Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks about the Christian’s greatest need in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
The task before me is to speak on the greatest need of our age, the most urgent need of our times, but with your permission, I’m going to approach the matter somewhat tangentially. I would like to begin by reading Psalm 1. We will get to the topic eventually, but cut me a little slack, if you will, and I will begin by reading Psalm 1.
As I read it, I would like you to watch carefully for the structure of the psalm, for transparently this first psalm is about the contrast between the just and the unjust, between the righteous person and the unrighteous person. As I read it, watch for where the themes change. Verses 1, 2, and 3 describe the righteous person; verses 4 and 5, the unrighteous person; and verse 6 is a final summarizing contrast. There are further breakdowns that we’ll observe in due course, but that’s the way the psalm runs. Hear then, the Word of the Lord.
“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season, and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous; for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”
The righteous are described in verses 1, 2, and 3. They are described negatively in verse 1. That is, what they are not like. They are described positively in verse 2, and they are described metaphorically in verse 3. Negatively, then, in verse 1, this is what they are not like. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked; who does not sit in the seat of mockers, ultimately; and, in between, does not stand in the way of sinners.
There’s a picture of someone who is walking along, picking up the advice, the counsel of ungodly people, of wicked people, and beginning, then, to walk according to that track, that way of looking at things, that perspective. If you do that long enough, then you stand in the sinner’s way.
Now that’s a bad translation. It’s what the Hebrew says, but it’s still a bad translation, because in English to stand in someone’s way means to hinder them. You picture Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge. Each is standing in the other’s way, and as a result, you’ll end up in the drink. On the other hand, to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew means to stand where they stand, to do what they do, to adopt their lifestyle.
In North America they would say, “to walk in the other’s moccasins.” So now you are not simply following the advice of ungodly people, you have become entrenched in their lifestyle. Now you are indistinguishable in the way you live from ungodly, wicked people, and if you do that long enough, then you might well come to the third line.
You now sit in the seat of mockers. You’re in your La-Z-Boy chair, you pull your lever, your feet come up, you kick back and you look down your long, self-righteous nose at all those stupid, narrow-minded, bigoted, right-wing, empty-headed Christians, and there is nothing but condescension and mockery.
Now it’s not simply that you’ve picked up a certain set of perspectives, that you follow certain advice. Nor is it that you simply, yourself, adopted a lifestyle that is identified with the ungodly. Now you are sneering and condescending with respect to everybody else. “Well,” God’s Word begins, “blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.” This is what he’s not like.
Now Hebrew poetry is built on parallelism. There are all kinds of parallels. Even in this first verse you get a kind of ascending parallelism, a kind of intensifying. Blessed is the man who does not do this, or this, or this! Sometimes you get antithetic parallelism, where you have a statement followed by a contrasting statement, or sometimes you get synonymous parallelism, where the two lines say roughly the same thing in slightly different terms.
Clearly, here, you expect in verse 2 antithetic parallelism, so you might expect in verse 2 something like this, “Blessed, rather, is the man who walks in the counsel of the righteous, who stands in the way of the godly, who sits in the seat of the praising,” or something like that. See, I might become a good psalmist someday.
That’s what you might expect, but that’s not what you get. It’s as if the writer breaks the normally expected pattern of Hebrew poetry to say something else, something different. The reason why he does this is because he wants us to see that, on the positive side, one criterion alone is sufficient. If you have this one criterion, you have everything. What is it? “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” or, as some wag has put it, “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” When I was a boy, I lived in the little town of Drummondville, which was on the Saint-Francois River in French Canada. It boasted the reputation of being the dirtiest river in Canada.
It had three paper mills upstream, and in those days things weren’t nearly as tight in the air pollution front, and so on hot summer days, with the river at a slower ebb and the wind blowing in the wrong direction, it really was the foulest river in Quebec. Not nice. Because of that, in fact, Drummondville turned out to be one of the towns first hit by all the bottled water people. They brought in their bottled water and did a roaring trade in Drummondville.
They had an ad going. On the English side, it said, “You are what you drink. Such a high percentage of your body weight is made up of water. You drink this river, and you are foul. Drink our water, and you are pure. You are what you drink.” But the Christian, in the light of Proverbs, says, “You are what you think.”
The civilities of your rearing may mean that, at a superficial level, you are a socially approved person, quite wonderful really, utterly charming, informed, and all of that, but, on the other hand, underneath you could be a mass of seething bitterness and lust, in which case you are a bitter and lustful person, because you are what think.
You may not have vast skills and technical competence, you may wish that computers had never been invented, and you may still prefer a quill pen, but if, nevertheless, you love people and you think highly of others and you live with one foot in eternity, then you are a loving, giving, spiritually-minded person, even if you are a Luddite, because you are what you think. You’re not what you think you are. You are what you think.
So there we have Joshua taking over from Moses, and the first thing that God says to him is, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.” Or there’s the instruction in Deuteronomy 17 to the person who would one day become king. It was foreseen that eventually there would be a king in Israel, so now we appoint the first Israeli king. What should his first act be? Deuteronomy 17–18 tells us.
“When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law taken from that of the priests who are Levites. It is to be with him and he is to read it all of the days of his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees, and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.”
His first job is not to appoint a chancellor of the exchequer, or a minister for war, a secretary of state. It’s not to audit the books of his predecessor. His first job is to copy out, longhand, this book of the law, which refers either to Deuteronomy or, perhaps, even to the Pentateuch, to copy it out so clearly that this becomes his copy for reading all the days of his life.
It’s not that he’s supposed to download it from a CD onto his hard drive without it passing through his head. He’s supposed to copy it out, verbatim, and then read it every day, and so revere the words that he learns to love God and not think of himself as better than anyone else in the kingdom, and to observe all that God has instructed, and to teach everyone in the kingdom what God has taught. That’s what he is to do.
If those three verses alone of all the books of Moses had been scrupulously observed, the entire history of Israel would have been different, because you are what you think. The New Testament says the same thing. “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your spiritual worship, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
You can claim you’re legally justified before God till the cows come home, but I will call in question the reality of your conversion unless you have a different mind. “His delight is in the law of the Lord.” It’s not just that he has it, or even that he disciplines himself to read it, as virtuous as those disciplines may be, but that he actually comes to delight in it.
“And on his law he meditates day and night.” He thinks about it. It’s not just that he or she reads it somewhere between pulling on socks and sipping orange juice before you beat it out the back door on the way to work, but you so absorb it, so hide it in your heart, so memorize it, so think about it, that when you stop at the stoplight before the lights change and your mind goes into neutral, it just gravitates back to Scripture, and you think about it.
You wake up in the middle of the night and your mind is so full of it that it revolves around what God has declared. You think in those terms, and when you see squabbles developing in the church, or when you see disputes about how things should be done, you just naturally ask yourself, “What does Scripture say? I wonder what God says on this? Is there some part of the Bible that I need to read again here?” He meditates on it day and night.
Of course, in this country you have a lot of sheep. Where I come from, there are a lot of cows. You watch cows out in the field. They have four stomachs. The food goes into stomach number one and then goes back for a rerun. We call it chewing the cud. You watch a cow out in the field and the head goes down, gets some grass and chews, and chews, and chews, swallows, waits, then that big floppy jaw starts again.
It’ll go on and on and on. Swallow again and regurgitate. What’s it doing? It’s meditating on its own grass, metaphorically speaking. It’s chewing the cud. It’s all coming back for a rerun. You see the idea is not to eat, swallow, and let it pass through as quickly as possible. The idea is to put it down there and bring it back up for a rerun. That’s what we ought to be doing with the Word of God. That’s what meditation is. You put it in and then you bring it back for a rerun. You think about it, chew the cud, spiritually speaking.
“His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Now if the Word of God says that this is the most important, indeed the only, in this context, positive criterion to identify what a righteous person is, then surely there is a sense in which we must say the most urgent need of our times is precisely the careful, delighted, repeated, reverent reading, rereading, and meditating upon God’s most Holy Word. That is the most urgent need of our times.
You can cast that in all kinds of very sophisticated ways. You can point out that during the last 30 years, in much of the Western world (not all of it, but in much of the Western world) there has been a profound shift in epistemology, so that we have moved from a dominantly modern epistemology to a postmodern epistemology, and I could lecture you for some time on some of the fundamental characteristics of the shift. Yes. Yes.
We could talk about the pressures of secularization, which do not have to do with the abolition of religion but with the squeezing of religion to the periphery. Yes. We could talk about that. We could talk about the differences in different nations. We could talk about the rising pressures of different civilizations around the world that are congealing into blocks and destabilizing things in the future. Yes. Yes. We could talk about all of those things.
We could talk about the fact that our cities are becoming more pluralistic, for good and ill, highly diverse, very interesting, multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-cultural, which some people view as a horrible threat and others view as a wonderful opportunity to enjoy multi-restaurants and get to know people from different parts of the world.
But at the end of the day, all of those things are relatively peripheral compared with this fundamental positive criterion. We must have Christians who delight in the Word of God and to meditate on it day and night, or we have nothing. We’re never more than a few years away from some faddish extreme, from some subjective claims by some new spiritual tyrant. There will always be errors. The truth may finally be won, but errors are many.
Thus, again and again and again, in every age, whether we are living in a time of profound insecurity and fear or living in a time and a culture of profound arrogance and superciliousness, whether we are living in a time of a lot of religiosity but enormous legalism or living in a time of secularization and a kind of sneering condescension toward religion, what are the answers?
What are the answers? In every case are they not tied to what is central? Thinking God’s thoughts after him. Learning to rethink everything in the light of God’s most Holy Word, not just as an academic discipline, though it may involve a lot of study for some, but as an act of delight, which presupposes repentance, contrition, and God-centeredness.
Then the person is described metaphorically. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water,” not a wild tree, but planted, and planted in a strategic place. A lot of the streams of Israel are dry wadis in the dry months, and so the foliage goes brown and shrivels up and looks as if it’s dead. Some of it never does come back, but this tree is planted by a confluence of streams so that there is always a supply of water.
The result is its leaf does not wither. It is always alive. It is always perky. There is no season when it seems to be dead, and in due season it brings forth its fruit. Whatever it does prospers. This is not teaching some sort of prosperity gospel. The prosperity here is within the world of the metaphor. That is, it’s the prosperity of the tree. It shows life. It shows greenness. It shows fruitfulness in the appropriate time and place.
The idea is that the Word of God, itself, once you step out of the metaphorical word, provides a constant nourishing, a constant rejuvenation, a constant feeding, such that there are always signs of life and vitality and hope in this person. And in due course, appropriate fruit is produced in all kinds of ways. Do you see?
This is such a common metaphor. It shows up in various ways. Think of the words in Jeremiah 17. Listen to this contrast in Jeremiah 17, verses 5 and following. “This is what the Lord says, ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands. He will not see prosperity.’ ” There’s that prosperity within the metaphor again.
“He will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in the year of drought, and never fails to bear fruit.”
There’s the metaphorical world. This righteous person draws deeply from the wellsprings of God’s most Holy Word, and it produces life, vitality, spiritual fruit, even when there is aridity all around, oppression, a blasting east wind. Then, suddenly in the psalm, there is the contrast. “Not so the wicked.” The Hebrew is very strong. One might almost say, “Not so the wicked, not so.”
It is as if everything the psalmist has affirmed regarding the righteous he now wants to deny to the unrighteous. Do the righteous avoid walking in the counsel of the ungodly? Not so the wicked, not so. Do the righteous avoid taking on the lifestyle of evil men and women? Not so the wicked, not so. Do the righteous avoid sneering condescension? Not so the wicked, not so.
Do the righteous delight in the law of the Lord, and on this law meditate day and night? Not so the wicked, not so. Are the righteous likened to a vital plant full of life and vitality, and in due season, fruitfulness? Not so the wicked, not so, and, in case we haven’t picked it up, then the author goes on to explain what the wicked are like.
They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Unlike the tree, then, they are rootless, lifeless, worthless, and fruitless. In this temporal order of things, they may seem as if they’re on top now and then. Look at it 50 billion years down the road, when all the buildings they built and all the empires they made will be remembered no more, but the Christian who has given a glass of cold water in the name of the Lord, that deed will still be remembered and sung.
“Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.” A separation is coming. Ideally, it comes within historic Israel by matters of discipline. Ultimately, it comes at the end of the age, perfectly. Strictly speaking, the final summarizing contrast in verse 6 is not between the righteous and the unrighteous, between the just and the unjust, it’s between the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous.
“The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” That is, the Lord so watches over it that he owns it as his. That’s what this means. He owns it as his. He watches over it. He acknowledges it. He protects it. He nurtures it, but the way of the wicked will perish, as significant 50 billion years from now, if I may dare speak of eternity in the categories of time, as significant as tracks on the seashore when the tide is out. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and you see that way no more. “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” Two ways, and there is no third.
“Now wait a minute,” you say. “Don, I know that’s what Scripture says. I hear you, but give me a break. It’s a bit idealistic, isn’t it? I mean, two ways and there is no third? That’s not our experience, is it? Abraham, the friend of God, man of faith, also given to telling half-truths and whole lies, ending up with his wife in a harem … somebody else’s harem … while he’s in the bed of his wife’s maid.
Moses, great man of God, blows it as a young man and kills somebody, but we’ll let that pass, and then later on, when he’s this great leader, he blows his temper again and never gets into the Promised Land. David, a man after God’s own heart, who manages to commit adultery and murder. One wonders what he would have done if hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart!
Then Peter, prince of the apostles, primus inter pares, the first among equals, swearing and blaspheming and saying that he never knew Jesus, thank you! Two ways to live? Give me a break! That’s for the ideal world, isn’t it? In fact, we’re really all over the spectrum, aren’t we?”
So how do these realities then.… Psalm 1. Two ways: this is the righteous way, this is the unrighteous way, and there is no third way. How do they have any bearing on our lives? How do they give us any priorities as to what is important in our lives, as to what is non-negotiable in our lives when, in the complex worlds in which we live and complex moral failures in which we participate, we’re all on a sliding spectrum, aren’t we?
Well, it is important to remember that all of the examples I’ve just given come from Scripture itself. It’s not as if Scripture hides the point, but it may be helpful, it may clarify some of our thinking here, if we remember four things.
1. When we reflect on these matters we need to be aware of our own culturally-driven assumptions.
We live in a time in Western culture where moral ambiguity is thought to be a virtue. What films are praised in the reviews and by the critics? What books are thought wonderful? Not the old cowboy Westerns where you had white hats and black hats and you knew which was going to win. No, no, no.
Now the films that are to be praised are those where you start off with someone good who ends up half-compromised and evil, and you start off with someone pretty disgusting and foul who is, nevertheless, pretty good, with all the moral ambiguities attendant thereupon. Even Spiderman has got to be deeply conflicted for him to get decent praise in the reviewers. A cartoon figure!
Not long ago, I was doing some study on the book of Job, and in commentary after commentary after commentary written in the last 50 years, I found that what I had known superficially before but found it reinforced. Critic after critic after critic thought the book marvelous, all of this moral debate about whether or not suffering is fair, or God’s responsible for it, or maybe he should be charged with injustice, and maybe he should be brought before Job himself to give an account for what he’s done.
The contemporary commentaries say, “All this moral ambiguity and debate back and forth, wonderfully sophisticated book, this. Of course, there’s that last chapter. That has got to be tacked on by another editor. The kind of writer who would produce all this marvelous, deep, moral sophistication could not possibly give us this happy ending.
So God brings Job’s wife back to him. Ten more kids? (One wonders what his wife thought.) Ten more kids, and then double the number of cows and sheep and so on that he had before, you know. Wonderful ending, happy ending, QED, we all go home and say, ‘Isn’t life good?’ Dumb. 1950s white-hat/black-hat cowboys … that’s all it is.”
But in fact, of course, Job 42 is absolutely essential to the account, because one of the lessons we are to learn from the book of Job is that, at the end of the day, God is no one’s debtor and justice will ultimately be done and be seen to be done. It is an Old Testament way of portraying New Testament eschatology.
That is, at the end of the age, there is finally a heaven to be gained and a hell to be feared, and justice will not only be done, it will be seen to be done. The separation will be seen to be absolute and absolutely fair. We will not spend an eternity in moral ambiguity and praise our own sophistication. Another thing to recognize is …
2. Psalm 1 belongs to a certain kind of literary category.
It’s called a wisdom psalm. One of the features of Wisdom Literature, which you find in the book of Proverbs, for example, or you find in Canticles, or you find in some other places. One of the features of wisdom is that it deals with ideal absolutes. It doesn’t put in the footnotes. It’s very important to understand that.
In the book of Proverbs you either follow Lady Folly or you follow Lady Wisdom, one of the two … those are the two ladies you follow. There is a righteous way and an unrighteous way, a good path and a foolish path. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Now if that’s case law, or supervening promise, which always falls out, that means that every time any child ever goes off the tracks it is always and exclusively the parents’ fault.
Now very often it is the parents’ fault, but on the other hand, we all know of instances where parents are as good as this broken world ever gets, and some kid goes right off the tracks. Then somebody is bound to quote that text, “Train up a child in the way he is old, and when he is old he will not depart from it. We know where the fault is here, don’t we?”
Meanwhile, those parents, poor people, are probably telling themselves the same thing, and writhing in loads of psychological guilt and shame. Part of the problem is they haven’t understood the genre of literature, for Wisdom Literature deals with the ideal polarities. It doesn’t put in the footnotes. It doesn’t talk about abuse. It doesn’t talk about failures. It doesn’t talk about inconsistencies. It lays out the ideals.
This is the way God has structured the universe. This is the way things work at a deep, principled level. This is the reality in which we live and move and have our being. Understand that, and undertake the rearing of your children well, but don’t view it as supervening promise or case law with no exceptions and no footnotes.
3. It’s important to remember that Jesus himself had many different styles and kinds of preaching.
He preached with apocalyptic language, for example, in the so-called Eschatological Discourse of Matthew 24–25. He preached parables with all kinds of narratives, but he also preached a lot of wisdom utterances with simple polarities, “Better this than that. Better that than this.”
Then he ends, for example, his Sermon on the Mount with four absolute polarities. So on the one hand, you enter in the narrow gate and the narrow way that leads to life or you enter in the broad gate and the wide way that leads to destruction. Two ways to live, that’s it. There’s either the tree that produces good fruit or the tree that produces bad fruit, that’s it.
There are some who either do what Jesus says or there are some that mouth his name but don’t do what he says. “They say, ‘Lord! Lord!’ but do not do the things that I say.” They either build on solid rock or they build on sand. No sort of halfway, in-between, hard-packed clay or anything like that. Solid rock or sand, that’s it. Simple polarities. Jesus is very often a wisdom preacher.
4. Scripture wisely, in the mercy of God, gives us both these absolute polarities and narrative accounts of believers in both the Old Testament and in the New who are compromised, who slip and slide between the polarities, and we must have both.
We must have both. Think of 1 John. Do you recall the argument of 1 John?
On the one hand, the first chapter can open by warning that if people say that they haven’t sinned or don’t sin or won’t commit sin, they’re liars. The truth isn’t in them. If you say you really haven’t sinned, you’ve achieved sinless perfection, or you’re beyond all of that, or, in fact, you haven’t sinned, well not only are you deceiving yourself, but you’re saying that God is a liar, because the Bible says we have sinned and do sin and will sin.
The solution is for us to confess our sins, remembering that Christ is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The solution, according to 1 John 1, is not to proclaim our sinful perfection. No, no. We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteousness one, and he is the propitiation for our sins. In other words, the assumption is that we people, we Christians, are still sinners, God help us!
Then you go and read a little farther on in the book, and we’re told that anyone who doesn’t love his brother, the truth isn’t in him. Anyone who doesn’t do everything that Jesus says, the truth’s not in him, either. Anyone who doesn’t make the right christological confession, the truth’s not in him.
In fact, the language gets ratcheted up and ratcheted up until you come to the third chapter, which goes so far as to say that if anyone is really in Christ, he cannot sin, strong as that. Oh, I know that we rack our brains and look at the present tense, “He cannot sin. Surely that means he cannot continue to sin.” Okay, so we cannot continue to sin. Do you continue to sin? You didn’t duck much, did you?
What do you do with this? On the one hand, the book says you’re not going to sin, you’re not supposed to sin, you cannot sin, even. On the other hand, it says if you ever say that you haven’t sinned or don’t sin or won’t sin, you’re a liar and the truth isn’t in you, and that’s all in two chapters! It’s enough to give you a headache. What do we make of this? But this is exactly where we live.
When I was 13 or so, I was in a class at school taught by a lovely old man who never should have been a teacher of 13-year-old boys. He was a World War II vet who obviously was looking for something to do to keep himself going after the war was over. He had gotten wounded in the war and was pretty severely crippled. He did not have any idea how to handle 13-year-old boys. None.
He thought he was still on the parade ground, which made matters worse. So if somebody did something really naughty or the noise level was rising in class he would sometimes stagger to his feet then grab the corner of the desk and lift it up, straining. You’d watch him, and then he’d slam it down with a huge crash, and he’d say, “That’s only one-tenth of my strength!” Boy, was I impressed. He didn’t have a clue how to handle us, not any idea at all.
Well, dear Mr. Cooper hated gum-chewing. Not too surprising with that military background. He hated it with a passion, and when he found some poor victim who was chewing gum in class, he would stagger up from his desk, grab the bin, stumble down the aisle until he was under the victim’s nose, hold the bin under his nose, and recite, “ ‘A gum-chewing girl and a cud-chewing cow look so much alike, yet different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I see it now: ‘Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow.’ SPIT!”
He did lack something in sophistication, you understand. Thus, you see, Mr. Cooper could truly say, “You cannot chew gum in my class!” and it would entirely miss the point for any of us 13-year-olds to think that the cannot in that statement was making an ontological claim. “You cannot chew gum in my class because, of course, ontologically speaking, you cannot do it. It is impossible for you to do it.” That’s not what he was saying.
He was saying, “Gum-chewing is not done here.” And it would quite miss the point for Johnny or Elizabeth three rows back to say, “Mr. Cooper, you’re wrong. I’m doing it. Hehehe.” The point is gum-chewing is not done here. That’s the point, and when you work through all the cannots of the New Testament, about a quarter of them are not referring to things that are ontological impossibilities … that is, things that really cannot be because, in the very nature of their reality, it cannot be … they are moral statements.
Listen. Sinning is not done here. Sinning is not done here. You cannot sin here! This is the church of Jesus Christ! This is the blood-bought community! You cannot sin here. Sinning is not done here, and it quite misses the point for you to say, “Mm-hmm, yeah, sorry. You’re wrong. I’m doing it.” It is not done here, and, God help us, we do it anyway, which is why we go back to the blood of Jesus Christ which alone cleanses us from all sin.
You see, unless you preserve the absoluteness of the biblical polarities you become soft with respect to your fighting of sin. Everything gets smeared over in gray. You’re never outraged anymore by your sin or anybody else’s. “Well I’m not too bad, all things considered. I mean, I know some Christians who are sloppier than I am.”
But don’t you see? Sinning is not done here. Do you want to know what the righteous person is like? The righteous person does not listen to the counsel of the ungodly. The righteous person does not watch porn. The righteous person is not greedy. The righteous person is not bitter. The righteous person is not hateful. The righteous person is not selfish. The righteous person is not prayer-less. The righteous person is not mean. Sinning is not done here.
The righteous person delights in the Word of God. The righteous person meditates on it day and night. The righteous person is like a tree planted by streams of water that brings forth fruit in its season. The righteous person loves God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and his neighbor as himself. The righteous person makes the right christological confessions. The righteous person loves his brothers and sisters in Christ. The righteous person does all that Jesus commands, because Jesus is Lord. Sinning is not done here.
Thus, every time we sin in thought and word and deed, by commission or omission, it is always without excuse. It is not done here, and, God help us, until the consummation, we do it anyway. God have mercy, which is why we return again and again and again to that old rugged cross and we hear the pronouncement of Holy Scripture, “Christ Jesus is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to purify us from all unrighteousness.”
And if we should die on the way home tonight and be asked at the portals of heaven why we should be admitted, will we say, “Ah, yeah. I was at a Christian meeting tonight” or will we say, “I have no other argument, I need no other plea; it is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me”?
The most burning need of our time is the burning need of every time until Christ comes back, to think God’s thoughts after him, to read and re-read Scripture, not merely as an end in itself but that we might turn to the God of our creation, to the God of our redemption, to the Son whom he sent, to the redemption that Son achieved, to the Spirit whom he has poured out that we might be empowered and transformed in preparation for the glorification that still awaits us on the last day.
We join the church in every generation and we cry, “Even so, come Lord Jesus!” For all of that span of time, we must have the absolute polarities or we will make endless excuses for ourselves, and we must have the brutal realism of our own cheap, compromised existences or we will not be driven back to the cross where, alone, there is grace to help in time of need. Let us pray.
In the midst of the pressure of our lives, Lord God, draw us back to what is of ultimate importance: your Word, your way, your Son, your heaven, the cross, the empty grave, the gift of the Spirit, the life everlasting, and the prospect of eternity.
Grant us mercy, Lord God, to loathe sin, and as we approach something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the splendor of your holiness, give us to see the heinousness and odium of our own compromised existence and to confess our sins and find in Christ all we need for cleansing, both for now and for eternity. Grant that as we see our deep rebellion and evil we will cry before you daily, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.
