Bayside Baptist Church

Jason King: Several years ago, the final eruption of Mount St. Helens happened in May of 1980. It was not a sudden event. For two months prior to this massive blast, which was the most deadly and destructive in American history, earthquakes and volcanic activity signaled that a major event was taking place. Everybody knew that it was coming. Authorities had plenty of time to sound the alarm and to go and warn people who lived nearby in the path of what would happen and what was going on.

Yet despite the seriousness of the threat and the communication of the need to get out of harm's way, there were people who chose to disregard the warnings. Probably the best known of those who refused to evacuate was a guy named Harry Randall Truman. He was 83 years old, and at this time, he was the caretaker of the Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake. He had survived the sinking of a troopship by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland during World War I, and he was not about to leave just because some scientist thought that there was danger.

He told reporters, "I don't have any idea when it will blow or whether it will blow, but I don't believe that it's to the point that I'm going to pack up." So on May 18th, 1980, Truman and his lodge were buried beneath 150 feet of mud and debris from the volcanic eruption, and his body was never found.

It is foolish to recognize temptation or to recognize danger and to think that somehow you and I can be exempt from what is certainly coming. The Bible paints this picture that we're going to look at today that speaks of this tendency in us to feel like this man did, that with the things that are coming, with the picture that God is painting, that somehow, some way, deep down we are exempt from what God has declared.

The Bible describes this picture that you and I are in the same boat as this man from Mount Saint Helens. The Bible teaches that judgment is impending, and yet we carry on often as if business is as usual. The Bible says that we're not good people who occasionally make mistakes, but rather we are people who have deceitful hearts. Your heart and my heart is not occasionally tripped up towards evil, but we are bent towards evil and we are bent towards what we want. We do what we want in the overflow of our lives. How we act and what we do is based upon what we believe.

So we deceive ourselves, the Bible teaches us, even in how we see our own lives. But the Bible teaches also that God offers a solution to this problem of a deceitful heart that we all have. God offers a solution that He extends to us. What I want to do for a couple of minutes today is for us to fully understand the problem that Scripture describes that affects every one of you under the sound of my voice and affects me as well.

Today we're going to be in Romans Chapter 2. If you have your Bible, you can open up there. It's a part of today's Life Journal reading. If you're not familiar with the Life Journal, it's just a tool that we want to give to you that we put an emphasis on in our church where we're learning to hear God speak to us through His Word. So each day there's a portion of Scripture that we read, and a part of today's reading is from Romans Chapter 2.

Paul is writing this letter to the Romans, and there's a lot in the book of Romans in its entirety. But in this letter, he's writing to a group of people that he's never met. He goes through, in particular, in the first three chapters to help them and help us fully understand the problem that we have even if we don't realize that we have a problem. He goes to great lengths for you and I to understand who we really are, which is often in contrast to who we believe that we really are.

He goes to great lengths to help them understand why this incredible offer of Jesus and the forgiveness of sin and being made right with God is such a big deal. It's why it's not just some token prayer that you pray when you're seven and you carry on the rest of your life as if it never happened. He says it's so significant that it's not just something that you have tacked on your walls or a bumper sticker on your car, but that it becomes your entire life.

In these three chapters, but in particular in Chapter 2, Paul answers the question: "What's wrong with the world?" His answer is very clear and it's very simple, but I'm going to warn you, you're probably not going to like what it says. I realize that today's topic is one that we don't like to think about, but until we understand what Paul is saying as the text has revealed, not like your mom said it or like that little Facebook post says it or like your favorite whoever says it, but like the text says it, it's impossible for us to grasp the weight and the significance of how much God really loves you.

Until we realize how bad we are, it's impossible to recognize how good God is and how incredible His love is for you and for me. In the verses leading up to it, if you were to go and read Chapter 1, which I would recommend, it is such a declaration of our day that people twist the truth and they do what they want to do. Paul speaks on all of that in Romans Chapter 1.

He very clearly says that all of us are filled with sin and we have no excuse. But in this passage leading up to what we're going to talk about today, Paul gives this picture of what God really believes and sees, how He views mankind in the world. He wants to make sure today that in the beginning of the book of Romans that there is not an exception clause that you or I can find ourselves in. It's hard to fathom that because we believe we're the exception with everything, don't we?

That speed limit is for everybody else, right? That self-checkout with 15 items is for everybody else, right? We think we're the exception with anything, and then we transfer that, it's human nature, into spiritual things. So we sidestep the harsh words that God has for us, in particular from this chapter, and we go to the light and fluffy stuff that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. But to be able to understand the depth of His love for us, we have to know who God says that we are.

The Bible teaches that none of us can stand before God based on ourselves, that we're all hopelessly corrupt from the inside out. The result of that is not a slap on the wrist and an "it's okay." The result from that, what we're going to see, is wrath and judgment from God, no matter how good of a person you think you are. We can do good things, and so can other people, but before God, the Scriptures teach us that we are as bad off as we can get.

Paul was teaching this passage. He knew that some people were going to think that because they're in the church or just because they were good people, that these words didn't apply to them. They might begin to think they're the exception or that they were exempt. But Paul also knew that for folks like us, when we begin to think that we're the exception or these truths don't apply to our lives, we begin to do something towards other people. We begin to judge them. We begin to make statements, and that's really what he's going to talk about here.

He's speaking not just of pagans outside the church who don't know God, but he's speaking to you and me today inside the church as well, how all of us are separated from God because of what's inside of us. Can I give you three things today that change in you, that change in me when we understand the depth of our sin? When you understand the depth of the junk that you have in your life, when I understand exactly what's in my heart, there are three things that change in us when we realize that.

Here's the first that the text says. The first thing is you refuse to judge other people. Look in Romans Chapter 2, beginning in verse 1. Paul says this: "You may think that you can condemn such people." What are the such people? It's the craziness of the world. It's the people claiming tolerance and telling you to accept however they want to live and "love is love" and all the other foolishness of our day. He says, "You may think that you can condemn such people, but you are just as bad and you have no excuse. When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are condemning yourself, for you who judge others do these very same things. And we know that God, in His justice, will punish anyone who does such things. Since you judge others for doing these things, why do you think you can avoid God's judgment when you do the same things?"

Paul is saying to us, when you are living in such a way where you are condemning and judging other people, you've missed the depth of the sinfulness in your life. He says, "Therefore," and he's speaking back to the passages before this, the verses before this. He's talking to the religious people because he's moved from the world at large to religious folks. He says that just like us, they would have a tendency to think that they were above all the talk of being depraved or broken or sinful or messed up at their core. They figured they might be exempt from God's judgment and that that would come at the end of life because they were religious people. They felt like they might be able to avoid judgment even though they really weren't obedient to what God had said, just because they were in the right place or the right crowd.

Before you think that might be disconnected from us, we do the same thing, don't we? A lot of folks in the church today believe that just being a part of a church is almost like a good luck charm. Or "I'm going to send my kids to a Christian school because I want them to become Christians and I think that's going to do them good." It's kind of like a rabbit's foot. Just a little bit of God sprinkled in here and there keeps the judgment away.

But Paul says nothing could be further from the truth. These words would have been startling to a Jewish person just like they might be startling to you today. You may have come here to hopefully hear something that would encourage you or help you feel good, but the text is telling us you've got to start with where we are before you get to the good news that God reveals to us.

He says by judging other people, we condemn ourselves. After all, just like the Jewish people of this day, even those that were gathered in the church, we're sure that people outside of the fold of the church are completely wicked and we can become convinced that we're a cut above the people who are out there. But God's standards are not ours, and our judgment of others leads to our own condemnation.

When we pass judgment on other people, do you know what I mean by judgment? Inside the church, we are called to encourage one another, to speak truth into each other's lives. If you see me erring off into sin, you're to speak that into my life and vice versa. Now we reject that in our day, but what we do is we point our fingers outside the church and we say, "How dare them? How dare this happen? How could that be so?"

But what he's saying when we do that, when we judge them and we begin to point fingers at people, not simply declaring the truth but making statements about their heart and where they are, he says we heap condemnation on our own head. Do you remember what Jesus said in Matthew Chapter 7, verse 1? He said, "Do not judge others, and you will not be judged."

Again, I'm not talking about speaking truth. When you become a judge, you begin to say what their motivation or their direction, what's in their heart, and you don't know that. I don't know that. "Do not judge others and you will not be judged. For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged."

Now, let me just throw that out there for some of us today. We can be harsh towards folks. Anybody had a comment about Lane Kiffin the last few days? Come on. You made a statement about some preacher that falls from ministry? You criticized somebody in your family that made a huge mistake? You're pointing your finger at somebody that's out there? You're not doing it in such a way to try to help, you're doing it in such a way to condemn.

Paul says when you do that, you're pointing three fingers right back at yourself when you point one at someone else. Jesus in that passage continues the same thing Paul is saying. He says, "Why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?" That's a literal speck of sawdust and a literal log. How can you think of saying to your friend, "Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye," when you can't see past the log in your eye? Jesus says here's what that means in verse 5: "Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye, and then you will see well enough to deal with that speck in your friend's eye."

Why do we judge other people? I'm not hating on you about it, I'm just saying this is what the text says and it's something that we all can find ourselves doing: condemning other people, criticizing other people, not with the intent to point them to Christ but with the intent to make ourselves look better. We do it to compare ourselves to other people so we can convince ourselves that we're really not that bad.

So when you understand the depth of God's love, one of the things you refuse to do is to cast judgment on other people. But it's so easy. Several years ago, I remember I was in a group of guys and we rode bicycles all the time. We lived in this area where we had lots of mountains, and it was before everybody was texting and driving all the time and it was relatively safe to ride on the road.

So the big group of us would get together and ride. There was one day where we lived near this mountain and we were riding this route to this mountain, and I remember it was winter so everybody was kind of coming out of being out of shape and starting to try to get back in shape. But there was one guy who was already in pretty good shape in the group.

A couple of times in the middle of that, I just took off from the group to see how I was feeling, to see what kind of shape I really was in. Each time I did, this guy who was already in good shape made sure he beat me wherever I was going. At least that's how it seemed. When I got home, I told Christy about it. I said, "You'll never believe this guy. What in the world was he doing?"

Do you know what she did? She laughed at me. She said, "You are so stinking competitive. You do that every single time that you ride, and if you're not first, it drives you crazy." So according to her, what I do is talk about it like I'm not competitive and I try to play it off, but she knows that even saying something to me about it gets to me.

So here I am judging this guy. "Who's he think he is trying to show off to everybody?" telling her that he couldn't stand to not be first. But do you know whose problem it really was? It was mine. You see, we often judge other people to make ourselves feel better. I would say to us today, if this is you and you're like, "Well, I don't have that problem," you have the biggest problem with it of all of us.

The person with the biggest problem is the one who says they don't struggle with that at all. We forget our own weaknesses, we rename our own wrongs. We call somebody else prejudiced, but for us, it's just our experience or having a conviction. We call somebody else defensive, but for us, it's just setting the record straight. Other people are hot-tempered, but we're just standing up for principles. They cheat and steal, but you just make adjustments on your expense account. Others cheat on a test, but you just need a little help.

You see, we start to think that we're really not that bad compared to other people, but that can only happen when we give ourselves a pass for our own sinfulness. He says even though you get impatient with everybody else's junk, whether it be their personality or an addiction or codependency or lying or dishonesty or selfishness, and we minimize our stuff, we've missed the declaration in Scripture that says that we are just as bad off from the heart as everybody else.

Look back in verse 4. He says this: "Don't you see how wonderfully kind and tolerant and patient God is with you?" Let me ask you, church, do you recognize how patient and kind and tolerant God is with you? Paul says, "Does this mean nothing to you? Can't you see that His kindness is intended to turn you from your sin?"

But we don't even realize sometimes that even in God's judgment, His kindness and His patience and His tolerance of our junk is clearly demonstrated. The fact that He doesn't take you and me out right now in this moment because of what we thought this morning or what we said this morning or what we did last night or what we did last week or last year is a demonstration of His heart and His love for us. We can put on a show and act like it's not there, but the Scriptures teach that even if you haven't acted upon everything, it's in your heart, and even those things you have acted upon, He doesn't minimize those, yet He's patient and He's merciful and He's kind.

When we assume that we're exempt from His judgment, it's contempt for God. When we judge, we are assuming that those things don't apply to us. Paul's like, "Don't go there. When you understand how sinful you really are, when I understand how sinful I really are, you refuse to judge other people."

That's the first truth that Paul teaches us. The second thing that he teaches us is when you understand the depths of your sin, you realize God judges your actions, not your intentions. Can somebody say "Oh snap"? God judges your actions, not your intentions.

Look in Chapter 2, verse 5. Paul says, "But because you are stubborn and refuse to turn from your sin, you are storing up terrible punishment for yourself. For a day of anger is coming when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. He will judge everyone according to what they felt." Did you see that? Is that what your translation says? No. It says he's going to judge everybody according to what you have done. Not what you felt, not what you intended, not what you thought about, but what you did.

He says He will give eternal life to those who keep on doing good, seeking after the glory and the honor and the immortality that God offers. But He will pour out His anger and wrath on those who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness. There will be trouble and calamity for everyone who keeps on doing what is evil, for the Jew first and also for the Gentile. But there will be glory and honor and peace from God for all who do good, for the Jew first and also for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.

He says if you and I have an unrepentant heart and we minimize sin in our lives and we refuse to repent from whatever it is, we refuse to let God have that area of our life because we got it, he says if that's us, what we're doing is we're actually storing up wrath. We're not getting away with it, we're storing up wrath in our lives. Ultimately the measuring stick of your life and mine is not my intentions, it's not my feelings, it's not my rationalizations or my deals with God, it's what I've done.

Yet we don't often judge ourselves by our actions, do we? Personally, we judge ourselves often by our best intentions and we judge others by their worst actions.