A Parable Jesus Didn’t Tell

by Dave Wilkinson

Joshua 24:14

January 20, 2002

When Heather, a pastor’s daughter in Falconer, New York was two years old, she began to learn all of the traditional fairy tales — Goldilocks, the Three Little Pigs and the rest. Her mother and father also taught her the familiar Bible stories. Heather’s young mind was like a sponge as she took all of these in.

One day, Heather’s mother read the 20^th verse of Revelation, Chapter 3. When she finished the verse she asked, "If Jesus is knocking at your heart’s door, Heather, will you open the door and let Him in?"

Without a moment’s hesitation Heather replied, "Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin."

There’s a certain danger in confusing fairy tales with real life.

Do you remember the parable of the lost sheep that we looked at last Sunday — one lost, ninety nine secure? Do you remember what Jesus said? "Just leave him alone and he’ll come home wagging his tail behind him."

Do you remember Jesus saying that about the idiot sheep that went off and got itself lost? "Leave it alone! It will find its way back! All roads lead to the top of the mountain! All paths lead to God. All dumb sheep get to heaven one way or another!" Do you remember that part of the parable?

Of course not! Because that’s not what Jesus said at all. "He left the ninety nine to go in search of the one and brought it home rejoicing."

Jesus didn’t say that the lost sheep will come home by itself. He didn’t say that it’s not really lost and doesn’t need to be found. He didn’t say that it’s not really makes no difference which way the sheep goes.

He said that a sheep without a shepherd is lost and doomed. He said that He is the Good Shepherd—the only Good Shepherd. He said it and He believed it hard enough that He was willing to lay down His life for the sheep.

And Jesus says that our allegiance to Him as our Shepherd is a life and death issue. So He calls us to make a choice—to choose for Him or against Him.

The choice Jesus presents to us is not a new choice. It is an old choice. It is as old as the passage from Joshua 24 which is our text: "Choose you this day whom you will serve."

The issue is the will.

From the Scriptures, the will is a key ingredient in terms of your coming to faith and continuing in effective Christian service. That is the human end. In Joshua 24, Joshua calls the people to choose God and to choose Him alone.

If you read Joshua 24 carefully, you can’t miss the real issue. It isn’t that the people of Israel don’t want to serve God. They like God just fine. After all, He’d brought them out of Egypt and fed them in the wilderness. They do want to serve God. But they also want to serve all the other gods. They want to play both sides. And Joshua keeps calling them to choose between the God of Israel, Yahweh as He is called in Hebrew -- to choose between Yahweh and the gods of their fathers, "Whether in Egypt or beyond the river or in the land where they were now living."

And they keep saying to him: "Far be it from us to forsake the Lord. We will serve Him." And Joshua says, "You can’t unless you are willing to forsake the other gods." You cannot serve all the other gods and also serve Yahweh. You must choose!

Human personality can be seen to be made up of three key ingredients. The first is the mind with which you think. The second is the heart or the emotions with hich you feel. The third is the will that can choose.

Christian faith is not just having your head filled with religious information. I have known pastors who have gone to seminary, graduated with a divinity degree and have been ordained and gone into ministry—and later have come to Christian faith. I know people who have all kinds of Christian data in their heads, but who do not have Jesus Christ.

Information is not faith. The Christian Gospel is not a philosophy to be learned or a creed to be argued. It is not a scientific theory to be proved. It is the miracle of a changed life. It is the belief that Jesus didn’t just die for the sin of the world but that he also died for my own very private and particular sins.

In the same way, people have emotional religious experiences but never come to genuine Christian faith. Getting goose bumps when a praise band or choir sings is not faith. Shedding a tear when someone gives a powerful testimony about what God has done for them is not faith. Hearing little children sing at the front of the church and being emotionally stirred is not Christian faith. Even getting emotionally stirred by a preacher is not faith.

You can have all of the information concerning Jesus loving you and dying for you and longing for you to give your life to Him. You can have all of the information. But unless you do something with the information, it does you no good.

So Joshua says: "Choose you this day whom you will serve." And the notion of choosing is an address to the will.

And it can be a very emotional thing for you. Some of you are very emotional people. You weep at the opening of a new gas station.

Emotionalism isn’t faith.

Faith comes from that third ingredient of which we hear too little — namely that we are called upon by an act of faith to choose Jesus Christ and to choose to serve Him.

Turn your attention to Mark 1:15. Jesus is speaking and He says: "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel."

When Jesus says "repent," that’s obviously an address to the will. "Turn around! Stop doing the wrong things you are doing! Turn your face the right way and do the right things!" Repentance isn’t feeling sorry for all the nasty things you’ve done. Repentance is stopping doing them, turning around in the other direction and doing what is right.

Jesus isn’t making an emotional appeal in Mark 1 and he’s not passing out information. He’s addressing the will and says: "Repent." And in the same breath He commands faith. He commands us to believe. He doesn’t say "Repent and then feel your way towards a relationship." He says "Repent and believe the Gospel." Choose.

You see, the Bible commands faith. Jesus commanded not only repentance but belief. That’s interesting. He obviously has a much higher regard for the freedom of the human will than some psychologists posses. He actually credits us with intelligence.

The word intelligence is derived from two words—"inter" and "legere" meaning "to choose" and "between." An intelligent person is one who has learned to choose between. We are not free not to choose. There is no such thing as a neutral state. Either you have chosen belief or you haven’t. And out of obedience to Christ you can choose to believe.

You probably don’t need more information. If you do, come and talk to me. I have tons of information. You don’t need a soul stirring sermon. If you do, let me know and I’ll try to do one.

You need, as an act of the will, to choose to give your life to Jesus Christ. If you haven’t made that choice, it is what you need and it will transform your life. The same act of the will is a part of obedient Christian service—where we put our priorities.

Do you remember the great contest on Mt. Carmel between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of God? 1 Kings 18:21 says that "Elijah came near to all the people and said "How long will you go limping along between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow Him and if Baal, then follow him."

But the people then, as many people today, do not want to finally choose. They want to go limping along between their lukewarm acknowledgment of God and their total commitment to making money, retiring early, securing their pension and having everyone in the community love them. Those are the gods of today.

"The God of peace at any price. The god of broad-mindedness. The god of non-offensiveness," he is called by Nicholas von Hoffman in an article titled "The Mush God." "Here is the key God of western civilization today. The mush god has no theology to speak of—being a cream-of-wheat divinity. The mush god has no particular credo, no tenets of faith, nothing that would make it difficult for the believer and unbeliever alike to lower one’s head when the temporary chairman tells the Reverend Rabbi Father Mufti or so and so to lead us in an innocuous, harmless prayer. For this god of public occasions is not a jealous god. You can invoke him to start a hooker’s convention and he she or it won’t be offended.

"Protector of the buddy system—the mush god is the lord of the secular ritual. The mush god is a serviceable god whose laws are not chiseled on tablets of stone but written on sand—open to amendment, qualification and erasure. This is the god who will compromise with you, make allowances, declare all wars holy and all peaces hallowed."

That is where many folks are today. They don’t want to decide between anything. Above all, they don’t want to have to deal with a God who has expectations.

Soren Kirkegaard, the father of existentialism and a Christian believer, summarized it in this way. He says that the New Testament is an inadequate book for converting respectable people because it was designed for sinners. "Owing to this," he writes, "It is almost impossible by the aid of the New Testament to punch a blow at real life, at the actual world in which we live, where for one certified hypocrite, there are one hundred thousand twaddlers, for one certified heretic, one hundred thousand nincompoops."

The nincompoops are everywhere -- even in the church. I hear this at Christian conferences and read it in so-called Christian books. Speakers talk about our need to redefine God—as if God were ours to define. They talk about reshaping our image of God—as if God were some malleable plastic that we have shaped instead of being the God who has made us in His image. I read so-called Christian books that talk about "Christian notions of grace" as if grace were our idea or creation instead of being God’s self-revelation through the cross of Jesus Christ. They need to remember that God introduced Himself to Moses at the burning bush as "I am who I am." "I’m not who you think I am. I’m who I .am."

British theologian John Stott has defined open-mindedness as the "capacity for taking into one’s mind varied and contrary viewpoints and never ever distinguishing between them and to go on doing so adnauseum."

You see how ridiculous it sounds when put in those terms?

You probably remember the old fable about the foolish donkey. He stood exactly half way between two hay stacks, undecided from which of the two he should eat. He couldn’t make up his mind. And this continued so long that at last he died from starvation. That is a fable that speaks to the state of many people today.

But there is another parable which speaks even more graphically of the danger of choosing false gods. In The Wounded Healer Henri Nowen retells a tale from ancient India about how four royal brothers decided each to master a special ability. Time went by and the brothers met to reveal what they had learned.

"I have mastered a science," said the first, "by which I can take the bone of some creature, and create the flesh that goes with it."

"I," said the second, "Know how to grow that creature’s skin and hair if there is flesh on its bones."

The third said, "I am able to create its limbs if I have the flesh, the skin and the hair."

"And I," said the fourth, "know how to give life to that creature if its form is complete."

Thereupon the four royal brothers went into the jungle to find a bone so they could demonstrate their specialties. As fate would have it, the bone they found was a lion’s. One added flesh to the bone, the second grew hide and hair, the third completed it with matching limbs and the fourth gave the lion life.

Shaking its mane, the ferocious beast arose and jumped on his creators. He killed them all and vanished contentedly into the jungle."

We too have the capacity to create what can destroy us. Goals and dreams can consume us. Possessions and property can turn and devour us—unless we first seek God’s kingdom and righteousness and allow God to breathe His purpose into what we make of life.

The Bible says that it is the broad way that leads to death. In other words, you will find the wide road of "open the gates and let ‘er rip" will get narrower and narrower and tighter and more burdensome and actually ends up in death. The devil doesn’t have any happy old people.

But if you do it God’s way and set out on the narrow way that leads to life, you will find that what feels disciplinary and restrictive at first starts to widen out and gets broader and broader and more joyful.

You are called to choose Jesus Christ. If you have already chosen Him, as most of you have, pray for those for whom Jesus has come looking this morning — walking up and down the aisles of this church — right here and right now. If you make anything or anyone but Jesus Christ God, it or they will crush you. Jesus is looking for you. Jesus offers Himself to you. You are the one He is looking for. And when He finds you, he brings you renewal and purpose and life forever. He is calling you to trust in Him.

Note: I am indebted to a sermon by the excellent Episcopal evangelist John Guest for the structure of the opening part of this sermon.