Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Whatever it is that is sinful, whatever it is that is less than holy, our obligation is to kill that stuff. There is a part of our lives that needs to die. This is where God really indwells your life and is working through you. And if you are led by the Spirit of God, you are sons of God, and people that are led by the Spirit of God are putting to death the misdeeds of the body because they are obligated to do so.

Dave Drury: Whenever I am preparing for a trip, I try to pack as little as possible so I can avoid any delays along the way. And our journey with Christ is not much different. Every day it is a struggle to remove temptation, to drop the baggage that is holding us back.

I am Dave Drury, and today on Focal Point, we are continuing our study called, "Our Fight with Sin." To complement this series, we are offering any first-time listener a free copy of Pastor Mike's newest booklet, Storing Up Treasures. Just reach out online at focalpointradio.org. Well, now here is Pastor Mike.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: For those that think coming to Christ is the end of the battle, you need to recognize it is the beginning of the battle. Because the day you stand up and say, "I want to follow Jesus Christ," not only does the satanic world system and the demonic spiritual forces of this world, but your flesh itself rebels against that resolve. And even though God recreates our heart and makes us new, we are now, according to Galatians 5 and 6, at war in our hearts. As Peter put it, he says they are desires that wage war against our soul.

And if you want to be passive and kick your feet up on the desk and say, "Well, I am loved by God and the grace of God, I am into all that, I do not really need to fight this stuff," you are a disaster waiting to happen. You have got to recognize it requires a fight, and you and I need to be ruthless about it. So, can we just have a little time of contemplation right now and say to God, "We are going to declare war on sin. Whatever hinders and whatever sin entangles me, I am ready to say I am done with it."

Which means that the practical implications of this series, if you give God the blank check and say, "God, whatever You decide in my life is not pleasing to You, I am going to cast it off." I am willing to adopt God's attitude about my form of recreation if I determine by His Spirit and God's word that that is an avenue through which sin comes. I am ready to stop the subscription to that magazine, as benign as my friends may think it is, if it is leading me to covet other people's stuff. I am ready to say no to that television program. I am willing to say no to that internet. I am willing to say no to that job. I am willing to move. I am willing to stop that relationship with that person. I am willing to change states because whatever it might be for you, God is going to say, "Hey, here is the problem for you."

And it is not just the sin, it is the avenue through which sin comes. The lure is temptation, the entanglement is sin. We need to deal with both. It is the hindrance and the sin that so easily entangles. And the command for us is to fight. If you are willing to do that, and I am willing to do that, here is the thing: this series can change your life, radically transform it. It could be one of those series you look back on five years from now and say, "That is where I got really serious about my sanctification. That turned my life around in terms of that habit and that sin that used to entangle me. God changed my life there." You are saying to God, "Okay, God, You got it. You are the King. You see something in my life You do not like, I am ditching it." That is the bottom line. We are going to fight it.

Now, if you are going to really declare war on something, there ought to be some good reasons for it. As a matter of fact, it sounds like a real hassle to fight something. Well, it is. So we need to remember why it is worth it. And the verse starts in verse number one of Hebrews 12 with a reason. And the reason is really a window into the whole 11th chapter. Look at it again, verse number one, the first line: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, then," he says here, "let us throw off everything that hinders."

Now it starts with a "therefore," so we are not talking about you having a great church and people around you. We are not talking about that. We are talking about the Hebrews 11 roll call of people that have ambitious faith. That is the backdrop to this chapter. As a matter of fact, those of you with your Greek New Testaments here, some of you scholarly ones among us, you can look at that Greek word right there that translates "witnesses" and it is the word that we use and transliterate into English "martyrs." We have such a great cloud of martyrs.

Now martyrs, just like the English word "witness," can be used in one of two ways. We can say someone is witnessing me, they are witnessing what I am doing, or we can say someone is witnessing to me. They are testifying to me of something else. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. What do you mean we are surrounded? Well, look at chapter 11. All these people are testifying to something. What have we been looking at in Hebrews 11? People that say, "I do not care what the world says, I do not care what people think, I am going to do the right thing, I am going to follow God. I am going to have the faith to move on to the next. I am not going to be lukewarm, I am going to be hot for God." That is what we have been learning about in Hebrews chapter 11.

And he says since we now are surrounded by people that testify to the appropriateness of it, to the value of it, he says now you do it. So that is where we are. Now let's try and see that as the reason. Chapter 11 is the reason for chapter 12. What are the reasons for me to be like those people in chapter 11? Why should I tear off the encumbrances and the sin that entangles me? Well, we learned some things about the guys in chapter 11. Let's go back to chapter 11, verse number six. When we define faith, this was the very first week we looked at verse one and verse six, you might remember. Here's what it says. It says that—look at the last phrase—He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.

Now that was one of the themes throughout chapter 11. That when people in Hebrews chapter 11, Old Testament examples, earnestly sought God, God made it worth their while. He promised good things for them. He rewarded them. Example, just to talk about our fight with sin, drop down to verse 24. Hebrews 11:24. Moses was a good example of this. By faith Moses, when he had grown up, he refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He grew up in the palace, he had everything there available to him, he could have had whatever kind of earthly indulgence he wanted. But he chose rather, verse 25, to be mistreated along with the people of God that they despised, rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He said no to temptation.

He could have indulged, but he did not. And he regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ, the coming Messiah and righteousness and the embodiment of God, as being of greater value than the treasures of Egypt. Why? Because as Hebrews chapter 11, verse six said, he was looking ahead to his reward. We need to rethink the reasons for this. The great cloud of testifiers testify to this one thing: when we do the right thing, let's put it this way, it is rewarding. Why should I fight sin? Why should I work so hard to follow the Master? Why should I say no to temptation? Because it is rewarded. God will reward you.

There is a promise of reward for doing what is right. And we just need to start there. We started our sermon there. John chapter 10. He is a good shepherd with good intentions for us. But as sheep, what do I have to do? I have to follow the shepherd. So I know that it is requisite upon me to follow the shepherd because if I do, it will go well with me. He wants to give me life and that to the full. Now this is not the prosperity gospel. But what I am saying to you is this: it will go well for us. As Moses said in Deuteronomy, choose life, this would be better for you to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing. It is rewarding.

And I know when we read this passage in Hebrews chapter 11, verse number 26, we looked to the ultimate reward. I know we quoted in that particular sermon the ultimate laying up of treasures in heaven. I get it. And there is an eschatological ultimate reality to God saying to us, "Well done, now here's your reward for doing the right thing." But you need to know that when we think about denying ourselves, saying no to sin, putting to death the sin in our lives, you need to know that there's benefit here and now. And that does not take a lot of imagination because a lot of us have experienced this. We can testify to that. There is reward here and now. Let me give you one example. Turn with me to 1 Timothy chapter four.

I just want you to underline it and highlight this verse because it is very helpful as we think about why should I go to the hassle of denying myself the pleasures of doing what I want to do, saying what I want to say, telling the jokes I want to tell, thinking the thoughts I want to think, indulging in the pleasures that I want to indulge in. Why work so hard at this? Why fight it? Well, it is certainly rewarding to fight it. Winning any skirmish against temptation is going to be rewarding, but it is not just by and by. Do not fall asleep in your bed and think one day God will reward me for this in heaven. When you deny yourself, you need to recognize there's reward here and now. 1 Timothy chapter four, verse number eight.

But godliness, you want to talk about working to do something that is hard? You see those guys in the gym sweating it out; they are working hard. And Paul says there is some benefit for that. But here is the deal. You work hard at this next word: godliness. See, that has value for all things. And this is great. It holds out promise for both the present life and the life to come. I want you to ponder that for a second. Let that percolate for a minute. That when you and I say no to sin, the sins that we are kind of getting entangled in right now, if eight weeks from now we are really winning battles against those temptations in our minds and our thoughts and our words and our attitudes and our actions, it will be rewarded.

Not only in the by and by treasures in heaven, it will be rewarded here and now. And we could get up and you could probably say, "I have fought temptation in one of a few battles in my life, and you're right, it was worth it." Couldn't we open up the mic and have you come up here and say it was rewarding to say no to sin? And though it was hard and I got the ridicule of the world and all that, and maybe I denied myself and I had an unmet appetite or desire, when I said no it was worth it. And if that does not prove it, let's invert that principle. Weren't there times when you gave in to sin that you look back on and say, "Wow, it would have been rewarding not to fall into that sin"?

I do not understand the hubris of our culture where you get these people on the TV all the time going, "I have no regrets about my life." I do not understand that at all. Aren't there some things you regret about your life? I do. I would like to go back and change a million things. I would like every time I have given in to temptation to go back and do it right. Why? Because you reap what you sow. And I would like to take all the scars of every failure and I would like to have not experienced that. There would have been a reward in the passivity of not having the damage caused by sin. Let's start with that.

So I am saying there will be reward. Because if you could run the tape forward in your life and you could see your life working out on two different planes: one where you fight the battle severely, you mortify the flesh, if you say, "I am going to fight it hard," and you see the reward that comes to your life. And then if you say, "Nah, whatever, I am going to cruise and just read me another verse about how much God loves me," if you go that path and you do not worry about this stuff, can't you compare those two lives in the imagination right now of your mind and say that is a better life than that one?

I do not want the scars of any more sin in my life, do you? Do you want to carry that stuff? Do you want to look back and say, "I should have, would have, could have"? I do not want to do that. I want to shore up as much of this as I can. And I hope that you do too. And the bottom line is, it is rewarding. Fight the battle, it is worth it. Every ounce of energy that is expended on fighting sin is you're going to say, "Wow, it is worth it." I know it does not feel like it in the middle of temptation, but it is worth the fight. Rethink the reasons. Reason number one, and certainly Hebrews 11 proved this to us: it is rewarding. It holds out promise and we saw these people testifying to the way that God rewarded them for doing the right thing.

Secondly, and if that was not good enough, fight sin because it is rewarding. How about this one? Fight sin because it is required. It is not only rewarding, it is required. It is not only something that you should do because it is worth it, it is something you should do because you should do it. God is telling you to do it. You must do it. You have an obligation to do it. You are clinging to a cross where God's anger was spent and Christ Himself took the penalty of that sin, and it is only something that is right to do because you have a debt. Just being forgiven indebts you to fighting sin in your life.

Let me give you one example. Go to Romans chapter eight. In Romans chapter eight, I hope that we will see with the clear and explicit language of this text that you and I have no option. Being engaged in a fight with temptation and sin is your birthright as a Christian. It starts at conversion and you are not let off the hook until you die. Contrary to the Wesleyans, our good friends in the Wesleyan Church, here is the deal: this battle does not stop in this life. You are going to fight it when you're 90 years old. There is going to be some area where you are going to see that you have got to declare war on sin. There is no perfectionism here. You and I are in this fight all the way to the end. That is every example in the scripture, and it is an obligation that we have.

Look at the word in verse 12. Romans chapter eight, verse number 12: "Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation." And that is a big legal word, a forensic word. It is a debt that we owe. You are in contract for this. You are a debtor to some obligation. And he says, "First of all, let me just tell you, it is not to the sinful nature." You are not enslaved to your body's impulses. You are not obligated, you are not in debt to carry out the desires and satisfy the appetites that you have innately in your fallen flesh. To live according to the sinful nature, if you do, verse number 13, here is the deal: you are going to die. People that do that are not even saved.

But if you live by the Spirit, here is the obligation. The obligation is to put to death the misdeeds of the body. And again, that's the mortification. That is the big word. That is even a stronger word than fighting. Whatever it is that is sinful, whatever it is that is less than holy, our obligation is to kill that stuff. There is a part of our lives that needs to die. And if you do that, you will live. There's the paradox, bottom of verse 13. Because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Now that adds a whole new conundrum in theology and that is this: that if you are fighting sin as a Christian, it is something you're not only obligated and required to do, but the obligation is so strong you could flip that on its head and look at it this way: if you are not fighting sin, you are not saved.

This is where God really indwells your life and is working through you. And if you are led by the Spirit of God, you are sons of God and people that are led by the Spirit of God are putting to death the misdeeds of the body because they are obligated to do so. And you're not on your own in this. As a matter of fact, if you want a cross-reference on this, jot down Philippians chapter two, verses 12 and 13. What a great set of verses, why don't we look at it?

The conundrum of your fight with sin, and by that I mean it's paradoxical. I'm calling you to fight sin. And some of you are thinking, "Okay, I should do that." But here's the deal: if you are a Christian, as 1 John 3 puts it, your relationship with sin is already changed. You are fighting sin already, maybe not as well as you should, because God's seed abides in you. 1 John 2 puts it, if you say you are a follower of God but you're not walking as He walked, if you're not fighting the temptations in your life, then we got a real question about your Christianity. John calls you a liar.

Here is the conundrum, verse 12. Here is the paradox. He says, "Therefore, dear friends," Paul writes to the Philippians in Philippians 2:12, "as you've always obeyed"—and that does not mean they were perfect, but they were always working at it, they were always moving, they were following Christ, they were following the Shepherd. Not only in my presence when the preacher was pounding the pulpit and breathing down their neck, but now much more in my absence, I'm hearing good reports you guys are still following Christ. He says, "Continue, keep on going to work out your salvation. Keep working at it. And do it with fear and trembling." So get to work, fight this sin. And what is the context? Look at verse number 12, obeying God. Fight, work to obey God. Do it.

Work it out, continue to work it out. That would be how some people are taking this sermon right now. I have to work at it. You do have to work at it. But remember this: it is so required that it is guaranteed by the indwelling of God in your life. In other words, you are going to fight this battle. All I am doing is giving you some tools to help you fight it because every real Christian if you say this, "Well, I'll look at maybe I'll fight sin in my life," if you can even say that, you're probably not even a Christian. Christians from the inside out, which are real Christians, are people that have God living in them. And because God lives in you, He has already declared war on sin in your life.

And He's going to push you to do it. Look at the next verse. Work out your salvation, obey God, work to obey God, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose. Translation: He is making you holy. He declared you holy at salvation; that is called justification. Now He is working in you to make you more holy in your life. That is what we are talking about. And to do that, what do we do? Declare war. But here is the deal: it is guaranteed. You're going to be declaring war. The question is how adept are we at it? How good are we at it? How skilled are we at it? Because some people you know bear fruit, some 30, and then other people bear fruit some 60, and then other people bear fruit some 100-fold. And here is the deal: it is rewarding to go after it, and it is also required.

But I would say listen, you have no option to be passive. It is a non-optional fight. So we are all going to engage in it. I am just telling you the harder we fight it, the more rewarding it is. But it is required. So please be encouraged by this: that it is rewarding, and please feel obligated by this: it is required. There is one more thing. In the 11th chapter of Hebrews, this great cloud of witnesses testify to something else. Not only that it is rewarding and that it is required, but they testify to the fact that it is right. And by that I mean it is right in a supra-true way. It is above the circumstances of just, "Yeah, it is the right thing to do, therefore I got to do it." I am talking about it is right in the fabric of the cosmos.

It is right in the most profound sense of all. Let me give you one example of this. Jot down if you would Psalm 51. Psalm 51 and Psalm 32, those two Psalms reflect David's penitent heart. And the superscript in Psalm 51 makes it very clear: this is after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and by proxy murdered Uriah, Bathsheba's husband. Now those are some pretty serious sins. Committing adultery, I mean it starts as some kind of—he did not plan it, but he is gazing at this naked woman across the street, and then he is going to go pursue her, and then he is going to bring her into his bed, and then he is going to then impregnate her, and now he is going to say, "I got a real problem on my hands." So he says, "Hey, I got a captain out there who can get the guy killed and then maybe I can..." He does all he can to dig a deep, deep hole of sin.

And I'm thinking if you're Uriah's parents, if you're Bathsheba's sister, you're mad at David, are you not? You're saying, "You violated our family. You killed my son," if you're Uriah's parents. What if you're Uriah's brother? "You killed my brother. I mean, you're totally responsible for this." Here it goes. Psalm 51, verse number four, David cries this out of the depths of his heart. He says, "Against You," speaking to God now, "and You only have I sinned." Does that sound odd to you? I mean if you're in Uriah's bowling team or something, I'm thinking, "No, you sinned against us. You hurt us. You sinned against Bathsheba, you sinned against your wife, you sinned against Uriah."

And yet he says, "You know what, that is all true on this level. But when it comes to sin in its most profound theological sense, we have sinned against God Himself." Every sin you commit is violence against the character of God. It is not right on that philosophical, theological level. Your sin, whether it is an outburst of anger, kicking the dog, screaming at your wife, lustful thought, compromise at work, telling a lie, whatever it is, it does violence against the character of an omnipotent, holy God who created the universe and sits whether we believe it or not at the center of all things. And out here somewhere in the cosmos, you as a person doing wrong does violence to all that is right.

And in that sense, every sin we commit is an exclusive sin against the righteousness, holiness, and appropriateness of God. That is a big deal. And so not only is it rewarding and not only is it required, it is just right in the most profound sense. So I want to fight sin in my life because it is going to be worth it for me, and it is something I got to do because I am a Christian, and it is just profoundly the right thing to do. We should be serving God and doing righteous things and saying no to temptation because it is right in the most profound sense. My sin does violence to the character of God.

Dave Drury: So having heard Mike Fabarez, what do you need to declare war on today? You're listening to Focal Point and a message titled, "Spurred On by Godly Examples." You can revisit this lesson anytime by going to focalpointradio.org or download the free Focal Point app, which lets you access all of Pastor Mike's Bible teaching resources wherever you go.

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Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hey there, Pastor Mike here. We are almost out of time, but before we go, I wanted to personally invite you to contact us here. Let us know how we can be praying for you. Head on over to focalpointradio.org and click the contact page, or send me a note on Facebook—facebook.com/pastormike—or x.com/pastormike. Can't wait to hear from you.