R.C. Sproul (0:00)

There's some truths that are so foundational, so basic, that if you deny them, you deny Christ. And that's what he's saying here. Your commitment to me has to be such that you have to love me more than you love your mother and your Father. And he who receives you receives me. And he who receives me receives the One who sent me. And to receive Christ is to affirm the truth of who he was and what he did.

Narrator (0:34)

There are many hard sayings in the Bible, even from the lips of Jesus. In fact, RC Sproul has several teaching series covering many of them. And today, on this Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind, we come across one such he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. Today's passage From Matthew chapter 10 is the final installment in this short series from Matthew's Gospel. If you'd like to learn more about this Gospel for the final time, you can request R.C. sproul's hardcover commentary. When you give a gift of any amount@renewingyourmind.org don't delay, as this offer won't be repeated next Sunday. So why did Jesus say that he did not come to bring peace on earth, and that he who loves father or mother more than him is not worthy of him? Here's Dr. Sproul in Matthew 10, beginning at verse 34.

R.C. Sproul (1:37)

Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth I did not come to bring peace, but a sword for I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter in law against her mother in law and a man's enemies will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. He who receives you receives me and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple, assuredly I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward. On other occasions I'VE called attention to you how important it is in understanding the mission of Jesus in this world. Rather than to speculate from our perspective, listen to his own assessment of the purpose of his ministry. And on different occasions he has explained that to his disciples. He said that he came that you might have life and have it more abundantly. He said, I came in order to seek and to save the lost. And when he was on trial for his life before Pontius Pilate and Pilate asked him if he was a king, Jesus said, for this purpose I came into the world to bear witness to the truth, and those who are of the truth hear my voice. Now, those different statements that our Lord made regarding the purpose of his mission are not mutually exclusive. Here he'll emphasize one facet, there a different facet, but they all fit together to the totality of his mission given to him by the Father. But in the text that we have this morning, notice that Jesus begins by explaining to those around him why he did not come. And herein we find something of a hard saying. He says in verse 34, do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. What would indicate to anyone that he did come to bring peace on the earth? Well, maybe if they were there in the plains of Bethlehem when the angels announced his birth to the shepherds and said, peace on earth, good will to men. Or if you were there as a fly on the wall in the upper room, when Jesus announced His last will and testament and declared his legacy to his disciples, you would have noticed that he said something like this. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. So that the last will and testament of Jesus was the bestowing of peace. And of course he's called the Prince of Peace. So it's natural for us knowing these things to assume that at the heart of his purpose for coming to this world was to bring peace. But here he says not. So don't think he said that I came to bring peace, but rather I came to bring a sword. How are we to understand these strange words from the lips of Christ? First of all, without spending too much time on it, I want you to notice that when he gives these explanations for his mission, frequently the Lord says, I came. Not for this reason was I born. Not for this reason was I trained, nor for this reason was I summoned or called. But Jesus will preface these explanations of his missions by speaking of his having come. Well, so what? Well, the coming of Christ into the world in his first Advent is not simply a coming to the this world, but is a coming from somewhere. And he explains this elsewhere when he says, no one ascends up into heaven except the one who has descended from heaven. And so when Jesus explains his mission, we have to understand where it is he has come from. This is the Son of man. This is the eternal Logos, the word of God, the second person of the Trinity who has come to this planet from heaven. And now he's saying why he came. Why the Lord God would take to himself a human nature in the person of Jesus and be involved with this world. He says, well, I didn't come to bring peace. I came to bring a sword. Well, if we look in biblical categories, we'll see that the sword is the symbol of conflict. It's the symbol of warfare. I've noted many times that it's significant. I think that the universal symbol of Christianity is the cross. The universal symbol of Islam is the scimitar. Whenever you see Mohammed displayed or depicted in art, he's always on horseback brandishing that curved sword called the scimitar, because his mission was to come to bring war, to bring conquest in the name of Allah. And nothing could seem to be further from the mission of Jesus than to see him coming brandishing a sword. Yet here he says, I came to bring a sword. Now, I think he's speaking here metaphorically. Obviously, in all of the teaching that he gives to his disciples directly and later through the apostles, eschews the idea that he comes as a military conqueror. So in what sense does he come to bring a sword? What sense does Jesus come to bring conflict? I think if we see this in the total scope of Scripture, and particularly in light of what he said to Pontius Pilate at the end of the life, that I came to bear witness to the truth, that when Jesus came as the incarnation of truth, I am the way, the truth, and the life. That he comes announcing a truth in this world that is divisive. It's a truth that provokes conflict. It's a truth that provokes separation and division. And he explains that to his disciples, saying that this conflict that I'm bringing will set mother against daughter, father against son, mother in law against daughter in law, that it will divide families. Did that happen? We could spend the rest of the day sharing our testimonies of the people who are in this room right now who have experienced very difficult conflict in their own homes, among their own family members, because of Christ. I remember when I became a Christian my freshman year in college, I had Grown up in the church. It was a rather liberal church where I was taught that the miracles of Jesus didn't really happen. In fact, including the resurrection didn't happen. But I was there every Sunday because my parents made me go. And it was the most important social life center of the community. That's where Vesta and I learned how to dance and all the rest. So I was, you know, regular churchgoer. And I came home from college all excited about having found Christ and being a Christian and assuming that my mother would be the most pleased person in the world to know that her son had now come to faith in Christ. And so in all my enthusiasm as a new Christian, I explained to her about my newfound faith and she was furious. Why? She took my confession of faith in Christ to her as a complete rejection of everything that she said. What do you mean you became a Christian? You've always been a Christian, you grew up a Christian. We're all Christians in our household. What do you mean that you just now become a Christian? Have you experienced that sort of thing? What happens to people in Islamic families who become Christians? They're expelled from the family. Sometimes Jewish families will hold funerals for family members who embrace Christianity. How many of you grew up Roman Catholic and left the Roman Catholic Church to embrace evangelical Christianity and in that experienced severe conflict and crisis in the family? This is what happens. You know, we say that we celebrate the unity of faith in Christ because we share one Lord, one faith and one baptism. And it is true that truth unites. I love to spend time with people who are like minded, who embrace the same precious truths that I do. But those same truths that unite also divide. And it's that kind of conflict that people who embrace pluralism or relativism want to get rid of once and for all, to end all disunity, all conflict that focuses around religion. You know the American adage, the two things we never discuss are religion and politics. Well, nowadays, at least we're discussing politics. Not too many people want to discuss matters of faith. And you've been taught since you were little children that really at bottom line, everybody believes the same thing anyway. It doesn't matter which road you take, they all go to God. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, we all believe the same thing, right? Do you realize that's crazy? If you spend five minutes just looking at the basic theses of the great world religions, you will see that they are in irreconcilable conflict. You can't be an orthodox Jew and believe that Jesus was the Messiah. You can't be an orthodox Christian and believe he was not the Messiah. Now, manifestly, dear ones, Jesus couldn't have been the Messiah and not the Messiah at the same time, in the same way. Years ago, I told the story of a discussion I had with a college student several years ago. And that student was being very solicitous to me and somewhat patronizing towards my religious convictions and said to me, now, let me see, you believe that there's a God? And I said, yes. And this faith that you have is meaningful to your life? Yes. You pray to God? Yes. You sing hymns to God? Yes. You go to church and worship God? Yes, I do all of those things. And the students said, well, then for you, God exists. But I don't find God at all meaningful. And I don't go to church and I don't sing hymns and I don't pray prayers, and I don't devote myself to any kind kind of deity. And so for me, God does not exist. I said, wait just a second. You don't understand what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about a God for me or a God for you. I'm talking about the existence of a being who exists apart from me and apart from you. I'm talking about a being who, if he does not exist, all my commitment to him, all my prayers, all my songs, all of my devotions do not individually or corporately have the power to conjure him up. And at the same time, if such a God exists, all of your unbelief, all of your disinterest or even hostility toward him does not have the power to annihilate him. Now I know there's such a thing as an either or fallacy or the fallacy of the false dilemma. When I say that's red and you say that's orange, and I say, well, it has to be either red or orange and we can both be wrong. It's a false dilemma when we find out that it's yellow. But there are certain issues that are either or situations. Either God exists or he does not exist. There is no third alternative. But the relativist, the pluralist, wants to give you an alternative when there is no alternative. Peace at any price. It's like the false prophets of Israel of whom Jeremiah spoke, who said peace, peace when there was no peace. It's like Neville Chamberlain leaning over that balcony, Munich, saying, we have achieved peace in our time. No, no, Francis Schaeffer once lamented that what the Church had lost in the 20th century was the concept of antithesis. What did he mean by that? What Dr. Schaeffer meant simply was this, that for every truth, there is a corresponding falsehood that is the antithesis of and denies that truth. Back in a period of 10 years in the late 70s, early 80s, I was president of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. We had a summit meeting in Chicago where 200 scholars from around the world assembled to draft a statement about our confession of faith, about the character and the nature of sacred Scripture. And I was asked by the drafting committee to write the first draft of our affirmations. And I said to the committee, I said, it's not good enough to write what we affirm, but we must also write our denials. Because in a culture that is committed to pluralism and relativism, it's not enough to affirm what you believe, but you have to to be willing to deny the antithesis. And that's what the Church is not willing to do today. You affirm you are faith. You affirm your faith, you affirm your faith. Everybody affirms their faith, and everybody's happy. And nobody dares to deny the antithesis. And we did. We did a list of 20 some affirmations and denials so that not only we affirmed what we did believe, but we denied what we did not believe. But when you do that, you draw a line in the sand, and when you do that, you bring the metaphorical sword of which Jesus is speaking there. The early church fathers were not martyred because of what they affirmed. They were martyred for what they denied. They took a stand for truth. Now I sometimes feel like I'm a voice crying in the wilderness when it comes to that in our day. But this is what's at stake in the culture in which we live now. I know there are people that want to fight over every tiny little detail, and they have no understanding of the difference between majors and minors. There are sins. There is a love that is supposed to cover a multitude of sins. We're not supposed to be rising up and screaming heresy for every little peccadillo or every little point of difference in the church. If that's the case, we would all be at each other's throats forever again. On another occasion, I gave the illustration of. Back in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, we had a meeting in my house of a delegation of people who'd come from Paris who were involved in the charismatic movement. And they had all experienced what they called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And they loved the sharing of that experience because they were persecuted because of it, from their various communions. And favorite song was We Are One in the Spirit. And they came into my living room, about 30 of them, and they were telling me about how much they were blessed by this newfound unity that they had in the Holy Ghost. And I said, well, that's nice. I said, but this is amazing to me. You're Roman Catholic. Yes. You're Lutheran. Yes. You're Baptist. Yes. How have you been able to get past the doctrine of justification on how we're saved? Well, what do you mean? Well, the Baptist said, well, we believe that we're justified by faith alone. Roman Cathedown. Before you know it, they were at each other's throats. But see, there are some truths. There are some truths that are so foundational, so basic, that if you deny them, you deny Christ. And that's what he's saying here. Your commitment to me has to be such that you have to love me more than you love your mother and your father. You have to love me more than you love my family. And he who receives you, receives me. And he who receives me receives the One who sent me. And to receive Christ is to affirm the truth of who he was and what he did. He who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Who wants to carry a cross? I don't know anybody who enjoys conflict. I sure don't. I would rather flee than fight. But sometimes truth is so important, particularly the truth of God, the truth of Christ, that we have to, as Luther said in his hymn, let goods and Kindred Go this Mortal life. Also, there comes a time when you're going to have to make that stand and decide what truth is worthy of your life and of your death.