The Christians greatest danger

["Who Will Build Tomorrow's Town?" playing in the background throughout the lecture.] Who will build tomorrow's town? Who will start the day? Who will build tomorrow's town? Who will start the day? ["Jesus, King of Kings"] Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth, we bow down at your feet. Father, we bring to you our worship, your sovereign will be done. On earth your kingdom come, through Jesus Christ your only Son.

Jesus, sovereign Lord, we worship and adore you. Jesus, name above all names, we bow down at your feet. Father, we offer you our worship, your sovereign will be done.

On earth your kingdom come, through Jesus Christ your only Son. Oh my God, you are so glorious, triumphant, victorious, reigning supreme. Your kingdom will increase, your power will never cease.

Till every knee, nation and power will bow before you. Oh my God, you are so glorious, triumphant, victorious, reigning supreme. Your kingdom will increase, your power will never cease.

Till every knee, nation and power will bow before you. Jesus, light of the world, we worship and adore you. Jesus, Lord Emmanuel, we bow down at your feet.

Father, for your delight we worship, your sovereign will be done. On earth your kingdom come, through Jesus Christ your only Son. Do not be yoked together with unbelievers, for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? For what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.

As God has said, I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people. Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.

Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God. Father, we offer these moments to you and pray for your help as we come to your holy Word. Give us understanding and give the preacher an ability to isolate those things that the Spirit of God wants to say to each of us, including him.

For your sons' dear namesake. Amen. It's an interesting passage.

Just keep your Bible open for a moment, will you? I hope you bring Bibles on a Sunday. I'd gladly give anyone a Bible who's not got one. It's the tool book at the tab.

We've got nothing else to say apart from what's in here, but mercifully there's a lot in here, so there's generally quite a lot to say. But we do like to be checked up, because we appreciate that people who come are intelligent folk, and, well, it's not what I say or the distilled wisdom of Tim or Hugh. It's what the preacher has to say that explains accurately the Word of God that's really important, and that's a very interesting passage.

It's a somber passage that we've just read together. In fact, there are those who say it shouldn't be there. Look at the thirteenth verse of the sixth chapter just for a moment, and you'll see why they say it shouldn't be there, because the apostle leaves off by these words in verse thirteen, open wide your hearts also.

Okay? Turn over the page, go to the second verse of the seventh chapter, and he says, make room for us in your hearts. In other words, he continues in 7.2 where he's left off in 6.13, and there are those who say that verses fourteen through to 7.1 actually didn't leave the pen of the apostle Paul, or if it did, it left him at a different time as the rest of the letter, and it's just been interpolated, that means inserted into the chapter through the passing of time. Well, I think that's a lot of rubbish, actually.

I mean, preachers do digress. It's been known here occasionally. What the apostle is doing is interjecting, putting in here a sort of somber sandwich, because he wants the people to whom he's directing this letter to be aware of what is the greatest danger that confronted Christians yesteryear, and the greatest danger that confronts us today.

Eric Heffer, now he's not a species of animal, actually, he comes from Liverpool, a very intelligent man, goes to the Church of England, as well as being a politician. He's not getting on very well with Neil Kinnock. To be quite frank, neither is Tony Wedgwood-Benn, though he's getting on okay with Heffer.

The problem is that latest socialist manifesto, they don't like it. Editorial in the Times Saturday suggested that when you read it, it's got more of the mark of Margaret Thatcher than anybody. The Financial Times had to say that you needed to look very, very carefully through it to discover anything in regard to pure socialism.

I'm not here to deliver a party political broadcast in defense of any party, I'm looking for a theocracy, for people to get up in the Parliament and in a simple way just direct us to some of the, to all of the directions for life that God is saying in His Word. The argument of Heffer and of Benn is this, that the Labour Party in their new manifesto are guilty of compromise. They're guilty of compromise.

They've let socialist principles just be so diluted that nowadays they reckon you can't work out the socialist party as really very much different from left-wing Tory party. What does the compromise mean? I went to see my secretary before I came here, I love her. She was my old secretary, she's now retired, she's 88 years of age.

She was one of the first people that I really got to know when I came to the tab. She said to me, look, you've been here 20 years, so I said, yes, that's right, Dorothy. With all discretion thrown away, she said, I'm going to call you Tony.

I picked myself up from the floor, dusted down my jacket, which wasn't given me for winning the open golf tournament, incidentally, as somebody suggested. She said, I still respect you. And indeed she has and does, and respect has got very little to do with calling someone mister or calling them by their Christian name.

It depends how much you esteem them, how much you love them. There's no compromise involved. What does compromise mean? Well, it means watering down, it means less than real, it means meeting halfway, it means live and let live, stretch a point, be liked, make the best of a bad job and so on.

I got that from the thesaurus this afternoon when I checked it up, which is not a prehistoric animal, it's a sort of dictionary that gives you synonyms. The Apostle Paul was very, very concerned that nobody should take the real stuffing out of Christianity, not only in its content, because he said regarding that if anyone preaches any gospel save the one that I have preached to you, let him be anathema, let him be accursed. But here he is very concerned that nobody should take out of Christianity in terms of practicing those vital ingredients that actually are the distinguishing marks between someone who is following Jesus and someone who is not.

And so he leads off in this very somber sandwich that he sticks in between the thirteenth verse of the sixth chapter and the second verse of the seventh chapter. He sticks in what, if I analyze it grammatically, is one command, and then there are five rhetorical questions, and then there are two quotations, and there is one injunction. His command is a statement that has no compromise in it at all.

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. Jesus never compromised. Listen to him.

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. The Apostle Paul takes a sort of dogmatism of Jesus, he reproduces it in one of the pastoral epistles, and he says there is no mediator, that is there is no goal between man and God with the one exception, Jesus Christ.

One church in East London that put that outside its church and its hoardings got into trouble with the local council because it was offending the Muslims. Suma wrestling is something they go in for in Japan. You know these big beefy fellows, they have got to be five foot six tall to be a wrestler of the Japanese brand.

And I got it from no less a journal than the Daily Telegraph two Wednesdays ago that one fellow who was only five foot two wasn't able to wrestle. So he had a three month intensive stretching course that put on three and a half inches, and he still could not get the Japanese wrestling authorities to allow him for this major bout. Half an hour before the fight he got one of his friends to bang him on the head.

He grew half an inch and he got in. But there was no compromise as far as the Japanese wrestling board was concerned. He was there, all five foot six of him.

You cannot squeeze into the conviction of the Apostle Paul and certainly not into the solid beliefs of Jesus Christ an inch of compromise. They won't water anything down. So the Apostle gives this command, do not be yoked together with unbelievers.

He's talking to Christian people. And he's got in mind an Old Testament text actually in Deuteronomy and probably it's triggered off also by Leviticus. In Deuteronomy it says don't yoke together an ass and an ox.

You're not to pull two animals of different size and temperament together. It's cruel. Incidentally the Old Testament laws could teach us a good deal about handling animals, couldn't they? The Old Testament writes prescription for what beasts of the field ought to eat.

And you don't turn a natural vegetarian animal into a meat eating animal and if we hadn't done that we would not have mad cow disease. The wisdom of the years still vindicates its own truthfulness as men bring about calamities in the world that God has given us because of their stubbornness in receiving the revelation from God as to how to behave. Well says the Apostle, if you put two animals together who are not of the like species the possibility is as you yoke them you will cause them discomfort that will be cruel and it is improper.

So he says taking the Old Testament references to animals it is the case as far as believers are concerned they're not to be yoked together with unbelievers. And in this epistle he'll tell you in the second epistle and in the first epistle that to marry an unbeliever is wrong. He'll tell you that it's compromising if in those days meat that you knew were offered to idols was put in front of you when you were in the company of a pagan it would be wrong for you to take that meat because it would be compromising.

It would be in effect giving tacit admission to the reality of pagan worship and no Christian worth his salt would ever do that. No compromise. Here's the command of the Apostle.

Don't be yoked together with unbelievers. And then he puts up five questions which helps if you like to butter us to underpin his point. They're rhetorical questions.

I've often wondered how the Apostle Paul preached haven't you? And it seems to me that here you've probably got an example. He was a man who engaged in the sort of teaching response formula that you get in a more extravagant fashion in the West Indies. Some of you may have come across the sermon once preached to illustrate the West Indian or the Deep Southern Negro type of preaching.

It was around the Easter time and the Negro started off, it's Friday now but Sundays are coming. And he kept breaking into the awfulness of Friday and all that happened, the Garden of Gethsemane, the arrest of Jesus, the trial, the butchery on the cross. But as he stopped he would say but and all the congregation would respond, Sundays are coming.

And I'm told that at the end of that address the place was just filled with electricity as the Negro with his eloquence went into the resurrection and the congregation were almost standing up in their exuberance as they realized all that God had done. That participation, it was sometimes basic to the teaching of the rabbis in a more sophisticated fashion in the time of our Lord Jesus. What do righteousness and wickedness have in common? The answer is they don't have anything in common at all.

Of course they don't. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the one who has come to establish righteousness. He says in the Sermon on the Mount, Depart from me you evildoers.

So a person who is trusting the Lord Jesus as Saviour and is playing fast and loose with that which they know is wrong is breaking a fundamental requirement of the Gospel, his being yoked together with that which does not really fit. What do righteousness and wickedness have in common? They have nothing, therefore come out from among unrighteousness. What fellowship is the second rhetorical question? The second rhetorical question presupposes the answer, in this case the negative.

What fellowship can light have with darkness? Well, the Bible tells us God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. The Lord Jesus comes as the light of the world, doesn't He? That's what it says of Him in John's Gospel. I am the light of the world.

And what does Jesus say will be the consequence of those who reject the Gospel that He brought into society? Well, they will be cast into outer darkness. So you see the apostles' logical argument here. What fellowship can light have with darkness? It can't have any fellowship at all.

There's no communion. There's no middle ground here. There's no base of one swallowing up the other.

Here are two opposites. Wickedness, righteousness, light, darkness. He says the apostle Paul, narrowing it down, what harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does he mean by Belial? Well, Belial is another name for the devil, Satan, the adversary, Beelzebub.

There are a number of ways in which reference is made to the evil one in Scripture. It was the devil who entered into Judas Iscariot and propelled him along on that mad-ass escapade when he betrayed the Lord Jesus, sold Him for some paltry shekels, and ultimately sealed the fate of Jesus at the human level with a kiss. The devil did that.

Now here says the apostle Paul, what can there be in terms of harmony between Christ, whom you're following, and the devil, the adversary of our Lord Jesus Christ? For this purpose Christ was revealed. For what purpose? To destroy the works of the evil one. He has come to destroy the principalities of Satan and all he stands for.

So says the apostle in his fourth rhetorical question, what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? The answer is he has very little in common. Very little in common indeed. Why? Well you see, if you're really a believer then your life is centered on Jesus.

Now the apostle has at the back of his mind marriage, but I think there are other developments of this. A man came to see me when I was in London before I came down here with Rowena to the tab. He's a businessman, a successful businessman.

He's a director actually on a firm. And his fellow directors were entertaining ethics that he knew were completely contradictory to the Christian gospel. I was a man then in his 50s.

I thought 50 was an old age at one stage. I'm beginning to realize it's becoming fairly respectable. It's a little way around the corner, but people remind me not that far off.

And so I gave him the benefit of my advice. It really wasn't worth very much. I didn't have much experience, but I suggested to him, look, if what you're doing day by day is contradicting what you're doing on a Sunday because he was a deacon in the church where I was in attendance, then you really are in problems.

Why not quit? Do you know he did that? Why not? He quitted the board of directors that he was serving on, 50 years of age plus. Not an easy time to break. And in our flat in London, he committed his life to the Lord and he established his own business on Christian principles with him in control every year for 20 years.

He's come down at some point in the year to the tab neither at the front of this church or in the privacy of my office. He surrendered himself again to the Lord, a Christian businessman in the hustle and bustle of the metropolis of London living out, working through gospel principles appreciating that as far as he was concerned he could have no truck with the ethics of the unbeliever. What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? And then the apostle goes on doesn't he as he nails it for the final time in his fifth question.

What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? Now the Jews had a thing about idols when the emperor made the Jews have a bust of himself in the temple in Jerusalem. Well it was a case of virtually all hell breaking out as the Jews just could not tolerate this because they recognized that there was only one God and that idolatry was wrong. The apostle Paul when he writes to the Thessalonians reminds them that God has delivered them from idols and turned them to the worship of the true and living God.

But you know there are idols today streets of Bombay you go down there and you see many a beggar before he goes to sleep at night he'll make his own little altar to the gods to ward them off. You probably find the same amongst the tribe in Nigeria which you've been hearing. But there are idols that people have in the 20th century in sophisticated England they may not be ones that you create in terms of a little altar at night but all that that takes your devotion all that that that imprisons your attention that takes first place in your life that's an idol.

The Bible gives stimulus to that hymn and every idol I possess whate'er that idol be I sacrifice it to thy throne and so forth. Get rid of all these things says the apostle why will you not to be equally yoked together what is righteousness and wickedness in common what fellowship can light have with darkness what harmony is there between Christ and Belial what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever what agreement is there between the temple of God and idols and now he starts to buttress his argument you see he says for we are the temple of the living God now isn't that interesting that you and I according to the Bible are as stones living stones and the temple that replaced the temple that was in existence when Jesus was alive is not one that's manufactured out of granite or marble slabs the temple of the Lord Jesus is all those people who have committed their lives to Him we're a royal priesthood a holy nation you remember we sang about it the beginning of our service this evening and God seeks the company of His children so Paul quotes from the Old Testament you see because he's this preacher isn't he he's a rhetorical preacher he gets responses from his congregation his mind is saturated in scripture he's not so concerned about what he's saying he wants to be in tune with the Holy Spirit he wants his thought processes to be enlivened by the Old Testament he remembers an Old Testament promise I will live with them and walk among them and I will be their God and they will be my people to whom is God referring in those Old Testament scriptures well he's predicating the birth of the kingdom of God he's predicating Christian people having responded to the message of the Lord Jesus God delights in the company of Christians didn't you know that we're always glad when folk come to our home and we want them to feel at home now that's similar as far as God is concerned we want Him do we not to feel at home amongst us not just when we're worshipping Him but individually not just on a Sunday that's reasonably easy to be holy in the tab isn't it reasonably easy but what about Monday through the Friday or Saturday the quiet hours the private moments for God to feel comfortable because well we've cut ourselves off from those things which we ought not to be yoked to so the Apostle again dipping into his fund of knowledge in the Old Testament verse 17 says come out from among them be separate he doesn't mean join a monastery he doesn't mean form an exclusive club what he means is that the things that people live for in our world that which they prioritise more than anything else perhaps the acquisition of finance perhaps drugs perhaps sex perhaps even less dishonourable things but things that crowd God out from their lives come out from that background and show that God has put here the thumbprint of his ownership upon you touch no unclean thing and I will receive you I will be father to you and will be your son and you will be my sons and daughters says the Lord Almighty I'm utterly thrilled that there are folk in the table who open their homes to youngsters who don't have parental support for no reasons for which they're personally responsible that little lad Jason within just a few weeks is calling Alan and Anne mum and dad God has called us to belong to him and he says I'll be your father you'll be my sons and your daughters and the implication is that God takes pride in the relationship that he enjoys with each one of us now says the apostle as he clinches the argument with a final injunction since we have these promises the promises that God will be amongst us the promises that God will commune with us the promises that we will be his sons and his daughters since we have these promises the most grand promises in the whole of the world dear friends let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit perfecting holiness out of reverence for God aren't you glad that Paul put that in? just a little afterthought ran along on a tangent not quite in keeping with all that it said in the previous chapter and the way that he continues in the seventh chapter and the second verse a somber bit of reasoning but we're glad that Paul's sails were set to the wind of the spirit and he was prepared to say that the greatest danger in his day was the danger of compromise and he didn't want Christians to compromise on their faith to water it down one little bit to stretch it because the faith was bought the blessings of salvation were the shed blood of Jesus the consequences of that shed blood are so wonderful you becoming the son and daughter of God and him longing for your company never prostitute that never compromise on that and dismisses a life from hell those people who dare to tell you that living this lifestyle is stuffy and Victorian and produces complexes and heaven knows what Jesus has come to give us life and life more eternal and you enter into life when you turn your back on this world and all that it reckons precious let's pray twenty years and still the same old stuff no apologies for that because it's the old stuff that's the best tell me the old old story of Jesus and his love he does love you Father, Son and Holy Spirit they want to enter into a relationship the Godhead with you how do I become a Christian Mr. Preacher how do I seal it well like my friend John Godfrey here last Sunday the newest steward that we got the smartest guy in the tab in his new suit and now with the Lord you say he was an old man no two years younger than me almost in the last days relatively speaking of his life he came out and went in came out from unbelief and entered into belief came out from the world and entered into the family of God and he went on record as saying last Monday in our discipleship class that he'd now discovered what it was to have peace and to be happy and he told some of us aboard Lagos when he was helping for a week doing ordinary welding work it was the best week of all his life come no compromise confess Jesus as Lord go on in the light of that profession throughout all the years or months or days or hours that God is allocating to you Lord Jesus I receive your salvation come into my heart Spirit of Jesus Christ come in today take sin away come into my heart Lord Jesus he'll do it if you ask him Amen 132 in the white supplement stand called to separation with a thirsty mind temples of the Spirit Satan's empty mind filled up with service by God's act of faith bring the cross to take her by His own strength stand by sacred Jesus Lord of our strength power of God and Lord with end the world in faith I surrender to you with my body shed sin's redemptive scourge God's love is strength now in Christ we're chosen healed and raised to be we are redeemed healed and raised to be stand by sacred Jesus Lord of our strength power of God and Lord with end the world in faith by His own strength power of God and Lord with sin's redemptive scourge God's love is strength now in Christ we're chosen healed and raised to be healed and raised to be by His own strength power of God and Lord with end the world in faith power of God and Lord with end the world in faith by His own strength power of God and Lord with end the world in faith