Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): Why did Jesus come? We pursue the answer to that all-important question next on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann.

Hello and welcome to Hope From the Word with Bill Luebkemann. Bill is the pastor of Calvary Chapel of Marlton. Recently, we've been recalling the Christmas story and we continue today. We're currently considering why Jesus came. Ezekiel was given prophetic insight into the purpose surrounding the coming Messiah some 600 years prior to that first Christmas.

Jesus came to bring peace, but he also, strange as it sounds, brings division. Then, of course, Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. Now to delve deeper into these glorious truths, here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: You don't know what you are asking, Jesus said. Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with? We can, they answered. Jesus said to them, you will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.

This is a funny story here. He says to the sons of Zebedee, James and John, if they can undergo the same baptism he will undergo. He asks them, and he's referring to his death on the cross. They probably don't know that, and they say, "Oh yeah, we can do that. Whatever you want us, we can do it. We're strong and we can do it." And we know from Acts at least one of them died a martyr not too long afterwards. I'm not sure that's what he had in mind.

And Jesus said he is distressed until this baptism is over with. John 19:30, when he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. That's when it was over, and Jesus was distressed before it happened. He was happy here, I'm sure, when it was over, when it was finished, when it was completed, because this is what Jesus was looking forward to and referring to when he said he had a baptism to undergo.

The theme of division may sound odd at this time of peace on earth, goodwill towards men, my peace I leave unto you, but there's a strong theme of division in the scriptures. Matthew 10, verse 34, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man's enemies will be the members of his own household."

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Jesus did come to bring peace, by the way. He came to bring peace between man and God, and he came to bring peace between believers, but he also brings division.

There's division between the Christ and the Antichrist, between light and darkness, between good and evil, between right and wrong, between God's children and the world's children, the devil's children. And you can see all this at Christmas, this time of tiding and good joy. It seems to be when more of the anti-God, anti-Christian people come out of the woodwork and want to protest things.

We better not sing "Joy to the World" at the kids' holiday concert. We better not even play it without the words. Unbelievable, but it is division here. Joshua spoke about it back in the Book of Joshua, chapter 24, verses 14 and 15. "Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness." This is Joshua speaking. "Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord."

"But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord." Joshua says you have to choose who you're going to serve. I read this passage at my wedding. I stood right there, and I said, "I have a few things to share." And all my relatives said, "Uh-oh, we didn't know we were going to get into this. He's going to speak at his own wedding."

And this is one of the things that I read. And I told everyone there I was going to be serving the God. And so it's a choice that we have to make. And it's a choice between right and wrong. It's just personified and it becomes, as you read the news or watch the news, however you get your news, or listen to it, you see the constant battle between God and the world, the Christ and the Antichrist, right and wrong, good and bad.

You have to choose who you're going to serve. Will you serve God or will you serve the world, the devil? Will you serve the true Lord and Savior, or will you follow the world, the flesh, and the devil? Will you live your life for Christ so you can spend eternity with him, or will you live for yourself the few short years that are allotted to you here on earth and then spend eternity without him? This is the message Joshua was speaking of. You must choose who you will serve.

Some will choose Christ, some will not. That's why Jesus said, "I've come to bring division. Make up your mind. You have to make a choice here. The time is short, the hour is late, you must choose, and you have to do it soon." And the last reason today we're going to look at why Jesus came, Luke 19:10, "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." And this is by no means the least, by the way. I'm going through these in the order they appear in the scriptures, not necessarily a meaningful order.

Jesus clearly here is saying we were lost, and he came to seek us and to find us. And if you've accepted Christ, then you've been found by him. The sign says, "Seek the Lord while he may be found." Really, he's seeking after us. Jesus clearly says here we were lost, and he has come to rescue us. Ezekiel 34:12, "As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness."

He's better than any shepherd. He'll never run away when the wolf or the fox comes. He'll always be there for us. In Ezekiel 34:16, just a few verses later, "I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice." We see here these prophecies were given to Ezekiel something like 600 years before Christ was born.

Yet they clearly say his purpose was, one of them, to reach out to the lost sheep. He'll bind up the injured, strengthen the weak, shepherd the flock with justice. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. John 3:17. We see again one of his purposes was clearly to save the world. And God clearly told us he didn't want to lose anyone. In Luke chapter 18, verse 18, a certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments. Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother." "All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

There was a lot of folks in the Bible who, when Jesus healed them, they wanted to follow him and he said, "No, you can't follow me. Go back and tell your own town or your own community. Go back and tell your family what God did for you." Here's a guy Jesus invited to follow him. Who knows, maybe he would have been the 13th apostle. Maybe he would have been one of the closest disciples. Jesus said, "Come and follow me." Here's what the guy did, verse 23. When he heard this, he became very sad because he was a man of great wealth.

Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Those who heard this asked, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus replied, "What is impossible with men is possible with God." Peter said to him, "We have left all we had to follow you." "I tell you the truth," Jesus said to them, "no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and in the age to come, eternal life."

Years ago, when I was a young believer, somebody told me a cockamamie understanding of this passage here, and it continues to go around the church. It was that there was a gate through the wall into Jerusalem which was really hard to get through. In order to get a camel through it, he had to get on its knees and really squeeze through. It's very awkward. And you had to push and drag, you'd be pushing behind the camel to push it through and pulling through. It was a certain gate in the wall of Jerusalem, so this explanation goes.

That it was very, very difficult to get a camel through there, which makes you wonder why they didn't just go around the corner and go through the regular gate. I have a friend who was in Vietnam and he was a Christian believer in the sixties when he was in Vietnam. He said they spent one time like three or four days hacking through the jungle. It was so dense, you could hardly fit between the trees. They were hacking and sawing and making very slow progress getting through the jungle. Three days of hard, excruciating, back-breaking work.

And when they finally came out, they came into a clearing and they saw a kid there on a bike selling Coke. And he said, "Why don't you take the road right over there?" We didn't know there was a road. Although he did, cutting down trees was better than fighting the enemy, so he wasn't unhappy about that. And the problem with that story is it's just not true. This was talking about a sewing needle and a hole in it. That's what it means here, a sewing needle.

Now maybe they were bigger then than they are now, but they weren't big enough to fit a camel through. The idea here is it's impossible. The problem with that explanation that I heard years ago is it makes it sound like you can get into heaven with a lot of hard work, a lot of pushing and shoving and pulling and kicking, you can get in. And that's not the message Jesus wanted to get through here. He wanted to get through it's impossible to get to heaven on your own. That's what this is all about here.

That's why those who heard it said, "Well then how can we be saved?" He wasn't trying to present something that was exceedingly difficult but achievable. He was presenting something here that was impossible. And that's why he said in verse 27, "What is impossible with men is possible with God." In other words, you get into heaven because of what he did, not because of what we did or we do. And we see in this parable, eternal life, this ruler came to him and said, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He wanted eternal life.

And we also see in the parable the kingdom of God, when Jesus said how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. And we see in it a further clarification of why Jesus came. He came to seek us and he came to save us. And he is willing to tell us what we have to do to get into his kingdom. It is simple, very simple. We have to follow him. And who was it that Jesus went to first? In Matthew, he gave this instruction to the twelve: "Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel."

That's where his ministry started, but it's not where it ended. It started there, but it didn't end there. It started with the lost sheep of Israel, the Jews who he went to first. And the sheep there really were lost. They were in the middle of all kinds of ungodly things, just like you and I were before we met him. Over in Matthew 18, verse 10, "See that you do not look down on one of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven."

If there's anyone you look down on or you can't stand to be around or who bothers you, this is what Jesus said: "Their angels always see the face of my Father in heaven." "What do you think?" Jesus says in verse 12 here. "If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost."

In this parable here we see again he's going after those who are lost. And even if it is only one in a hundred, he will go after that one in a hundred. He will. He came to the earth for all of our sins, but he also did it just for you and just for me. And though we were lost, we were all lost, I was lost, you were lost, but although we were lost, he found us. And though we were dead in our sins, he made us alive. And he wants us to live for him.

Romans 6:13. "Do not offer the parts of your body to sin as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness." We have been brought here, it says, from death to life. And he wants us to offer ourselves to him with that in mind, to keep that in mind, to remember at all times. We were dead and now we're alive. We were brought from death to life. It's an even better deal than if a stiff in the morgue got up.

What happened to us is even better than that. When I was a kid, I used to love to answer the phone and say, "Hello, City Morgue." And one girl once, she said, "Hi, is Susie there?" I said, "No, this is the City Morgue." And she said, "Morgue?" I said, "Yes, this is where we keep dead bodies." She said, "Oh how awful!" and hung up. Well, this is an even better deal than that. You see, a stiff in the morgue gets up, that would be pretty shocking, but this is even better than that.

We say that God brought us from death to life. I did a lot of other things too, but I can't say what they all were. In Ephesians 2 here, verse 1: "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinfulness and following its desires and thoughts."

"Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved." And this is the long and the short of it, folks. We were dead and now we're alive. We were lost and now we're found. He came to seek and to save what was lost. He came to separate us from the world and to separate us from everything that is not of him. He came to preach the kingdom of heaven.

He came to be a servant and to teach us to be servants. He came to fulfill the law and the prophets. He did all of that, and it was all planned by God before time began. God knew the whole plan before he created Adam and Eve. He knew they were going to sin. You know, there's a guy now promoting a thing called Open Theism. And basically what he says, he's some university professor, but that of course doesn't mean anything. And he says God does not know the future.

The reason why is, he says, since you didn't make the decisions yet, say that you're going to make tomorrow, you could get up tomorrow and decide to do one thing or another thing. And that since that didn't happen yet, how could God know what's going to happen? And he's written books and everything. I think he just got thrown out of whatever Christian group he was associated with. But he's got a book out, it's called The God of Possibilities. And his whole thing is God doesn't know the future because he doesn't know what decision you're going to make tomorrow.

So you can make your own future with God by making the right decision. And this guy's God isn't very powerful at all. His God is a ninety-pound weakling. Can't do anything. If he doesn't know the future, what good is he? My God knows that the battle is over and that he already won it. And he knew before he created Adam and Eve exactly what they were going to do. Because he is outside of time.

This guy writes all these books, he's trying to get God down here stuck in time where we are. It ain't going to work. God is outside of it. He's before time, after time, outside of time. Whatever that means, I don't know, because I'm stuck in time, but God is not. For him to know what's going to happen tomorrow is no different than us knowing what happened yesterday. He knows what's going to happen tomorrow even better than we know what we ate for dinner last night.

That's a God. And he is not the God of possibilities. He is the God of yesterday and today and tomorrow. And the only decision is, after he did all this work, the only decision each of us have to make is will we invite him into our lives? Will we accept what he did for us? He knew Adam and Eve were going to sin. That's why he planned a way for them to be redeemed. And he knew that you and I were going to sin also, and he planned a way for us to be redeemed also. And here's how it works. It's very simple.

If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. That's our part here. Our part is we decide if we're going to believe in him, if we confess that he is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead. Some people say, "Well, I don't really believe God could raise somebody from the dead." Well, then sorry, but that doesn't qualify you.

You have to believe that. See, and if you don't believe he could raise Jesus from the dead, then he can't raise you from the dead. And if he can't raise you from the dead, then why have a God? Why be bothered with that kind of God? Better to have some other kind of God. People are always making gods in their own likeness. God made us in his likeness. It's sin that has come between us and that has made us different from him. And now he has provided a way back. And he came to do all these things, to seek and save what was lost, to preach the kingdom of heaven, to separate us from the world, to teach us to be servants, to fulfill the law and the prophets.

He did all that. And it was all planned by God before time began. But he also came to die on that cross so that we could believe in what he did and that his blood would pay the debt of our sins. If you've been reading along in Numbers here, which in the church bulletin, the chapters that we put in there every week, it goes from one sacrifice to the next to the next to the next. There's so many animals they had to—I don't know how they keep track of it.

You need a computer to keep track of it now. You know, this day we have to do this many animals at this time. But on this day, and on this week and that week. I mean, it is confusing. I'm glad I live now AD and not BC, so I don't have to be bothered with that, because his sacrifice paid for everything. And all he wants us to do is believe it, to confess with our mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead. Verse 13 says everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Everyone. No losers, nobody left behind, not the first 144,000 of the best Jehovah's Witnesses. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord. It's not related to how much money you have, how much money you put in the offering. It is related to who you know. It's related to if you know God or not through his son Jesus Christ. And everybody can know him if they just ask. And my prayer this morning as we close the service, if you have not made a decision to follow Christ, to ask him into your life, then I pray you would do that even now.

Guest (Male): What glorious good news we're privileged to present to you. And as you just heard Pastor Bill Luebkemann express, God's desire for you is to call on him and be saved. Along with Pastor Bill, we invite you to respond to Jesus, who came to seek and to save the lost. You're listening to Hope From the Word, with a special series of messages designed for the Christmas season.

For a CD copy of the message, call 856-983-1662. That's 856-983-1662. You can also replay today's program and catch what you may have missed at CCMarlton.org. Another great way to listen to a program you enjoyed or access other teachings from Pastor Bill is through the Hope FM app. Go to CCMarlton.org to download the Hope FM app today. It's available on all platforms and it's free.

We want to invite you to join us here at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. We have a Sunday morning service which begins at 10:00. We also have a midweek service as well on Wednesdays at 7:00. It would be great to have you here with us. Look for our directions and more information about the church online at CCMarlton.org. And would you please send us an email sometime today? It would be nice to hear from you and learn how the Lord is using the program in your life this Christmas season.

You can also email Pastor Bill from our website at CCMarlton.org, or just call us if that's preferred. 856-983-1662. We'll have more Hope From the Word from Pastor Bill's Christmas series next time. We'll see you then.