Key Life Network

Guest (Male): Where were you the week of November 6, 1988? It was an era of acid wash jeans and hair metal. The TV show Rosanne had just debuted and just two days later, on November 8, George H. W. Bush would be elected as president.

It's also when Steve delivered a timely sermon called "What God Hates," based on a passage from Matthew 23. So far this week, we've learned God hates obstructors of life and crushers of joy. And yesterday, we ended on a powerful but very sad story about a young Christian hippie named Eddie, who was essentially chased out of the church because his hair was too long and his clothes weren't quite right.

And this sermon is brought to you by The Vault Project at keylife.org/vault. The Vault is our ongoing effort to rescue and preserve vintage messages from Steve by digitizing old tapes and reel-to-reels. More about The Vault soon, but for right now, let's go back to 1988. Here is Steve.

Steve Brown: Thirdly, you have to be careful because God not only hates obstructors of life and crushers of joy, God also hates dichotomizers of divinity. Matthew 23:16-22: "Woe to you blind guides, who say, 'Whoever swears by the temple, it's nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.' Fools and blind. For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?

And 'Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing, but whoever swears by the gift that's on it, he is obliged to perform it.' Fools and blind. For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift? Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it. And he who swears by the temple swears by it and by Him who dwells in it. And he who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it."

Ted DeMoss tells a great story about a woman who comes into a bank with two bags of money. It's obvious that they're big bags and there's a lot of money in those bags, and she comes to the teller and she says to the teller, "I want to make a deposit." The teller says, "Do you have an account here?" And she said, "No, but I'd like to open one." The teller immediately recognized that this is somebody who needed some help with somebody bigger than she was. So she sent this woman over to the president of the bank.

The president of the bank said, "You want to open an account?" And she said, "Yes, I do." And he said, "How much money do you have there?" And she said, "About $100,000." He said, "Where'd you get that kind of money?" And she said, "Well, I bet on future happenings." He said, "What do you mean you bet on future happenings?" She said, "Well, like I bet you next Monday that you'll come into the bank with pink underwear on."

He said, "I don't own any pink underwear." She said, "I'll bet you $10,000 you come in on Monday with pink underwear." And he thought to himself, "This poor bag lady with all this money needs a lesson. Anybody carries this money around in cash, I'm going to teach her a lesson. I'm going to accept her bet." So he said to her, "I warn you, I don't have any pink underwear, but I bet you $10,000 I don't come in here with any pink underwear on Monday."

So on Monday, this elderly lady walks into the bank and she's got a guy with her. And she comes up to the bank president and says to the bank president, "I'm here to settle our bet." And he said, "Look, I told you before I don't have any pink underwear. I told you that." She said, "Well, I want to check."

So they went back behind his desk and he unbuttoned his pants and pulled them out just a little bit to show. And then he looked up and the man that was standing behind the elderly lady was falling over flat. And he said to the elderly lady, "What's with him?" She said, "Oh, I bet him $20,000 you wouldn't pull down your pants in the middle of this bank."

Now, what's going on here is that kind of hedging of bets. Torah had said this. Torah had said you must never swear, but if you swear and swear by God and break it, you have offended the God of the universe. Now you remember what Jesus said in Matthew 5:33 about this same subject. This is what he said: "Again, you have heard that it was said to them of old, 'You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform the oaths to the Lord.'

But I say to you, do not swear at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by earth, for it is His footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king, nor shall you swear by your head, because you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your 'Yes' be 'Yes' and your 'No' be 'No'. For whatever is more than these is from the evil one."

Now these Pharisees and scribes were masters of hedging and evasion. They looked out and said, "Look, the God who gave us the Torah, and we say this about our scriptures, is certainly a practical God. And we live in a gray world. Everything's not black and white. I mean, there's sometimes when you've got to swear and you've got to break it because that's business. That's the way the world works. Sometimes you've got to compromise. Nobody's perfect."

And so they dreamed up, as we dream up, a set of rules that let them out of living according to the law. They said, "If you swear by one thing in the temple, it's okay if you break it. But if you swear by something else in the temple, then you're in real trouble if you break it." In other words, they said, "We're going to separate the real world from the sacred world."

There's going to be the spiritual and the secular, and as long as you're dealing in the secular, then you can swear anytime you want and you can break it anytime you want. What was the danger there? The danger there was the separation. And when Jesus said you should never swear by anything, Jesus was saying God is everywhere. He's all you are. He's everything. He is real.

You heard about the two bookies who came to church, and as they walked away, one bookie said to the other, "Stupid, it's 'Hallelujah,' not 'Hialeah.'" Well, we say "Hallelujah" inside church and "Hialeah" outside of church. I want you to know, people are always saying, "You can't have jazz in the church or no liturgical dance in the church." Listen, this place is no more sacred than that yard out there. This is where the people of God meet.

People always come to me and say, "I'm going to go into full-time Christian service." You're in full-time Christian service. Everything you do, whether you're playing golf, or whether you're singing, or whether you're laughing, or whether you're going to school, or whether you're working, or whether you're reaching out to a neighbor, that's your worship. That's what it is to belong to God. And Jesus is saying here, "I hate people who separate."

He said there's one world over here and another world over here. God is God of all worlds, of everything that is and of all your life. And so you don't have to swear by anything. As soon as you give your word, you are His. You've got to be careful.

Fourthly, you ought to be careful because God not only hates obstructors of life and crushers of joy and dichotomizers of divinity, He also hates magnifiers of superficialities. Matthew 23:23-24: "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you pay tithe of mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel."

I think maybe I told you about the elderly lady who was dying. She'd been a servant all of her life to other people. She had worked for them, and she'd cared for them, and she had compassion on them. And a mature Christian of the church came to visit her on her deathbed and found out in the course of the conversation that she had not been baptized. And he said, "My dear, what are you going to do when you get to heaven and you stand before the throne and He finds out that you haven't been baptized?"

At that point, she took her rough, callous, coarse hands and lifted them above the covers and said, "I will show Him my hands." You know what God hates? God hates that trait which makes the five points of Calvinism more important than love. God hates those people who make the Westminster Confession of Faith more important than evangelism. God hates those who place proper ritual above obedience, those who make religious words more important than reaching out to the hurt and the needy who need to know Him.

Harper Davidson said it at a Bible study that I teach on Wednesday. We were talking about eschatology, and we were looking at some of the details of the pre-millennial, post-millennial, pre-trib, post-trib, mid-trib position. And I was explaining, as a teacher always explains, what each of those positions meant and which one was proper. And Harper said something like this. He said, "I don't see how it makes any difference."

He said, "I don't see how it makes any difference in how I reach out to my brothers and sisters in Christ and whether or not I live an obedient life and whether or not I'm faithful to Christ. I don't care." And I was offended at first until I got to thinking about it, and I thought, you know, he is right. Now, the great hope is important. The five points are important. Westminster is important because that's the basis of the place from which I operate. But I want you to know, there are other things that are more important than that.

And Jesus said, "Make sure that you don't magnify things that are small and make them big and major and the thrust of your life." I remember one time, for those of you who are not theologically sophisticated, those of us who are Calvinists are not real happy with the first of the four spiritual laws of Campus Crusade for Christ. The first law says God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Now we know that God probably doesn't love you if you're not of the elect, and He certainly doesn't have a plan for your life if you're not of the elect. And you have no right to tell anybody that they're elect if they're not, so you can mess up this whole thing. Well, a young man came before the presbytery, which encompasses Chattanooga, where Ben Hayden is, to be examined for the ministry. And he had a copy of the four spiritual laws in his pocket.

And they examined him, and he was very sharp. He was very theologically literate, articulate about his faith. When he left, they were discussing this young man. One of the guys said, "You know, I really think he'd make a good pastor, even though he had the four spiritual laws in his pocket." Those who were there said Ben took his fist and hit the table, and the table bounced off the floor. And he said, "Do you believe that it's come to the point in this denomination where we can't tell a man that God loves him?" So important that we get first things first. We don't forget about the other things; they're important. But make sure we get it right.

Guest (Male): Thanks, Steve. All this week, we've been enjoying a sermon from Steve called "What God Hates." So far, we've covered obstructors of life, crushers of joy, dichotomizers of divinity, and magnifiers of superficialities. Say that five times fast. But there are yet three more types of person on that list and we'll meet those folks tomorrow.

As I've mentioned, this sermon is just one from a larger series on the book of Matthew that Steve gave from 1986 to 1989. Wow, three years. That is an incredible wealth of teaching and you can find all of it right now at keylife.org/vault. That's V-A-U-L-T. We also have sermon series on Acts, the gospel of John, there's a new one on Hosea. And if you're not ready to dive into a 126-sermon series, we also have one-off sermons as well. Something for everybody, right?

We have been so blessed by folks contributing to The Vault Project this year and that generosity is what allows us to digitize these old tapes and reel-to-reels, preserving them for both us and future generations. If you'd like to hear more classic sermons and join us in that effort, I invite you to check out keylife.org/vault. There you'll find a mini-documentary about our preservation process and hear a free sample. Again, that's keylife.org/vault. We will wrap up this sermon tomorrow and I hope you'll join us for that.

Hey, since we just mentioned Acts, I want to let you know about a special booklet called "Through the Eyes of Grace: Acts and Romans." This is taken from Steve's classic overview of the New Testament. How did the early church get its start? What about the leadership, Pentecost, the fellowship of believers, the persecution? Well, it's all covered in this booklet. Get your free copy right now by calling us at 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That's 1-800-539-5433.

You can also email steve@keylife.org to order that booklet or go to keylife.org/contact to find our mailing addresses for the U.S. and Canada. Again, just ask for the absolutely free booklet called "Through the Eyes of Grace: Acts and Romans." Hey, and before you go, would you consider giving to Key Life to help the work of our ministry? Giving is fairly easy. You can charge a gift on your credit card or include a gift in your envelope.

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