What do I need to do to inherit eternal life?

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:11] In the hymn we just sang, come to Calvary's holy Mountain. [00:00:17] Well, it's. [00:00:19] We're singing about the place to go to find riches. If you're, you know, if you're coming in poverty and meanness, come to the cross. [00:00:31] If you're coming in sorrow and contrition, come to the cross. [00:00:38] If you're sinners ruined by the fall, come to the cross, to Calvary's holy Mountain. [00:00:48] It's the place to find wealth. It's the place to find forgiveness of sinse. The place to find life is at the cross. Now, that looks a little bit backwards, because it's the place where Jesus loses everything, earthly speaking. It's the place where Jesus appears to be weakest, where he gives everything up for you and for me, for our salvation. [00:01:18] But Jesus knew that wealth wasn't something to be grasped according to human will, but something to be received by faith. [00:01:34] Here's the beginning of our intuit for this morning. [00:01:39] Praise the Lord. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. And you could summarize that with faith. [00:01:51] Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever. [00:01:57] You can think of Jesus on the cross, the righteous, the faithful man, the good man on the cross, looking to his father, giving up all worldly pursuits, delighting in the commandments of his father and fearing the Lord. Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever. [00:02:34] A rich young man comes to Jesus in our gospel reading, and he's looking for wealth. [00:02:43] He's looking for eternal life. [00:02:52] And Jesus says to him, one thing you lack, go sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come follow me now. [00:03:09] Following Jesus to Calvary's holy mountain, following Jesus to the cross. [00:03:17] You can't take things with you. [00:03:20] This young man goes away disheartened because he doesn't feel like he can sell all his possessions and give to the poor. [00:03:31] That's what it takes to get treasure in heaven. [00:03:36] He wants it all. [00:03:38] He wants them both. And he doesn't realize that by giving up Jesus offer, he's giving up true wealth. He's giving up what he really ought to prefer. [00:03:49] If he could only see clearly, he follows a different path. Come to Calvary's holy mountain. Notice that that's a journey to undertake. [00:04:02] It's a path to walk. [00:04:07] Jesus says, come, follow me now. Obedience is like that. Obedience is about. It's about following. It's about listening and obeying. [00:04:21] So a father or mother gives a command to a child, and the child has options. Right? Now, which path is he gonna choose? Is he gonna choose obedience or disobedience? And then he's gonna walk that path, and those paths are gonna lead different places. [00:04:42] Faith in Jesus Christ means walking a path, and so does obedience. [00:04:51] And sometimes when we think about righteousness or obedience or justice, as our Old Testament reading talks about, sometimes we could think of it as a list of things to do, to do well or badly. [00:05:10] Like the Ten Commandments, right? The Ten Commandments could be a list of things. You hear the ten commandments like Jesus listed off to the rich young man, and you think, okay, did I do that? Did I do that? Did I do that? [00:05:24] You can kind of list them up. Or God telling his people, I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins. You who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe and turn aside the needy in the gate. [00:05:44] Okay, so they're afflicting the righteous, they're taking bribes, and they're not supporting those in need. You could think of it as just like a list of things to check off or not check off. And it's like, oh, no, if only they had been kind to a few more people, right? Or taken the time to give to the needy, or if only they had said no to taking the bribe. [00:06:12] But it's deeper than that. [00:06:14] It's not just a list of things that they did wrong. [00:06:18] It's a list of examples of how they followed their own desires, how they walked a different path than faith in God, fearing the Lord, believing in God, receiving his word, and letting it work in them, that produces different fruit than pursuing something else. Go back to the garden. You look at eve there, tempted by the serpent, and she walks another path. It's like, obey God or go my own way, come up with my own ideas, pursue treasure, pursue wisdom on my own terms. [00:07:04] Those are the choices before her. And so her disobedience isn't just like, uh oh, God's going to be unhappy about that check, you know, on the. On the bad scale or whatever. [00:07:18] No, this is about following one path or another. [00:07:25] Seek good and not evil. God says, seek good and not evil. Notice how that's a. You could kind of make that into a traveling image as well. Like seeking something. I mean, it is, right? If you're seeking something, you're looking for it, and that takes you somewhere. [00:07:45] If you're seeking your family roots, you might go to Europe or somewhere else, right? Seeking something takes you somewhere. Seek good and not evil. Travel the path of faith in God, the creator of all that is good. [00:08:03] Don't follow the lies of the devil. [00:08:09] This is why sin is so deceitful. Okay, so we're tempted to think that sin is just bad choices that we've made. And everybody makes bad choices. We're human, after all. How often do we say or hear that, well, he's human. [00:08:29] Well, okay. [00:08:31] It's true that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And it's true that we all have inherited the disobedience of Adam. Through Adam have come the consequences of sin, death, guilt to all. [00:08:55] But sin is not just something to be brushed off like, well, that's just part of our nature now. So whatever. We're going to make bad choices. Sin is deceitful because it leads us down another path than faith. [00:09:14] Whatever is not done in faith is sin. Paul says in Romans. [00:09:21] So here's a little bit from our reading from Hebrews, chapter three. [00:09:26] Take care, brothers. Lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart. Remember, seek good, not evil. [00:09:38] Lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. [00:09:47] You see so unbelief as seeking another path, as following another word that leads you to fall away from the living God. [00:09:58] But exhort one another every day. [00:10:02] Every day. Exhort one another that's speaking to one another. Okay? Remember that that's you and I exhorting one another, speaking to one another with purpose. What purpose? [00:10:15] Exhort one another every day as long as it's called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. [00:10:27] Sin isn't just innocuous. It's not just bad choices. [00:10:32] Sin I draws us away from Christ, draws us away from faith. [00:10:38] See, to sin, to disobey, which we do, all do right. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So this is common experience. We don't want to take it lightly. [00:10:50] To sin against God is to listen to another word than his right or to neglect his word. [00:10:59] Doing so means taking a step down a different path, a path of disobedience, a path of unbelief, to produce a different kind of fruit. [00:11:14] And thank God, he calls us back. [00:11:17] He convicts us by the Holy Spirit. He puts God's word in front of us. Or maybe it's the confession that we say at the beginning of our service. Or maybe it's the word of a friend or a brother or sister in Christ who says, you know, that's not right. Or something like, how do you think God feels about that, right? Something to put it in front of your eyes and make you go, oh, that was a choice of disobedience. That was. [00:11:55] I was straying there. [00:11:58] See, it's this call to repentance that keeps us on the path as we die to sin and live to God as we die to our inclination to what's wrong. [00:12:12] And by God's grace, seek good following Jesus. [00:12:20] Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. [00:12:31] We can become hardened by sin. Sin is a tricky thing. [00:12:37] As soon as we follow our sinful desires and taste, the consequences may be delightful for our sinful nature. Well, then we're sort of confirmed in that a little bit. Like when we make bad choices, just think about a habit, right? A habit is like walking a wrong path. Usually. I guess there are good habits, but we're talking about bad habits, right? So you walk a bad path enough times, and it becomes a path, right. You're wearing down this path and. And now pretty soon you're in the habit. And this is your. This is your pattern of life. And we all know it's hard to break bad habits. [00:13:23] This is part of the deceitfulness of sin. This is just where I'm just human. [00:13:28] This is just me. Right? Right. We all have this experience. [00:13:38] Yes, we are all sinners. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But that's not the last word that we should speak about sin. [00:13:50] We should never excuse sin as just the thing that everybody does, because we can't help it. [00:13:56] We should repent of sin and call others to repentance and faith. We should recognize that at the root of sin is a faith problem. [00:14:11] I believe help my unbelief. [00:14:14] We all have a faith problem. We all have a faith struggle, and it's a lifelong struggle. [00:14:22] And we need to help each other out with that struggle. The struggle is to look to God to seek good and not evil. The struggle is to find our treasure and everything worthwhile in Jesus Christ, who doesn't hold on to earthly treasure, who gave up everything going to the cross for our sake. The struggle of faith is to follow him to Calvary's holy mountain, no matter what it might mean. [00:14:57] The beginning of our gospel reading says this. As Jesus was setting out on his journey Jesus is journeying to the cross, and following him means giving up all that we have for this mandev. Jesus recognized that really he needed to get rid of all his stuff. Why is that? Because that stuff was drawing his attention, his love, his movement. [00:15:31] He was seeking that treasure and not the kingdom of God. [00:15:35] He was hardened to what Jesus had to offer because he already had it all. [00:15:42] So he walked away and didn't give everything up. Right. Now we might say, do we all need to sell all our possessions and give to the poor in order to have treasure in heaven? [00:16:01] No. We all have to give up something, though, that's for sure. Lots of things. [00:16:07] We have to give up our idols, all the things that would draw us in another direction. [00:16:13] We can't have it all. We can't have them both. [00:16:17] But this man, Jesus knew. He looked at him and he loved him. [00:16:22] And because he loved him, he said, go sell all your possessions and give to the poor. [00:16:28] You know, people have actually done that. [00:16:32] There's a famous guy, Antony, okay? He's like the most famous monk ever, okay? From the fourth century. [00:16:41] And he walked into church one day and heard these words. [00:16:47] And he had just inherited a bunch of money and land and things like that. And he recognized, well, I need to obey this. And he actually went and sold everything and gave to the poor. And God worked through that. [00:17:04] He ended up teaching and inspiring many others to keep the faith. [00:17:10] But there are other ways of doing this as well. There's a famous man who, well, relatively famous, he's written about from that same time period who was high up in government in the roman empire. And so he enjoyed a lot of honor and prestige, but he realized he was addicted to it. Like, he just couldn't get enough praise from other people and attention. [00:17:45] But he was Christian, and he recognized, this is really harmful for me. And I'm stuck in this temptation because I have all this honor and prestige and what do I do? [00:17:57] And so I think, if I remember the story correctly, he asked a wise Christian who said, you should go and become a nobody. And so he did. He went and became a nobody and lived by himself. And then he helped many others to overcome pride and idolizing honor and things like that. [00:18:19] Now, you know, what does it look like for you and for me? Well, as the Holy Spirit shows us our sin, shows us our inclination toward earthly things, the kinds of things that draw our attention away from Christ and puff us up or give us hope in anything but Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we give those things up. [00:18:48] Your idols are maybe different than mine, although human beings share a lot of things in common in terms of our experience of the christian faith and of sin. [00:19:02] But Jesus loves you. [00:19:04] He loves you enough to encourage you away from those things that draw you away from him, because he knows that you have in him everything that you could possibly hope for. [00:19:17] You have eternal life and treasure in heaven. You have honor and glory, thanks be to God. Because you're in Christ by faith and through baptism, you're in Jesus Christ, who has the name that's above every name, every knee bows at his name, and every tongue confesses that. [00:19:38] That he is Lord to the glory of God the Father. [00:19:42] There's nothing that you and I don't have in Jesus Christ. And even as that looks backwards in this world and to this world, even if it means giving everything up or not being wealthy, not accepting a bribe, we can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us because we have strength and righteousness and life and treasure in him. In Jesus name, amen.