July 2, 2006
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Got
a Ticket?
Matthew 25:31-46
A man in
Kiev
,
Ukraine
wanted to be a modern day Daniel. He
went to the zoo in
Kiev
earlier this month and lowered himself by a rope into a den of lions.
The lion enclosure is on an isolated “animal island” surrounded by
thick concrete blocks to protect people from the lions.
The zoo was packed with visitors when the man took of his shoes and went
up to the lions shouting, “God will save me, if he exists”
A zoo official said, “A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down
and severed his carotid artery.” He
was killed almost instantly.
This Ukranian man evidently had read the story of Daniel and the lion’s
den, but he had failed to read Christian history where Christians faced lions in
the Roman coliseums and lost their lives — much to the pleasure of the emperor
and citizens of
Rome
. I think there are many people who
have a very naive and simplistic concept of God and the Christian life.
It is easy to get caught up in idealism and miss the real message of
Scripture, not to mention the meaning of the Christian life.
The message of Scripture always has both feet planted firmly on the
ground. It is people who misread and
misunderstand the message that is there. And
the reason is that it is easier to believe in the simplistic ideas, that people
like our friend from
Kiev
had, than to live out what it means to know God and live the life he has set
out for us. The Christian life is
not about trying to prove God exists, or even believing he exists, it is about
being a new person.
It is dangerous thing to test God, either by doing something foolish to
see if he will rescue you, or by living your life going against everything that
he has said, and think that as long as you shoot up a prayer before you gasp
your last breath everything will be just fine.
It’s what I call “ticket theology.”
Ticket theology says, “Being a Christian is all about being ‘saved’
and getting your ticket to heaven. It
doesn’t matter if you don’t live like a Christian.
If you believe the right things, or you are saved that is all that
matters. After all, if you are saved
you are always saved, and you can’t lose your salvation, so don’t worry if
your life is messed up, you’re still going to heaven.”
People with ticket theology think that the only thing that is important
in the Christian life is salvation — whether or not they are forgiven and are
on their way to heaven. They rarely
think about real discipleship and taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously as a
lifestyle, they just want their ticket. They
want to avoid hell and go to heaven without ever considering whether they will
be happy in heaven. I might say that
if you don’t like living for God here, you’re going to really hate it there.
I have some basic objections to ticket theology, and the first is: It
trivializes the Christian life. This
kind of thinking reduces the Christian life down to some kind of spiritual fire
insurance. It turns the Christian
experience into a recipe: “Say this and you will be saved,” or “Pray this
prayer and you will be forgiven.” Now,
I am not minimizing the importance of that, or the fact that we are saved by
grace. The Bible does say, “For it
is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves,
it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.”
But many people stop reading there and forget the next verse: “ For we
are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God
prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:8-10).
We cannot save ourselves by our good works, and whenever we think God
owes us heaven because we have been better than most people, then we are in
trouble. But there is more to the
Christian life than just being “saved by grace.”
This week Angel Maturino Resendiz, known as the “Railroad Killer,”
was executed. He was an extremely
cruel and brutal serial killer. Just
before his execution he mumbled a prayer, saying “Lord, forgive me. Lord,
forgive me.” He turned to the
families of his victims who were watching through a window in another room and
said, “I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me.”
I don’t know what was really going on in the heart of this man.
I do know that it was too bad that he could not have been repentant before
he committed the crimes. It is
remarkable that he wanted mercy when he showed no mercy to his victims.
I’m not saying he could not be forgiven, but what horrors could have
been prevented, and how different his own life would have been if he had not
waited until the last moment to try and “make things right” with God and
other people. This same scenario is
played out in many people’s lives on a lesser scale.
They avoid God their whole life and then want a ticket to heaven at the
last minute. They have no use for
the Christian life, but for some reason still want to go to heaven.
It is a trivialization and gross misunderstanding of what it means to be
a Christian. Ticket Christianity has
nothing to do with actually knowing God and living for him.
The second objection I have to ticket theology is: It misses the point of the Christian life.
What is the point of being a Christian?
It is developing a relationship with God and living for him.
It is the decision to no longer live for ourselves or our pleasures and
interests, and to give our lives totally to God.
It is falling in love with God and his ways.
It is discovering life as we become closer to him and learn his will for
our lives on a daily basis. It is
coming alive to joy and the fullness of what we were created for.
It is learning that the laws of God are the moral laws built into the
universe, and understanding that they are the secret to life.
It is so much more than just having our sins forgiven.
It is growing every day in our relationship with God and learning to be
faithful to him as we mature as his disciples.
It is developing our relationships with other Christians and becoming a
part of the family of God. Contrast
a person who only wants to be a ticket carrying Christian to what Paul was
talking about when he wrote: “What is more, I consider everything a loss
compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose
sake I have lost all things. I
consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a
righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith
in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the
fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so,
somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:8-11).
And this is not just for our personal benefit, but so that we may be a
blessing to the world. A couple of
days ago Sue and I received a letter from a campus minister that we help
support, and in his letter he had a line that caught my attention.
It was a sort of purpose statement that said that he was in ministry,
“...so that everyone may know someone who truly follows Jesus.”
I thought, “That’s it. That’s
what this is all about, that our lives might be a living video of what it means
to be a Christ follower.” That is
so much more than just someone who has been forgiven.
It means that we display in our lives what it means to love, to forgive,
to show mercy, to be kind, authentic and good.
Maybe you think you have your ticket, but you have never entered into the
kind of life that mirrors the life of Jesus.
What good is the ticket if you never walk into the theater?
And what you discover as you walk into the theater is that you are not
there to be entertained, you are supposed to take your place on the stage and
become one of the players. You are
to live out on that stage what it looks like to be a person who follows Jesus so
well that others want to join you and become a part of the play themselves.
This is more than just doing a few good deeds, this is a matter of being
a transformed person. It is not a
matter of correcting a few things on the outside, but becoming a new person on
the inside. This week Warren Buffet
announced that he was giving his fortune to charity.
Buffett is worth $44 billion just in stocks.
He is giving away $37 billion dollars and most of that will go to the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I
was interested to read that in presenting the gift to the Gates, he made the
remark, “There is more than one way to get to heaven, but this is a great
way.” If money could buy your way
into heaven then Mr. Buffett was right and he would have done it in spades, but
fortunately for all of us who do not have a billion dollars, a million dollars
or even a thousand dollars to throw around, it is not about money.
It misses the point, because heaven is not for sale.
You cannot buy your ticket. Heaven
is not for those who do something remarkable, it is for those who live
unremarkable lives, but who live them faithfully, lovingly and joyfully every
day. It is not about just believing
in Jesus, it is about knowing Jesus. It
is not just about knowing Jesus, it is about following Jesus.
It is not just about following Jesus, it is about losing your life,
taking up your cross and making God’s will your will.
It means denying yourself, forgiving your enemies, loving and caring for
the outcast. Max Lucado writes about
the end of those who are merely “I got my ticket” Christians: “Consider,
then, this explanation of hell: Hell is the chosen place of the person who loves
self more than God, who loves sin more than his Savior, who loves this world
more than Gods world. Judgment is
that moment when God looks at the rebellious and says, ‘Your choice will be
honored.’”
The third objection I have to ticket theology is: It reduces the Christian life to a formula.
It makes becoming a Christian a one time event rather than a life-long
experience of growth in God — loving him, learning his ways, maturing in our
ability to obey and trust him, being transformed into his likeness and serving
the hurting and helpless. If all you
are worried about is the magic formula: believing in God, saying the right
prayer, getting baptized the right way and avoiding the major sins, knowing and
keeping the list of do’s and don’ts, then you are following a formula rather
than living a life of faith. You are
believing in some formula to save you, and you have avoided having an ongoing
relationship with God.
The writer of Hebrews was concerned about the spiritual immaturity of the
people of his day. They were merely
skimming the surface of the Christian life, so he wrote: “Though by this time
you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of
God’s word all over again. You
need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is
not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness” (Hebrews 5:12-13).
The apostle Paul said that we were to, “become mature, attaining to the
whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then
we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here
and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in
their deceitful scheming. Instead,
speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the
Head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:13-15).
This is more than just being saved from our sins, it is being saved from
stupidity, futility, negativism and despair.
It means seeing the world with new eyes and living in it in a new way.
Spiritual maturity begins by recognizing that the Christian life is not
about a change in what we do, it is about a change in who we are — our
thoughts, choices, feelings and disposition.
This kind of reformation of the heart changes how we feel about things,
it radically revises and reverses the things we care about.
Our will is transformed. Our
affections are redirected. Dallas
Willard, in his marvelous book Renovation
of the Heart, says, “Those who are not genuinely convinced that the only
real bargain in life is surrendering ourselves to Jesus and his cause,
abandoning all that we love to him and for him, cannot learn the other lessons Jesus has to teach us.”
In one of the most powerful passages in the book, he writes: “The
impression gained by most who hear about ‘counting the cost’ of following
Jesus is one of how terrible and painful that cost is.
But to count the cost is to take into consideration both the losses and
the gains of all possible courses of action, to see which is most beneficial.
...The cost of non-discipleship would then be seen for what it is — unbearable.
That is why one would become able to sustain cheerfully the much smaller
‘cost of discipleship’ to him.”
Some of you are may have seen the film Beyond
the Gates of Splendor , the film documentary which tells the true story of
five American missionaries: Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint,
and Roger Youderian, who in January 1956 were killed by the very people they
were trying to reach and help. They
were speared to death in the jungles of
Ecuador
by the Waodani Indians, and their bodies were found floating in the river or
strewn along the bank. At first it
seemed that the Waodani were opening up to them and becoming friendly, but
through a strange turn of events they fiercely turned on the missionaries.
What is amazing is that several family members of the slain missionaries
returned to live among the tribe and minister to the very people who had killed
their loved ones. In one scene of
the movie, Kathy and Steve Saint, children of Nate Saint, spoke of what it was
like to be baptized by the Waodani who are now followers of Christ.
Kimo, one of the Waodani who participated in the killing of Kathy and
Steve’s father, talked about Steve’s baptism: “By his father’s grave we
did it when Steve was a little older. It
was right up the river there. He
brought his mother too.” Kathy
says, “I was in the same water where my dad’s body had been thrown, and at
either side of me were the two men that in their youth had killed dad.
And all I knew was that I really loved these two guys.”
That’s what Christianity looks like.
It is a renovation of the heart that sees people with new eyes and loves
them from a new heart. When Christ
comes into our lives the world becomes a different place.
It is not just about being forgiven, it is about experiencing the truth
of the scripture that says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new
creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Rodney
J. Buchanan
July 2,
2006
Mulberry
St. UMC
Mount Vernon
,
OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
Mulberry
Street United Methodist Church