Following in the Footsteps of Jesus: What Real Change Looks Like

Posted on Aug 16, 2009 in Sermons | Comments Off

Speaker: Andrew Brown
Key Passage: Matthew 5:48-6:18
Date: 16 Aug 2009

Whenever a person follows Jesus there’s a big change in their life.  Whenever a person accepts Jesus invitation to enter the Kingdom of God there are profound changes that will take place.  Have you ever thought of what these are, and what the changes would look like?

When I was a teenager there was a youth magazine called ‘Reach Out’ that came out with a humorous view of what a biblical Christian would look like.  The perfect Christian they said (starting at the bottom) has webbed feet for walking on water (Matt. 14:28), camel knees from long hours praying (that’s just tradition), ink-proof forearms and forehead (Revelation 13:16) so they can’t take the mark of the beast, a very stupid left hand that never knows what the right hand is doing (Matt. 6:3), a telescopic right arm for extending the right hand of fellowship, a very soft neck guaranteed not to harden, the Gift of Tongues, slap-resistant cheeks (for turning the other cheek), an extra right arm and right eye in case they need to cut them off because of sin, every hair is numbered, and apparently there is even a halo and wings to help you talk your way through the gates of heaven if St. Peter gives you hard time (although they couldn’t find an actual verse for that one).

The cartoon is meant to be funny, and the idea is that no one is a perfect Christian.  None-the-less it points to the fact that when you become a follower of Jesus there are profound changes that take place in your life.  Changes to do with humility, prayer, persecution, relationships with other people, spiritual gifts, your attitude to sin, and your entire image of God –a whole wide range of things.

In the passage just before the one we read today Jesus has been talking to the crowd about six major changes that He would make to the Jewish religion in order to bring it back to God’s original intention.  Jesus describes how he would radically reform Judaism in order to get it back to the values of God’s Kingdom.  Then he goes on to talk about how a Kingdom approach to life is worked out in the three main areas of our daily lives –in our public religious life, i.e. what others see of us spiritually (6:1-18), in our personal interior life –what we actually think and believe inside (6:19-34), and in our relationships with other people (7:1-12).  Today we are going to look at the first one and discover the kind of changes that being a follower of Jesus makes in terms of our religion or spirituality.

1. The starting point is that Jesus expects you as one of His followers to carry out spiritual disciplines. Jesus expects you to carry out certain practices and habits that are part and parcel of a normal religious life.  When you accept Christ’s invitation, when you decide to give your life to Him, your heart and inner attitudes willy change, but it’s more than just about the heart. Jesus says, “When you give to the needy,” “when you pray,” and “when you fast,” not if.  There are practises and spiritual actions (Jesus calls them ‘acts of righteousness’) that you will begin to regularly perform.

In fact amongst the people of Jesus day there were three main religious acts that people were expected to perform. The ‘Big 3’ consisted of giving to the poor, praying, and fasting.  Of these giving to the poor was considered the greatest.  One of the High Priests said that giving to the needy was an essential pillar of religious life, while others suggested that while prayer and fasting were both good, giving to the poor could save the giver from death and get rid of every sin.  This morning you have recognised the needs of the spiritually and materially poor around the world by giving to a special offering, so you would be considered very respectable religious people indeed in Jesus time.

Regarding prayer good Jews would pray at three set times each day.  There were morning, afternoon and evening prayers.  At these particular times you would stop whatever you were doing wherever you were and you would pray.  That might be somewhere private like at home, or more public like on the street or you might drop by a local synagogue to pray.  It was entirely up to you.  Fasting, however, was only required on one day of the year –the Day of Atonement, although diligent people might fast twice a week. Now days, of course, we have a slightly modified list of what is considered foundational to our spiritual lives–the Seven Spiritual Habits over there, but the important thing is that Jesus expected His disciples to perform these kind of actions and He modelled them Himself.  Jesus kept regular spiritual habits.

For example the disciples kept a purse in which they put their money for the poor.  You might recall that Judas was the treasurer.  Jesus prayed we know frequently at many different times of the day and night.  He gave His disciples the Lord’s Prayer to pray. Jesus also fasted on numerous occasions.  He modelled an active human spiritual life for his disciples and told them to follow it in order to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).”

You see Jesus regards spiritual practices as spiritually beneficial and worthwhile.  He actually goes so far as to say that they will have a reward, although it’s not clear what this reward will be.  Some people think that it could be God’s praise at the Last Judgment for looking after the poor.  Jesus said “whenever you give a glass of water to a little child in my name you give it to me.” Others think your reward might be continued spiritual growth so that you grow closer to God and look more and more like Jesus.  As 1 Timothy 4:7-8 says “(7) Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. (8) For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” But what is clear above all is that Jesus expects His followers to carry out spiritual disciplines.

So how well you doing?  How well are you developing at the seven spiritual habits?  If you weren’t doing them before you met Jesus, then today is a good day to start. Ask an older Christian how they do them.  They’ll e only too happy to meet with you regularly and give you some tips.  Get a book out of the church library today. Join a home group, find out and start.  And if you were doing them before you were born again and baptised, then don’t stop.  Jesus would want you to carry on!

2. However Jesus goes on to say that the way in which you carry out these practises is very, very important. There is a right way and a wrong way, and the wrong way, can in fact be hazardous to your spiritual health.  Have you ever considered that the way in which you pray, or attend church, or give to the poor may or may not be on the right track?

The issue that Jesus is basically getting at is that your spiritual practices could be covering up or hiding things from others, even from yourself. You might be the world’s best giver, the planet’s best prayer or an expert at fasting, but there might also be something wrong going on underneath.

You see the Jews of Jesus time assumed that if you looked good spiritually to others, then you must look good to God as well.  If a little bit of public prayer was good, then a lot of public prayer must be better.  If a little bit of public giving was good, then a whole lot of public giving must be greater.  If fasting once a year had value, then why not fast twice a week and let people know that you’re doing it?  The idea that you could earn praise from others while also earning praise from God was a very strong idea.

Only Jesus won’t wear it.  He explodes the myth.  He’s adamant that you can’t do both and the word he uses to describe people like this is a very strong one.  Does anyone know what it is?  Yes, hypocrite.  The word, hypocrite has its origins in the Greek theatre where men played all the parts.  If a man needed to play several roles, or to act as a woman, then he would wear a mask.  So that what you saw on the surface, is not whom they were underneath.

So what Jesus says is that you have to question the motive of the people doing it.  You have to ask yourself, ‘Why are you doing it?’ Is it all that it appears?  Are they doing this to influence or impress God?  Or is it to look good in the eyes of others?  Is this a genuine response to God’s kindness, or is it because it’s the right thing to do?  What’s the real reason behind their actions?

I need to explain, though, that this is not all about feelings, because I think some people get a bit confused on this issue.  Some people think that they should not come to church, or give money to the poor, or worship God or pray, when they don’t feel like it.  They think that if they do something when they don’t feel like it, then they’re acting like a hypocrite.  Jesus, however, is making a different point.  It’s not about whether you feel like doing your faith or not.  It’s about why you are doing it.  Are you doing this, even though you might not feel like it, because you want to honour God, or are you doing it because you are more worried about what other people will think?  Sometimes it appears that many of our actions are influenced more by what other people might say than by what God Almighty Himself wants! This is often what it’s all about –or if we use one word to describe it, it’s pride.  We all want to look good in front of others.

For example, Thomas Keating, a well-known spiritual writer, tells the story of how as a young man, he was very competitive.  He liked to drink everyone else under the table.  Every Friday and Saturday night he would be out at the pub or the nightclub drinking until the other person dropped.  When he met Jesus, he felt drawn to join a monastery in order to get to know God better, so he joined the toughest order to join, e.g. in those days you weren’t allowed to talk to anyone other than your superior or spiritual director.

Keating set out to become the very best monk that he could.  In addition to the seven times a day that he had to pray, he would often rush through his chores so that he could get extra time in the chapel to pray, however, there was only one problem.  Every time he snatched some extra time there was another monk in there as well also praying -and Keating began to resent it.  How dare he try and be a better monk than me?  Apparently this feeling went on for quite a long time because they couldn’t talk to each other, but at the end of it Keating realised what he was really doing.  Instead of trying to drink the other fellow under the table, he was now trying to out pray the other monk in the chapel.  In the end he said he wondered how much of his prayer had really been meant for God.  Most of it had really been about looking good in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.

Which is very sad, because as Jesus said, you will receive no other reward then people’s applause if you do that.  You can’t play to two different audiences.  If you seek the praise of humans, then He says, in the Greek language of the text, that you will have received your receipt from God marked “Already paid in full.” That’s it!

3. So if this is your temptation Jesus says that it is better for you to practice your spiritual disciplines in private. It is better for you to make your religious acts a little less visible than before.  He’s not saying to vanish entirely.  Just to hide a little.  You see, there’s a bit of scholarly debate about it, but in most Jewish homes there were no private rooms. There was nowhere you could actually go, as Jesus instructed, and close the door to pray on your own.   So His instruction is metaphorical.  He’s not telling you to stop doing things.  Continue to be generous, continue to pray, and continue to share your faith with others, only do so in a way that is out of the public spotlight.  Go to the opposite extreme for at least a season.  Be a little bit shy for a while, and do this to achieve an important spiritual purpose.

Because ultimately Jesus wants you to let your light shine in order to draw attention to God.  That’s in Matthew 5:16 – “(16) In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven,” but before that you have to learn one important thing. It is not our task to appear to be righteous before other people. Rather, it is our task to be well pleasing to the King.

4. You and I must learn to play for that great audience of One. You nd I must learn to focus all of our love and desire for attention upon Him.  We must learn what it means to live for Him alone.

Now Chuck Coulson tells the story of a businessman, Jack Eckerd, who owned one of the largest drug store chains in America.  The two of them had hit it off well and they toured around the State of Florida together advocating criminal justice reform.  They got to know each other well and everywhere they would go to speak Jack Eckerd would introduce Chuck to the crowds and say, “This is Chuck Colson, my friend… He’s born again. I’m not. I wish I were,” and then he’d sit down. Later they would get on the airplane, Chuck would tell him about Jesus, then they’d get off at the next stop, and he’d say the same thing all over again.  Finally after about a year Eckert decided that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead and Chuck lead him in a simple prayer by which he became a follower of Jesus.

Well within a very short time everything in his life began to change.  One of the first things he did was walk into one of his drugstores, walk by the bookshelves and see Playboy and Penthouse on them. (This is going back a few years ago).  It was funny because they had never bothered him before, but now he saw them with new eyes, so he went straight back to his office, called the President of his company and told him to take all those magazines out of his stores.  The President thought he was joking.  He said, “You can’t mean it. We make $3 million a year on those books.  He said, “Take them out” and so 1,700 of his stores right across America removed that evil.

The intriguing thing is that customers then started flocking to his stores because they heard they were pornography free and so the opposition drugstores were forced to follow suit.  Within a period of 12 months 11,000 retail outlets in America removed Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves and all because of the influence of this one man.

So Coulson rang him up and “I want to use your story.  Did you do that because of your commitment to Christ?” Eckerd said, “Why else would I give away three million dollars?  The Lord (just) wouldn’t let me off the hook.”

And I guess that’s the moral of the story –of what Jesus is talking about –that whatever your circumstances and the situation you are in, you must learn to play to God’s audience, and not to any other.  You must do it all for Him.

C. So how well are you doing?  What would be the result of an audit on your life?  Is your religious behaviour regulated by the approval and opinions of other people or are you more about worried what God thinks?  How would you approach things differently if God was the real focus of all your spiritual activities?

You see Jesus says you cannot have both. To deliberately perform your religious duties in front of other people so that you can gain their approval and admiration is to give up any possibility of divine reward and real spiritual growth. So what are you going to do?

The best piece of advice that I know on this subject is by A.B. Bruce.  Let’s say it together. “Show when tempted to hide; hide when tempted to show.” So what is it that you need to change?  What is it that you will do differently because of Jesus words?

Today I want to give you a chance to respond to what Jesus has said.  If what He’s talked about has struck a cord in your heart, then I invite you to simply come to the front during our next song.  If no one comes, that’s okay.  But if you want more honesty in your relationship with God, I invite you to come forward during this song.  Maybe you don’t know the reason why, but you just need to come, then I urge you to come.  Don’t worry about what others will think.  Ignore them –after all that’s part of the original problem –wanting what the crowd more than what God wants.  This time do it for yourself and for the Lord, and at the end of the song we will say together the words of the Lord’s Prayer and recommit ourselves to His will and His kingdom.  Let’s sing.