True Commitment, Part 2
Selected Scriptures
Last Lord's Day we were teaching on the subject of commitment, and I just though, "Well, maybe we oughta just cover the basics." So last Lord's Day morning we just talked about the basics of true commitment, of surrender to Jesus Christ. And maybe the Lord has a very real purpose in...in just ministering to our hearts on some of these foundational things that are just kind of cornerstone to our Christian life. In John chapter 13 is a jumping off point. We have a very good illustration of this. That surrender or dedication or commitment or loyalty or whatever you wanna call it to Christ is not just something that is verbalized. It is something that must be actualized. It isn't what we say. It's what we are that is the real issue. And, you know, we make those kind of commitments. They come and go, I suppose, from time to time whenever you get under real stress and you're hurting. You got a lotta guilt or something. You say, "Lord, if You'll deliver me from this deal, I'll commit my life," you know. Or you've all been to camp and you've gone through the camp commitment thing. And we've all done that. Maybe we get into terrible trouble, you know, and everything goes badly, and we say, "Lord, just deliver me from this and I'll commit everything to You." The verbalizations come, and they come pretty freewheeling and...and fairly often to some of us.
But I notice here an illustration in John 13:36 of a man who was real freewheeling with the verbalizations, but never could support 'em with his life. He wanted, in a sense, to be everything that he should've been, but he just really never followed the needed patterns so that he could be. And the desire, you know, without fulfilling the pattern doesn't mean anything. I mean if a guy wants to be a great anything, the want is here. The being is here. In the middle is a tremendous amount of discipline, right? I don't care what it is. If a man wants to be a good doctor, he says, "I'd like to be a doctor." Here's being a doctor. There's a lotta things in between the want and the fulfillment. Doesn't matter what it is, that's how it is.
Well, there's a lotta Christians standing saying, "I want to be..." And here's the objective and all the stuff in the middle is just really what stymies them, 'cause the discipline isn't there. And that was Peter. Notice 36, "Simon Peter said to Him...of course, Jesus is announcing here that He was going to leave, and He was referring to His death...Peter says to Him, 'Lord, where are You going?' And Jesus answered him, 'Where I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shalt follow Me afterwards. Peter, you can't go where I'm going. You can't go through crucifixion and death now. You will later on.' Peter said unto Him, 'Lord, why can't I follow You now? I will lay down my life for Thy sake.'" Well, that sounds good, doesn't it? I mean he's saying, "I will do anything for You, even if it means death."
"Jesus answered him, 'Will you lay down your life for My sake? Truly, truly I say to you, the cock shall not crow till you have denied Me three times."...On the contrary, Peter, your commitment is strictly verbalizing. Boasting in that commitment without any substantiation. Peter, you won't cut it. Oh, there are a lotta people who are making the boast, but they never fulfill the commitment.
You know, I like a verse in 1 Kings 20:11. It's a little bit obscure; but, boy, it's one you really oughta mark down somewhere. It's a tremendously helpful proverb, 1 Kings 20:11, listen to this. "Let not him that puts on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off." Did you get that? In farm language, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." In Notre Dame vernacular, "Don't celebrate the victory at halftime." I mean that's the greatest illustration of 1 Kings 20:11 I ever saw in my life. "Let not him that girds on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off." Just don't count the victory till it's over. And that's really a very important principle and commitment. You know, it's easy, and it's cheap to be able to boast before you've gone through it. Commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ is not some wishful thinking. It's not some idle boast. For Peter, the boasting came easy. The commitment, just really tough.
Lemme show you why. Luke 22, and here in Luke 22 we have a parallel passage to John 13, which follows up his boast, and we get some insights into why he messed up. Nobody could ever fault Peter's wants. They just could fault his submission to the principles that would bring them about. Luke 22 gives us three reasons why Peter failed to be able to carry out his commitment. He made a verbal commitment. He couldn't carry it out for three reasons. Number one, number one is verse 39. Follow as I read. "After Peter had just made his boast...says...and He came out and went, as He was accustomed to the Mount of Olives; and His disciples followed Him." Christ goes to the Mount of Olives after the time in the upper room there before His death. "And He was at the place, He said to them, 'Pray that you enter not into temptation.'" You know, He was saying that, "Things are going to be very difficult when I'm captured, and you better pray that you not fail to be able to handle the pressure that's gonna come through temptation. You better spend some time praying."
"And He went away about a stone's cast, kneeled down and prayed, saying, 'Father if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me, nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done.' And there appeared an angel unto Him from Heaven, strengthening Him. Being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." A beautiful thing to notice Jesus praying. If He needed to pray, beloved, how do we need to pray? "And when He rose up from prayer and was come to His disciples, He found them praying." Is that what it said? Found them what? Sleeping. Oh, that's bad news. "And He said to them, 'Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation.'"
Now, you see, the first failure on the part of Peter in carrying out his commitment was the failure to pray. He slept instead of praying. Deadly to commitment. You know, and it's very easy to be so smug and so boastful and so self-confident about your commitment because of what you know and because of the things that have...you've done in terms of maybe service to the Lord, that you just kind of feel your commitment is rock solid on the basis of your self-confidence. And, boy, the props just get knocked out from under you unless you lean on divine strength. That's what prayer is.
There was another thing that made Peter fail. Not only a lack of prayer, but he had a problem with self-will. He just never really learned how to submit to the Lord's will. He was pushy. Verse 50, you know, the soldiers came, and the...the priests and the high priests and the scribes and everybody came to take Jesus there in the Garden, and Peter grabbed his sword, and one of them standing by, whose name was Malchus according to the Matthew account and others, was the term of the high priest. It says, "Then Peter cut off his right ear, and Jesus said, 'Just let this happen as it is. Peter, put that sword away.'" Of course the other account tells us. You live by the sword, you'll die by it. "He touched his ear and healed him."
Now, here you see stupid Peter, got a sword in his hand, and he's gonna chop up the people who are gonna capture Christ. That wasn't the point. Jesus says, "Will you put that thing away?" You see, instead of submitting to the will of God, he was so confident, he was so strong in his own verbal commitment, that he was just gonna go sailing away in his own stupidity. I mean if you look at your own life, I look at mine, and I wonder, "How many times, without really careful prayer and knowing God's will, have I bulldozed into some deal, and the Lord comes along and says, "Excuse him, folks." It's a little out of order.
Well, that was part of Peter's problem. You know, one thing about commitment, if you're gonna commit yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ, you better wait to see what He wants you to do. Another problem that Peter had was he was a coward. And cowardice and commitment don't go along very well. Verse 54, "They took Him, led Him, brought Him to the high priest's house. And Peter followed afar off." Now, that's the first mistake that he made in terms of really revealing his cowardice. He followed afar off. He didn't have the courage, he didn't have the guts, if you will, to stand near Jesus. All this verbal commitment, "I'll die for You," and he wouldn't even follow Him. He wouldn't even walk with Him. He wouldn't even claim to belong to Jesus Christ. And right away, bang, bang, bang, he denies Christ on three occasions.
Yeah, commitment is great, but I'm telling you, if you're gonna drift far off from Jesus Christ, if you're afraid to be identified with Him, if you don't want anybody to know you're really a Christian, if you don't wanna stick out in the world and be somebody different, if you're not willing to count the cost and be what a Christian is, then, frankly, your commitment isn't worth anything. You see, Peter failed because of a lack of prayer, because of the positive direction of his own self-will, and because of cowardice. He wasn't willing to stand up and be counted for Jesus Christ, and so his commitment was ashes in his mouth.
Now, what is commitment? I mean just making the verbal statement here, and then down the road seeing the fulfillment of it involves something in the middle. There are some principles that get me from the statement to the actual commitment. What are those principles? Lemme give them to you. I gave you three last time. We'll just review 'em very quickly, and I'll give you a couple more. And...and these are just very simple, basic milk-type concepts. One, commitment begins with a commitment to love the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, friends, you must remember that this does not mean a sentimental attachment. Because Peter had that, didn't he? Peter definitely felt sentimental toward Christ. He definitely in his heart felt emotion toward Christ. But the way the Bible defines this love is self-sacrificing obedience. Remember from John 21? "Do you love Me? Do you love Me? Do you love Me? Feed My sheep. Feed My sheep. Feed My lambs."
"Do you love Me? Then you're gonna get crucified for Me. Do you love Me. Follow Me." All the way down the line, Jesus defined love as self-sacrificing obedience. "If you love Me, keep...what?...My commandments." And, you see, to begin with, commitment means to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is not loving Him in the sense of an emotion or a sentiment. It is loving Him in the sense of obedience. That's loving Him.
Now, I want you to look at Matthew 22. I wanna give you a little insight here. Matthew 22 is a very helpful portion, because it helps us to see the most important thing there is in the world for human beings. Matthew 22:34. Pharisees, of course, and the Sadducees are doing all they can to upset Jesus and try to trap Him. And so the Pharisees followed the Sadducees, who had been flattened by His answers. And one of them, verse 35, says, "A lawyer asked Jesus a question, testing Him...This is his question...'Master, which is the great commandment in the law?' Jesus said unto him, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.'" The whole Old Testament is build on these two principles. Love God and love each other.
Now notice this, the incident here is interesting because, you see, the Jews had a problem with this concept of the greatest commandment. In the first place, there were some commandments in the Bible. In the second place, the traditions of the rabbis kept stacking up more and more commandments. Till the time of Christ, you got 600 commands, 600 little specific things that they had to do. There was no human way to be able to crank out all 600 of those things all the time. So, since they couldn't do that all the time, the rabbis had to accommodate. I mean if...if the only way you could stay right with God was to keep the law...and there were so many rules that you couldn't keep 'em, you were really in a bad place. So the rabbis came along and divided the laws into the light laws and the heavy laws. And they said, "The heavy laws are, you know, just that. They're heavy. They're binding. The lights, ahhhhh, you can give a little on those." Some rabbis even went further than that, and some rabbis taught that if a man selected just one great precept to observe, he could disregard all the rest.
Now, you see, they did that because of the absolute hopelessness of the legal system. God was trying to show them its hopelessness. But instead of accepting its hopelessness and turning to faith in God as the only hope of salvation, they just eliminated all the necessity of the law down to any one that might wanna keep. And, of course, that made an argument about which one they'd have to keep. Which was the great one? And if they kept the great one, they could let the rest flop. Which was the one thing that, if God had a choice, He would want them to keep and not others? And so the question comes in verse 36. "Which is the great commandment?" And Jesus said, "Here it is. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like it, Love thy neighbor as thyself." You can imagine the reaction of the lawyer. "Oooooh. That's a small thing."
But, you see, the first great moral principle stated, not in the Ten Commandments, but implied, but stated here by our Lord Jesus Christ is to love God with all your faculties. That's basic to commitment. That's where it all begins. And, friends, the loving here, it has a sentiment to it. It is love with your heart. There is feeling. There is affection. There is understanding. But it is also loving with your soul. Then there is love with the mind, the intellect. Every dimension of man is called upon to love God. Now, how is that love manifested? We saw it before. It's manifested in self-sacrificing obedience...Self-sacrificing obedience.
You know, in Revelation 2, when Ephesus left its first love, it wasn't just the loss of sentiment. It was the loss of obedience. They ceased obeying the principles they knew to be true, and it caused the dissolution of the great church at Ephesus, founded by Paul and pastured by Timothy. Sad. Basic to commitment is to love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And that's what Jesus wanted out of Peter, and He defined that love as sacrifice. Service to God. Obedience to God.
Second principle we mentioned last time is in the same passage. Commitment to love the brothers. The second principle of commitment is to love one another. Over and over again, the New Testament. Philippians, 1 Peter, over and over again, love each other, love each other, love each other. It becomes a recurring theme in 1 John and as well as other books. Even 1 Thessalonians says that we have been taught of God to love one another. So he says in the next verse, 1 Thessalonians 4:10, "Increase in love toward one another." Then in the 12th verse, he says, "That the outsiders may know the legitimacy of your Christianity." Loving each other is so basic. It has the purpose of evangelism. It has the purpose of...of strengthening each other, of serving each other.
Now, mark this, the second commandment is, "To love thy neighbor as thyself." Now, you remember what I told you last week? John 13, you have the illustration of Jesus loved His disciples. And He says, "As I have loved you, so love one another." And how had He loved them? He'd washed their feet. Love, again, is not emotion. Love is service to one another. Love is serving each other's needs. That's what love is. Now, I can give you a simple illustration of that, that maybe it will help you to see what I mean. It's so easy, when you talk about loving your neighbor as yourself, to mess that up.
Lemme give you an illustration of what it means. Turn to James chapter 2. You know, I've heard so many psychologists, you know, so many sermons on that. I've heard dozens of sermons on that. I've never heard anybody really handle it what I think is Biblical. "Well," they say, "before you can love somebody, you have to love yourself." You ever heard that? Somebody asked me last Lord's Day, after I finished, "Weren't you gonna talk about the fact that before we can love anybody else we have to love ourselves?" I said, "I might talk about that since you mentioned it." So now I'm gonna talk about it. He said, "You have to love yourself before you can love anybody else. You see, you have to have a proper psychological self-image." And he goes on, "If you think you're a scum of the earth, if you think the lowest of the low, if you don't have an exalted view of yourself and see yourself for all that you really are, you'll never be able to love other people."
That's so much philosophical, psychological gobbledygook. I don't even know what they're talking about. But that isn't what the Bible's talking about. Because the Bible is not talking about sentiment. The Bible is not saying you're supposed to love yourself. You know, "Ummmmm, just, you know, you're so terrific, you know." That is not what the Bible's talking about in terms of love. It is not the sentiment that God's after. I'll show you. James 2:1, "Brethren, my brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons." In other words, if you're a Christian, don't treat people with respect and other people with indifference. Everybody's equal. "If there comes into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in fancy clothes, and there comes in a poor man in vile raiment, oh, they walk in the back door here, and you have respect to him that wears the fine clothing and say to him, 'Sit thou here in a good place.' And you say to the poor, 'Stand over there,' or 'Sit under my footstool. Get out of the way, fella.' Are you not then partial in yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Hearken, my beloved brethren: Hath not God chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs to the Kingdom which He's promised to them that love Him? But you have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by which you are called? Have you forgotten that, for the most part, the rich have nothing to do with you or with Christ?"
"It's hard for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, harder for a rich man to get in than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle."
"Do not they blaspheme that worthy name, these rich people?" Now watch verse 8. "If you fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture...what's the royal law?...'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' you do well. But if you have respect of persons, you commit sin." Now, notice, the royal law is to love your neighbor as yourself. What it means is treat everybody as you would treat yourself. Now watch. It means that whatever great sacrifices you make for your own comfort, you make for other peoples' comfort equally without respect of person. It has not to do with your psychological self-image. It has to do with your service toward other people. You just stop and think of the lengths you go to make sure you're comfortable. When you're uncomfortable, you go out and buy a different chair to sit in. Or you don't like the bed, you buy a different bed. And when you want some particular thing to eat, you go buy what you want, because that's what you want. Or when you're tired of your car, you go buy the kind of car you want. You buy the house you want. You do the things you want. You get up and you go through all kinds of things, and you do difficult things, and you drive yourself to get what you want.
That's what He's saying. That's the same way you should drive yourself to meet the need that somebody else has. The same way that you treat your own desires, treat somebody else's. Love them in terms of self-sacrificing service, like you'd make sacrifices for yourself. That's the point. It isn't psychological at all. It's just plain, old, practical, everyday serving each other with the same intensity that I serve myself. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to get up off whatever it is that you're doing that makes you comfortable and be uncomfortable to make somebody else comfortable? Are you willing to sacrifice the thing that you enjoy so that somebody else can have their needs met? That is loving your neighbor as yourself. It isn't psychological. You sit down and evaluate what you do for yourself and then translate that equally to other people whether they're rich or poor, and do it for them. That's the point. Now, you see, that's loving the brothers the way the Bible says. That's commitment.
Third principle of commitment was holiness. We talked about the fact that God desires us to be pure and holy. "Vessels fit for the Master's use," 2 Timothy 2:20 says. "This is the will of God...1 Thessalonians 4:3...even your sanctification. Stay away from sexual sin...he says...handle your body so it honors God