Understanding Salvation Through Obedience

They say the Old Testament is confusing or difficult. The reality is that God is the same yesterday, today and forever. And there's no different God in the Old Testament that's in the New Testament. The same concepts that God uses in the New Testament, He uses in the Old Testament. There never were two ways to being saved. There was always just one. And what God does in the Old Testament is explains the details in a different way, in a setting, but they're really the same concepts. In verse 11, Moses is saying, Now what I'm commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It's not up in heaven, so you have to ask who will ascend to heaven and get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it. All the things that He asked in the Old Testament and the things in the New Testament are really possible for us to do. They're not beyond our capacity or our ability. They're not too difficult for us. While we may say that all of us sin at one point or another, our sin is not always that we don't do anything that God tells us. Usually there's one or two things that we don't do. We're doing things and we fail on some of them, but not any of the things that God asked is it impossible for us to do. And that was true in the law in the Old Testament. The instructions God gave were possible for everyone to do. So that's what he means by saying they're not difficult or beyond our ability. They're close by. They're easy for us to get a hold of. They're easy for us to obey. And when he says, and who will ascend to heaven to get it and proclaim it so that we may obey it, there's no reason for someone to have to go a long way off to get what God wants. It's all right here. God has given us everything we need to know to know how to live in obedience to him. So the plan of God and the purpose of God is clearly explained. We can do it. We don't have to have extraordinary knowledge or ability or have to go to some great lengths to find it. Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us, so we may obey it. No, the Word is very near you. It's in your mouth, near you. It is in your heart. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so you may obey it. Whenever Paul is talking about, in the book of Romans, the same dealing with the law, in chapter 10, he's describing what Moses was talking about. I've been doing this study of Romans on Wednesday night, and the passage Paul deals with, with Romans, is dealing with the Jew and Gentiles and how God has worked in their lives and the relationship they have with each other and how both of those groups come to know Christ in the same fashion, in the same way. So in Romans chapter 10, he says, verse 5, Moses describes it in this way. The righteousness that is by the law, the man who does these things will live by them. But the righteousness that is by faith says, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven, that is to bring Christ down, or who will descend into the deep, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? The Word is near you. It's in your mouth, in your heart. That is the word of faith we are proclaiming. Now he goes in this verse to describe what that is. That if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, 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, with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the scripture says, anyone who trusts him will never be put to shame. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile. The same Lord is Lord over all and richly blesses all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Though the passage in Romans where Paul talks about the relationship between Jew and Gentile has the very same message given in Deuteronomy to the Jews, the very same instructions. I think it's important for us to realize that the issue of salvation is critical. And it's important that we understand exactly what that means. Because some of the words that are used to describe that are different than the way we might normally see them. And whenever Paul in Romans chapter 10 says, As for the scriptures, everyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, with your mouth you confess and are saved. And so we oftentimes say to people, if you will confess Jesus Christ as your Lord, if you will say you trust him and you have faith in him, you'll be saved. It puts salvation in terms of just a word spoken rather than a commitment of life. I think all of us have seen over the years, if you've been in church at any length of time, you've seen people who profess trust in Christ, but whose lives drift far away from God. The problem for many people is they're confronted with the idea that if I ask Jesus Christ into my heart, that I'm saved. The reality is that it's much more than that. The reality is that what God asked for us to do is to surrender the control of our lives to him. I could ask you into my house, for example, but it wouldn't mean that you'd do what I told you. The language we use sometimes for salvation doesn't give the full picture of what God's talking about. Moses in the Old Testament was giving them a clear instruction. What I'm commanding you today is not too difficult or beyond your reach. This is easy for you to be able to do. It's not something that's difficult. What he was asking them to do was to commit themselves to live in obedience to the instructions of God. To take the instructions of God as the guide for their life. The Bible is clear about this from the beginning to the end. That you accept the authority of God over your life. And whenever God becomes the ruler of your life, and you submit yourself to live in obedience to him, that he guides your life, and you live in that submission and obedience, that you find life eternal, everlasting life. Saying a few words does not mean the same thing. It is a surrender of your life to the authority of God. I accept you as the ruler of my life. Every time we have vacation Bible school, they try to make it as simple as possible for the kids to understand. But it always distresses me because they say it's easy as ABCs. A. You admit that you're a sinner. B. You believe in Jesus Christ. And C. I forgot what that is. Confess him. You can confess something and not let it control your life. You can believe something is true and not let it control your life. You can admit you're wrong and never be intending to change. In all of those, there's not very much a clear picture of a person saying, I'm giving my life to you to begin to live a different direction. A new kind of life. A life submitted to the authority of God. And so many children hear this and they think it's really easy to do. All I have to say is I believe in God like I believe in anything else in the world. But it's different to believe in God because you believe he is God. And he has authority and power over you. And if he becomes the controller of your life, he will tell you things to do. And if you really believe he has the authority to tell you what to do, you will do them. And it's not simply an entrance into this. It's a lifestyle that goes on forever. In verse 15, Moses expels this out. I set before you today prosperity, death, life and prosperity, death and destruction. To come to place your faith in God is to change the direction of your life. Moses said, what I'm asking you to do is to make a choice about what you're going to do. If you choose to live in obedience to the commandments of God, you will find life and you will find prosperity. Now, the word prosperity or prosper in our culture because of the prosperity gospel that's preached on TV and a lot of churches around. It comes to mean a certain thing for us like you're going to get rich. You're going to have, I read one of the guys that preached that. He said, God wants everybody to have a Rolls Royce. Well, if he wanted everybody to have a Rolls Royce, we'd all have one. All he has to do is give me 10 million Rolls Royces and they'd be in your garage every house. What the Bible means by this in this set of contrasts helps us. If you look at them, he sets before us today life and the opposite is death in the next two words. He sets before us prosperity and the opposite of it is destruction. He's not talking about unlimited wealth. He's talking about the opposite of destruction. You will have a constructive life. You will have a life that is meaningful and valuable. So you have life and you have a life that is constructive, meaningful and valuable. Or you have death and are destroyed. Those are the choices we have. There are no in-betweens on this. So even though a person professes or says I've gone through the ABCs of salvation and their life is not submitted to living in obedience to God, they don't know what this is about yet. And recognizing that this is a life-changing event and it's not simply a change when you make that decision. It's a change the rest of your life. I'll tell you, every one of us have things in our life God wants changed. And if he's the Lord of your life, he's telling you about that. He's making you aware that there are things in your life that don't measure up to what he wants. And that happens to us until the day we die. We're in a constant process of listening to God and allowing him to set before us life. And if we listen to him and we do it, we find the life in all of its fullness as Jesus described it. And if we don't listen to him and do our own thing, you don't even have to be doing anything wicked. Just doing your own thing. It's kind of like, you know, if you have kids you're trying to raise in your family, in your house. And you say, I want you to come in and have supper. And they're outside playing. They might be doing a single thing that's wicked. But I can assure you as a parent, you're going to be mad if they don't come in. It's not what they're doing is bad. It's that they fail to recognize the authority of a parent. And when a person fails to recognize the authority of God, they violated everything that God stands for. That's what makes people enemies of God. So people like to look at their lives and say, well, I'm a good person. You know, if you're a good person, you're going to have a good life. Well, I'm a good person. You know, if you're a parent and you say it's time for supper, you go out the front porch and say, come in, it's time for supper. And the kids didn't come in. You go out there and you're really mad and say, you get in this house right now. You don't have any reason to be mad at me, Dad, because I wasn't doing anything bad. Well, that's a good argument, but it doesn't get very far. Because the voice of authority has been spoken. And it's been ignored as if it had no authority. The child has taken the place of the parent. And the whole order and structure of the family is at risk. That's what it means whenever we listen to the words of God and disobey them. Or even more than that, whenever we know that the words of God are spoken, proclaimed on Sunday, studied on Sunday, proclaimed and studied on Wednesday, and we have no time for it. I mean, if you went out and said to your kid, it's time for supper, and they said, I don't have time to listen to you. I've got some other things on my mind. I mean, sparks would fly. You see, the issue is the authority of God. Does he have the right to tell me what to do? Ignoring the right of God in his proper place is what makes us separated from him. And there can be no resolution to that till the rebellious person says to God, I have ignored your authority over my life, over my marriage, over my family, over my money, over my time. I've acted as if you had no instructions for me with regard to these. And I admit that. And I recognize that I violated your authority. That's what it means to believe that God is the ruler of the world. And that you trust him. So I ask you to forgive me, and I make this pledge to you. I recognize from this point on in my life that you are the ruler of the world, and I give you the right to rule my life. And I accept that authority and will submit myself to it from now till the day I die. I'll learn what you want me to do. I'll put it in practice as best I know how. And I will not stop that as long as I'm alive. That's what it means to be committed to Christ. It is not a simple or easy thing to do because of our rebellious spirit. And yet everyone can do it if they really trusted God. Whenever you witness people and you talk to them about making their, committing their lives to Christ, they always come up with excuses that let you know they don't trust God. They don't believe him. I have a guy say to me one time, I don't want to become a Christian because if I do, I'll have to give up all the things that are fun in my life. What he believes is God is not going to give him anything that's really going to be worthwhile or meaningful for him to do. He doesn't trust God. Now, your kids may say when you say, go out and say, I want you to come in. I have some really interesting things for you to do. They might have every reason in the world to question that because usually that involves some kind of work that they don't want to do. But God, while he asks us to do work, it is always something that is beneficial to us and to those that are around us. He never asked us to do lazy things, nor things that are really his job. He asked us to do things that are good for us, rewarding for us, and beneficial. What Moses is talking about is the very same thing that God tells all the way through the scriptures. Here's what's required of you. Moses said in verse 16, For I command you today. Now, this is an interesting phrase. Normally, we don't think that you can command someone to trust Christ. But he's got the people of Israel before him, and he uses this language, For I command you today to love the Lord your God. Now, the phrase that he's talking about, love in the Bible is not romantic or emotional necessarily, but it's self-denying sacrificial service to someone. So, I command you today to respect the authority of God and submit your life to give yourself in sacrificial service to God because you're recognizing his supreme authority. That's what love means. I command you today to give your life in sacrificial, self-denying service to the Lord your God, to walk in his ways. Okay, now if I've said to God, you take my life and he tells me what to do, and I do the things he tells me, then I'm living the way he wants me to. And that phrase, to walk in his ways, is sort of a way of saying to live your life as he tells you. In those days, everybody walked around. So, wherever you walked, that was your life. And so, they often use this word to describe simply living. So, if you live the way he tells you to live, and keep his commandments, and notice this, you recognize his authority by submitting to it sacrificial, self-denying service, which is what Jesus said, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. It's the same kind of idea. And then you live the way he tells you, and you keep his commandments, decrees, and laws. See, that's what salvation really is. Now, you can compromise this and make it counterfeit when you say to yourself, okay, I'm going to read the Bible, and I'm still going to do what I want to do, but I'm going to keep all these commandments that God gives in here too. And then, because I keep the commandments, I'm going to heaven. Well, you see, you've omitted this personal surrender to God as the Lord of your life. That's the key ingredient. You do the commandments because you've accepted the authority of God over you. The legalism that came out in the Jewish community was a result of them keeping control of their life, and then deciding they were going to do these things over here so they would make it to heaven, and still be in control of their own lives. That's what legalism does. The same actions that the legalist does, the person following God will do with entirely different consequences, because the legalist is trying to get into heaven by their own choice. The person who surrendered to God has trusted his life to God and is living according to the law because he believes the authority of God is critical, and he surrendered to that. So, Moses, when he gives this way of salvation, is giving us nothing less than what God has required since the very beginning, and he does even in the New Testament. Now, if you do this, he says, then you will live and increase. See, this is the same thing he's talking about up here. Have life and prosperity. So you know that he's talking about increasing. He's simply talking about having the things you need, growing in your financial life, growing in your physical life, growing in your mental and spiritual life. You will become a better person. You'll grow to be more of a person than you were before. And the Lord your God will bless you in the land you're entering to possess. The key to God's blessings is for us to respect him as the Lord. And when we respect him as the Lord, he responds to that. And you can put this in the context of your own family life, of parents and children. You know, it's awfully, it's much easier to reward a child who respects your authority, who does what they're supposed to do joyfully, and is faithful in doing it, than it is when you have a child that you have to push, pull, tug, threaten, and beat to get them to do the basic things they need to do. God blesses those who trust him and live in obedience to him. It's a promise he gives us. Whenever you see people around you whose life is not blessed, they need God. And your greatest opportunity to witness to them is to look at their life and the mess it's in and look at your life and see that you're not in that mess and say to them, this is how God has helped me. That's our witness. You don't have to memorize anything. You just have to be alert to the way God is blessing you and see that your own life is different than the people who are living a life of death and destruction. And if your life doesn't have the blessings of God, you need to stop and sit down and say, wait a minute, Lord, what's happening here? I can guarantee if you say, is there anything wrong with me, Lord? Something will come to your mind if there is. God's never shy about asking, answering that question if it needs to be answered. Because he really wants to bless his people, his people, his creation. He made us to be in this relationship of blessings with him. But our own resistance to that's what keeps it from happening. Moses says to the people, if you walk in his ways and keep his commandments, decrees and laws, then you will live and increase and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you're entering to possess. Verse 17 is the converse of that. But if your heart turns away, see, here's that resistance to the authority. Your heart turns away from God. I don't want you telling me what to do. I don't want you bossing me around. I read one time a line from John Paul Sartre, a poet who was an atheist poet and existentialist. And he was making fun of believers and he said, hell is having someone looking over your shoulder all the time. And that's true. If you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. If you're wanting to speed down the road and you see a patrolman following you, it annoys you. But if you have someone chasing you with a gun and a patrolman pulls up, you're just happy to see him. And if you have a flat and you're stuck beside the road and there's no one there and a patrolman comes along, you just want to hug him. You see, if you see God as your great enemy because of your life of rebellion against him, it's a living hell to have him looking over your shoulder every minute and watching everything you're doing. But for those who have given their life to him and know that in him is life, to know that he's there is the greatest comfort in the world. John Paul Sartre didn't know that he was confessing to us how lost he was. That's what he was doing. Now, probably this didn't happen to you, but sometimes when I was growing up, I would do things that my parents didn't want me to do. And when I heard my mom or dad walking through the house toward me, panic and terror set on inside of me. There were times, you know, whenever I was really feeling bad that I wanted to see my dad. We used to have a farm and we'd get down in the bottom 40 we'd have down there and the tractor gets stuck and Dad would say, I'll walk the house and get the pickup and come back down and pull it out. And it'd be night in the Ozarks. You couldn't see a light anywhere in the world down there in that hollow there. And there were creatures around. And, you know, 10 year old, 11 year old boy, you hear all the kinds of things around you. I just strained to hear my dad coming with that pickup to pick me up. I wasn't afraid at all. I was just longing for him to be there. Our need that we have and the way we think of God determines whether or not we love him and we enjoy his presence or whether or not we're afraid of him. His promise is that as long as your heart is turned toward me, you will always enjoy my presence. But if your heart turns away and you're not obedient and if you're drawn away to bow down to other gods, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you're crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. God's word is clear and plain from the beginning to the end. Those people who live and rebel and reject the authority of God over their life, the Bible has nothing to do with them. The authority of God over their life, the Bible has nothing to do with me. I don't read it. I don't listen. I don't long for it. It's not important. They're headed for destruction. And it doesn't start the day they die. It starts the day they say no to God. And they're all around us. They're living with terrible difficulties and problems. They don't need to know that there's a church they need to know there's an answer. And all the problems you see around you with people that come to you and you hear them tell their story, you can try to tell them to fix it, good things to do, but it all has to go back to say, whose authority are you going to accept for your problem? I don't know if this happens to you, but you ever go to a doctor and he looks you over and diagnoses you and decides what's wrong and gives you some pills to take and you say, I'm going to take them. You do, Alan? I've got a couple of prescriptions in my house that they gave me and I said, I don't need that. It's just, you know, I'd get by without it. So far I have. And some people look at the Bible and they say, I don't see a reason to do that. It's deadly. The doctor can make a mistake and give you a prescription you don't need. He can make a mistake diagnosing you, but God never does. Everything he has in the Bible for you to do and for me to do is a sin. It's a sin. It's a potential to be able to live and succeed. And every one of those things that you ignore, regardless of how insignificant they might seem to you, are deadly somewhere in your life. They can kill relationships with you. They can kill friendships with you. They can kill marriages. And those things can even kill your life. What God is telling us is there are very important things we must pay attention to. And this is not just New Testament stuff. It's all the way back to the Old Testament. You will not live long in the land you're crossing to Jordan to enter and possess. He gave them this land. He had a plot of land that they would own the rest of their lives. But it was conditioned on accepting his authority over their life. Verse 19 ends this sort of discussion. This day, I call heaven and earth as a witness against you. Now he's talking like he's brought us to trial. Like the final days of our life when we tell you in the New Testament language, when Judgment Day comes. I bring you before me and I say to all the people on earth and all the heavens that there are, has this person accepted my authority? Have they listened to what I had to say and submitted to it? And everyone around knows whether or not you've done that. I've set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life so that you and your children may live. And I'll tell you, that's a really important thing. That's a really important thing because children are influenced by parents. I mean, if you've been raised in a godly home, you know the advantage it gives you. It's really like being raised in a home that speaks English. You know, in a country where you can speak English, where English is spoken. If you're raised in a family that speaks Spanish and that's all you know, you're at a real disadvantage in that culture. This is God's world. And being raised in a place in a way in which you've learned what God's all about is critical. I've set before you life and death. Now, in Southern Baptist life, there's a pretty big debate about Calvinism. And there's all kinds of Calvinism, but on the far end of it, the hyper-Calvinist, it's the ideas given to us that there's no, man has no choice in all this. You're determined before you're born as to whether you go to heaven or hell. If you see in this passage, it's hard to imagine that doctrine being at play here. Moses very clearly says, now choose. I don't know what kind of foolishness it is for, you could bring somebody in your house and say, I've got a Pepsi here, and I've got a glass of water here, choose. And then you take both of them and they don't have one to choose. You don't give a person a choice unless they have a choice. Now, I don't say everything about Calvinistic viewpoint about the authority of God and all that are bad, but I don't think that this is determined before we were born. Moses, I don't think, thought that. He thought he was telling the people of Israel, go into the land of promise, you have some choices to make. And the choices you make are going to determine where you end up, whether you end up with the blessings of God or the curses of God. I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life. I urge you, choose life. Choose the authority of God over you so that you'll be able to have everything in life that God intends you to have. So that you and your children may live. And to live, to grow up in homes where the parents don't follow God is really difficult. I mean, we've, if you've been in church very long, you see mom bring her kids to church and sons to church and when they get to be, you know, old enough teenagers, they want to stay home with dad if he didn't come. They want to be like dad. Children need a guide. They need a guide to be able to help them. And we have a lot of kids that come on Wednesday nights, their parents don't come. It's really critical with those people that we talk to those parents and help them to come to know Christ so that what we're teaching those kids, the parents then will begin to put it in practice in those homes and change the whole direction of those children's lives. Because they're making the decision to turn away from Sunday school and church when they're not old enough to understand that if their parents stay home. I want to stay home with dad, little boys will say. I want to stay home with dad. And so we need to be able to not only have the kids here and begin to teach them, but we need to make friends with those families and help the families to understand how critical it is for a dad and a mom to be living and practicing what the kids are learning here so that they will have an influence outside of the Sunday school classroom. Influence outside of the Sunday school class and the Wednesday night class. Because whatever they do has a great impact on the life of the children. Choose life so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God. Listen to his voice. Hold fast to him. You know how this keeps coming around to that? They keep emphasizing the authority of God over your life. You may love the Lord, put him above everything else in your life. You listen to his voice. You listen to his instructions and you hold on to him. You do exactly what he says. You don't turn loose of him. You follow him. You let him guide you. For the Lord is your life. It's more than just admitting that you're a sinner. It's making the Lord your life. It's what we're trying to get here. And if you don't do that, then you don't have what God is talking about. For the Lord is your life and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Doyle. Your name's on that list. Because he swore to give it to you, too. What God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he's promised us. This relationship with him in which we will find life in all of its fullness. We have the great advantage of knowing not only what's in the Old Testament, but seeing it lived in the person of Jesus himself. And that's what Jesus was talking about when he said, if you want to come after me, follow me. You must take up your cross. Follow me. You must deny yourself and follow me. And in the following hymn, we follow in the footsteps of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, all the characters of the Old Testament. And all the apostles. And all the apostles. And all the disciples. It is a road that leads to life. And to not be on that road leads to death. And the key ingredient in this whole process is one simple thing. Acknowledging the authority of God over our lives. I believe you know more about life than I do, so I will listen from this book and do everything you tell me as best I know how. I believe you know how marriage should work, so I'm going to promise you that my marriage is going to be based on what you tell me in this book it should be based on. I believe that raising children, you're the only one that knows how to do this. We've kind of got ourselves in an awkward spot here in this culture. We've come to believe that, you know, if you don't have counseling and training, you can't ever do these things. For thousands of years, people have found life in all of its fullness doing one thing. Listening to God and obeying what he told them to do. And it still works. You and I have that message. We must live it so that they will see it in our lives. And we must ask God to tell us whenever we see people who are on the road to death and destruction to let us see that and give us an opportunity to tell them how he has changed our lives by simply listening to him and trusting him and doing what he tells us. And whenever we can tell them that and they can see it in our lives, then they will want to find the life of life, the life of life and blessings. No one wants to live a cursed life. But when they're around a lot of people whose lives are all cursed, they think that it's a great victory if I'm not cursed nearly as much as the guy next to me. But there's a way to not only get out of the curses, but get into the blessings. And that's the answer we have. Moses was warning the people as they were getting ready to go into the land of promise. God can't keep all the promises he has for you unless you do this. Acknowledge his authority today and live it all the rest of your life. And then you will find life and you will find life with its blessings. Let's pray. You've committed your life to follow Christ openly, publicly identified with him. Identified with him. And if you're reading the Bible, listening to what he has to say and putting it in practice, regardless of the circumstances you're in right now, you can thank God for the blessings you're getting and going to get. Do that. If you can tonight, thank God for what he's done for you. I'd like you to ask him another question. God, am I coasting or am I still working? Do you know now in your life one thing that God is trying to work in you to change? If you don't, you're probably not listening to God, because I'm sure there's something wrong with you. There is with all of us. We need transformation and help. If you know what it is, say, God, I want to do what you're telling me. Give me wisdom, strength, and courage. God, I want to do what you're telling me. Give me wisdom, strength, and courage to follow you and not the detour that I've taken in this part of my life. Becoming a Christian doesn't mean going to the front of the church. It doesn't mean saying, I give my life to Jesus. It doesn't mean being baptized. It means saying, God, you're now in control of my heart. I want to do everything you tell me to do the way you tell me to do it. Short of that, you haven't gotten there yet. You play games with God, or if you're not really, have not made that promise, I really urge you tonight to say, God, I'm not going to let my emotions control me, my passions control me, my weaknesses control me, friends around me control me. From this moment on, I want you to control me. Father, you promised to give us life. Never let us be satisfied with less. Open our eyes to the world that's facing death and destruction. Let us be satisfied with less. Open our eyes to the world that's facing death and destruction. And don't allow us to be timid to bear witness to the one who's given us life. In the name of Jesus, we ask for this. Amen.