Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. It's time for another edition of Ask Pastor Mike here on Focal Point. We're glad you've joined us for this Friday edition of Focal Point.

We look forward to this time each week when we take a break from our current Bible teaching series to answer a question from a listener like you. Today, Pastor Mike explains the difference between justification and sanctification.

Well, let's enter the pastor study now where our executive director, Jay Wirtin, is sitting down with Pastor Mike for today's Q and A segment.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dave. I am here with Pastor Mike. And Pastor Mike, we have a question about salvation. A listener asks if salvation is supposed to be a gift we see in Ephesians 2:891, why does the Bible make it sound so hard, like in Luke 9:23.

Speaker 3

Luke 9:23, yeah. To deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him? Yeah. Well, because one passage is speaking of that declarative reality that we are forgiven of our sins, the gift of salvation saved from the penalty of our sins because our sins have been canceled out. That is a very simple thing. I mean, it's tremendously complex and deep because of what it took to achieve, but at that moment, being freed from the penalty of my sins, like someone stamping on my bill, paid in full, canceled, that's a very simple thing. It's a simple thing. It's a free thing. It comes as a gift, and it's unearned.

But those who have their sins forgiven are now called to follow Christ. This is the distinction between justification—being declared righteous—and sanctification—becoming more holy, becoming more like Christ. Following Christ is that journey, that path, that process of being more and more like Christ and doing more and more of what he says. It's like the Great Commission, making disciples of all the nations, teaching them to observe all that I commanded.

So the disciple being made a disciple, being named a follower of Christ or being adopted as a child of God, bam, instantaneous justification declared, it's done, gift free. Now follow me. And that following part, which is what Luke 9 is all about, that's not easy. That is a hard process. That is a demanding process that requires my whole life engagement.

And so for me to talk about why it on the one hand seems so easy and free and it's a gift, on the other hand, so difficult, so hard? Well, that's because sanctification and justification are inextricably bound. They're two distinct things, and they're described and defined in different ways. But you can't have one without the other. I can't be saved without following Christ. If I'm a follower of Christ and adopted into his family, well, then I live in the family and I follow the family rules. If I'm a follower of Christ and declared his disciple, well, then I have to follow Christ. It's the daily taking up of my cross and denying myself. That's how they work. Two different sides. Components that are distinguishable, that are inseparable.

Speaker 2

Do you think some people get the two concepts mixed up because they expect their life to be easy once they become a Christian?

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Well, I think a lot of people want to sign some kind of insurance policy that gives them their ticket to heaven. But now they don't want any implications of that. And I think that's the problem for a lot of people. They've been taught as young people going to church, walk an aisle, slip up your hands, repeat this prayer. Those are simple things to do. And they think what they're doing is signing this kind of get out of jail free card. And now they can put it in their back pocket and get on with their lives. But that's not how it works.

No one can be justified. No one can receive the free gift of salvation who is not then indwelt by the Spirit and drawn to follow Jesus Christ. It is not only something that is commanded of us externally in Scripture; it's something that's demanded of us internally. I mean, it's a compulsion because the Spirit of God is at work within us.

Well, that instantly begins a warfare with the flesh, with the world, and with the devil. Think about that. There's no way I can be a Christian indwelt by the Spirit without now having an instant conflict with the desires of my flesh. Having a conflict of being out of step with my culture and my world. And now being on the radar of the enemy—a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. There's no way that's going to be an easy life. That's going to be a difficult life. That's going to be a life where I'm called to take up my cross and follow him. Suffer hardship as a good soldier in this world. You'll have tribulation.

I could go on and on and on. Verses all through the Scripture tell me that through many tribulations, I must enter the kingdom of God. Yes, salvation is unearned. It's a gift; it's free. It's a very simple thing in terms of receiving it in the sense that I'm receiving the cancellation of my debt before a holy God. But that is the beginning of me walking with Christ, being indwelt by the Spirit. And that becomes daily warfare.

Speaker 2

Pastor Mike, I've heard you talk around here about that little phrase at a pat, anytime, any place, anything. Talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3

Yeah, well, I mean, you can't deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him without that sense of, I'll do anything for him, I'll go any place for him and I'll do it at any time. I mean, that's what it means to deny my schedule, my priorities, my sense of what I will and won't do. It's really my kind of shorthand around our church of just saying, are we as Christians really following him?

Because he doesn't give us the whole plan. It'd be nice if he handed us a roadmap of our whole life and said, here's what I want you to do as a Christian. But that's not how it goes. I mean, his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. And it's not always high beams looking way down the road. It's like, here's the next step for you.

I just had lunch today with a parishioner that was talking about God revealing what the next step was through good counsel and Bible study and prayer with his wife. And it's like, I don't know what will happen, you know, beyond this, but I know this is what God would like us to do. It's the implication of our Bible study. It's the peace we have as a married couple. So we're going to do it. We're stepping out in faith to take this next step in our lives, but we're not sure where that will take us.

That's the kind of at a pat spirit that we want to see in people. Because you can't really be a follower of Christ without being willing to lay down our own priorities and schedule and say, okay, God, I'm yours. What would you want to do with me in the next season of my life? And that happens on a daily basis for us as Christians, we're presenting ourselves as living sacrifices.

We're here saying, whatever it is that you would like me to do, I'll do. And I just like that little phrase, add a pat, anything, any place, anytime. And if we keep ourselves there, I think we'll be okay. As long as we're in the Word and in fellowship with a good Bible teaching church, we're going to know where God's taken us, and we'll go there as long as we're willing to do his will.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike. I trust this conversation was helpful for our listeners. And we're going to finish our time today with a message you gave called our struggle to say anything.

Speaker 4

There are certain days of our childhood we never forget. One of mine was my first day of junior high. Filled with trepidation, I approached the buildings there at the corner of the school. Of course, you want your mom to drop you off far from the front of the school, but she got closer than I was comfortable with. Nevertheless, I took a deep breath, had my lunch sack in one hand, had my notebooks in the other, and I stepped out of the car right into a puddle of standing water. I basically launched myself, literally, with all my notebooks and lunch flying in different directions, face down. I mean, a perfect belly flop right in the standing water in front of the school. I got up looking like the creature from the black lagoon. You young people Google that; you'll see the image of that.

Here I was, and you know how compassionate and understanding junior high students are, right? They all rushed over to see if they could help. No, they jeered. It was one of those moments, you know, that will live on in your memory. They jeered and they laughed and they mocked and they pointed, and you know, it was just unbelievably embarrassing. So, of course, I quickly scurried up onto my feet, grabbed whatever I could find there that I had strewn about the corner, and I crawled into my mom's car and I said, "Take me home. I'm skipping junior high school." I was done. I could not imagine going back.

Well, my mom, of course, was compassionate and gracious. She took me home, gave me a chance to put on some dry clothes, get a new sack lunch, and then she said, "Son, you're going back to school." Imagine my heart at that point. I don't know; I vaguely remember a stop, maybe at the donut shop, to help coax me back to start my junior high career that day. But that story I thought of when I was reading through John 21 here because it feels a lot like the story of John 21 where we meet Peter at the donut shop, if you will, with Christ after falling flat on his face in Caiaphas' courtyard, denying Jesus three times. You remember that story?

He is now, after the crucifixion, after the resurrection, and Jesus makes a third appearance in the post-resurrection ministry of Christ while Peter is out—not preaching, not leading the disciples, but fishing, his old career. Pick it up with me, if you would. In John 21, verse number 15, as Jesus talks to the demoralized Peter about what in the world he's doing. Verse 15: They had finished breakfast. Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" And he said, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." And he said, "Feed my lambs." He said a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" And he said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." And he said, "Tend my sheep." And he said to him a third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he had said a third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you." And Jesus said, "Feed my sheep."

"Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go." John adds this: he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God. And after saying this, he said, "Follow me." Whether you recognize it or not, with a quick read through of those verses, this is a battle of the wills between Jesus, the Lord of life, saying to Peter, who he had chosen to be the quarterback of the early church, a rock, if you will, on which he was going to begin this movement of concentric circles in the book of Acts.

He says, "You've got to get to work here. Feed my lambs," verse 15. "Tend my sheep," verse 16. "Feed my sheep," verse 17. "You've got a job to do, and it's not fishing. The job is for you to get off of this fishing thing and get back into the pulpit." It's ironic that Peter is having a showdown with Christ about his future, and he's calling him Lord, and yet he's really not all that excited to do what he says. I know the exchange may not be as tangible as this one, but we all struggle at times in our life with the will of God. It's not just at the outset of the Christian life. It may be like Peter, after years of walking with Christ, there's that fork in the road, and you know what Christ wants of you, and you're struggling to do it.

I know there are things you don't want to do. I understand there are things that are scary. I understand sometimes in your life there are understandable reasons for you to balk at the will of God. But it's time for us to recognize that we really have no right to say to God, "I don't want to do it." Back to our text, John, chapter 21, verse 15. It's interesting. The discussion is not, "Hey, listen, you need to go to school," or in this case, "You need to feed my sheep." Now, he does say that you need to tend my sheep. You need to feed my lambs. This is not a discussion, though, or a question that says, "Don't you like preaching better than fishing?" It's not what he says.

"Don't you like preaching? Don't you think that's a good idea? Don't you think you'd be a good preacher?" That's not what he says. The question he asks three times in verse 15, 16, and 17 is, "Do you love me?" Now, that's an interesting approach to this. "Do you love me?" That gets to the heart of the matter. As a matter of fact, when it comes to the will of God in your life, you might want to jot this down: number two, you need to reevaluate your love for Christ, because that's the real core of it all. Your love for Christ needs to be questioned when you're balking at the will of God.

"Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Now, he asks the question three times. If you look at it there, verse 15, 16, and 17. But he begins the question in verse number 15 with a comparative: "Do you love me more than these?" Do you love me more than these? What's the comparison? Jesus wants Peter to consider his love. And the first time he asks the question, he wants him to consider his love compared to something—these. What are the "these"? Well, pick up any commentary that's of any size at all, and they're going to say, well, there's at least three seemingly logical contextual options for that.

"Do you love me more than these?" The first one, I suppose, if you want to think about it in terms of the context, would be, "Hey, you're out here fishing." That's what verses one through three say. He's out fishing when he is called to now, by Christ, to tend sheep, feed sheep, which is the analogy for him to be the pastor, which is what he's going to do and what he's eventually going to obey and do. The question is, "Do you love me?" And what I'm asking you to do is not the real focus. The focus is me. But if you love me, you'll do that. "Do you love me more than these?" What has he just done? He's holding a big catch of fish. He's been out all night fishing.

"Do you love me more than the nets, the boats, the career? Do you love me more than that thing you're doing right there? Do you love me more than these?" That's the first, I suppose, logical contextual option. The next one is, as any good commentator, any Bible student will tell you, just looking at it for 10 minutes, "these." "Do you love me more than these?" What else is around? If you look up in the context, verse two, Peter's there, Thomas is there. Nathaniel's there. You've got the sons of Zebedee—that's James and John—are there, and two others. You've got a whole team of disciples. Maybe he's saying, "Do you love me more than you love these guys? Do you love me more than these guys?"

And if you love me more than these guys, you're going to do what I want. Most commentators are quick to dismiss that. Well, what do you mean? You know, Peter's never known for loving the other disciples. I mean, there's no passage about, "Oh, I really love Nathaniel. He's such a great guy." Most people dismiss that. But I mean, logically, it's at least grammatically possible. The third one is, and most commentators would like to say this must be it, because of the preceding context of Peter proclaiming his superior love for Christ. Some people would say, "Is Jesus asking the question, do you love me more than these disciples love me? Do you love me more than they love me?"

Now, that would be an odd question to consider, and maybe we should. But let's start with the first one. "Do you love me more than these things, this career, this thing you're doing right now?" Which you may say, "Well, I'm not sure that's what Christ had in mind," and perhaps it's not. But it is the thing that holds a lot of us up, isn't it? The reason we don't do the will of God is we like what we're doing better. And certainly in the context, Peter seems to be more comfortable, as I said, in a fishing boat than he is in a Christian pulpit. So perhaps we need to think that through.

When you consider your love for Christ, ask yourself the question, "Do I love him more than the stuff that I want to do? Do I love him more than that?" By the way, and I hate to use inflammatory language here, but you do understand what it means when you love something more than you love Christ? When you love something more than you love Christ? When I am supposed to supremely love God, the triune God, more than anything else, when something else supplants that, you know the Bible word for that—idolatry. It's even called this in the Bible—adultery. I mean, this is a problem.

The second option these commentators toss around and clearly, contextually could be possible is, "Do you love me more than you love these guys? Nathanael, James, John, do you love me more than you love them?" Now, that would be a weird thing to say in the immediate context, it would seem, because it's not those guys that said to Peter, "Hey, let's go and fish." As you'll see up there in verse number three, it was Peter that said, "I'm going fishing." And they said, "We'll go with you." So that's a weird question to ask and probably not what Jesus had in mind.

But before we leave that option too quickly, I think we should at least spend a moment there thinking that that is a serious problem that Jesus did talk about often. And that is, "Do you love me more than you love other people?" As a matter of fact, when I start talking about, "Do you love Christ supremely more than anything?" some of you, if you really were honest in giving that a little thought here in the last few minutes, your mind didn't go to a career or an activity. Your mind went to a person.

Oh, and by the way, as we'll see in this text and in many others, and I should kind of round this discussion out, if you're starting to get a view of God, perhaps because you haven't been taught this, that God sure seems to be really, I don't know, jealous, so focused, so controlling, so domineering. He wants all of our attention. He wants to be first. What kind of Christ is that? Let me make this very clear to you. When Jesus wants to be first, it's not so that he can, you know, just look down on all the peons and all his slaves and go, "Look at me. I'm in charge now." He's not an egomaniac.

Now, he is the center of the universe's attention and rightly should be. And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that he is Lord. But note this carefully: when he says to people, "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me," he's quick to follow that up with this: while that may feel like you're losing your life, he says, "If you choose to keep your life, you'll lose it. But if you are willing to lose your life, you will find it." There's something about the loss of all these things that we cling to that really allows us to find our lives.

For me to say to you, "You need to be willing to do anything for Christ" should not be seen as some subservient person coming to Christ going, "Oh no, he's going to make me, I don't know, scrub the floor with a toothbrush." That's not the point. There's nothing better for a human being to do than to find the right ordering of his life, which begins with letting God be God. Which means that you and your heart need to realize there's nothing better that could happen for your life than for you to get all the idols out of the way and to let the Lord be the Lord and let your agenda take a second place to His.

Reevaluate your love for Christ. Do you love Christ more than the things that you love? Do you love Christ more than the people that you love? And lastly, as strange as it may sound, it may be exactly what Jesus had in mind when he said, "Do you love me more than these?" It may have exactly meant the fact that, "Do you love me more than Nathaniel loves me? Do you love me more than Thomas loves me? Do you love me more than James loves me? Do you love me more than John loves me?" Why would Jesus ask that?

I've already told you that in the story of Peter, just before he takes the belly flop in the algae pond, he said to Jesus, "You know what? If everybody else falls away?" This is Matthew 26. "Now if everybody falls away, I won't." In the parallel passage, it even adds this: "If I have to go to prison for you, I'll do it. If I have to die with you, I'll do it." Now, what was he doing in that passage? Comparing his loyalty to the other disciples, saying, "I love you more. Even if all these losers aren't going to love you or be loyal to you, I will." Which, of course, Jesus says, "No, you won't. You're going to stumble; you're going to fall. Before the rooster crows, you're going to deny me three times." Remember that? And that's what he did.

No one could love you more than I love you. It's that comparative language. I don't know if this is what's in view. I suppose that it is what's in view in Jesus' mind when he asks him the question. But all I know is it's where he wants Peter to go back to. I know that in part because Jesus later addressed an entire church in Revelation, chapter two, the Church at Ephesus. And he said, in essence, the very same thing: "You've left your first love." It's a kind of love that was supreme. And it's a kind of love that you can't help but think is comparative. It's a kind of unparalleled commitment that you think you have, and there's nothing wrong with that.

And even as new Christians, I hope some of you have looked at your life and said, "Wow, no one could love Christ the way I love Christ," which, you know, is not analytically, technically, objectively true, but it's the feeling in your heart. And what was it like for you, by the way, if you're the Peter here in the room, thinking, "Yeah, there was a time when I was willing to say, 'I will go to the ends of the earth for Christ. I'll do anything for Christ. I'll die for Christ. My commitment to Christ is superior to anybody in this small group. I'm ready to. If everyone else falls away, I won't.'"

He says, "Think of the things you did in that period of your life. Remember where you've fallen from. Repent and do the deeds you did at first. Start acting like that again." Guess the upshot of all this is to look at this passage and recognize that while it's a historic snapshot of a narrative with Jesus and Peter, it was recorded for your sake and mine. In other words, you need to see this text and envision you having breakfast with Christ and him looking at you and saying, "Do you love me? Do you love me?" And if you love him and you trust Him, I think you're going to be willing to do whatever it is that he says.

Speaker 1

Anything, any place, anytime. If we love the Lord, that's our answer whenever he calls. You're listening to Focal Point with Mike Fabarez. Our love for God should also motivate us to love others. That's a point made by Dr. Albert Mohler in his book *Culture: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America*. Dr. Mohler helps us engage with people on a variety of challenging topics. The mandate to love our neighbor should encourage us to stand up and speak out. There's so much at stake, and that's why Pastor Mike would like you to have this book. Request Dr. Mohler's book, *Culture Shift*.

When you give a gift to Focal Point today, you'll find it highly readable and hard to put down, and it can be on its way to you today. When you make a donation to Focal Point, ask for *Culture Shift*. When you call us at 888-325-8855, again, that's 888-325-8855, or go online to focalpointradio.org. Offering resources like the book *Culture Shift* is part of our mission here at Focal Point. We believe that faith comes, so we use every means possible to share God's life-changing word. And that includes the radio, the Internet, and our free Focal Point app and podcast.

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Well, we hope you gained valuable insights from this Friday edition of Focal Point. Now, if you have a question that you'd like us to consider for an upcoming Ask Pastor Mike segment, just email us at our website, focalpointradio.org, or post your question on Pastor Mike's Facebook or Twitter. You can also write to us at Focal Point, Post Office Box 2850, Laguna Hills, CA 92654.

I'm Dave Droue, wishing you a great weekend. We'll come back again on Monday to hear more from Pastor Mike Fabarez on the Book of Romans right here on Focal Point. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.