is just not true. Because it’s not about me. I want to submit to you this morning that to a large extent it’s about you. Now you might say, well, it’s about Jesus. Yes, it’s always about Jesus. But as Jesus is in you, it’s Jesus in you. You’re the key to what Jesus is seeking to do in this church. You’re the key.

I noticed this past week in Outreach Magazine that there are 400,000 churches in America. I saw where they listed the top largest hundred churches in the United States. And they had us on the list—we’re in the largest hundred churches in the United States. I don’t know whether that’s true and I don’t care. I don’t think Christ looks at a church simply in terms of its size. Christ is looking for faithfulness. So if you’re a small church in a small town in the country, you are precious to Christ. He’s looking for faithfulness from the people. If you’re a large church, sometimes called a megachurch, in a large city in suburban America, again, He’s just looking for the same thing: faithfulness. He’s looking for faithfulness.

It’s not about me. I’m called to be faithful, and I’ll be judged accordingly. But you know, in this church we have enrolled are thousands of kids. We have like 1,300 children in Sunday school on a Sunday morning and hundreds of students and youth. There are classrooms that need teachers and volunteers. And it’s not about me. I can’t go and teach all those classrooms. It’s about you.

We have an operating budget of $11 million at the church, and with our three schools and our missions and outreach designated giving, it’s about a $22 million a year deal. It’s not about me. I’m called to give generously and sacrificially and that’s what Barb and I seek to do. But it’s not about me, because I can’t cover that. It’s about you collectively and whether or not you are faithful in this hour. So when I look at the problems we face and when I get on my knees and I cry out to God, I know it’s not about me. When I ask God to rescue the deal, I know God is saying, “That’s what I want the people to do. I’ve given the money, and it’s in your bank accounts.”

So it’s all about excuses we make. It’s about whether we give our time and our talents, because we’re busy. We always have excuses. It’s about whether we give our money, because we’re not as rich as we’d like to be. We always have excuses whether or not we come on the Lord’s Day, because we’re busy and we always have excuses. But you’re the church. You’re the church.

I want to close with a story about Eduardo Sierra. Eduardo Sierra lives in Hamburg, Germany, today, and you might remember his story. He was born in Spain. In the year 1996, while he lived in Germany, he traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, on vacation. He has the desire, in the middle of the week, for some time with God. He knows that there could be any place anywhere because God is everywhere. But he’s a Christian and he has a desire to go into a Christian church and get on his knees. So he starts looking around Stockholm, Sweden, midweek, for a church. And there are lots of churches, but they’re all closed. I mean, isn’t that sad? Even here in America so often on weekdays churches are closed. Churches ought to be the busiest places.

So anyway, he finally finds a church that’s open. It’s a Catholic church and he’s not a Catholic, he’s a Protestant, but it’s Christian. So he thinks, “I’ll go into this Catholic church and I’ll pray.” He gets into the Catholic church and he sees as he goes in there a casket that’s waiting. And there’s a man who has died, but there’s nobody else. There’s nobody in the church. There’s just this casket with a dead guy. Then there’s a book of condolences by the casket, but there’s not a single signature in it. And he just feels bad. He looks around—nobody’s there—and he just feels bad for this guy whose body is waiting and nobody seems to care. And so there by the casket Eduardo Sierra decides to pray, and he prays for this guy’s family. He doesn’t know him, but he just prays for this guy’s family, whoever he loved, that God would comfort them and be with them and bring some good out of this. When he is done praying, he thinks, well, maybe I’ll sign this book of condolences, because nobody else has. So he signs the book of condolences and then it asks for his address and he writes it in. He leaves the church. Weeks later, he’s back in Hamburg, Germany, and he’s contacted by the government of Sweden. And they say, “Is this Eduardo Sierra?” And he says yes. They say, well, we want to congratulate you, first of all, on becoming a multimillionaire. He said, what are you talking about? They said, well, you visited Stockholm, Sweden, and you came into this Catholic church, and a man named Vince Vincent, 73 years old, had died. He was in the casket. That man had arranged with the Swedish government that whoever was the first person to sign the condolence book would receive all of his inheritance. And you are the only person, so all of his estate belongs to you.

Now, I do want to say I hope you understand this will never happen to you. But I also want you to understand that you can find blessings in a church beyond measure—beyond money, beyond wealth, beyond millions. You can find blessing because God set the deal up that way. There’s a kind of reciprocity that God has established in His kingdom, and He blesses the faithful—not necessarily with wealth, but maybe with health, maybe with friends, maybe with anointing for ministry on earth and power from on high. He blesses the faithful and He’s longing to bless you if you would learn the difference between your birthright and a bowl of soup and if you would reprioritize your life.

So maybe you leave here today and you say, “This is going to be a new beginning for me. I’m going to change my worldview a little bit and change my lifestyle and life patterns a little bit. I’m going to try to be more faithful on the Lord’s day to assemble. I want to bring the full tithes into His house and see if He will open up the windows of heaven for me and pour down for me an overflowing blessing. I want to offer myself in ministry and service to the cause of Christ on earth. I want to take some of my precious time and offer it to kids in a Sunday school class or to sing in the choir or to tutor a kid. But I want to make the main thing, the main thing: the kingdom of God.” Seek it first and its righteousness. Let’s close with a word of prayer.